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Solitary Confinement In Prison Essay

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The conditions of jails in the Unites States are no longer suitable for living but instead inmates need to survive to get through the day. Locked into these restricting jail cells they can’t escape from the heat, inedible food, violence, solitary confinement, and horrible conditions around them. The worst system in the US is the Rikers Island jail in New York City, and state prisons in Alabama, Arizona and Texas. The Marshall Project exposes the cruel environment that inmates had to endure while in jail. All the jails have something in common, and it is the cruelty prisons would make prisoners go through.

There are many ways prisons abuse inmates when they are “misbehaving” for example solitary confinement is one of them. What is known as …show more content…

Along with the long sentences and the harsh conditions of jail, one is bound to have mental conditions get worse or created. The abuse that prisoners receive from guards is not from a few bad guards but instead it’s a large number of guards. For example, the Standford Prison Experiment is a great example that anyone can become abusive guard even if they’re “good kids” from Standford, but then it is easy to imagine normal guards turning bad quickly. The experiment shows that the abuse of incarcerated people is not a result of bad guards but instead is inherent to the prison environment (Fichtelberg, 2020, p.296). Only if they improved the prison environment it can improve overall. People who are put into solitary confinement are already emotional and mentally disturbed to start off with (Fichtelberg, 2020, p.309). Instead of the prison system putting people who already have mental health issues in solitary confinement, they should be helped, not put into solitary confinement which can cause more disruptive behaviors or worsen conditions of mental health. The system should decriminalize mental illness, meaning instead of punishing, they should help or treat it. In one prison in Texas reached 110 degrees without air-conditioning in the cells. For them to get out of the heat they need to lose access to better services like getting a job and education to get out of the prison and move to a higher security prison where the only cooled cells are solitary (Lartey, 2023). So many opportunities are lost due to the harsh conditions, but why are there harsh conditions in prisons in the first

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