Pros And Cons Of Solitary Confinement

Over the last couple of decades, prison systems have adopted the use of solitary confinement as a means of punishment and have progressively depended on it to help maintain obedience and discipline inside the prison structure. Solitary confinement is a form of incarceration in which a prisoner is isolated in a cell for multiple hours, days, or weeks with limited to no human contact. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the United States represents only 5% of the world's population, yet houses 20% of the world’s prisoners (ACLU, 2017). Two of the biggest problems with our modern day criminal justice system is the overwhelming number of people that are incarcerated in the United States and the overwhelming number of convicts who

Many prison policies fail to reform an offender at all, which brings into question what true purposes these policies serve. Solitary confinement being one of these prison policies serves a purpose that represents both pros and cons in the eyes of many critics, as the cons clearly outweigh the pros. Solitary confinement is a punishment with irreversible consequences that provides no real purpose of rehabilitation for an inmate. In the modern day it is primarily used as a tool of punishment that achieves little to no means of success in reforming an offender. The use of solitary confinement is an abuse of power by prison officials the has severe consequences on inmates, juveniles, and the mentally ill. Solitary confinement in itself does not only fail to reform an offender, but instead guarantees his return to prison after his eventual

However, problems with solitary confinement were found to be evident even then as noted by, Beaumont and Tocqueville, who both came to the United States to observe and describe the new American penitentiary system, in order to gain an additional sense of knowledge in making recommendations for prison reform in their nation of France. In their observation of the Auburn Prison in New York, they found that the use of solitary confinement and subjecting the inmates to complete isolation had serious negative results, in which Beaumont and Tocqueville noted that solitary confinement did not reform and rather killed (Panzarella & Vona, pg 287). As a result, solitary confinement lost much of its popularity over the next couple of decades and later reemerged with the establishment of supermax prisons in the late nineteenth century. Supermax prisons, which is short for maximum security prisons hold the most dangerous convicts using the methods of isolation and solitary confinement to primarily control and direct them. Inmates in maximum security prisons are held in isolated cells for years or even decades as they serve their sentence. In her University of Michigan Journal of law Review, Solitary Confinement, Public Safety,