Posts tagged prisons

Hellhole: The Most Devastating Article About Long-Term Solitary Confinement in US Prisons, and Why It Is Torture

Andy Worthington writes an excellent piece covering the various costs (psychologically and morally) of prisoners in long-term isolation units.   

EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. (…) Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

(…) One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction.

Which makes clear sense. Neural pathways once used for social interaction, communication, bonding, higher cognitive functioning, atrophy. Neurons die. Aside from the various clinical psych sticker diagnosis, there is real neurological/physical damage to be shown. The cases Worthington covers shed light on the excessive  cruelty and revolting treatment prisoners experience in extended solitary confinement in our infamous retributive punishment system. We find it preposterous that someone could become better after being whipped, dunked, stretched, bled, but we still are ok with throwing someone in a hole for months/years. When people say the US has the best justice system in the world, they clearly aren’t speaking about the punishment extension of that system. But it wasn’t always like this: 

In 1890, the United States Supreme Court came close to declaring the punishment to be unconstitutional. Writing for the majority in the case of a Colorado murderer who had been held in isolation for a month, Justice Samuel Miller noted that experience had revealed “serious objections” to solitary confinement:

A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover suffcient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

So, unless you have a better plan, this is it.  Oh, wait, there IS a better plan:

Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, [the UK] gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.

So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. via

They have similar and successful endeavors in Norway, that I’ve mentioned before. In the US, I’m reminded of Bill Strickland, a Pittsburgh social entrepreneur who has a famous slide show about a lot of good things, but overall how to treat people …which we clearly can’t get right.

Image credit: Karen Franklin, PhD’s post about her time working in a  segregated housing unit and a controversial study about super max prisons and psych effects. 

Warehousing psychopaths? That's some wording.

But the point about conditions for prisoners is valid.  Is it acceptable that a life sentence serving serial killer receive tax payer supplied privileges like a personal trainer while writing her cook book, while others are denied a therapist for lack of funds?  The deeper question the author asks is how fair is it benefit$ be given to someone with little to no ability to appreciate their circumstance or crime (and to that end, rehabilitate) when the money could be used for therapy those who actually could improve.

  It has been often discussed that it is almost pointless to try to punish people with antisocial personality disorder because they will not learn from it and it is impossible to rehabilitate. (…) This is where the idea of the warehouse to put psychopaths and others that are unable to be rehabilitated would come in handy. By doing this you separate people who are obviously mentally disturbed from prisoners who can function as completely normal citizens after rehabilitation. This would allow different standards to be set for different groups. VIA

Separating criminals based on level of mental illness and possibility of improvement (like we do with the level of heinousness of the crime/risk of the offender- min vs max)… assuming rehabilitation and thoughtful appropriation of funding is our prison system’s goal. I know the Senate Republicans of NY  would love a new permanent money making facility.  Thoughts?

Inmate on death row for nearly 30 years

Howard, now 61, remains incarcerated at Ely State Prison. Nevada provides him free room, board and medical care, even flying him by helicopter to University Medical Center in Las Vegas when he slipped into a coma in 1991. Howard is one of 80 male prisoners on death row at the Ely prison. Twenty-nine of them were given death sentences before 1990. Seven have been on death row longer than Howard.