Frontline had an interesting show on solitary confinement in U.S. prisons last night. The report highlighted the negative consequences of placing inmates in solitary confinement. My question is, assuming solitary confinement (particularly for punitive purposes) is ineffective, what should be done with inmates who break the rules in prison? Minor offenses? Take away the TV or whatever. But what about serious assaults on staff or other inmates?
If they’re in solitary, how would they assault other inmates? Isn’t that the kind of behavior that lands them in solitary in the first place?
Given that the stress of solitary confinement seems to drive them to suicide in extreme cases, I don’t know that we need to make the punishment worse.
You have to have some mechanism by which you can render someone physically incapable of attacking anyone, if you cannot render them unwilling to do so. Letting them see and talk to other people does not necessarily interfere with that.
Yeah. The solitary part is punishment. It’s obviously possible to put the prisoners into a setup where they can talk to each other but cannot stab each other. The problem with using long-term solitary is it stops being punishment and is now just torture.
One reason it’s torture is when you start talking about months to years of solitary, the individual has no opportunity to respond to the punishment and show they no longer deserve to be punished. You just keep punishing and punishing them until they go insane. In some cases, prisoners with life sentences are just kept in solitary forever - you have no intention of ever letting them out, so you are just torturing them until they are dead.
Remember the movie The Green Mile? Where the death row inmates were kept in separate cells a few feet from each other? That would be a simple way to keep the prisoners where they are unable to harm each other but won’t go crazy from lack of inter-human comunication.
They’d find a way, darts made out of toilet paper or something.
I know that’s the position of the European Court of Human Rights, but I do not agree with that statement. The reason I think it’s bullshit is because there is no test for whether a violently aggressive prisoner still needs to be isolated that does not require violating your duty of care to at least one other person.
The solitary confinement cells are often sealed rooms where sound cannot enter or leave. There is nothing in them but the bed/toilet/sink. The prisoners are generally kept in them 23 hours a day, and when they are removed for a small amount of exercise, they have no opportunity to communicate with anyone.
If you have a violently aggressive prisoner, your two options are not gen pop or a “hole” intended to punish. You could stick them in a cell where they can see and communicate with several other prisoners but cannot reach them with any kind of weapon. (I guess you could give them an intercom system or some kind of lower tech method with plexiglass and baffles that let sound but not knives and darts through).
You could give them access to adequate reading material and television to watch. You could give them the opportunity to perform some kind of productive task that does not require them to come into contact with other prisoners. And so forth. The reason the solitary cells are made that way is as a punishment - but there is no point in punishing someone if they can’t reform (as it turns out, some of these violent individuals may actually be missing pieces of their brain and thus unable to reform even if they want to) or you aren’t going to give them a second chance anyway.
The fundamental problem here is that the prison-industrial complex gets accolades from the public if prisoners are tortured until death. This is considered a good thing. The rampant rapes and the frequent deaths from disease are also part of the punishment. The public feels that anyone who has broken the rules should be made to suffer until they are dead. Every time a prisoner is given a second chance but commits a violent crime, the public brays for all prisoners to be held in jail for ever longer periods of time, and for the conditions to be kept as inhumane as possible. “That’ll teach em”.
I cannot recall the figures off the top of my head, but around 80% of suicides and suicide attempts take place in Seg units, and a wildly disproportionate number of malicious fires take place in Seg units.I did quite a project on the issue of fire in prisons and was struck by this particular statistic.
When a prisoner lands in the seg, there is no further they can fall, they have truly hit rock bottom.
With all that in mind, the use of seg units for longer term incarceration is extremely carefully monitored. There really does have to be an overwhelming case for keeping a prisoner in a seg unit for over a week, and much more so for longer periods.
Prisoners in seg units are checked every day by medical staff, their cases are subject to scrutiny every day.
So why keep a prisoner in isolation? - firstly its not isolation in the sense of the ‘cooler’, such prisoners have the right to supervised exercise, they have rights of communication with family and visitors and they are housed fairly near to other accommodation units - they can frequently have an awareness of life going on around them - so in that sense they are not as isolated as you might imagine.
The risk to the seg prisoner has to be balanced to the risk they pose to other prisoners, which can be extreme - google up Robert Mawdsley for example, or a case I know of where two prisoners decided to consume a third - I will not name those individuals since they are not quite so publicly known as the former.
There is the risk to prison staff, and finally some prisoners remain a serious danger to members of the public even when in prison, these can be terrorists, or revenge seekers or organised criminals.
The rights of those under threat from prisoners must be taken into account when considering what to do with a prisoner. These longer term cases are rare, but the reality is that whilst such individuals are alive, then the use of isolation will always be with us.
Seg units may be used for short term punishment, isolation in seg units is generally for the protection of others.
Anyone got any clever ideas about how to keep extremely dangerous individuals alive and under control, individuals who WILL kill others?
None that involve keeping them alive.
Regards,
Shodan
Not to deny the reality of this problem, but I think we need to drastically reduce our prison population before we can hope to address this type of problem. Maybe if we didn’t have gazillion people in jail in the first place, we wouldn’t have such a big problem with having to resort to solitary.
Are you a disbeliever in rehabilitation, then?
For “individuals who WILL kill others”, I am aware of its limitations.
Regards,
Shodan
And I am aware that we lack the current future-telling ability to pick those current prisoners out of the system.
If you think it takes a fortune teller to give you the odds on rehabilitating Robert Maudsley, you need to take the Psychic Hot Line off your speed dial.
Regards,
Shodan
I agree with this line of thinking and take it further, prison should not be as bad as it is, this way there are places we can put such people as the OP is asking without resorting to perhaps what may be the cruelest thing one can do to another human being.
[hijack] According to the author Rory Miller, some introverts prefer solitary. He’s known of cases where they commit infractions to be sent there. For an extrovert though, it can be torture. [/hijack]
Fun fact: “In 2004, only 40 out of 75,000 inmates held in England and Wales were placed in solitary confinement cells.” Solitary confinement - Wikipedia
Alternatives, from wikipedia:
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Well, if the prisoner is nuts you might consider -you know- treatment for mental health. Nah.
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Encourage visitations.
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Regular re-evaluation.
Pretty thin gruel IMHO. But then there’s the British experience.
The wiki article also reviews the pro-solitary confinement research.
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That’s one hateful paragraph you’ve written.
You are talking about the UK prison system, which is mostly functional. Solitary Nation was talking about US prisons, which are barely functional.
From Justice Kennedy today:
Interesting tea leaves on whether the practice will survive constitutionally.
Seems to me that part of the problem with solitary confinement as currently practiced in the US is the sensory deprivation aspect of it. It’s not just that these people are confined and have no physical contact with other people, they are also denied sensory input by being confined in what are essentially concrete boxes with absolutely nothing to do.
So what do they do? Stare at the wall? Plot mayhem? Self-injure to get some attention/out of the cell for medical treatment? All of the above?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t prisoners in protective custody, that is, in solitary because they are at risk of harm rather than because they can’t behave, are given many more perks like reading material, TV, and so forth? Are they less inclined to act out?
See, I totally get the need the need to prevent the worst sorts of criminals from harming others, including other criminals. For that, yes, you need to physically separate them. But giving someone literally nothing to do for 23 hours of the day is not going to improve anyone. At least give them a TV (probably behind thick bullet-proof plastic - we can make it voice controlled with an over-ride at the guard station for volume or when an announcement of some sort is needed) or something to do, to distract them, to pass the time. If it makes those guys safer to handle without putting others at risk why not?