Agreed. A lot of the "defiant" behaviors of the prisoners seemed to be efforts to exert some control over their environment. Also, the newer British system allowed more control in addition to less confinement.
I wonder if there's much overlap at all between the psychological effect of voluntary solitude and forced solitude.
Modern solitary confinement is a descendant of the Pennsylvania System, a Quaker penal management system by which prisoners were kept in solitary in order to both prevent influence from other prisoners and to speed up the prisoner's spiritual rehabilitation, through prayer and meditation. It's about 200 years old, and has gone in and out of favor, but current solitary practices are, if not religious, aimed at the same barbaric form of rehabilitation.
Related, if you're ever in Philadelphia, I suggest visiting, eastern state penitentiary, the first penitentiary in America. For many years, everyone was basically in solitary confinement. Very sobering place.
I think we decided that it wasn't constitutional, in most cases, to keep prisoners safely isolated from each other. Somehow, having the safety of a private cell is considered cruel, while having to sleep in a cell with a convicted criminal is not.
Very odd that supposedly advanced Denmark would impose barbaric solitary confinement. How we as a species still get away with this tactic is beyond me.
The punishments make sense to the people meting them out.
The prison authorities transparently use isolation in an SHU as punishment for making them look bad or for inconveniencing them. The two inmates mentioned in the article who acted as 'jailhouse lawyers' seem like good examples of this. Anyone in prison who offers any resistance to the power of the authorities is very likely to be treated this way, even if they are merely requesting legally-guaranteed rights or marginally better treatment, because doing so acts as an example to others.
Auernheimer was imprisoned, it seems to me, primarily for unrepentantly embarrassing those in positions of power, and later transferred to the SHU for the same reason.
Well, prison fundamentally is about holding someone against their will. The specific issue here is that they’re being held contrary to the rules laid out by society.
It shouldn't even be physically possible for a prisoner to assault another prisoner. I'd even give the prisoners privacy so that they can't see or hear each other. Oddly, people argue that it is somehow cruel to protect the prisoners from each other. There is no pleasing everybody, and some people can't ever be pleased.
Considering that the First Congress authorized the death penalty for crimes like counterfeiting, and punishments like the pillory were still in use in the U.S. until well into the 1800's, no, I don't think the founders would have understood solitary confinement to be "cruel and unusual." The rack, drawing and quartering, flaying, etc, that's what the 8th amendment refers to.
Wow, that is dehumanizing. This is the kind of thing that really drives home our Puritan roots. It's like we've decided that merely locking people behind bars isn't good enough, we need to make sure that every moment is hell.
It was a shock to me to learn that refusing to work in prison is grounds for being put into solitary confinement. You act as if they are given a choice but it is made under duress.
Those people were not speaking candidly due to being observed or fear of being reported. Also, they are not allowed to leave the country and can, along with their extended family, receive harsh punishments for things that would be considered unjust in much of the world. Prison is a fair description.
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