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Supermax Inmates

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The past 25 years the numbers of prisoners who are held in solitary confinement has sky rocketed. State and federal prisons all have solitary confinement. Therefore, when an inmate acts out and tries to attack other inmates, and officers then they are put into an individual cell and are isolated from other individuals. One senator had said that the expansion of the use of solitary confinement is an issue. Supermax prisons hold inmates that are considered “the worst of the worst”. Prisoners that are in supermax prisons are isolated 23 hours out of the day. ADX-Florence Colorado has a law suit against them by fellow inmates. According to the speaker there are mentally ill patients who are not given drugs, counseling, and are held in conditions …show more content…

She describes an inmate screaming at the top of his lungs, and another inmate banging his head against the door. All of 128 beds are full in the psychiatric unit and there is also a waiting list. There are a variety of inmates that are not clothed properly and that are exposing themselves. In Pelican Bay the inmates are in an 8 by 8-foot cells that is made of all concrete with a desk and chair. The officer will push a button that will allow the inmate to go “outside” for an hour or hour and a half. Outside meant that the offender would be able to go to a concrete room that had a grate as a ceiling in which if you looked above your head you would be able to see the sky. Also, when you are done with that hour the officer will then press the button and you would walk back to your room. While walking back to their cell they would not have interacted with the officer, and other cells are made of steel and have holes the size of nickels, so they are not interacting with other offenders either. Consequently, three times a day the inmate’s food is slid underneath the door, and they would most likely not have any conversation either. From then on, she went to explain how she talked to many offenders who resided in Pelican Bay and they had told her that they hadn’t spoken to anybody in years. Finally, only one inmate was allowed out of their cell at a time despite if it was

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“LockDown” is the short story of a man, named Evan Hopkins, and his time spent during his prison sentence. Hopkins received 16 years in prison for armed robbery and spent his sentence at Nottoway Correctional Center in Virginia. Hopkins describes the prison in great detail down to how it operates on a lockdown, hence the name of the story. In the period of the lockdown, prison guards checked for contraband hidden in cells, or in possession of the inmates. Most of the lockouts last for a week, but this one was due to a botched escape attempt.

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Before the centralization of prison systems, prisoners had the privilege to decorate their prison cell, personalize their prison clothing, and have different types of furniture, such as bookshelves, rugs, and chairs. However, this changed when the prison system became more centralized. Austin and Irwin (2012) explained that “the centralization of authority and the formation of rules and regulations in prison systems resulted in stringent and uniform routines”, which eliminated the privileges of the prisoners. In our course textbook, Dannie Martian, a former prisoner at Lompoc, provided insight on the changes that occurred at the prison in which he was incarcerated.

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Under article 8 of the Bill of Human Rights it states, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted (The Eighth Amendment).” Placing a mentally ill inmate inside four walls away from any social interaction and medical attention is in fact cruel. As said by a federal judge, putting a mentally ill person in segregation is the “equivalent of putting an asthmatic in a place with little air to breathe (Wallace 11).” A mentally ill person needs help, not a poor environment in which they won’t get any better. Not only does solitary confinement mess with the mind, but it inflicts inmates to self-harm in any way possible.

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Super Max prisons are harsh and rigid. They house individuals who have been convicted of some of the worst, most violent, and most heinous crimes which shock the conscience. Individuals who are incarcerated in Super Max prisons are confined solitarily on a basis of 23/7. For 23 hours per day, 7 days per week they are confined solely to themselves in a small cell with little to no view of the outside world, and only receive one hour per day of recreational time which allows them to exit their cells (Tapley, 2012). Furthermore, this type of confinement is extremely difficult on the mental health of individuals (Schmalleger & Smykla, 2015).

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According to American Friends Service Committee, “numerous studies have documented the harmful psychological effects of long-term solitary confinement, which can produce debilitating symptoms and result in an increased risk of suicide and the effects are magnified for two particularly vulnerable populations: juveniles, whose brains are still developing, and people with mental health issues...” (2017). My topic of discussion deals with the injustice of social isolation in our prison system and the effects on an individual 's mental health. Kalief Browder a fairly normal adolescent residing Bronx, NY. Kalief endured false imprisonment at the age of sixteen; he spent three years and 800 days of those years were served in solitary confinement.

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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 poem “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” by Etheridge Knight is a commentary on the twentieth century American prison system. It invokes within the reader a feeling that many of the processes used to ‘correct’ a prisoner is dehumanizing. Solitary confinement is one such method. Solitary confinement should be outlawed because it is ineffective as it traumatizes the victims and is a violation of human rights. To begin, solitary

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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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Chapter 1: Ghostly Inmates Trapped in a Jail Built in 1885, this Victorian three storey brick building is one of the only three revolving jails left in USA. Also called ‘squirrel cages’, there are 30 in total and resemble pieces of pie in a circular jail. The jail was built on a land that had once been a morgue of an Episcopalian church. Between 1184 and 1969, for a period of 85 years, this jail has been occupied by the superintendents and their families as well as prisoners.

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Inmates in confinement have no contact with any human beings other than the guards, and this often leads to extreme mental health problems. Additionally, many inmates do not receive proper medical treatment and are left with severe physical health complications. One example of these health problems is presented in an excerpt from the American Law Yearbook from 2017. In this excerpt, the authors say, “Those held in solitary confinement are often subject to physical torture, including different types of restraints. Prisoners report that they also endure nonphysical torture, such as sensory deprivation, forced insomnia, permanent bright lighting, and extreme temperature.”

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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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Additionally, in an attempt to foster an increase in professionalism within the correctional community, care and consideration must be taken with the care and housing of inmates both privately operated and those operated by some branch of the government. “The quality of prisons has improved from the past, but there continue to be too many inhumane new prisons. New construction does not always result in a prison conductive to humane incarceration” (Bartollas,

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