Essay about Solitary Confinement: A Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Many researchers have found that long periods of time in solitary confinement can have negative mental effects on inmates. This is due to long-term confinement because it consists of not only prolonged deprivation of social interaction but also sensory deprivation (Haney, 2003). Medical ethics are also in question about the effects of long term confinement. Medical professionals have to handle a particularly difficult situation because they are required to provide medical assistance to these inmates that may be facing psychological issues. This is a problem because medical professionals are aware that solitary confinement has negative effects on the well-being and mental state of these individuals (Shalev, 2011).

Solitary confinement has had a long history in the American prison system. America is the first country to adapt solitary confinement into the prison regiment. Pennsylvania had the first special housing units for inmates or “SHU”. When Europeans came to America to look at the new model for prisons in Pennsylvania they wrote reports describing to the European parliament on how prisoners were treated like caged animals. Many of them quickly realized that this was not what prisons were set out to accomplish. The purpose of a prison is to rehabilitate criminals and bring them back into society as an individual that has the best mental tools and skills to make their respective communities better. Putting inmates in solitary confinement for more than 48 hours can only lead to awful emotional pain and mental problems which can result in self-destructive behavior to regain the self-control that is being deprived through this process of isolation and expulsion.

Solitary confinement is occasionally used in most prison systems as a means to maintain prison order. Mainly for disciplinary punishment, or as a place to put inmates that are at escape risk, or a risk to themselves and prison order. Sometimes inmates that are sex offenders voluntarily choose solitary as a means of protection from other prisoners. Sometimes solitary can be used to hold pretrial detainees to prevent them from messing with witness, so they can’t try and force a confession. For 23 hours a day inmates are confined to the barren environment that is their cell with high surveillance (Smith, Peter Scharff, 2006.) Inmates have no social contact. Visits and phone calls are infrequent and highly restricted. Visits sometime only take place via video screens. The physical contact one experiences is limited to the interaction with prison guards, weather it be putting on restraints or taking them off.

Solitary confinement can cause mental distress to inmates. Solitary confinement causes problems with people’s heads, lives, and in some occasions makes the world more dangerous. The barbaric conditions of solitary confinement may cause or worsen depression, paranoia and anger. Scientist say if you ever go in solitary you will be damaged by it. If you survive it, it has impact on you. Solitary confinement is a big discussion all around the world, because of all these mental health issues. Inmates have nothing to do but just sit there. The barbaric condition only worsens men and women, they are lonely and drenched with depression in their heads. If there wasn’t solitary there would be less angry inmates walking out of the cells and going into the real world. Nikki Jenkins went straight out of solitary to be a free man, within a few weeks

What if something that is supposed to be keeping society safe is actually doing more harm than good? As it turns out, that might be the case with the solitary confinement of prisoners. For multiple days at a time prisoners are locked into a lonely cell as small as a bathroom stall, going days without any human contact or communication. While solitary confinement is expensive to taxpayers, it is costing even more in social terms, as it can debilitate inmates and cause serious mental harm in forms of anxiety, paranoia, and even hallucinations beyond their life behind bars. The argument ‘On the Edge of Humane’ by Keramet Reiter argues that the inhumane conditions of solitary confinement

Prisoners are locked behinds cells confined in a small space without windows for 22 to 23 hours per day. Cells are illuminated by artificial light with no means for prisoners to control the brightness. These lights remain on all day so inmates have difficulty-distinguishing day from night (Arrigo and Bullock, 2008). At times the prisoner may be confined the whole day if they decide to misbehave. Interaction with other human beings is strictly prohibited. The only contact prisoners have is through a closed-circuit television to talk to their visitors or when correctional officers placed handcuffs and other restraints (Pizarro and Narag, 2008). From the extreme isolation, such inmates tend to fear

Inmates currently in solitary confinement reach numbers as high as 100,000 and this includes juveniles and people with mental illness. Stuart Grassin, a board-certified psychiatrist and a former faculty member at Harvard Medical School, has interviewed hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement. In one study, he found that roughly a third of solitary inmates were “actively psychotic and/or actually suicidal.” Suicide is a huge concern with solitary confinement, in one study of California’s prison system, researchers found that prisoners in solitary confinement accounted for nearly half of all suicides. Within the confined walls of your segregation prison cell I can see how over time it would seem like the only way out of your cell is to take your own life.

