Solitary Confinement: A Cruel and Unusual Punishment Essay example

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.

Experiments with psychiatric diagnosis these are considered experiments that people sometimes volunteer or sometimes they have an illness and they have to take medication in order to find out what is going on. They might be given strong medication so they see how they react or they want to see what happens in their heads. Sometimes they hook them up into machines and take a look at their brains to see how the medication is working. When this process is done, they go and they see what is wrong. Sometimes their brain shows where the damage is done. I have gone to see someone when they are doing this to their brain and well the picture is not that nice. You could see the brain and where the damage is done the brains are moving. It

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

The problem with Solitary Confinement is that it causes mental health issues, it has been misused in prison, causes torture, inmates social life aren 't the same as before with their family members or friends. Prisoners have suffered severe psychological harm by being alone in small dark room without having anyone to talk to, having to only see a pitch black room. This issue should be fixed by using a different method without harming them and causing humans a physical damage. United States prisons should instead put inmates who are placed in solitary confinements and have them all together in the same area, than having each inmate in a room to their self. I believe that this method would work because prisons would be isolating them but they won’t be in a room by themselves, they will instead be in a room with other inmates to at least talk to and reflect amongst them together to become a better person outside of prison.

About 15 hours in the subjects reported seeing things and having strange hallucinations. One woman saw a zebra driving around a little car in her cell.(BBC, 2008).

Solitary Confinement has been a practice, dating all the way back to 1787 with the idea that when inmates would be left alone in silence, they would show regret and become more remorseful. In 2005, the sentence still thrived with nearly 82,000 men and women were in solitary confinement in federal adult prisons with the title of “restricted housing.” This statistic doesn’t even include jails or immigration facilities. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, the rate of confinement for juveniles skyrocketed to the point where we define that time as an epidemic. In that time, there became definitions of a “super predator,” defining it as teenagers who are fatherless, Godless, and jobless and don’t have anything better to do than to terrorize their community. In

Solitary confinement can actually be worse for the mentally ill. Many of the inmates that are subjected to solitary confinement “have serious mental illness, and the conditions of solitary confinement can exacerbate their symptoms or provoke recurrence.”(Metzner). Solitary confinement worsens the effects of mental illness which can be very dangerous to the prisoner and the few people that they get any human contact with. Solitary confinement is considered torture by the U.N. “The U.N. Convention Against Torture defines torture as any state-sanctioned act “by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” for information, punishment, intimidation, or for a reason based on discrimination”(“Solitary Confinement Facts.”) which solitary confinement clearly falls under especially with people with mental illness. Solitary confinements is a human rights violation which no one should be subjected to especially people with mental illness. Sometimes prisoners are not treated properly, in fact “roughly 60 percent of the inmates whose solitary cases were reviewed had serious underdiagnosed or untreated mental illnesses.”(Eilperin). Prisoners with mental illnesses did not get treatment and this can be very dangerous to not only the prisoner themselves but

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

It was in a brainstorming situation that I discovered the topic of discussion I wanted to hear a convincing opposition against. I knew that choosing something more controversial would garner a greater opposition, but at the same time, I wanted to avoid topics that seemed almost too commonplace in assignments like this. With that in mind, I decided to hear out the opposition against my view of the inhumanity of solitary confinement. The person with whom I discussed, who will be referred to as Person X for the purposes of this write-up, believed that in certain situations, solitary confinement was a just punishment. We had this discussion waiting for our Microbiology class to begin. Bringing up random topics of discussion is not something unusual within the scope of my character, and so rather than wait for an opportunity that would not present itself, I simply asked Person X for his/her opinion on solitary confinement as a justified punishment for convicted criminals. To give the discussion some direction and so that I could better understand Person X’s point of view I asked some questions. The two most important I found being: “Why do you feel that it’s okay to punish people like that in some cases but not in others?” and “How long is too long?”. I found these questions particularly helpful in understanding Person X’s position because I noticed that he/she didn’t completely agree with either one side. He/she was intent on making a point based on conditionality. Although I

Multiple regression analysis was run to predict hallucination history from source monitoring variables; speak vs. hear and imagine vs. hear. The model statistically significantly predicted hallucination history, F(2, 177) = 171.7, p < .000, adj. R2 = 65.6%. All variables added statistically significantly to the prediction, p < .05

This case study involved question of whether certain experiences produce physical changes in the brain. It all started back in 1785 when Vincenzo Malacarne, an Italian anatomist studied pairs of dogs from the same litter and pairs of birds from the same batches of eggs. He would train one participant extensively over a long period time while the other would be equally cared for but not trained. He discovered in autopsies of the animals that the brains of the one that he trained appeared more complex and with a greater number of folds and fissures on the brain. This research for unknown reasons was discontinued.

These discoveries where quite magnificent at the time and led the way for more research into the brain and then later development of PET and MRI scans. But there are still a great number of problems in this research and any research using electrical stimulation. For a start in the above experiment there was a very small sample of people used and therefore the results cannot be generalised to the rest of the human population. Also all of the patients had either brain tumours or epilepsy and therefore their brains were "abnormal" anyway.

In 2013, at Duke University School of Medicine, scientists implanted brain chips into rats’ barrel cortex to teach them “see” infrared light that they normally cannot see. Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis and Eric Thomson made an experiment where they implanted four clusters of sensors into the barrel cortexes of the rats that were responsible for their senses. Those clusters converted infrared light into an electrical signal that stimulated rats to go to one of the four feeding stations. Rats would go the feeding station where the infrared light was on and press the button on the feeding station to receive the reward. “In an older, single sensor version of the experiment, it took the rats one month to adapt. With four sensors, it took them just three days” (Coghlan). What interesting was that rats’ original senses stayed the same without changes, plus they learned to use their new sense of seeing infrared light. Later, scientists want to teach rats see the ultraviolet light, microwaves, radio waves, and X-rays. A reporter for New Scientist Andy Coghlan stated, “It seems that nature