Inmates should be allowed to fight their stay in solitary confinement. Even throughout the prison system inmates still hold their Rights to be heard. A well-presented case against a stay in solitary confinement should be heard and it should also determine whether the inmate needs to continue being in solitary or not. Solitary confinement is effective but cruel at the same time, this can cause many problems such as lawsuits, possible deaths or mental illnesses from the prisoners who have stayed in solitary. The inmates who have stayed in solitary confinement have a right to appeal, just the same way these individuals have a right to appeal their conviction they can also appeal and fight against their stay in solitary confinement.
Under article 8 of the Bill of Human Rights it states, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted (The Eighth Amendment).” Placing a mentally ill inmate inside four walls away from any social interaction and medical attention is in fact cruel. As said by a federal judge, putting a mentally ill person in segregation is the “equivalent of putting an asthmatic in a place with little air to breathe (Wallace 11).” A mentally ill person needs help, not a poor environment in which they won’t get any better. Not only does solitary confinement mess with the mind, but it inflicts inmates to self-harm in any way possible.
The documentary, “Kids Locked in Solitary Confinement” depicts the toll that solitary confinement can have on the juvenile population. Approximately, 27% of adolescents in Riskers Island are in solitary confinement. The majority of which have not yet been convicted of a crime. However, these juveniles are in jail because they cannot afford to post bail. Supporters of solitary confinement believe that the segregation juveniles experience is not equivalent to the segregation in the federal system.
Guenther discusses the effects of solitary confinement such as “They experience intense anxiety, paranoia, depression, memory loss, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions” (1). But doesn’t provide enough reasons as to why U.S prisons should become a rehabilitation place to help those get back into the society they were once in. she only establishments that solitary confinement and prisons are not good to inmates because they caused them to develop psychological problems. What I mean is that, the entirety of the article and her arguments gives the sense that, that’s the purpose of what she is trying to achieve here, making prisons a rehabilitation place instead of something else. But the thing is why should prisons become a rehabilitation center, Guenther claims that “Given that 95 percent of all inmates are eventually released into the public, and that many of these will be released without any form of transition or therapy, solitary confinement is a problem that potentially affects every one of us.”
Solitary confinement legal definition is referred as the act of being kept alone in a cell without any interaction with other prisoners (US Legal, n.d.). In the article “The Hole: Solitary Confinement” by Jack Abbot writes about a vivid real life description of the author’s incarceration in prison. Abbott account unfolds the hardship and the effects of solitary confinement on the human body and mind. In this enclosed space of a cell there is little room to maneuver, measuring ten feet long and seven feet wide. In addition, there is a bunk, toilet and sink combination which leaves only approximately seven feet long by three feet wide of walking space (Abbott, 2002).
Imagine being trapped in a damp, dark, cage as a form of punishment for something that seems completely out of your grasp. Prisons were understaffed and as barbaric as it gets the people charged with crimes were whipped. The primary cause for their creation was to keep the crooks from harming any people right? Everyone in solitary confinement is treated the same way but not everyone came for the same reason. In fact, mentally ill people were considered to be harsh maniacs which did not receive treatment for a long time.
Major Ethical Issues of Solitary Confinement Solitary confinement can affect a person’s physical and mental health simply because it deprives an individual of their need to interact with others on a daily basis. Solitary confinement, which is used to restrain violent and volatile inmates from the general prison population, is done in increments ranging from several months to years. In an article retrieved from the American Psychological Association, ‘Alone, in ‘the Hole’’, the author states that, “for most of the 20th century, prisoners' stays in solitary confinement were relatively short.” This was the standing rule, in which inmates visited what is known as ‘the hole’, for several weeks to months. As time went by, the average length of stay
The United States Government spends a lot of money($75 billion) on locking people up and helping big businesses than helping prisoners. Many prisoners probably spend hours, days, or probably months in solitary confinement. Once they get out of solitary confinement the prisoners behavior changes like they won’t talk to no one and they just rather be by themselves cause they can’t be around big groups of people cause that 's what solitary confinement does to the mind of people. Haney’s research has shown “that many prisoners in supermax units experience extremely high levels of anxiety and other negative emotions.
