Matthew Hutson:

Inmates in solitary confinement at Snake River spend 23 hours a day in cells with no windows to the outside world; their outside-the-cell time is spent in a concrete-enclosed exercise room.

But during the course of Nadkarni’s one-year study, half of the 48 prisoners in a solitary cellblock got to watch nature videos of their choosing projected on a wall in the room during the 45 to 60 minutes they spent there each day.

The videos projected in what inmates called the “blue room” included imagery of forests, beaches, and Earth viewed from space. Inmates in the other half of the cellblock took their exercise time as usual, without being exposed to any nature videos.

What happened? According to surveys and interviews conducted at the conclusion of the study, 43 percent of the inmates who were allowed to watch the nature videos said the videos soothed them. “When I first went into the blue room, I was like ‘wow, how beautiful this world is,’” one of the inmates said.