Solitary Confinement In Prisons

The United States is home to half of the world’s total imprisoned population (BBC News). In the nineteenth century, solitary confinement was thought to promote reform in prisoners. However, modern research suggests that locking a human being in a jail cell the size of a handicap bathroom stall for more than 22 hours a day does more harm than good. In spite of these scientific discoveries, prisons in the United States continue to use solitary confinement as a method of incarceration. Due to the negative impact prolonged solitude has on the human mind, solitary confinement should be outlawed as a form of torture.

Solitary confinement is considered sever psychiatric harm after fifteen days. More than fifty percent of the US prisoners held in solitary confinement are held past this fifteen-day marker. (The Ethics of Solitary Confinement). "More widely, according to federal records, some 80,000 prisoners were held in solitary confinement across the US in 2005 - the last time such information was released by the government" (The Ethics of Solitary Confinement). If our government is withholding the information, there is clearly something amiss.

Last but not least, in order for some inmates to earn their way out of supermax segregation, they were asked to participate in a study to determine if mental health issues were a problem for the confinement which only allowed inmates to come out of their cells for 1 hour a day. Also, once the inmates and staff of these type of prisons where back in society their where many of questions on whether or not the long hours and shifts inside of supermax prisons had a positive or negative effect on them.   The type of inmates that are housed in supermax prisons are ones “who are dangerous or chronically violent, have escaped or attempt to escape from a high security correctional facility, have incited or tempted to incite disruption in correctional facility, or who have prayed on weaker inmates are removed from general population and housed in supermax prisons”(Schmalleger & Smykla, 2015).  Many of these types of prisons were “originally designed to house the most violent, hardened, and escape-prone criminals, Supermaxes are increasingly used for persistent rule-breakers, convicted leaders of criminal organizations and gangs, serial killers, and political criminals”(Ross,

Introduction Since the innovation of the prison system in the nineteenth century, crowding has consistently been a feature of American prisons (Mullen 31). In the past couple of decades, crowding has gone unnoticed and become more problematic in the United States. Prisons are essentially storage lockers for inmates to punish them and keep them from criminal activity, yet the more prisoners that are stored, the more conflict that arises. Joan Mullen, a former vice president and manager of the Law and Justice Area of Abt Associates, Inc., and sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, evaluates how prisons fail to meet standards of human decency when there is crowding (Mullen 33). A lack of privacy, harmful mental and physical conditions,

" Incarcerated persons often suffer long-term consequences from having been subjected to pain, deprivation, and extremely atypical patterns and norms of living and interacting with others" (Clemmer). Mika 'il DeVeaux 's article, The Trauma of the Incarceration Experience, discusses the psychological aspects of being incarcerated, focusing on his personal experiences as a prisoner serving a life sentence in various maximum-security prisons in New York. Personal trauma and sociologist Donald Clemmer 's book "The Prison Community" dating back to the year 1941 is mentioned, along

The first term that applies to him is solitary confinement. During his time in prison, Bronson is the most famous prisoner in Britain. As the movie mentioned, he has spent thirty-four years in prison, thirty of them in solitary confinement. As the book explains, solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which an inmate is isolated from any human contact. The book also explains that “the most severe sanction by a disciplinary committee is confinement in administrative segregation (sometimes called “solitary confinement”)

The paranormal activities outside cells, in the hallways and especially in the fourth floor residential apartments are attributed to these entities. The hauntings of the two former superintendents have been happening since decades. In the 1950s, a man called Bill foster became the jail’s superintendents. As it was the tradition in those days, the superintendent was allotted an apartment in the fourth floor.

History of prisons- Why were they created? What is their purpose? What are we doing to actually reform them? a) Who has jail helped? Most inmates seen repeatedly coming in and out of jail?

Some common symptoms associated with isolation are insomnia, a lack of appetite, and trembling. These can escalate to heart palpitations, which is a tell-tale sign that the punishment has gone too far. Despite these warnings, the incline in suicides tells us that changes in our current laws need to happen to force preventative measures onto staff in federal prisons. A study occurred in 1951 at McGill University in which a paid group of voluntary graduate students stayed in a confinement room, to conduct a study on sensory deprivation. The plan was to observe these students for 6 weeks, nevertheless not one of the students lasted for more than 7 days.

Basically, individuals who are sentenced for federal and drug crimes are being are being held for longer period of time. Other nations have come up with creative and effective ways to use programs to decrease crime and recidivism. Germany uses many rehabilitation programs in their prisons. It can be proven that rehabilitation programs reduce recidivism. In Heidering prison Germany, many inmates can work at various jobs, including onsite factories built specifically to give inmates work experience.

These are not the kind of people that should be prisoner not for their own good, but also to the other prisoners in the facilities. Many inmates in prison are being sent in with disorders that are need special attention, and if sent to facilities in isolation and overcrowding, they will exit with an even worse condition than how they went in. In “Are too many with psychiatric problems behind bars?” , At age 16, Kalief Browder was falsely accused of stealing a backpack and sent to New York City 's notorious Rikers Island jail after he was unable to post bail. He spent three years at the facility — two in solitary confinement — before being released, never having gone to trial. Like many inmates who have endured solitary, the once sociable

The reading “Facing the Demon Head On: Race and the Prison Industrial Complex” by Manning Marable is about race and the prison industrial complex in the U.S. Manning first talked about what he saw and experienced when he visit the prisons, and then he talked about the New York Theological seminary (NYTS) program in the prisons. He found out that there were number of people in the prisons who wanted to earn their bachelor’s degrees and learn more. Also, he discussed the racial discrimination in the U.S.

and Hopkins Burke (2012). The article from the Huffington Post, titled “Let’s Stop Treating Mental Illness Like It’s a Crime”, discusses concerns with mentally ill persons not receiving proper treatment while incarcerated. Another problem noted is the inability of communities to meet the needs mentally ill individuals within them. The author contends that these factors initiate a cycle that turns jails and prisons into “de facto asylums” with the likely hood that those in need of care will return to jail.

Why the Issue is Important Solitary confinement, or in other words isolation, is the confinement of an inmate in a 80 foot cell or a special housing unit where he or she is completely secluded from everyone. In most cases, when an inmate is held in solitary confinement, they spend up to 23 hours of the day in a cell, and given an hour of free time in another small cell. The first experiment of solitary confinement started in 1834, and has been proceeding since then. When one is held in solitary confinement, they have very limited interaction with other individuals; they are denied phone calls, limited family visits, they have no personal property, and can suffer from insomnia and forms of brutality.

The author presented good points when it comes to the issues with placing juveniles in secure confinement. When placing these juveniles into confined locations it can sometimes set them up for failure and the chance of rehabilitation is slim to none. In the text it mentions issues these kids face by being in a secure facility, the issues consists of not being properly handled to due undertrained staff , not having enough staff to monitor the kids, and keeping the kids away from the adult offenders if they are placed in that type of facility. These issues and others have been known to cause depression, suicide/suicide attempts, rape, and other horrible things to happen to the kids.