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Solitary Confinement Research Paper

468 Words2 Pages

I started this week’s assignment by watching the video, “Why Solitary Confinement is a Form of Modern-Day Torture”. The facts haunted me; I could never image sitting in a concrete cell 22 to 24 hours a day, for years. I get massive cabin fever and feel myself go a bit nuts when I don’t leave my house (where I have access to clean bathrooms, a fridge of food, a TV, a computer, books) for a couple days. To know that there is little evidence needed to strip someone of the little luxury and socialization you get in prison is insanity. And then to hear that some guards justify this isolation as protection is hard to bear. How is this protection when these inmates don’t have contact with their families, destroying their personal lives? How is this protection when this type of confinement enables abuse from guards through starvation and beatings? How is this protection when they have no contact with the outside world, to the sky, or to any form of information (like from books and art)? Forcing someone to living in these conditions is doing the exact opposite of what a prison should be doing. It is doing nothing to reform the person, but instead doing everything to make them go completely insane. As well, it strips them of their right to parole, forcing them into longer sentences.

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