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Essay On Solitary Confinement In Prison

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The Never Ending Prison Cycle
Prison is a place where individuals who have made mistakes, are sentences to in order to serve their time and later fade back into society, but is this a reasonable thought? Do prisons honestly allow released inmates to return to turn their lives around or do they set their inmates up to fail and to get trapped in the prison cycle? As of January 28, 2017 the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that 177,056 individuals were in prison and eight out of every ten inmates who were sentenced to more than a year in prison will return within three years of their release, but why? In today’s society the American people are encouraged to embrace their “second chance” and live the American Dream that is desired all around …show more content…

Another key element in the decay of the American prison system includes the controversial idea the prisoners should be placed in solitary confinement if they act out or for their own safety. Tens of thousands of American citizens are locked in windowless, 7.6 ft X 11.6 ft, concrete wall cells for twenty-three or twenty-fours hours per day only being allowed to leave to shower if they are privileged enough to do so (Goode, Solitary Confinement: Punished for Life). Many doctors have conducted research that has shown how solitary confinement worsens mental illnesses and produces symptoms in prisoners who start out physiologically robust by causing people to long for the sight of a tree, a bird or another human. After individuals have been placed in solitary confinement for a few days they begin to experience suicidal thoughts and many attempt suicide because they are mentally going insane due to this tortuous punishment that is often abused and not executed properly. In the past prisoners were sentenced in solitary for days or weeks, but today prisoners are commonly placed in solitary for years and they slowly forget how to be human. Studies show that solitary

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According to Bassett, 50% of suicides occur inside solitary confinmenet (419). Not to mention, inmates are sometimes physically abused by the guards in power. Through the Solitary Nation documentary, it is seen that guards sometimes have to use bigger forces like a toxic gas to get an inmate out of their cell. While it makes sense that guards have to do it for their own protection, there needs to be thought about why inmates do the things they do. When inmates suffer from their mental illnesses, they begin to lose their sense of reality as well as sense of right and wrong.

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Craig Haney’s article Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and “Supermax” Confinement illustrates the complications faced in solitary confinement emphasizing the rise in mental health challenges imposed. Particular attention is paid to the escalation in the nature of mental health-related issues, including the negative psychological effects of imprisonment. Haney discusses these increasingly widespread and specialized units that bring forward the issues presented taking into account the notion of isolation and the association of the high percentage of prisoners suffering from mental illnesses. The article briefly assesses the recent case law concerning the difficulty of mentally ill prisoners, suggesting that the majority of broader psychological problems have been overlooked by the courts.

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Solitary confinement, in my opinion, is cruel and unusual punishment. If there was not a mental-health crisis in America, and there was in fact a rehabilitation-focused prison system, solitary confinement would be greatly reduced and used much more sparingly. What is the point of driving people to madness by putting them in isolation? It would be so much cheaper for tax payers to change the system to a more effective one that actually reduces

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The documentary solitary nation demonstrates the effects of solitary confinement on the prisoner’s health. There are several problems associated with using segregation as a punishment, however, the main problem is the effects to the mental health of the inmates. The documentary illustrate that some prisoner lost their sanity in solitary confinement. One example is what happened to the prisoner Adam Brulotte, at the beginning of his solitary confinement time he was optimistic and have plans to improve himself by reading books and think about his future, but only after twenty five days he started to lose his mind and become unstable, threaten to cut himself, pushes feces under the door and flooded the unit. This behavior clearly indicates segregation bad affects to the mental health of the inmates.

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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

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In Atul Gawande “ HellHole” essay they talked about the experiences and effects of people who were previously in solitary confinement. Solitary confinement can be best explained as the process of removing an individual and isolating them from their environment and socialization. Atul Gawande is specifically talking about prisoners of war and incarcerated people and how their experience was and that process. The essay talked about how people are put in isolation which caused them to act out of their character. Goffman would argue that effects of solitary confinement are exactly what total institutions can do to a person's.

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Thousands of people across America are experiencing near-hell while they are locked inside a type of prison called solitary confinement. Solitary confinement must come to an end in America, even for the worst of criminals. The effects of solitary confinement consist of mental illnesses, wrongful convictions, staff members receiving trouble, the long-lasting suffering for the criminals, and the number of people experiencing it must end now. Solitary confinement can change the life of a person behind bars forever. Prisoners are left with multiple mental illnesses, and some are worse than others.

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A finding from a study done by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that 67.8 percent of ex-convicts were rearrested. Two-thirds of them spent their time in prison waiting for the release, only to go back into that dirty old cell again. Why don’t they try to get a real job, earn their own living and cherish the second chance we grant them. Let’s step down from the moral high ground for a second. Often released prisoners lack the skills and knowledge to keep up with the pace of society.

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Within juvenile detention facilities, staff place children in isolation for varying periods of time, ranging from hours to months. The reasons staff place children in solitary confinement cells vary widely from one facility to the next, and even from one staff to another at the same facility. Employees often place a youth in isolation because it is the easiest and fastest way to ensure facility security. Some rationales for the practice are: safety, security, disciplinary, administrative, protective and medical. Using this method to control a youth’s behavior or for a disciplinary reason is very common.

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Life after incarceration, here today gone tomorrow. 95% of adults sentenced to prison will return to our communities, and reentry will be their first step back into society. Imagine have a thousand questions flooding one’s mind all at once. Where will I live, how will I survive, and contribute to the family, while maintaining to the stipulations of one’s parole/ probation, without risking freedom. The number one goal for those newly released back into society by way of the reentry program is to never return to the inside of a prison cell.

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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.

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Once someone is arrested and sent to prison, most of us think they have done their punishment and learned their lesson. Unfortunately, this is not the case most of the time. Once these inmates are released most of them end up re-offending and going back to prison, this is called recidivism. It looks follows the inmates three years after they are released and sees if they get reoffend and go back to prison with a new sentence. The Bureau of Justice did a survey to see how many offenders went back to prison after they were released.

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Solitary confinement has been used in the United States prisons for more than one hundred years. Recently, the use of solitary confinement has become a large issue in whether it is constitutional. Many people believe that solitary confinement will cause mental illness in the inmates. This paper examines the research that have been conducted to see if solitary confinement will cause mental illness symptoms in the inmates. The studies include inmates throughout the United States, in jails and prisons with all different backgrounds, but mostly focuses on male inmates.

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Research has proven that the use of solitary confinement is having a major impact on the mind of inmates. To test the validity if solitary confinement and its true affect the mind of inmates at the University of Wisconsin psychologist named Harry Harlow conducted an experiment of rhesus monkeys. These monkeys were placed in solitary chamber that they nicknamed “the pit of despair.” Within these chambers the walls were slippery on every side, which made it impossible to climb or climb out. After two days in solitary it was noticed that the subjects started showing signs of "hopelessness, profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves” (Breslow

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When discussing prison reform, success is often difficult to measure. One measure of success that the government uses is the recidivism rate. If the rate is lower it means that more inmates are adjusting to life outside of prison. If the rate is higher, like it is now, then prisoners are struggling to gain a footing in society and are going back to prison. As a current measure of success, a recidivism rate that is upwards of fifty percent in most states shows that prison reform and the prison system is failing.

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