Solitary confinement should be abolished all across the United States because of the severe negative effects it has on prisoners. A negative effect of solitary confinement that can occur is that a prisoner can become depressed and suicidal. In a popular case in New York, a sixteen year old boy named Kalief Browder, spent over three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. After he was arrested in 2010, he spent more than 1,000 days in Rikers waiting for a trial that was never given to him.
have had a positive drug test while they are in prison, they could be getting out of prison back into the community, or they just might not meet all the qualifications for the residential drug abuse program (Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2012). The residential drug abuse treatment program is designed to be the most intensive prison drug treatment that the Bureau has this program is about 9 months long. The inmates that are a part of this program live in a different part of the prison not mixed in with general population. They spend half the day in the program and the other half working or taking classes or other vocational activities.
In my honest opinion solitary confinement in the U.S. is not justified and only does more harm than good. Not only is it a rash punishment, but it is one of the worst kinds of psychological tortures that could be inflicted upon an inmate. Human beings are undoubtedly social creatures and without the mere contact of another person the mind decays and ultimately leads a person to anger, anxiety, and hopelessness. Psychologists also claim that solitary confinement and isolation in general also cause depression or the loss of ability to have any "feelings", cognitive disturbances, such as confused thought processes and disorientation, perceptual distortions, such as hypersensitivity to noises and smells, distortions of sensations, and hallucinations affecting all five senses, as well as paranoia and psychosis which often times involve schizophrenic type symptoms, and finally, the worst of all symptoms, being self-harm such as self-mutilation, cutting and even suicide attempts.
The 2010 One Year Longitudinal Study of the Psychological Effects of Administrative Segregation conducted by a group of scientists concluded, “Although there were statistically significant findings, the results did not support the hypotheses of the study. We expected that there would be a worsening over time in reported behavior/sensations and that this change would be worse for inmates with mental illness in AS. However, we found that when significant changes over time occurred, they tended to be in the direction of improvement and this improvement tended to occur more frequently for inmates with mental illness,” (. O’Keefe, page 150). This study was conducted in Colorado. Although Colorado is known for having a few supermax prisons, their prisons are not as inforcing about contact with the outside during confinement as our very own Washington.
In order to outlive the prison experience, inmates are constrained to endure great psychological changes. Noetic harm inflicted whilst imprisonment as well the challenges posed have only grown over the last several decades. These challenges include a much-discussed de-emphasis on rehabilitation as an objective of imprisonment along with rigorous policies and conditions of solitary confinement. Thus, creating prisons more troublesome places to adapt and sustain oneself. Adjustment to advanced imprisonment demands particular mental costs of incarcerated persons; few individuals are more vulnerable to the pains of imprisonment than others.
I think one of the main goals of incarceration should be rehabilitation. This is why I am against solitary confinement because seg is not rehabilitating these inmates and even worsens them in some cases. Rehabilitation is supposed to be helping restore health and goodness into a life and essentially teaching an individual how to act properly in society. Solitary confinement is doing the opposite by isolating individuals so they lose social skills, develop mental health issues, and even make some individuals more angry, violent, or harmful because they are deprived of needs. Deterrence is also something I think solitary confinement doesn’t necessarily help with.
The extent of the mental damage will be revealed from the result of the two populations from the instruments utilized, Beck Depression Inventory and the Hamilton Anxiety Scale. It is anticipated that the result will be significant in showing sever negative damage to offenders who have been in solitary confinement preventing them receiving any benefit to their punishment and rehabilitation. It further predicted that severity will be increased in the results of repeated visits to solitary confinement. The Becks Depression Inventory consists of 21 items, each being scored on a scale where the highest score is 63 the suggested cut off low score for minimal depression is 13, a score of 14–19 indicates mild depression and 20–28 moderate and 29–63 serious depression (Hesse, 2004). The total score indicates whether the individual presents a mild, moderate or major depression.
