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Solitary Confinement In Juvenile Detention Facilities

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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. Experts conclude this practice is both widespread and underreported. Staff use solitary confinement as a security management tool; until more effective solutions are available and implemented, youth will continue to experience substantial negative repercussions of being confined in a solitary cell. Facility staff need effective and easily-implementable alternatives they can use. Some of the psychological distress from spending time in confinement can lead to instances of self-harm, suicide, …show more content…

President Barack Obama, in 2016, banning the use of solitary confinement for youth housed in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In his op-end, President Obama wrote, “How can we subject prisoners to unnecessary solitary confinement, knowing its effects, and then expect them to return to our communities as whole people? It doesn’t make us safer. It’s an affront to our common humanity…[and has] devastating, lasting psychological consequences.” He points to the most tragic repercussion of solitary confinement: the correlation between time spent in isolation and suicide. Lindsay Hayes has studied youth suicide in confinement settings extensively. He confirms

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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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The documentary, “Kids Locked in Solitary Confinement” depicts the toll that solitary confinement can have on the juvenile population. Approximately, 27% of adolescents in Riskers Island are in solitary confinement. The majority of which have not yet been convicted of a crime. However, these juveniles are in jail because they cannot afford to post bail. Supporters of solitary confinement believe that the segregation juveniles experience is not equivalent to the segregation in the federal system.

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Not only does Berstein call for an overall reform of this nation’s juvenile prisons, she goes as far as saying the practice of locking up youth is in need of a “more profound than incremental and partial reform” (13). The fact that Bernstein outlines the numerous failed strategies and goals of this practice with her compelling use of studies and statistics is enough to promote an audience to reject the practice of locking up youth. The statistic she shares that “four out of five juvenile parolees [will be] back behind bars within three years of release” as well as the studies she conducted on numerous instances when a guards abuse of power lead to the death of a child work to further prove her point: being that “institution[s] as intrinsically destructive as the juvenile prison” have no place in a modern society (13, 83). Bernstein refutes this false sense effectiveness further by sharing her own ideas on what she believes works as a much more humane solution to rehabilitating

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I think one of the main goals of incarceration should be rehabilitation. This is why I am against solitary confinement because seg is not rehabilitating these inmates and even worsens them in some cases. Rehabilitation is supposed to be helping restore health and goodness into a life and essentially teaching an individual how to act properly in society. Solitary confinement is doing the opposite by isolating individuals so they lose social skills, develop mental health issues, and even make some individuals more angry, violent, or harmful because they are deprived of needs. Deterrence is also something I think solitary confinement doesn’t necessarily help with.

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Imagine being trapped in a damp, dark, cage as a form of punishment for something that seems completely out of your grasp. Prisons were understaffed and as barbaric as it gets the people charged with crimes were whipped. The primary cause for their creation was to keep the crooks from harming any people right? Everyone in solitary confinement is treated the same way but not everyone came for the same reason. In fact, mentally ill people were considered to be harsh maniacs which did not receive treatment for a long time.

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The prisoner sits alone. Darkness and his thoughts are all he has for company. Sometimes the occasional guard will check up on him. This stasis of activity goes on for almost an entire day. Solitary confinement is a form of punishment used in many American correctional facilities.

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Physical and mechanical restraint can be similarly defined to be “Any device or individual that confines or restricts movement,” whereas chemical restraint is defined to be “Any drug that is used… to either control behavior or to restrict the patient’s freedom of movement that is not typically administered… as being prescribed for a medical treatment or psychiatric condition” (Fryer 27). Clearly, there is a stark difference between the physical and mechanical restraint uses as compared to the chemical, for many would consider injecting an adolescent with a medication that they are not prescribed for as being unlawful. Seclusion of a patient involves confining a patient, voluntarily or involuntarily, to a set space or location without any social interaction, but sometimes the patient is adamant and refuses to adhere to the order.

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The article, The Steep Costs of Keeping Juveniles in Adult Prisons by Jessica Lahey states that “due to the imbalance of power between children and adults, not to mention between children and prison staff, sexual abuse of juveniles in adult prison is underreported; fewer than one in 10 of the juveniles surveyed reported their abuse.” ( ). The adult prison is not safe because of the abuses between the staff and juvenile, they need to be aware of what happens in the adult system. Lahey wants to show how dangerous the adult system is by stating what actually happens in prison to the juveniles because of the adult prisoners and the staff. Lahey also explains about how the lack of services and safety, “juveniles housed in adult prisons are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than juveniles housed apart from adult offenders.”

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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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