Solitary Confinement, Its Effects, and Its Overuse
This report by Susan Greene is a first-rate piece of work, and should be read in full. A key paragraph:
Among the misperceptions about solitary confinement is that it’s used only on the most violent inmates, and only for a few weeks or months. In fact, an estimated 80,000 Americans — many with no record of violence either inside or outside prison — are living in seclusion. They stay there for years, even decades. What this means, generally, is 23 hours a day in a cell the size of two queen-sized mattresses, with a single hour in an exercise cage, also alone. Some prisoners aren’t allowed visits or phone calls. Some have no TV or radio. Some never lay eyes on each other. And some go years without fresh air or sunlight.
We, as a nation, are no longer into ‘rehabilitation’ for people who commit crimes.
We are into punishment – purely, and simply, punishment.
And, the harsher, the better.
I think I could survive solitary if I could read whatever I wanted, and/or had access to the internet.
But, that AIN’T in the cards, is it?
No, they want you to suffer!
I’d like to force them to live inside their own minds and souls, in solitary, like they force the people convicted of crimes.
But, even Dante might draw the line at that.
He was too kind.
Living inside THEIR minds and souls is another “Circle of Hell” that not even he could have imagined.
It’s too dark a place for even Satan to peer into…
That’s true. The cruel treatment of prisoners makes them harder and more expensive to incarcerate. If we weren’t so obsessed with misery, we’d have less recidivism, less prison violence and lower expenses per prisoner.
Gut wrenching. We are a sick society in every meaning of the word.
I read a discussion somewhere a couple of years ago about what things future generations would hold us in contempt for the same way we’re contemptuous of things like slavery, primogeniture and using the death penalty for petty theft. There were quite a few answers, but our policy of massive and often very cruel incarceration won quite a lot of support for being stupid, counterproductive, unnecessary, and (relatively speaking) not due to any longstanding cultural biases or practices.
The fact that future historians will (hopefully) have access to all the “rape in prison harf harf” jokes that occur isn’t going to help things.
Yes and this is a problem for liberals. We can’t get liberal policies unless people are willing to elect more liberal politicians. Most politicians will not try to advocate policies that they know that most of the people won’t like. In parliamentary regimes, its more than a little easier for politicians to go against public desires at least until the next election. In our regime, not so much.
I keep thinking how many people would be outraged to learn that prisoners in solitary confinement are allowed to watch tv.
Yeah, so do I. It’s sad.
God forbid they have cable.
The really sad thing is that it’s done purely for control purposes, not because they care at all about the prisoner’s welfare. (I remember reading something about prisoners being supplied with black-and-white televisions, long after they’d become pretty rare, because for the longest time it was a source of outrage to law-and-order types that prisoners had color TVs, even though color TVs had long since become a fact of life to almost any American who wanted one.)
Yeah, and a lot of people don’t realize that some people, often juveniles are held in solitary before their trial, ostensibly to protect them.
http://solitarywatch.com/2010/10/22/children-routinely-held-in-pre-trial-solitary-confinement-in-texas/
Atul Guwande says that in terms of psychological effect, solitary is worse than physical torture.
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/5/dr_atul_gawande_solitary_confinement_is
The Guwande article is a must-read.
Why not update the post with a link to it then?
A friend of mine made a short film about the way solitary confinement — in its stricter forms — can be used as a kind of punishment without trial. The film is not very loosely based on the treatment of B. Manning. It’s worth watching. Really!
Here’s a link: http://preventionofinjury.com/
Oh, wait, we need to hear about how Manning had it pretty good.
My wife and I are psychiatrists. She does a fair amount of consulting with US DOJ on prison issues. Most commonly, folks with psychiatric illness are put in ad seg (solitary) for what is perceived as protection by correctional staff. They also serve disproportionally longer sentences and are rarely offered community based supervision. We are just making it worse.
Maybe I have an overinflated view of the risks of physical violence in prison, but I’ve always thought that if, somehow, I ended up going to prison, I would beg to serve my entire sentence in solitary confinement. I’d rather go crazy by myself than get raped on a daily basis.
Well, that’s like asking if you’d rather have your eyeballs torn out or your testicles torn out. It’s not impossible to make a prison where you could have your own room and still socialize with other prisoners in an environment that would make sexual assault extremely unlikely.
This reminds me of a local attorney’s war story regarding the client who complained that he had been kept in solitary despite violating no rules. He asked the attorney to get him moved to general population. The lawyer responded:
“You are a 50 year old, chubby, jewish guy. Just why do you think they have you in solitary?”
Our whole prison system is a massive violation of human rights. This is obviously even worse than usual, but the whole thing is rotten.