Solitary Confinement Thesis

Solitary confinement is a mandated arrangement set up by courts or prisons which seek to punish inmates by the use of isolated confinement. Specifically, solitary confinement can be defined as confinement in which inmates that are held in a single cell for up to twenty-three hours a day without any contact with the exception of prison staff (Shalev, 2011). There are several other terms which refer to solitary confinement such as, administrative segregation, supermax facilities (this is due to the fact that supermax facilities only have solitary confinement), the hotbox, the hole, and the security housing unit (SHU). Solitary confinement is a place where most inmates would prefer not to go.

In today’s prisons the two most common types of solitary confinement used are disciplinary and administrative. Disciplinary segregation is used when an inmate breaks a rule. Administrative segregation is used when prisoners are a safety risk to other inmates or staff. It has become common practice in prisons to turn to disciplinary segregation for any violation no matter how minor. In Illinois more than 85 percent of the inmates sent to solitary confinement were there for more infractions like not standing for count or using abusive language. Piper Kerman the author of Orange is the New Black said she saw women sent to solitary confinement for at least 30 for minor infractions like moving around their cell during count or refusing an order

Segregation, Disassociation, the SHU, the hole, the cooler, and many more are all prison terms describing solitary confinement. Chances are you have heard some or all of these terms watching TV shows and movies, but what does it mean for the people who actually spend large amounts of time on the inside. Many are against the use of solitary confinement and say that it has no place in the modern world. In pointing out the many negative side effects of solitary confinement, the positive side must be looked at as well. Certain parts of control require a path of discipline to keep order in a prison, so what happens when solitary confinement is no longer an option.

According to “Solitary Confinement: Common Misconceptions and Emerging Safe Alternatives” by Alison Shames, Jessa Wilcox, and Ram Subramanian on the Vera Institute of Justice, solitary confinement is often sentenced to “fulfill a prison’s or jail’s top priority: the safety of its staff and the incarcerated people under their care.” (Shames, Wilcox, & Subramanian, 2015). However, most inmates that are placed in solitary confinement are

Over the last couple of decades, prison systems have adopted the use of solitary confinement as a means of punishment and have progressively depended on it to help maintain obedience and discipline inside the prison structure. Solitary confinement is a form of incarceration in which a prisoner is isolated in a cell for multiple hours, days, or weeks with limited to no human contact. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the United States represents only 5% of the world's population yet houses 20% of the world’s prisoners (ACLU). Two of the biggest problems with our modern day criminal justice system is the overwhelming number of people that are incarcerated in the United States and the overwhelming number of convicts who return

Thesis: Private prisons actually exacerbate many of the issues they were designed to solve by incentivizing increased incarceration, and at the same time they produce lower value than regular prisons while ultimately costing more, such that private prisons should be abolished and incarceration should remain exclusively public.

While solitary confinement is one of the most effective ways of keeping todays prisoners from conflict and communication, it is also the most detrimental to their health. According to NPR the reason for most solitary confinement units in America “is to control the prison gangs (NPR, 2011).” But that is not always the case. Sometimes putting a gang member in solitary reduces the shock and awe effect that it is supposed to have, when they start losing their minds. The prisoners kept in solitary confinement show more psychotic symptoms than that of a normal prisoner, including a higher suicide rate. Once a prisoner’s mental capacity to understand why he is in prison and why he is being punished is gone, there is no reason to keep said

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

What is solitary confinement? It is the practice of isolating prisoners in a small cell for 23 hours out of a day. These prisoners spend anywhere from 30 days to 30 years in solitary confinement, with very little human contact. The cells that they are confined to are 80 square feet and they may or may not have a window. One hour out of the day is set aside for exercise.

Solitary confinement is isolation from other inmates as a punishment for when you fight or get in trouble in prison. People Say that Solitary confinement is like being in a prison inside a prison, and that the second prison is the prison of your mind. “The worst scars are left in your mind,” they say. The prisoners that already have mental issues are put in solitary confinement more than non mentally challenged inmates. More than them simply because they have the issues and they can’t “act right” but how are they supposed to act right if they don’t know what acting right is.

Solitary confinement should not be allowed in juvenile centers. Being in solitary confinement makes kids delusional and it’s diagnosing them with disorders that they have a less chance of even getting. ¨Getting placed in a 80 square feet room no bigger than a king size bed will make you go crazy,¨ says Brian during a Fusion tv interview. ¨You here things that´s not even there, then it´s hard for you to sleep,¨ Brian also said during his interview.

Nelson Mandela once said, " As long as poverty, and gross inequality exists in our world, none of us can truly rest." Do you ever wonder why he said this? Well I am not exactly sure, although perhaps a specific reasoning of this saying will act as vicious punishments in his time that were cruel and unjustifiable for them. There may be such punishments in this ignorant world that it may have the power to harm us. One of them happening in our time can continue to become the use of solitary confinement. Solitary Confinement can have a small Isolated room with no human contact and it if you are lucky you may get a toilet and a bed. An example of solitary confinement can mean isolation or solitariness. A 16-year- old boy named Kalief Browder was accused of stealing a backpack his excruciating and queer maltreatment was being situated in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and inasmuch as two years. After freeing himself he continued his life and studied at Bronx community college and became successful in his studies, but still had struggles in life. On a Sunday afternoon, he committed suicide in his mother's house. Browder, of course, knew firsthand the horrific mental health consequences of solitary confinement. Kalief struggled to adjust to the outside world. Which

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

Solitary confinement has been viewed as a form of “segregation”, however over the past two centuries, this dangerous activity has been proclaimed as a form of torture by International Human Rights. The American Red Cross has conveyed its concern with the United States Prison systems and the skyrocketing legal challenges it has faced in the past 20 years. By using the information from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, researchers approximated in 2011 that over 80,000 prisoners are held in some form of solitary confinement unit; this includes regulatory segregation, disciplinary segregation and protective custody—all forms of housing involving significant use of social isolation. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, the largest law enforcement agency