I was completely cut off from my family for about 3 months when I went in. But I have to say that that moment of judgement, is a moment of relief. You were lucky to be under house arrest, this was impossible in my situation. I was crammed in a 4x5m cell with 3 or 4 other people, mostly who did not speak english, and a l lack of common decency from the ones I got stuck with the first three months eventually forced the remand centre administration to relocate me.
Things were not so bad for the 4 months following this first horrible period, stuck in with mostly north african arabic speakers.
The next cell I was in, at least they spoke a language I was starting to learn, Bulgarian.
I somehow over a 2 year period, despite any support, managed to remember my google password, or at least, was able to recover it. But it was touch and go. A couple of years later I completely lost that account by being clever as I was travelling, homeless and penniless, north through Italy.
I didn't mind, in the end, that I rolled over my online identity. I had reinvented myself many times before, and I expect I may still do this again, and I have already mostly abandoned my Facebook account, and I will be pleased in fact when I can divest myself of my Google account completely, and depend only on a password and distributed systems to secure it.
Maybe I am fortunate that I had very little to lose when they put me away. It dulled the loss a lot. I had in my brain the one and only number still, that would never be erased, my mother's phone number. We had no right to free phonecalls of any kind in the Bulgarian prison system. The cost for calling my mother was something like $20 for about 10 minutes. It pained me to have to be so cut off from everyone, but I think it sharpened me, and made my long declared rebellion and opposition towards the system that was encaging me, even stronger, and more certain.
I even wrote about this in my journal, which I sadly decided to shred and throw down into the sewerage system. But I remember enough of what transpired. I will be writing more about it in a followup post soon.
For true rebels, like Charlie, and myself, these experiences only cement our certainty as to what we are fighting against. In my case it was my personal crusade against drug prohibition. I went down, did my time on a cross, and I was born again and they only made a better enemy by being unfortunate enough to not have killed me during the arrest. They came pretty close. But that's too bad for them :)