There is a lot of debate in the government and scholarly sphere when it comes to when to and how to incarcerate people. A subdivision of that argument comes down to the actual housing that a prisoner is kept in while they are in prison. One method that is used for inmates who commit certain acts, either inside of or outside of prison, is solitary confinement. While this is deemed to be a way to prevent a prisoner from being a danger to others or even himself/herself while in prison, there are many that say that solitary confinement for any prolonged amount of time is inherently damaging and terrible in terms of its outcomes and thus should not be used. While the alternatives to solitary confinement have their own risks when it comes to mentally ill and/or violent inmates, it is clear that the effects of solitary confinement need to be explored and verified.
Analysis
As partially referred to in the introduction, a big reason solitary confinement is employed is that it is one of the few ways to keep certain prisoners contained and confined in a way that disallows them from furthering their life of violence and crime within prison. Indeed, gangs and violent/mentally ill felons often continue their violence unabated in prison. This can come in the form of gang turf wars or people with untreated mental illness harming others (or themselves) when given the chance. The United States in particular is intriguing due to their high crime rate, high incarceration rate and so forth. There is also the broader topic of federalism and how law enforcement meshes with the different levels of government in that country. Federalism, however, is a complex thing to discuss when it comes to crime in the United States as very few crimes are prosecuted on the federal level or as federal crimes. Indeed, the state and county/local law enforcement and judicial systems handle the brunt of the case load and the ensuing incarceration. However, this does not stop Congress, the President and others from putting in their input on things like street crimes and so forth. In other words, the federal government does not arrest, charge or jail the vast majority of the people that enter the correctional system but this does not stop them from trying to guide and shape how those lower-level agencies do their job. Of particular focus are the people that are engaged in street crime as they are much of the same people that continue their activities inside of jails. Thus, the federal government has an interest on when, how long and in what way those people are house. Obviously, this would include solitary confinement. However, the nature of the crime is of obvious import but so are the demographics of the people that are charged, convicted and house in jails. So often, those people are the poor and minority populations when it comes to jails in the United States. Further, those two groups are one and the same as minorities are often the poorest people in the country. Given all that, what happens to the most vulnerable and apt to engage in crime (of any sort) is important. If what happens to them in prisons makes them worse off rather than reforming them, the federal government obviously would take an issue with that even if their involvement is not overly direct (Richman, 2006).
However, while the federal government might be apt to put their proverbial two cents in when it comes to the prison-related actions of the lower levels of government, the federal government in the United States is often seen as being hypocritical or even barbaric when it comes to what they do have on their plate at the federal level. Just one example would be the way in which prisoners are treated at “super-max” prisons that ostensibly house the worst of the worst including serial killers, terrorists and so forth. There is also the question of what happens when it comes to prisoners that are of particular military and/or national security interest. One perfect example would be Bradley Manning and his involvement in one of the more notorious WikiLeaks information dumps that has occurred over the years. Many people hailed Mr. Manning and sang his praises. Indeed, they saw him as an ethical man that was being a whistleblower. However, the treatment he has received while incarcerated by the United States government has been deemed to be “torture” by some parties and this included wide assertions about how he was housed, presumably in solitary confinement. Regardless, it has been deemed that Manning, at the very least, was severely punished while receiving little to no of the due process that is ostensibly afforded to him under the United States Constitution, the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments in particular. What has obviously emerged in the weeks and years since Manning’s rise as the main suspect in the WikiLeaks disclosure is that one man’s hero is another man’s pariah when it comes to government secrets, no matter how tawdry and unseemly they might seem on their face (Rothe & Steinmetz, 2013).
Regardless of whether everyone agrees with them at all times, one important thing to look at is the laws and regulations that prevail and thus the prisons of the United States are subject to. Of course, those laws and whether they are being met would be determined in large part by appellate courts when complaints and grievances are made against prisons for either not following the laws as they exist or via a claim that the existing laws and standards are not constitutional. In 2008, a scathing state appellate decision served as just one example of all of this when it found that there was extreme risk to the people in prisons and this pertained to the guards and inmates alike. That decision, and others since then, have centered on the state of California. The state is plagued with overcrowding. This has led to many prisoners getting out early but the prisons remain overcrowded, understaffed and underfunded. It got so bad that courts had to order that inmates be released as housing them all at the same time was deemed to be unsafe, inhumane and cruel. As far back as 2003, even the Supreme Court and its justices have spoken on the subject of what is and is not happening in the prisons of the United States including the overall incarceration rate, how precisely the prisoners are housed when they are in jail and beyond. Coming back to the subject of standards, the American Bar Association (ABA) put in its treatise on the subject when they put forth the Standards for Criminal Justice and the Treatment of Prisoners. The guide covers a lot of ground and includes access to healthcare and beyond. Of course, solitary confinement is part of what is covered in great detail. The 1981 version of the standards was void of a lot of important details. As explained in the new standards, this included “long-term and extreme isolation, privatization, re-entry and external oversight” (ABA, 2010).
