Pros and Cons of Solitary Confinement Essay

Which side do you agree with? Explain why. Also, find at least one additional scholarly source that discusses the impact of supermax prisons on the criminal justice system. Discuss how supermax prisons have impacted criminal justice for good or bad.

A supermax prison houses extremely violent or severely disruptive inmates. These types of prisons can stand alone, or be within a prison. Since these prisons hold what you could say as, the worst of the worst criminals such as the shoe bomber and the Unabomber, etc., it is very high security and inmates are very controlled and watched over all the time. Supermax prisons are beneficial to have especially due to the high numbers of extremely violent and disruptive inmates. Supermax prisons provide safety, improve prisoner’s behavior, they carry out punishment and maintain order, and they are goal-oriented. All of these things are probable reasons for more supermax prisons to be built.

If designated to plan a supermax prison for my state several protocols would be implemented for inmates work their way out of solitary confinement. Most offenders in solitary confinement do demonstrate some type of positive behavior in order to get out of prison. It is the unusual prison system that keeps the majority of people in solitary confinement indefinitely. When observing solitary confinement units around the country, unsettlingly offenders are being released directly from solitary confinement out into the free world without no transition whatsoever. When these individuals are put in that situation it is terrifying. For some of them, it is a terror that they never get over. So you find them self-isolating in their homes, self-isolating

What if I said that the prison population in America has grown by 700% between 1970 and 2005? Whether that is shocking or not, that statistic is significantly large to ignore. The United states has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and about 20% of inmates have spent time in solitary confinement. Solitary confinement is the act of isolating a prisoner, from the rest of the prison population, in a cell for 22-24 hours a day. Some facilities deny them the right to make phone calls or get visitors.

Since the introduction of solitary confinement and the construction of super-max prison there has an on going debate on whether using these punishment is violating the 8th amendment and also explaining all the health risk caused by solitary confinement. Solitary confinement is when a prisoner is held in a cell alone and they spend between 22.5 and 24 hours a day. Prisoners have no contact with other inmates and guards are also have limited contact with inmates. Solitary confinement was first introduced in the mid-nineteenth century and it was believed that it would help reform prisoners. The ideology behind solitary confinement and super-max prisons was that prisoners would be locked up alone and left with nothing but their Bible and this would allow the prisoner to reflect on his actions and wrong doings and eventually reform into a law-abiding citizen. But soon after solitary confinement was put into place it became clear that solitary confinement did not meet there goal of reforming individuals but evidence proved it caused harmed to the prisoners physical and mental health. Besides being harmful to prisoner’s physical and mental health it was also very expensive to run super-max prisons. Many began to question whether it was morally and ethically correct to keep prisoners in solitary confinement for long periods of time at once. When solitary confinement was first introduced it was used as a short-term punishment for prisoner who committed severe offenses in prison.

Moreover, maximum security prisons that use solitary confinement as a primary means of prison discipline are more likely to target inmates that are suffering from mental health illnesses. According to a study produced by the American Friends Service Committee, the researchers found that 26% of inmates in Arizona’s supermax prisons were suffering from mental illness, which only compared to 16.8% of Arizona’s general prison population (AFSC, 2012). Supermax prisons holds larger numbers of mentally ill inmates then that of the general prisons. Therefore, it is very likely for inmates suffering from mental health issues to become the most primary victims of solitary confinement.

Four concrete walls, a steel bed, and a sink to soak the unclean clothes in as well as an insignificantly compact restroom. Welcome to solitary confinement where the lights always stay on and there’s always room for just one, you. When we think about solitary confinement we probably think of a killer or rapist getting what they deserve. What we don’t see is another human life being psychologically destroyed. Some of these prisoners have been in solitary confinement from a couple of years to decades. It is true that these are not honorable or peace keeping men, but a human life being tortured by solitude is a torture no one deserves.

Solitary confinement is a mandated arrangement set up by courts or prisons which seek to punish inmates by the use of isolated confinement. Specifically, solitary confinement can be defined as confinement in which inmates that are held in a single cell for up to twenty-three hours a day without any contact with the exception of prison staff (Shalev, 2011). There are several other terms which refer to solitary confinement such as, administrative segregation, supermax facilities (this is due to the fact that supermax facilities only have solitary confinement), the hotbox, the hole, and the security housing unit (SHU). Solitary confinement is a place where most inmates would prefer not to go.

