Of course they’re less inclined to act out. Even if you took solitary confinement out of the equation altogether, somebody is naturally going to be more likely to act out if the reason you put them there is because they were already acting out.
OK, that was poorly worded.
The point is, do we know if providing a more enriched environment makes the Very Extremely Dangerous (VED) prisoner easier to manage?
Also, I’m assuming that prisoners in protective custody are going to vary in provided privileges/distractions/entertainment, depending on which prison they are housed in. If we could compare various groups within that segment and demonstrate that a more enriched environment makes for better behavior perhaps it would be enough of an argument to attempt it with the VED’s.
I hope that’s a bit clearer.
I think this is the point that is being missed. I don’t think anyone wants to argue for taking the most violent criminals and set them loose in GenPop. The real issue is the, um, regular criminals who are dumped into solitary for weeks or months at a time for relatively minor offenses.
Maybe (probably) there’s a better answer. Maybe solitary is part of the answer, but it seems to be being used in a way that is well past the “cruel and unusual” line.
Far as I’m concerned, the question of what to do with violent killers probably belongs in its own thread. My understanding was that the OP was about the everyday abuse of prisoners who are not nearly so scary.
My wife loves the police-related reality TV shows, so every now and then she inflicts them on me. Last week, she inflicted part of an episode of “Long Island Lock-up” (or something like that). One of the events of the episode was a woman who “attacked” another woman during church service over jealousy. When I say attacked, I mean she lunged and was quickly wrestled to the floor. Never even landed a punch. Once they toted up her offenses, they gave her 65 days in solitary, and they talked like this was really lenient.
I’ve never thought the issue was so much about whether society is getting enough satisfying revenge on criminals. The issue is that past a certain level of abuse, you’re “de-civilizing” people. One of the canards of our justice system is that people that aren’t hard-core criminals when they go to jail probably will be when they get out. To the extent that this is true, we should be concerned.
For the hard-core criminals who are never coming out, I guess it comes down to how much revenge we want. For the ones who will be released eventually, we really should care about what they may have become.
-VM
Measure for Measure
Your quote of 75,000 UK prisoners is way out of date, its not been down at those levels for many years.
We are currently at 85,000, and in the period between your quoted figures and now, we have had a number of initiatives aimed at reducing numbers over those years. One can speculate how many we would have inside if we had the staff and facilities, I have seen graphic projections that would have put the population well above 110,000 had those programs not been put in place.
In the meantime there have been fundamental changes to the way UK prisons operate, staffing levels are hugely changed and probably not for the better.
An out of date cite is more dangerous than no cite at all
I also examined some of the quotes that were referenced in the report by Howard league for penal reform that were in that wiki article, and frankly some of these are extremely misleading and poor.
For example that linked cite by wiki mentions a 70lb child who was immobilised by three members of staff. In fact the usual practice is to use 4 members of staff - you may not understand how and why force is applied to restrain a prisoner, but the reality is that attempting restraint with fewer staff is actually much more dangerous than with more - it is more dangerous with fewer staff because you have to use more forcible methods of control, including the use of breathing restrictions. This can put both staff and prisoners at greater risk.
I imagine not many of us have had to restrain prisoners, let me tell you this, application of pain is not any sort of guarantee that a prisoner will become compliant, indeed this may well make a situation far worse, pain might well provoke a much more extreme reaction, and it can be difficult to ascertain resistance is an attempt at more violence OR - an indication of life threatening distress.
That’s why the use of three staff on a 70lb child is much safer then having fewer restraining staff, and one of those staff will usually be trying to communicate with the subject - explaining what is going on and what they want the subject to do.
I am concerned that an organisation such as Howard League gets is so very wrong, if we were to take that approach to restraint , there would be a much greater number of injuries to staff and prisoners and probably Control and Restraint deaths - in other words, that wiki article is very poor, by using cites that are rather ill-informed.
The best form of restraint is to not have any restraint at all, if a prisoner kicks off and finds themselves surrounded by 7 or 8 bulky disciplinary individuals - the fight almost always vanishes from them, and there is no chance of physical harm to anyone.
I can tell you that much for a fact. Maybe at the 10% of “high security” places, can’t say from experience, but at low and medium security, the rooms in Seg all have 2 men in them. Space is at too much of a premium to not have 2 bunks per room. Same is true of similar security level state prisons, for the same reason. I’ve been GLAD to be in a one man room in country jails, for months at a time, due to not having to put up with the monkeys in the “normal” part of the jail.
At the risk of appearing a tad unseemly in expressing a vicarious interest in how you fought the law and the law won, DO go on.
until they locked me up, only EYE knew my method of making and threading onto an unthreaded barrel a commercial grade silencer in just one hour. After they locked me up, I wrote the book and now a MILLION people know how. 
You can bet that on average, each of my books are read by 2 people and half a million have been printed.
I promoted the idea of using a brass piloted tap drill bit to counterbore the .22 barrel about 1" deep and then use a tap to thread that counterbore. the mail thread-stud protrudes out of the back of the silencer. This solves a great many serious problems that the normal method of attachment presents. The male thread on the barrel of the gun has real problems when the barrel does not protrude from the slide of an autopistol or when the .22 rifle’s barrel is dovetailed for a front sight, or when the barrel is swaged/fit to the frame (ie, Jennings .22 pocket auto).
My way of making baffles is likewise a game changer. Copper screenwire is first cut into 6"x 3" rectangles with a pair of kid’s paper scissors. Then the rectangle is folded into thirds (lengthwise) and annealed, to remove it’s “springiness”. Annealing requires nothing more than passing the screen tru the flame lf a gas kitchen stove or “playiing a propane torch over it. Then it will “take” any shape into which it is crushed (“formed”) My book shows you how to make a simple, mallet-powered “die set” with which you form “donut” shaped baffles, about 3/4” long. 8 or so of these baffles are stacked into a 6" long, 1 " diameter tube, and an internal snapring and washer form the front endcap of the “can”
Well, it seems my interest was misplaced.