Comparing and contrasting the 1981 and 2010 standards are important for another major reason. This would be the aforementioned incarceration rate and how high it has gotten in the United States. Indeed, there were only about half a million prisoners in the United States when the 1981 guide came out. When the 2010 guide came out, that number increased nearly five-fold to 2.4 million. About two thirds of that figure are in prison and the others are in jails. Jails are used to house people for minor crimes or until trial while prisons are used to house people that have committed felonies that require longer sentences and/or special support. Every year, about 13 million people are under some form of jail or prison control. When it comes to solitary confinement, there are two types of this housing that must be considered. There are prisoners that are in solitary due to behavior but there are others that are where they are due to classification and the whim of the prison. This sort of housing is common to normal in the aforementioned super-max prisons. The number of those super-max prisons is increasing by the year. Indeed, Alcatraz was very much the predecessor and precursor to what is seen now but that prison has been closed since the 1960’s. Not until USP Marion was closed down in 1983 was the super-max born. In response to two guards murdered on the same day in the USP Marion facility, a new type of prison typified by Florence, CO’s super-max opened in 1994 and thirty or so others were all open for “business” by 1999. In such prisons, literally every part of a prisoner’s life is controlled or at least monitored. Prisoners are alone in cells and they must remain there up to twenty-three hours a day and the cell is only seven feet by fourteen feet.
Ohio State Prison is not dissimilar in that even the doors are sealed with metal strips so that prisoners cannot even yell through the gaps in the edges of the doors like is prevalent in many other prisons. Many people in the scholarly sphere have determined and decided that such isolated and solitary conditions are a form of physical and mental torture and thus should not be happening in any modern society or its jails. They apparently assert that while these prisoners can be dangerous and thus need to be monitored, housing them in such a exclusionary environment is extremely cruel and harsh and probably makes bad-acting prisoners and the mentally ill in general even worse than they already are. Even if many of the people in these situations will never see the light of day again due to sentences that they will die before serving out, it is still deemed by many to be improper to ever treat a prisoner in such a manner as the way these prisoners are treated is seen as being a reflection of the society that the person lives in. In other words, it is expected that these people will be punished but any sort of “eye for an eye” mentality or treatment that is torturous and cruel in nature should be forbidden (ABA, 2010).
The overall point of this treatise should be viewed as the follows. Just because someone is committed to jail for inhumane acts does not mean that prison or jail should serve as revenge or that the outcomes of the prisoner do not matter. Of course, the psychological and health well-being of a prisoner matters a great deal. In most cases, of course, the prisoners in question will eventually return to society and what shape they are in when they get there matters a great deal. Concurrently, if solitary confinement is seen as hurting, rather than helping, the prisoners, then the use of that system should be examined (Verdot, Champely, Clement & Massarelli, 2016). Beyond that, there are some genuine civil rights concerns that exist when it comes to solitary confinement. Indeed, while prisoners are in prison for a reason, treating them in certain ways goes beyond the pale and beyond what is acceptable in terms of how a fellow person is being treated, and this applies to super-max prisons more than any other (Arrigo & Bullock, 2007).
Conclusion
Of course, preventing inmate violence and keeping guards safe is important. However, solitary confinement should be a last resort rather than a norm and should probably be reserved for the worst of the worst. It can and should be conceded that prisoners not in segregation will engage in violence if they are left to roam free. However, throwing those people in a closed off room and forgetting about them is not the answer either. All criminals should be given a chance at redemption and rebirth. This chance at salvation cannot be realized so long as the person is in solitary confinement and that type of imprisonment can surely be done without the full isolation that is commonplace nowadays. While dangerous people should be housed away from society, there needs to be at least an attempt to reform them or, at the very least, not make them worse as a direct result of their in-jail experiences. Lastly, this accountability and reform of the system should start at the federal level and go down but that is absolutely not happening at this point, as proven by the Manning situation.
References
ABA. (2011). ABA standards for criminal justice. Chicago: American Bar Association, Criminal Justice Standards Committee.
Arrigo, B. & Bullock, J. (2007). The Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement on Prisoners in Super-Max Units: Reviewing What We Know and Recommending What Should Change. International Journal Of Offender Therapy And Comparative Criminology, 52(6), 622-640. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306624x07309720
Richman, D. (2006). The Past, Present, and Future of Violent Crime Federalism. Crime & Justice, 34(1), 377-439. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/500056
Rothe, D. & Steinmetz, K. (2013). The case of Bradley Manning: state victimization, realpolitik and WikiLeaks. Contemporary Justice Review, 16(2), 280-292. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10282580.2013.798694
Verdot, C., Champely, S., Clement, M., & Massarelli, R. (2016). Physical practice as a means to limit the noxious effects of prison confinement: impact of a physical program on prisoners’ perceived health and psychological well-being. PTO, 16(1), 63-78.
