Members of a legislative committee yesterday heard testimony on a bill that would limit the use of solitary confinement in Maine prisons to 45 days and prohibit its use for the mentally ill. Corrections officials say that the very phrase "solitary confinement" unfairly conjures up distorted images of dungeon-like settings and total isolation. But those who have experienced time in a cell alone say that segregation is a form of torture that actually causes bad behavior, and can lead to mental illness. Susan Sharon has the second of a two-part series on the issue. A warning: This report contains graphic descriptons that some listeners may find offensive.

Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and authority on solitary confinement, says he has conducted research on several hundred inmates at state and federal penitentiaries around the country. Grassian says he has concluded that solitary confinement can cause a disturbing pattern of psychiatric symptoms that he describes as toxic.

In one study of inmates at the State Penitentiary in Walpole, Massachusetts, for example, Grassian found that half the prisoners reported a progressive inability to tolerate ordinary stimuli such as dripping faucets or the buzz of a flourescent light.

"There's a ventilating thing going on where you hear this ehhhhhhhh motor thing," says 68-year-old Robert Dellelo, who has spent much of his life in prison, including a long period of time in segregation at Walpole where he lived in a large, white cell. He says he was locked down for 23 hours a day with nothing to do.

"After a while, you hear that as words, not as a sound," he says. "And it's very common to be laying there and hear somebody yell: 'What? Huh? Yeah! You call me? Who called me?' Nobody called you. It was this noise. This is what them units do to people's minds."

Dr. Grassian's study also found that about a third of inmates described hearing voices, that often told them frightening things. Half had severe panic attacks; and about half reported paranoid and persecutory fears and fantasies of revenge, torture and mutilation of prison guards.

"This big guard had the door ever open with just him and me with no cuffs on," Dellelo says. "There's no doubt in my mind I would have tried everything within my physical capacity to kill this man with my bare hands. I fantasized cutting guards' heads off and rolling them down stairs, recognizing the insanity of that kind of thinking. You have a constant lump inside of you that's just eating away with you. Anger, hate and rage, and the only way you can control it is you have these insane thoughts."

"That's one of the obsessional preoccupations that I guess is not terribly surprising that that would be a content," says Dr. Grassian, who came to Maine this week to testify in support of the bill to limit solitary confinement. Dr. Grassian says what's actually more common among segregated inmates than aggressive fantasies are obsessions over their own bodies.

"Oh they have a little feeling in their stomach and after a while it turns into cancer and they're sure they're gonna die and they can't stop thinking about it," he says. "Or it's something as trivial as this: A middle-aged man who had a very minor prostate problem spent 24 hours a day, seven days a week trying to empty his bladder. He could never have the sensation that it was empty. He'd stand over the toilet, could not stop thinking about it. And of course when he got out of solitary the preoccupation went away."

While some preoccupations and psychiatric symptoms do go away, others, some former prisoners insist, do not. Ray Levasseur spent more than 10 years in solitary confinement in federal prisons. Once released, he returned to his home state of Maine where he is focused on resuming a normal life.

Consulted by supporters of the proposed legislation, Levasseur says he still finds it difficult to talk about some aspects of his own experience. "I think it would hurt me as an advocate if I just bared my soul," he says. "I have problems. When I started working on this, on the solitary confinement issue and putting testimony together and doing some research, it was bringing something back that I don't like to think about every day. Not frequently, but when something triggers it, I have the most horrible, horrible nightmares you can imagine. I won't even begin to describe them for a public audience, they're so horrendous."

What Levasseur will discuss is how disorienting it was for some prisoners in segregation to keep track of time. He says there were no calendars allowed in his facility. Writing instruments were often nubby pencils with worn down tips. Levasseur says while in solitary, an inmate grows so used to being alone that when sent back to the general population -- the chow hall for instance -- the sounds and the other people are overwhelming.

"I had eaten alone, you know, on a bunk for so many years, food brought and pushed through a slot in a cell door. I couldn't get used to this hustle and bustle around me, all this conversation, all this noise. And the mess hall is a noisy place with hundreds of prisoners in it. It made me feel very uncomfortable, very edgy."

"Many of them didn't come out to take showers. They had to force them to come out to take showers. And, you know, they felt there wasn't any hope," says Robert King, who spent nearly three decades in solitary confinement in Louisiana, where he says some prisoners tolerated segregation better than others.

One of the most difficult things he had to endure was going without physical contact visits, without hugging another person for seven years. This, he says, serves no good purpose. "I think the courts need to set a precedent that you can only hold a person for so long, and 24 hours in solitary-type isolation is enough to kill a person, which means, you know, the point is that: one year or 100 years, the danger is the same."

Corrections officials say, in defense of solitary confinement, that it's intended to remove inmates who are considered a potential danger to staff or other prisoners, and to correct negative behavior by forcing those inmates to reflect on what they've done in a sensory-deprived setting.

Supporters of the bill to limit its use, however, say the practice only makes matters worse, and point out that 97 percent of those serving time will eventually be released. Members of the Legislature's Criminal Justice Committee will take up the bill at a work session next week.