Shedding light on solitary

If you didn’t already know, the United States is the largest jailer in the world. With 2.2 million Americans behind bars, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

PBS’ Frontline documentary “Solitary Nation” will air this week. It focuses on the use of solitary confinement of prisoners in the U.S., a practice that isolates inmates from virtually any human contact for 22-24 hours per day, lasting anywhere from days to
decades.

According to reports released in 2005, anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 inmates are held in solitary confinement. The exact number is unknown. Prisoners are sometimes allowed “recreation,” which the Center for Constitutional Rights says “involves being taken, often in handcuffs and shackles, to another solitary cell where prisoners can pace alone for an hour before being returned to their cell.”

Solitary confinement is used to protect prisoners and prison guards from especially violent inmates, according to corrections officials.

The American Friends Service Committee argues there are other far less compelling reasons to use solitary confinement, including using it as “punishment while (prisoners) are under investigation; as a mechanism for behavior modification; as retribution for political activism; or to fill expensive, empty beds, to name but a few.”

As I’m sure you can imagine, the mental consequences of solitary confinement on prisoners is devastating.

It is considered to be a form of torture by the international community, and it is a blatant violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which bans cruel and unusual punishment.

Unfortunately, the way the U.S. uses solitary confinement as a casual way to lock prisoners up does not surprise me. But the widespread cynicism towards our criminal justice system should not keep us from rejecting and protesting the flaws within it. It is both hypocritical and perverted that the U.S. uses such a brutal and cruel system to deal with its prisoners, many of whom are mentally ill in the first place and need mental health treatment, not mental torture.

I look forward to watching “Solitary Nation.” One man filmed in the preview of the documentary shared his feelings about solitary.

“It’s like being buried alive,” he said. “You can’t conduct yourself like a human being when you’re being treated like an animal.” Indeed, if society wants to rehabilitate and change prisoners for the better through the criminal justice system, the use of torture through solitary confinement is the last thing we should be doing.

Unless we start treating prisoners like human beings and not like animals, our criminal “justice” system will continue to perpetrate injustice towards the millions of people who are incarcerated, failing both to protect society and to protect these prisoners from torture.  

sydhoffe@indiana.edu
@squidhoff10