Since the point of prison, and in more specific, solitary confinement, is rehabilitation it becomes very clear that there is a cost involved in keeping inmates incarcerated, and these costs befall the tax payers. It’s costly enough to house one inmate in a regular prison, but even more so when the inmate is in solitary confinement. With reports by the Bureau of Justice, the prison population is already at nearly a staggering two million. Out of those two million, over eighty-thousand are in solitary and the costs quickly add up (Adkins 210). Furthermore, these figures don’t include criminals in jails or juvenile correction facilities, so the cost is even greater (“Key Statistics: Prisoners”). It’s been reported by NPR, in an article titled …show more content…
In fact it’s at the tax payer’s expense. The whole thing is counter-intuitive as it’s shown clearly that solitary confinement does not rehabilitate an inmate like it is supposed to. Tax payer’s pay triple the cost of what it takes to house an inmate and get no results from it; in fact things just end up worse for the inmate. Solitary confinement adds to this imbalance and disturbance since it has been shown that once solitary confinement is removed as a form of punishment, prison violence decreases by fifty percent and the cost of incarceration also went down (“Punishment or Cruelty”). Solitary confinement is actually worse for the prisoner in which prison violence continues, inmates go back to solitary confinement and inmates are more mentally unstable after their time in …show more content…
Only an estimated 3.6 percent of all prisoners have mental illness but this number jumps to a staggering thirty to forty percent when looked at inmates who were placed in solitary (Atkins 210-211). This in itself detracts from the notion that solitary confinement is supposed to be a safer method of dealing with violent inmates. On the contrary, solitary confinement makes an inmate more dangerous – at the very least to themselves (Breslow). Prisoners that do enter prison with some sort of mental illness are not protected against the use of solitary confinement. Breslow goes on to say, similar to Atkins, that an estimated twenty to sixty percent of inmates in solitary confinement are reported in having mental illness. Only was this practice of putting the mentally unstable in solitary banned when a mental patient in solitary “declined to the point where he mutilated his own genitalia” (Breslow). Because of that event, juveniles, pregnant women and the mentally ill are disqualified from solitary