* Hallucinations – see things that aren’t there or talk to people who aren’t around.

One way that prisoners can be dealt with more humanely is by eliminating the need to use solitary confinement for minor rule infractions and prohibiting that inmates with mental illness be subjected to solitary confinement. According to “Solitary Confinement: Common Misconceptions and Emerging Safe Alternatives,” many believe the misconception that solitary confinement is used only for the most violent of inmates, when in reality disciplinary segregation is commonly used for minor rule violations. We should not be punishing inmates with solitary confinement for minor infractions instead we should enforce less severe consequences, such as providing correctional officers with sanction grids that guide them to choose the appropriate punishment for certain behaviors (“Solitary Confinement: Common Misconceptions and Emerging Safe Alternatives”). Moreover, inmates with a known mental illness should not be placed in solitary confinement because, in concordance with “Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement,” it causes severe mental suffering and isolating them to a small cell where they experience sensory deprivation constitutes torture. Instead of sending

Imagine yourself in a cell no bigger than a closet, isolated from the real world. You are in your cell to 22 hours 23 day, day, without any socialization. You can't communicate with your family or friends. Food is served through a small hole on your door, and the food isn’t good. That’s only part of the picture of solitary confinement.

Every day, adolescent inmates under the age of 18 are being held in solitary confinement. Solitary Confinement is imprisonment where the prisoner is separated from human contact for 22 hours of the day. Inmates can occupy these cells from days to decades’ contingent on many things. Prisoners can be put into this form of confinement for serious fighting, getting caught with items that aren’t allowed in prison, serious infractions, and sometime this is used as a tool to isolate people who are suspected to be in gangs. Solitary confinement leads to social isolation, disturbances in mental health, alterations in physical health and many other devastating side effects.

Since the early 1800s, the United States has relied on a method of punishment barely known to any other country, solitary confinement (Cole). Despite this method once being thought of as the breakthrough in the prison system, history has proved differently. Solitary confinement was once used in a short period of time to fix a prisoners behavior, but is now used as a long term method that shows to prove absolutely nothing. Spending 22-24 hours a day in a small room containing practically nothing has proved to fix nothing in a person except further insanity. One cannot rid himself of insanity in a room that causes them to go insane. Solitary confinement is a flawed and unnecessary method of punishment that should be prohibited in the prison

Solitary confinement dismantles a persons mental capacity for life situations- “More than half the prisoners reported a progressive inability to tolerate ordinary stimuli”(Grassian). Some of the prisoners said: “You get sensitive to noise, the plumbing system. Someone in the tier above me pushes the button on the faucet . . . It’s too loud, gets on your nerves. I can’t stand it. I start to holler”(Grassian). This specific effect is very similar to Hard Rock’s effects-not only was he not able to handle life anymore, but he also didn’t have the mental energy for life itself. Also, solitary confinement also causes “difficulties with Thinking, Concentration, and Memory: Many reported symptoms of difficulty in concentration and memory. One prisoner described his experience, ‘I can’t concentrate, can’t read . . . Your mind’s narcotized. Sometimes I can’t grasp words in my mind that I know. Get stuck, have to think of another word. Memory’s going. You feel like you are losing something you might not get back’

Brain scans of individuals affected by psilocybin, the dynamic fixing in enchantment mushrooms, have given researchers the most itemized picture to date of how hallucinogenic medications work. The discoveries made by two studies, being distributed in exploratory diaries not long from now, recognize ranges of the cerebrum where movement is smothered by psilocybin and recommend that it helps individuals to experience memories all the more strikingly.

Being devoid of any sensory input for hours, days, weeks, even months, has drastic repercussions that at times manifest as hallucinations. Hearing sounds that aren’t real, seeing objects that disappear when focused on, and even full blown scenarios that don’t and couldn’t possibly exist are all too common to those subjected to such extreme situations. Donald Hebb, a psychologist at McGill University Medical Center in Montreal conducted a sensory deprivation experiment, reporting that the