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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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