Solitary Confinement
Also known as maximum security, segregation or lockdown, solitary confinement is, literally speaking, a prison within a prison, where criminals and convicts who violate the institution’s rules and regulations are put. They are placed in a cell and are not allowed any communication with other prisoners. Most of the time, people under solitary confinement are left in their cells for 23 hours a day, an act considered by some people as a necessary disciplinary action, but inhumane for others. Considering that prisoners are also human beings who are social creatures and need interaction in order to stay mentally healthy solitary confinement is not a reasonable punishment to implement in a prison system. Prisoners in these units live almost entirely within the confines of a 60- to 80-square-foot cell, can exist for many years separated from the natural world around them and removed from the natural rhythms of social life, are denied access to vocational or educational training programs or other meaningful activities in which to engage, get out of their cells no more than a few hours a week, are under virtually constant surveillance and monitoring, are rarely if ever in the presence of another person without being heavily chained and restrained, have no opportunities for normal conversation or social interaction, and are denied the opportunity to ever touch another human being with affection or caring or to receive such affection or caring themselves. These tight confines result in serious health and mental defects and are cruel and unusual punishment and therefore should not be allowed to exist.
Those who are being isolated would be vulnerable or at risk of having mental disorders, such as schizophrenia. They might experience delusions and hallucinations, as well as become very paranoid or may display symptoms of mental distress, making them lose their grip on reality. Craig Haney (1997), a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has “documented several cases of individuals with no prior history of mental illness that nonetheless developed paranoid psychosis requiring medical treatment after prolonged solitary confinement”. As damaging as the consequences are for otherwise healthy adults, they are even worse for adolescents, whose brains are still in their final stages of development, and the mentally ill, who already struggle to maintain a solid grasp on reality. Self-mutilation and suicide are more prevalent in isolated housing (Hayes, 1989), as are deteriorating mental and physical health (beyond self-injury), other-directed violence, such as stabbings, attacks on staff, and property destruction, and collective violence (Glancey & Murray, 2006. The use of extreme forms of solitary confinement in so-called brainwashing and torture also underscores its painful, damaging potential (Vrca, 1996). In one study the mental health of nonincarcerated normal populations, Brodsky and Scoginís protective custody prisoners, and the supermax sample from Pelican Bay SHU where compared. The contrasts with the nonincarcerated normal samples are striking. As would be expected, in almost every instance, the prevalence rates for indices of psychological distress and psychopathology in the samples from the general population are quite low. The only exceptions were for anxiety and nervousness, which was found in “45% of their normal sample, and depression, which was found in almost a quarter of the persons they assessed”(Haney 1997). Otherwise, the “indices of distress and symptoms of psychopathology occurred in less than 20% of the nonincarcerated samples”(Haney 1997). On the other hand, in both of the isolated prisoner populations, the prevalence rates were “well above 50% on virtually all of the measured dimensions. For certain symptoms, rates for the prisoner samples were five to ten or more times as high”( Haney 1997). In fact, in both comparative and absolute terms, the prevalence rates were extremely high for the supermax prisoner sample (Haney 1997). These prisoners are being subjugated to horrible conditions, which in turn harm their mental health. Solitary confinement should not be allowed as a punishment within prisons since it is proven to have negative long-term effects on the prisoner’s psyche.
Solitary confinement breaks peoples constructional rights. The Eighth Amendment (Amendment VIII) of the United States Constitution prohibits the federal government from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishment. Solitary confinement is considered to be cruel and unusual punishment by many scholars. Solitary confinement can actually fit the definition of torture, as stated in some international human rights treaties. This means that it constitutes a violation to human rights. As an example, the UN Convention Against Torture clearly defines torture as an “act through which severe pain and suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for punishment, intimidation, and information or for other reasons, such as discrimination”(1987). As shown within the first point, prisoners within solitary confinement experience negative mental effects as a result of being thrown into a solitary confinement cell as punishment. Even The U.S. justice system once understood that long stretches in solitary served no good purpose and is cruel and unusual punishment. In 1890 the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the pernicious nature of solitary confinement in the case of a man who had murdered his wife. In their decision, the justices noted that
“A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still committed suicide, while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community”(Ruiz v. Estelle).
With solitary confinement blatantly breaking a rule set out by the founders it should no longer be used in todays federal prison centers.
Some people support solitary confinement, claiming that it is an effective way to decrease violence within the prison. Any person who is causing trouble gets to have a time out and the guards are able to split up the two opposing forces. The person is also so starved of human interaction it is believed that they will exit solitary confinement a docile person who will not cause any trouble. Evidence suggests that the opposite is true. After the state of Mississippi reduced the number of prisoners in solitary confinement at its Parchman facility and developed new units for prisoners with mental illness, the number of violent attacks plummeted from a high of 45 in March 2006 to five in January 2008. (Mississippi also saved more than $5 million.) (Oshinsky, 1997). A 2007 study of Washington State's prison population found that 69 percent of those who were released directly to the community from solitary—a dishearteningly regular practice—committed new crimes that landed them back in jail within three years, compared with 46 percent of those who had been allowed to readjust to the general prison population before release (Binswagner, 2007). Solitary confinement does not reduce violence at all in fact it seems to heighten violence in some cases and therefore should not be allowed to exist with our prison systems.