In their observation of the Auburn Prison in New York, they found that the use of solitary confinement and subjecting the inmates to complete isolation had serious negative results, in which Beaumont and Tocqueville noted that solitary confinement did not reform and rather killed (Panzarella & Vona, pg 287). As a result, solitary confinement lost much of its popularity over the next couple of decades and later reemerged with the establishment of supermax prisons in the late nineteenth century. Supermax prisons, which is short for maximum security prisons hold the most dangerous convicts using the methods of isolation and solitary confinement to primarily control and direct them. Inmates in maximum security prisons are held in isolated cells for years or even decades as they serve their sentence. In her University of Michigan Journal of law Review, Solitary Confinement, Public Safety, and Recidivism, Prisoner Rights advocate Shira Gordon states, “Unlike the nineteenth century, correctional administrators in modern prisons do not implement solitary confinement for rehabilitative purposes. The goals of modern solitary confinement are simply to incapacitate and assert control over prisoners: the warden and

The way special housing units work in prison is that inmates spend 23- hour lockdown in single- cell housing. Inmates have very limited movement within the facility with constant video surveillance (Segregation and solitary: Necessary Evils?).When they are allowed visitation they can only communicate with their loved ones through thick glass with no physical contact whatsoever. This is the average experience for inmates in the SHU. It

Solitary confinement is occasionally used in most prison systems as a means to maintain prison order. Mainly for disciplinary punishment, or as a place to put inmates that are at escape risk, or a risk to themselves and prison order. Sometimes inmates that are sex offenders voluntarily choose solitary as a means of protection from other prisoners. Sometimes solitary can be used to hold pretrial detainees to prevent them from messing with witness, so they can’t try and force a confession. For 23 hours a day inmates are confined to the barren environment that is their cell with high surveillance (Smith, Peter Scharff, 2006.) Inmates have no social contact. Visits and phone calls are infrequent and highly restricted. Visits sometime only take place via video screens. The physical contact one experiences is limited to the interaction with prison guards, weather it be putting on restraints or taking them off.

For years the controversy over whether solitary confinement is considered torture or not have been a big issue. Solitary confinement is when prisoners are locked in a room with usually no windows, no bigger than a parking space, denied showers, phone calls, visitations and clean clothing (Washington Post). More than 80,000 men, women, and children are in solitary not including jails, juvenile facilities and immigrant detention centers (AFSC). Obama was the very first president to visit a federal prison and has come out and phased the question, “we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time” (Goode). Many people go into solitary for multiple reasons.

Solitary confinement is isolation from other inmates as a punishment for when you fight or get in trouble in prison. People Say that Solitary confinement is like being in a prison inside a prison, and that the second prison is the prison of your mind. “The worst scars are left in your mind,” they say. The prisoners that already have mental issues are put in solitary confinement more than non mentally challenged inmates. More than them simply because they have the issues and they can’t “act right” but how are they supposed to act right if they don’t know what acting right is.

Administrative segregation is used to control certain inmates of a prison population who cannot function properly within the general population. Ad-Seg or Solitary confinement is a form of punishment that inmates will be subjected to because they are not adhering to prison rules. The amount of time an inmate will be placed in Ad-Seg usually depends on the severity of the offense that they have committed. An inmate is put into a tiny cell by themselves for periods of up to 23 hours a day. There is no outside contact except from the prison staff and this is only to deliver food and medications if needed. The inmate may be let out of his or her cell for one hour a day to shower or exercise but even this activity is done in total isolation. Many of the new Super-Maximum security prisons are set up to house their inmates in a totally administrative segregation system. These prisons usually house the worst of the worst criminals that have either been convicted of committing repeated horrendous criminal acts and or have

There are a good handful of supermax prisons around the world. Here are 10 good ones, Japan, England, California, Inida, Ireland, China, Maryland, Rusha, Massachusetts, and Colorado. The mackson inmate hold in these to is the one in maryland it can hold up to 1471 inmates as of right now.