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The Pros And Cons Of Solitary Confinement

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In conclusion, the practice of solitary confinement must be put at the center of attention and reestablished with the given reform principles. As it stands now, the practice of solitary confinement is a punishment with irreversible consequences that provides no real purpose of rehabilitation for an inmate. Inmates that are subjected to solitary confinement are physiological and physically tortured. Inmates are put into solitary confinement and are later released into society with long term mental health issues, in which they return to prison as recidivists. Metaphorically speaking, prison officials are placing inmates into solitary confinement and are essentially throwing away the key. The practice of solitary confinement has it’s evident positives
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Guenther discusses the effects of solitary confinement such as “They experience intense anxiety, paranoia, depression, memory loss, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions” (1). But doesn’t provide enough reasons as to why U.S prisons should become a rehabilitation place to help those get back into the society they were once in. she only establishments that solitary confinement and prisons are not good to inmates because they caused them to develop psychological problems. What I mean is that, the entirety of the article and her arguments gives the sense that, that’s the purpose of what she is trying to achieve here, making prisons a rehabilitation place instead of something else. But the thing is why should prisons become a rehabilitation center, Guenther claims that “Given that 95 percent of all inmates are eventually released into the public, and that many of these will be released without any form of transition or therapy, solitary confinement is a problem that potentially affects every one of us.”

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800 Words | 4 Pages

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 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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75 Words | 1 Pages

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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540 Words | 3 Pages

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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638 Words | 3 Pages

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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859 Words | 4 Pages

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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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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There are also many reasons why people are in solitary confinement. Reasons such as violence, fighting, and contraband. There are many effects that solitary confinement has on a person. For example, Adam. Adam has just arrived at solitary confinement and is confident he can last.

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739 Words | 3 Pages

Thousands of people across America are experiencing near-hell while they are locked inside a type of prison called solitary confinement. Solitary confinement must come to an end in America, even for the worst of criminals. The effects of solitary confinement consist of mental illnesses, wrongful convictions, staff members receiving trouble, the long-lasting suffering for the criminals, and the number of people experiencing it must end now. Solitary confinement can change the life of a person behind bars forever. Prisoners are left with multiple mental illnesses, and some are worse than others.

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906 Words | 4 Pages

Many prison policies fail to reform an offender at all, which brings into question what true purposes these policies serve. Solitary confinement being one of these prison policies serves a purpose that represents both pros and cons in the eyes of many critics, as the cons clearly outweigh the pros. Solitary confinement is a punishment with irreversible consequences that provides no real purpose of rehabilitation for an inmate. In the modern day it is primarily used as a tool of punishment that achieves little to no means of success in reforming an offender. The use of solitary confinement is an abuse of power by prison officials the has severe consequences on inmates, juveniles, and the mentally ill.

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446 Words | 2 Pages

Solitary confinement is, “Living in a concrete box the size of a walk-in closet. You get tour meals through a slot, you do not see other inmates, and you never touch or get near another human being”(Stevenson 129). Solitary confinement is a punishment not fit for humans. Humans need social interaction to live. We have established how messed up solitary confinement is, but how do we fix it?

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353 Words | 2 Pages

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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1000 Words | 4 Pages

Another request for records will need to be completed. The records will be utilized to determine which offenders have been to solitary confinement, how many times they have been sent to solitary and for what reasons. Additional information will need to be gathered on inmates who have not been sent to solitary confinement to be able to evaluate the difference and see the psychological damage that solitary confinement imposes. It needs to be taken into consideration that not every inmate will be willing to participate and a record for both general population and solitary confinement populations should be kept on how many refused out of the 900

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1526 Words | 7 Pages

This argument presents solitary as a solution rather than a problem, a way to isolate violent offenders, keep order in oftentimes chaotic environments, and protect the prison population at large from especially dangerous inmates. For critics of solitary confinement, it can often feel like an argument with a frustratingly simple foundation: what else are corrections officers supposed to do? This question, however, as well as the argument in full, deserves consideration in any serious discussion of solitary

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