Ridgeway writes: "For the first time, legislators are considering the plight of the tens of thousands of US citizens tortured by solitary confinement."
Solitary confinement is torture. (image: Human Rights Watch)
America's Hidden Shame of Solitary Confinement
20 June 12
magine a place filled with closed, windowless cells. Each cell may be so small that you can extend your arms and touch the side walls. It may contain a bunk of poured concrete, a toilet, perhaps a small table and stool. A few personal possessions – books, family photos – may be permitted, or they may not. The door to the cell is solid steel.
Three times a day, a food tray slides in through a slot in the door; when that happens you may briefly see a hand, or exchange a few words with a guard. It is your only human contact for the day. Five times a week, you are allowed an hour of solitary exercise in a concrete-walled yard about the same size as your cell. The yard is empty, but if you look straight up, you can catch a glimpse of sky.
Imagine that a quarter of the people who live in this place are mentally ill. Some have entered the cells with underlying psychiatric disabilities, while others have been driven mad by the confinement and isolation. Some of them scream in desperation all day and night. Others cut themselves, or smear their cells with faeces. A number manage to commit suicide in their cells.
You may remain in this place for months, years, or even decades. The conditions in which you live have been denounced as torture by UN officials and by a host of human rights, civil liberties, and religious groups. And yet you remain where you are.
This place is located not in some distant authoritarian nation or secret black site abroad, but here on US soil. In fact, there are places like it in nearly every state in the union, within sight of our own cities and towns. On any given day in the United States, supermax prison and solitary confinement units hold at least 80,000 men, women, and children in conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation.
Most of them have committed nonviolent offenses against prison rules or have been categorically branded as "high risk". A large and disproportionate percentage suffer from serious mental illness. Some of them are children. Condemned to solitary by prison officials, they spend 23 hours a day in their cells without work, rehabilitative programming, or human contact of any kind.
These prisoners live out of sight of the public and the press. Their conditions have, with few exceptions, been condoned by the courts and ignored by elected officials. As a result, over the past three decades, the use and abuse of solitary confinement in US prisons has grown into one of the nation's most pressing domestic human rights issues – yet it also remains one of the most invisible.
On Tuesday, for the first time, the US Congress has taken a look at these domestic black sites. The Senate judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights, and human rights held a hearing in which corrections officials, lawyers, and mental health experts – along with one lone survivor of prison isolation – testified to the "human rights, fiscal, and public safety consequences" of solitary confinement.
For evidence of humanitarian consequences, the senators need only turn to their colleague John McCain, who spent two years in solitary confinement as a prisoner of war in Vietnam (in a cell somewhat larger than those in most American supermaxes). "It's an awful thing, solitary," McCain later wrote. "It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment."
As for fiscal and public safety consequences, the subcommittee members can look to evidence-based research that keeping prisoners in solitary confinement costs two to three times more than keeping them in the general population, and is likely to increase both prison violence and recidivism. Or they can study the example of the few states – including Maine and Mississippi – that dramatically reduced the number of prisoners they keep in isolation, with positive results.
What remains to be seen is whether Congress will take further action to curb this failed and torturous practice. Given the political will, the subcommittee could begin by holding more hearings around the country, while its staff carries out an investigation that opens up to public scrutiny the tormented inner workings of supermax prisons and solitary confinement units.
An independent federal body with the absolute right to enter and report on prisons could go even further in exposing abusive conditions. Legislation could then force the creation and adoption of federal standards for the treatment of prisoners, which states would have to meet in order to receive federal funds.
All of this depends upon our elected leaders taking seriously the notion that all Americans – including prisoners – have an absolute right to immunity from torture by the state. That is likely to happen any time soon, but until it does, unimaginable things will keep taking place at black sites in our own backyards.
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Years ago in america, was the notion that those in prison could be educated in skills necessary to society and find themselves not only with new knowledge but habits conducive to a workplace.
Now they sit and rot. Getting angry at such a state they do cause troubles and end up in solitary.
How long will it take for the US citizens to find that.... since now 60 percent or more do find themselves back again in prison, a few thousand spent in education and job skills reinforcement, would very shortly be a game changer financially.
Taught will skills and habits.....now employable. Whereas with no treatment for abuse problems and no training..... regardless of economic climate they are not employable.
Imagine that...trying in america to rehabilitate them not torture or simply punish them.....in these tough times we can no longer afford such extravagant things as torture or strict punishment with no rehabilitation. We must rehab them...to save money.
As other countries quite often do. Treated as human like as not they act human....it as human are to act such a way.
As animal they are treated animals they will become.
Simple really
......but no longer surprised.
The Very Heart of Evil
Incarceration in the US is higher than anywhere elese on the planet: 5% of the world population, 25% of the world prison population.
Land of the free, really!
The larger the Prison Industrial Complex grows, the more numbers it needs to feed it. There is no rehabilitation left in this penal system, they are just training schools for repeat offenders; just the way the money makers like it.
BTW, I wonder what John McCain's position on solitary confinement reform is?
Sensory deprivation does brain damage, often permanent.
Most of the prisoners in super max prisons are political prisoners. Many of them were simply framed up on phony charges. The super max in Florence, Colorado may be the worst.
There's a super max in Ohio where most of the muslim prisoners convicted in FBI sting operations are sent. They are all in solitary confinement.
There can't be any reason for sensory deprivation in prisons other than pure torture. There's no rationalization for it. The people who design such policies are themselves psychopaths. They think the results they produce in inmates is a good thing. They think being psychotic is the goal.
One of the things that most Americans are unaware of is the HUGE design and construction COSTS of a prison complex, the lack of imagination given to the "rehab" areas like recovery meeting rooms and so-called "recreation" or Industrial sweatshops.
The main thrust of design is to allow maximum surveillance using the minimum amount of guards via high-tech central consoles for each cell block, whilst dedicating much of the budget to overbuilding (even the ducts have to have welded bars as they pass through walls). There is some justification for this as, before the KY complex was opened, some escape experts (old cons) were locked up and were out in 15 minutes!
YET THOSE -mostly on the right- who whine about "Fiscal Responsibility" and cut education and social safety nets TEND TO WANT MORE JAILS.
But in "The Hole", Devils Island is alive and well; all they need is a Guillotine in the yard -and everybody knows where the "Death House" is and I think some would prefer this.
Yet they wonder why prisons are Universities of hard crime and many who enter fairly harmless, come out pissed-off and with vengeance on their minds.
Marvel at the spiritual-warri or strength of Leonard Peltier, who has survived many spells of isolation.
- Dostoyevsky.
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