The use of solitary confinement is widely used in American is knownove internationally as a form torturement. This form of punishment is increasely common in the United States since it was introduced in the “supermax” prison system which begin in the mid-1980’s. (ICCPR Treaty Summary
2012). Prisoners are kept in a small, windowless cell for 22 to 24 hours a day, with minimal contact with family, guards, even lawyers. The number of prisoners currently in solitary confinement is estimated to be around 80,000 through the number is continuing to grow faster than the overall prison population, meaning that this is coming a normal thing for prisons.
Many people will say that the first experiment of solitary confinement in the United States
began …show more content…
But the use turned out to be unsuccessful, prisoners would go insane and commit suicide, or when released no longer able to function in society, so the practice was slowly abandoned during the following decades. One critic of solitary confinement was
Charles Dickens, who once visited Eastern State Penitentiary, during his tour of the united States in
1842. Dickens concluded that: I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance which none but the suffers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict up on his fellow creature. It was obvious that Eastern State was a failure and was closed in 1971, 100 years after the idea of total isolation was abandoned. In the past 25 years, the penitentiary system has come back to this practice of solitary confinement- absent to the theories of the past- that governed the "Quaker" system invented for prisoners. It seems that we no longer have faith in the "penitent" part of penitentiary, and our "corrects" system part of corrections for anti-social behaviors. The Supermax,
Control Units Prisons, and Security Housing Units all which include inmates that are isolated to one …show more content…
Isolating prisoners to more torturous days of confinement does not make the prison safer, rather likely the opposite and lead to more violence. Visitation should be increased depending on the level of confinement, to give inmates a sense of hope and that they still are alive in the outside.
Prisoners should be allowed to write or at least have some form or contact with the immediate family once a month.
To sum it up, how long will the system continue doing what they know does not work? When will America stop thinking it is morally ok to house mentally ill people with rapists, killers, and gang members? I am not saying let these people out of prison, but there I am suggesting a new approach to take a fresh way to spend $74 billion every year on something that will work rather than something that has not been for ages. Therefore, can America start with a plan that separates the hardcore criminals from the nonviolent and house the mentally sick and addicted by their selves? Turn some of our prisons into psychiatric centers to the fragile mental prisoners. The past shows that a majority of inmates that suffer from mental illness and addition are not violent at all. They are said to be lost souls who if