The Attention Step Take a moment to imagine sitting in a room slightly smaller than the size of where you parked your car before coming to class today, In fact, about the size of a King size mattress. This room is where you will spend the next 23, possibly 24 hours a day for the next two weeks, and if you are lucky you might get one hour of exercise, again alone. This is the life of over 81,000 people, and in any other country would be considered torture. I am here today to tell you of the harsh realities of solitary confinement, and why it should be used as a last resort punishment instead of an everyday use, and why there should be an enforced legal limit on the amount of time an individual can spend in solitary confinement per infraction. …show more content…
Here in the United States the longest that any one inmate has been in solitary confinement is 41 years, and many people consider this an issue of the 8th amendment which prohibits the use of “cruel and unusual punishment.” The United Kingdom does use solitary confinement as well but it does not normally exceed 72 hours unless in extreme cases where the inmate is in solitary no more than 3 weeks at a time, and there are only about 30 cells used for solitary at any given time compared to the 81,000 inmates in the United States in Solitary at any given time, including juveniles. Closer to home, in an Oregon Intensive Management Unit, or an isolation cell, one man spent 12 years in isolation before being sent to an out of state super max …show more content…
Although solitary confinement is not part of the legal process, at least 44 states as well as the federal government has super max prisons, and every state has some type of isolation cell, they just have different names. If anyone has watched orange is the new black on Netflix, they talk about the SHU, which is the isolation cell in that prison, Shu stands for security housing unit, there is also Restrictive housing units, special housing units, intensive management units and communication management