A person has a sense of who she/he is as an individual through conscious decisions about the use of time, planned actions over expanses of space, feelings experienced in interactions with others, and the use of one's skills in occupational tasks and the pursuit of interests. The author develops the concept that an inmate in the general prison population can, within the confines and routines of prison maintain and expand experiences necessary for the affirmation and reinforcement of a personal identity; however, in segregation, all of the rituals, props, instruments, and people that have been a part of the inmate's sense of self are withdrawn. One of the women interviewed about her experience in segregation in a Canadian prison said, "You are left! You feel like you are not human any more. You feel like you are a dog or an animal caged up. It is horrible." Another woman who engaged in self-mutilation (slashing) and an attempt to hang herself while in segregation commented, "So, you don't even know if you can feel. Sometimes some of this behavior (slashing) is just to find out. And then you discover that, yeah, you still hurt, yeah you can still cry, you know." Successful reintegration is highly unlikely if not impossible for inmates who have spent significant periods of incarceration in segregation, because the sense of identity upon which positive action and interaction are based has been undermined. 55 references