Solitary Confinement Case Study

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 has been used as a punishment, to keep the prisons secure. However, with the changing of opinions from a few decades ago, to present time, more people want less solitary confinement used. With also corrections policies changing over time has also changed the dynamic of how a younger person could be charged and sentenced, compared to an older person who is not a juvenile could be put into solitary confinement. More facts about the use of Solitary Confinement, the policy is up for debate. Starting with do I agree with the New York Times, The Living Death of Solitary Confinement?

Insomnia, paranoia, uncontrollable feelings of rage and fear are just some of the effects that a prisoner can experience after being placed in solitary confinement. I think the government should ban solitary confinement because it causes mental pain and suffering.

A 2014 U.S. National Research Council reports discovered that in 2012, around one-fourth of the world's whole detained populace was housed in the United States. On a normal, 1 in every 100 Americans are in detainment facilities (Freudenberg, Daniels, Crum, Perkins, & Richie, 2005). One correctional facility practice has come under contemplation in recent years because of the separation of prisoners into special management for the purposes of severe punishment. It is commonly known as solitary confinement, segregation, isolation, and special management. This practice frequently involves sending prisoners in small, confined (precisely a box) for months, or even years. Long-haul detainment as an option apparently is more sympathetic sentence for detainees who have carried out terrible wrongdoings, and may not be considerably more caring than capital punishment. Turns out that keeping prisoners imprisoned in isolation for long-haul sentences can have genuinely harmful impacts on prisoners.

Individuals willingly or forcefully become separated from communities. This is called isolation. Isolation can have drastic consequences on an individual. Physical and social isolation can only affect an individual negatively. Ethan Frome conveys the story of a static farmer who is married to a woman he doesn't love called Zeena.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Solitary Confinement is the confinement of a prisoner in a cell or other place which he or she is completely isolated from any and everyone. Merriam Webster also states that even some prisoners are held from 22.5 to 24 hours a day. Solitary confinement is sometimes referred to as isolation, segregation, separation, and cellular confinements so that it seems different from solitary confinement or too make it sound like a less harsh punishment. Solitary Confinement is a huge controversy in today’s society, although some might of forgot due to the fact that there’s an orange oompa loompa celebrity as our president, but this has been a problem since it was introduced in 1829. “In 1829, the first experiment in solitary confinement was at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. It was based on a Quaker belief that prisoners isolated in stone cells with only a Bible would use the time to repent, pray and find introspection.”(Timeline on NPR.org) A large population of people believe that solitary confinement is a violation against anyone 's human rights. On the other side of this argument, some people believe it is a necessary form of punishment and that it does not violate anyone’s human or constitutional rights. In my personal opinion, Solitary confinement violates both the 8th Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article five of the Declaration of Human Rights. I don’t understand how isolating someone for that

“Closed in a room my imagination becomes the universe and the rest of the world in missing out”. Solitary Confinement has been dated back to the 19th century and had been researched by a variety of scholars and academics. In 1818 a New York reformer Thomas Eddy and a friend lobbied for inmate labor and solitary confinement in place of other forms of punishment such as hanging. Soon after New York decided to include solitary confinement and inmate labor into their penal system. Mental instability has been then linked to solitary confinement since as far back as the 1860s. It has been put in place for criminals, who put themselves and others in danger or the risk of hurting someone else or themselves. Prisoners who are put in solitary confinement

Solitary confinement has been a controversial topic for many years now. People do not merely argue if they are pro or con, they question the short and long-term effects, look for alternatives, or try to banish it from the United States entirely.

Author Amy Bennett has recently noticed the increasing media presence on solitary confinement and the abuses found in the U.S. prison system. She noticed that states have been rethinking the practice of solitary confinement with the most notable one being New York and the investigation of Rikers Island. She talked about solitary confinement and how it relates to torture. “Despite the reforms underway at Rikers, there are still those over 18 years of age who will experience the torture of solitary confinement, many of them mentally ill. Still others will become mentally ill as a result of solitary confinement.”(Bennett, 2016) She is saying that isolation can cause one to become mentally ill even though it is under reform.

Solitary confinement is viewed as one of the best punishments for prisoners’ bad behavior in order to protect the rest of the inmates. Solitary confinement has proven to have the reverse effects in terms of a person’s psychological state. Solitary confinement means that the prisoners do not have normal stimulus and human communication which has its toll on the prisoners. Prisoners who are in solitary confinement only have themselves and the acoustics of their squared prison cell which tends to drive many to hallucinate, act violently, or commit suicide.

The United Nations Convention Against Torture stated that torture is defined 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 reasons based on discrimination” (AFSC). Craig Haney, a social psychologist and psychology professor of University of California, interviewed a group of people in solitary confinement in 1993 at Pelican Bay State Prison (a supermax, Security Housing Unit (SHU)) where he was studying psychological effects of isolation on prisoners. 20 years later he went the same prison to do more interviews only to find the same prisoners there in the same condition (Goode). Haney found high rates of psychological trauma in long term solitary confinement where more than half of the studied prisoners had nightmares, heart palpitations, fear of impending nervous breakdowns, hallucinations, perceptual distortions, while a quarter of the prisoners had suicidal ideation (Rice). In ACLU prison, prisoners have gone as far as swallowing broken glass, amputating fingers, testicles, scrotum, earlobes, and one even amputated a finger and ate it in a bowl of ramen noodles (Katel). Dr. Haney describe what they were going through as, “They were grieving for their lost lives, for their loss connectedness to the social world and their families outside and also for their lost selves. Most of them really did understand that they had lost who they were, and weren’t sure of who they had become” (Goode). In other words, in solitary confinement prisoners experienced identity loss as they were completely isolated from human contact: One inmate who was in solitary confinement for 24 years explained, “I got a 15-minute phone call when my father died. I realized I have family

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.

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