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Summary Of Hellhole By Atul Gawande

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In Hellhole by Atul Gawande, the idea of solitary confinement as a means of punishment has been looked upon as more a form of torture. Gawande explains that the human rights of prisoners have been violated by means of solitary confinement. For the reason that it is in our nature to socialize with other people and by taking that away, it strips one of their rights as a human being. Mainly Gawande provides examples that relate to how solitary confinement is considered a form of torture. As in one experiment that involved monkeys, some monkeys were placed with fake mothers of wire and of cloth to figure out why they seemed disturbed. The experiment showed how vital it is to be physically surrounded by others than not to as it can have lasting …show more content…

Terry Anderson, one of the hostages, and a journalist in Beirut was held at gunpoint in his car by three men and he was tied up with tape around his wrists and was questioned on the names of other Americans. They did not beat him but instead confined him to a closet space enough to fit a mattress. Anderson's words of what had happened to him were explained as “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me” (Gawande 3). Based on Anderson's experience, it’s needless to say how he felt as if his brain had been dead from the isolation from others and being in a small room. Anderson reflected during his time there and discusses the dangers of 3 years in isolation had done to him and felt as though he was losing his mind that he snapped and ended up injuring …show more content…

Solitary confinement could last years as specified and is a brutal form of torture and can be seen as inhumane. Not many believe it to be a form of torture, even when presented with stories such as these that are real-life examples of what can happen to someone when they are socially isolated with no human contact. It continues to occur because the American public would never vote on being less harsh on inmates. Inmate violence is unchanging even when putting prisoners in solitary confinement and as mentioned, “the result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness -- a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change” (Gawande 10). Given this, the main reason it continues to be in place and people justify its use is due to believing it helps prevent further violence when it doesn’t and is also due to this unprecedented

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In Nelson’s case, for example, within the first few months of his arrival, he became extremely depressed. His sleeping schedule was erratic, and he was very susceptible to panic attacks due to his high levels of anxiety. He was also losing weight rapidly, probably due to the fact that he spent a majority of his time pacing whenever he was not reading any form of literature he could get his hands on. He paced to the extent that he had worn tracks into the concrete floors. Considering the room he was confined to was only big enough to have a bed, a toilet, and a desk, that’s all he could do to allow the time to pass.

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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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I INTRODUCTION TO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT It is somewhere around three a.m. in the morning. You wake up to an empty, cold room, no larger than 60 square feet, with nothing but four walls surrounding you. You are stripped, handcuffed and taken about 30 feet outside your cell where you are allowed a brief shower.

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The first being I view solitary confinement as psychologically harmful. As the documentary highlighted, there are a lot of psychological issues that arise when offenders are incarcerated in solitary confinement for a long period. Mental health is such a big issue in our society and is often overlooked in the prison system. I believe inmates still deserve the same access to good mental health services and solitary confinement is the opposite of that. Solitude is proven to cause mental health issues and social issues, such as depression, anxiety, antisocial behavior, etc.

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TO: Thomas R. Krane, P.h.D., Acting Director of Federal Bureau of Prisons FROM: Roger Rael, Graduate Student University of Colorado-Denver DATE: Tuesday, May 10, 2016 RE: Evaluating the consequences of continued super-max confinement I. Issue The issue is broad and national in scope. Whether the Federal Bureau of Prisons should continue supporting the use of super-max facilities is a matter of extreme societal and legal questions. Solitary confinement, for an extended or indefinite period of time, implicates constitutional rights and questions our morality as a society.

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The article is mostly fact and it does provide references for quotations and dat. The author of this source is Kevin Johnson, and this source was originally published by USA Today Information Network. The article does not give the author credentials. Owning the fact that the author is trying to inform the ready that solitary confinement is an effective punishment, the article is mostly free of bias. In this source, I learned that once you are released from solitary confinement it is hard for someone to adjust to the real of the world.

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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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Graves recalled that he remembers hearing loud piercing screams from inmates losing their minds and the feeling of isolation can dehumanize themselves. A person will eventually completely lose their emotions and become a shell of a person they once was. Graves noted, that there should be a reform on how solitary confinement should addressed when there is a need to separate a dangerous prisoner from the general population. He believes that there should be a system of policies and regulations that should be carried out in court before putting an inmate into solitary confinement. He claims that the majority of inmates in solitary confinement observes their lives is hopeless and

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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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A punishment warns someone or something that to do whatever they did again will end in bad consequences. It, hopefully, prevents them from making the same mistake twice. It should never hurt the person to the point of psychological damage which many people claim solitary confinement does. If it scares some people into doing the right thing, however, then the results outweigh the means. For example, my mother dated a boy her senior year of high school who had spent time in solitary confinement in his freshmen year.

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In Atul Gawande “ HellHole” essay they talked about the experiences and effects of people who were previously in solitary confinement. Solitary confinement can be best explained as the process of removing an individual and isolating them from their environment and socialization. Atul Gawande is specifically talking about prisoners of war and incarcerated people and how their experience was and that process. The essay talked about how people are put in isolation which caused them to act out of their character. Goffman would argue that effects of solitary confinement are exactly what total institutions can do to a person's.

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Annotated Bibliography on Solitary Confinement Cheril L. Hall American InterContinental University CRJS405 Research Methods for Criminal Justice Solitary Confinement and Mental Health An issue we have in the correctional system is solitary confinement & mental health. Solitary confinement is the practice of confining a person that is incarcerated to a small cell for around twenty-two to twenty-three hours of the day without any social contact. The problem with solitary confinement is that it is either being done to someone that is weak minded or to someone for an extended period of time.

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140 Words | 1 Pages

Inmates should be allowed to fight their stay in solitary confinement. Even throughout the prison system inmates still hold their Rights to be heard. A well-presented case against a stay in solitary confinement should be heard and it should also determine whether the inmate needs to continue being in solitary or not. Solitary confinement is effective but cruel at the same time, this can cause many problems such as lawsuits, possible deaths or mental illnesses from the prisoners who have stayed in solitary. The inmates who have stayed in solitary confinement have a right to appeal, just the same way these individuals have a right to appeal their conviction they can also appeal and fight against their stay in solitary confinement.

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" If you shout or scream, your time in solitary is extended; if you hurt yourself by refusing to eat or mutilating your body, your time in solitary is extended; if you complain to officers or say anything menacing or inappropriate, your time in solitary is extended. " They overuse their power; they take their job way too personally. To close, prisoner abuse and the disregard for human dignity described in Just Mercy highlight how the urgent need for reform within the correction system is very wrong for those who are in positions of power to prioritize their responsibilities over personal

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353 Words | 2 Pages

In my honest opinion solitary confinement in the U.S. is not justified and only does more harm than good. Not only is it a rash punishment, but it is one of the worst kinds of psychological tortures that could be inflicted upon an inmate. Human beings are undoubtedly social creatures and without the mere contact of another person the mind decays and ultimately leads a person to anger, anxiety, and hopelessness. Psychologists also claim that solitary confinement and isolation in general also cause depression or the loss of ability to have any "feelings", cognitive disturbances, such as confused thought processes and disorientation, perceptual distortions, such as hypersensitivity to noises and smells, distortions of sensations, and hallucinations affecting all five senses, as well as paranoia and psychosis which often times involve schizophrenic type symptoms, and finally, the worst of all symptoms, being self-harm such as self-mutilation, cutting and even suicide attempts.

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