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Examples Of Solitary Confinement

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Solitary Confinement
Every day 48,000 inmates are held in solitary confinement for 22 hours or more. These inmates are held in confined spaces for days and sometimes years. This is detrimental to the health and well-being of inmates, and it can leave them permanently disabled. Even though it negatively affects the inmates, many people believe that they deserve this treatment because of their crimes. However, solitary confinement is an inhumane practice that needs to be abolished due to poor living conditions and negative effects on the inmates' health.
To start, inmates in solitary confinement experience miserable living conditions that restrict their physical and mental capabilities. They live in confined spaces for up to 23 hours each day, …show more content…

Inmates in confinement have no contact with any human beings other than the guards, and this often leads to extreme mental health problems. Additionally, many inmates do not receive proper medical treatment and are left with severe physical health complications. One example of these health problems is presented in an excerpt from the American Law Yearbook from 2017. In this excerpt, the authors say, “Those held in solitary confinement are often subject to physical torture, including different types of restraints. Prisoners report that they also endure nonphysical torture, such as sensory deprivation, forced insomnia, permanent bright lighting, and extreme temperature.” This quote provides many examples of torture in solitary confinement, which is a result of the actions of the prison guards. Many of these examples can lead to disruption in inmate sleep cycles, mental illness, and physical complications. In Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, we see the effects of these types of torture when he presents the story of the juvenile offender, Ian Manuel. In Chapter 8 of the novel, Stevenson describes Manuel’s problems when he says, “In solitary, Ian became a self-described “cutter”; he would take anything sharp on his food tray to hurt himself. His mental health unraveled, and he attempted suicide several times. Each time he hurt himself or acted out, his time in isolation was extended.” This story is important because it gives the readers a real-life example of the effects of long periods of confinement. Additionally, it shows us how inhumane the justice system is because they extended his time in solitary confinement due to the effects of his mental illness. Instead of adding to his time, they should have removed him from confinement and provided the necessary resources for mental recovery. To conclude, many sources and real-life examples show us how an inmate’s health can be

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The Rolling Stone article “Slow Motion Torture,” written by Jeff Teitz, is a perplexing article that dives into the various psychological affects that solitary confinement can have on an individual’s mind. The arrangement of the article itself was hard to follow at times. It was all over the place, talking about multiple things at once that did not correlate with the topic of the paragraph. But, for the most part, I was able to understand it.

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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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For breakfast, you are served what is comparable to dog food and quickly return back into your room. For the next 23 hours of the day, you remain completely isolated from all human contact. As the days in solitary confinement pass by, this routine persists for a total of four and a half decades. While the scenario outlined above may sound a nightmare, this is a reality to thousands of United States prisoners held in long-term solitary

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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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Additional example is Todd Fickett, who has to spend six months in the solitary unit. This prisoner mentality changed and he converted to a suicidal person, several times he cut himself in attempt to commit suicide. All these problems reveal that using segregation, as a punishment is not beneficial for the prisoner’s mental health.

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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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The film “Solitary Nation” by Dan Edge had an impact on me as I was watching the film of the inmates’ lives in solitary while a new warden is trying to make a change for them. Although it was similar to other prison documentaries, it had more of a closer view to solitary than the normal prisons. It provided evidence of how torturing it could be after a certain time, and how the world is constantly full of that nature no matter what measures are taken. It depicted the causes of solitary on the inmates’ behavior, and how contradictory it is to have solitary confinement. Should solitary still be used as a way of punishment?

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Criminals on death row will be placed in solitary confinement. This usually consists of twenty-three hours a day, alone in a small cell, with the only human interaction being with the jailer letting the criminal out for their one hour of exercise. Since the average time spent on death row is approximately ten years, the daily solitary confinement can have detrimental psychological effects on the prisoners. These effects, called Death Row Syndrome, include symptoms such as, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, self mutilation, thoughts of suicide, and stress (Harrison, 6-7). Prisoners also experience psychological stress and mental suffering from not knowing when their execution date will be.

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PEople who are isolated said that they experienced hallucinations, tried hurting themselves and felt a disconnect to reality. Which brings in an interesting question is that even though these guards see that solitary confinement is hurting prisoners and is not working why do they do it? I would suggest that Goffman would say that people are dehumanized when they are

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As they hope to be released from bondage and the fear of losing themselves while gaining freedom, voices the impact that imprisonment can have on a person's sense of self and identity. In conclusion, Bryan Stevenson's 'Just Mercy' serves as a poignant reminder of the systemic injustices and

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Solitary confinement is, “Living in a concrete box the size of a walk-in closet. You get tour meals through a slot, you do not see other inmates, and you never touch or get near another human being”(Stevenson 129). Solitary confinement is a punishment not fit for humans. Humans need social interaction to live. We have established how messed up solitary confinement is, but how do we fix it?

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The prison system of California has agreed to change the way in which it is decided that an inmate is kept in solitary confinement. This change could decrease the number of solitary confined inmates by more than half. Solitary confinement involves inmates having little to no human interaction for twenty-two hours or more. These hours are spent locked in a cell. In California, the state with the second largest prison population in the nation, the number of inmates currently in solitary confinement is 3,000.

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Some might argue that solitary confinement is actually effective and has its benefits, however this is not the case since this punishment only seems to make criminals much more dangerous when they leave prison than they were before and research shows that inmates who left solitary confinement experience increased anger and end up committing the kind of criminality that society is looking to prevent by using this method of punishment. Thus, solitary confinement ultimately fails as a rehabilitative measure, and as a way to "settle down" problematic

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In 2003, the Human Rights Watch reported that at least ⅔ of the prisoners in solitary confinement have a mental

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