The man who murdered six people and injured 62 others when he drove his SUV through the Waukesha Christmas parade in 2021 is now living in conditions that international human rights experts and former prison wardens call worse than death – and the full extent of his punishment is only now becoming clear.
Darrell Brooks Jr. , 43, sits in an 7-by-12-foot concrete cell at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls, isolated for 23 hours each day with no windows to the outside world, no television, no meaningful human contact, and nothing but a concrete bed, a thin mattress, a bolted-down desk, and an 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 toilet. This is not temporary.
This is every day for the rest of his life.
Judge Jennifer Dorow sentenced Brooks on November 16, 2022, to six consecutive life terms without parole plus 762 years and nine months for the 76 counts he was convicted of – including six counts of first-degree intentional homicide, 61 counts of recklessly endangering safety, and multiple hit-and-run charges. The sentence was met with applause in the courtroom. But what no one anticipated was what would come after the gavel fell.
Brooks was initially held in Wisconsin, but in January 2025 he was transferred to South Dakota. Prison records indicate the move was for his own safety – other inmates had beaten him because of the nature of his crimes, which included killing eight-year-old Jackson Sparks and elderly grandmothers like Virginia Sorenson. The transfer placed him far from his family, far from any support network, and into one of the harshest incarceration environments in the country.
The South Dakota penitentiary is not a standard prison. Brooks is housed in what corrections officers call a Special Housing Unit – effectively solitary confinement. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has declared that solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days amounts to psychological torture.
Brooks has been in isolation for over a year and will remain there for potentially decades.
Medical studies show devastating effects on the human brain from prolonged isolation. Within days, anxiety becomes overwhelming. Then depression sets in, followed by hallucinations, perceptual distortions, and memory deterioration.
Researchers call it SHU syndrome – a specific psychiatric condition caused by lack of stimulation and human contact. Inmates in solitary develop paranoia, obsessive thoughts, and a sense that they are losing their grip on reality.
The physical toll is equally brutal: vision problems from monotony, headaches, digestive issues, vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunlight, increased risk of heart disease, and a suicide rate that is disproportionately high. Though solitary confinement inmates make up only six to eight percent of the U. S.
prison population, they account for approximately half of all prison suicides.
Former ADX Florence warden Robert Hood, who ran America’s most notorious supermax prison, once stated plainly, “The supermax is life after death. In my opinion, it’s far much worse than death.” That assessment comes from a man who spent years overseeing these facilities.
Brooks’s trial was one of the most bizarre in American legal history. He chose to represent himself, building a literal box fort out of evidence boxes, refusing to answer to his own name, interrupting the judge hundreds of times, and being removed from the courtroom repeatedly. During victim impact statements, he flipped through books and rolled his eyes.
He showed no remorse.
Judge Dorow called him “someone bent on evil” and said, “Some people choose the path of evil, and Brooks was one of them.” She rejected explanations that his actions stemmed from bipolar disorder, stating there is no medication for a heart that is bent on evil.
Now, the same man who seemed so defiant in court has become subdued. In recent appearances via video from South Dakota, he appears calmer, more coherent. Some observers wonder if he is finally on medication.
But his appeals are going nowhere. He has requested 11 extensions to file his appeal, each time citing various reasons – prison lockdowns, inability to access files, missing materials. The deadline was January 7, 2026.
No further extensions will be granted.
Legal experts who watched the trial say there are virtually no reversible errors. Judge Dorow ran the trial by the book, bending over backward to accommodate Brooks’s pro se defense. The court of appeals has made clear that the case is effectively closed.
The conditions Brooks faces raise uncomfortable questions about justice and punishment. Death row inmates often have better living conditions – up to six hours outside their cells, mingling with other death row inmates, televisions, more phone privileges, and more public scrutiny. The average time between sentencing and execution in the U.
S. is over 20 years. When execution finally comes, it is over in minutes.
Brooks, by contrast, faces decades of isolation, psychological deterioration, and physical decline with no hope of parole. He will likely die alone in his cell, forgotten, his mind deteriorated by years of sensory deprivation. Multiple death row inmates have dropped their appeals and volunteered for execution, effectively saying, “𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 me now rather than keep me in these conditions.”
The victims’ families remain divided. During sentencing, David Sorenson, whose wife Virginia died in the attack, told the judge that life in prison was too kind and called for the death penalty. Other survivors spoke of nightmares, anxiety, panic attacks, and depression that have become daily realities.
But a small number expressed willingness to forgive, saying they did not want hate to consume them.
The broader question remains: Is what Brooks is experiencing justice? The United Nations considers solitary confinement beyond 15 days to be torture – the same UN that investigates war crimes and crimes against humanity. They are saying that what America does to prisoners like Brooks constitutes torture.
And yet, the public largely accepts it because the crime was so horrific.
Darrell Brooks committed an unspeakable act. He drove through a Christmas parade, killing six people and destroying families. He deserves severe punishment.
Nobody argues otherwise. But prolonged psychological torture that violates international human rights standards demands scrutiny. We abolished drawing and quartering, stopped public hangings, moved away from firing squads.
We did all that because we decided those punishments were too barbaric for a civilized society. Now we have replaced them with something that might be worse.
Brooks will remain in that South Dakota concrete box for the rest of his life. Every day, he will wake up to the same gray walls, the same stale air, the same silence. He will eat every meal alone.
He will speak to no one but guards. He will watch his own mind disintegrate. And when he dies, likely unnoticed, the world will barely register the event.
This is not about sympathy for Darrell Brooks. This is about examining what we are doing as a society – whether prolonged isolation constitutes justice or vengeance, whether there is a line we should not cross even when punishing the worst criminals. The death penalty debate usually focuses on whether the state should have the power to execute.
But perhaps we should also be asking whether the state should have the power to inflict decades of psychological torture.
The answer is not simple. Both positions have validity. Both come from understandable places.
But the conversation is necessary, because it forces us to confront what it truly means to be a civilized society.