In this modern era, surely one would reasonably think that when it comes to the humane treatment of prisoners, that the United States would desire to be the industry leader in providing a reasonably safe environment for those so incarcerated and would not countenance cruel and unusual punishment. Yet, as reported by ncchc.org, we read “…that approximately 80,000 inmates are held in some form of isolation in state and federal prisons on any given day;” of which, we need to keep in mind that this is not simply someone having a “time out” but rather involves the isolation of a human being from everyone else for 22 and even 23 hours every single day. If this was just for one day, or for the temporary protection of a given inmate, or as a reasonable means of punishment for a given inmate for a finite amount of time, not exceeding a few days that would be one thing, but in America, solitary confinement can be well beyond hours, days, weeks, or even months, for it actually can be for years.
It is unfortunate, that far too often, when America has to deal with inequality, lack of opportunity,
discrimination, poor housing, poor healthcare, dysfunctional family environments, and massive income disparities, that the go-to answer for the United States, is typically to clamp down hard upon those that are agitating for change through ill-advised behavior. Further to the point, America, even in today’s world, is all about invoking the antebellum Southern attitude which is that for all those that are compliant and thereby subservient to the master’s desires, life can be somewhat tolerable; and for all those that are not compliant, then corporal punishment, solitary confinement or its equivalency is the price to thereby pay.
The bottom line is that most of those subject to solitary confinement, do not willingly wish to suffer such, and often aren’t deserving of being in such; but following the perverse philosophy that “those that are out of sight are out of mind,” this is what America’s justice system in reality propagates. This signifies that in America, incarceration is fundamentally a punishment tool, and further to the point, not only does the United States care not a whit about the successful rehabilitation of those so incarcerated, but rather it prefers to take that which is human and thereby of unalienable rights, and wrest their humanity away from them as if they were functionally animals, or not even that, just things or just plain trash.
America spends an extraordinary amount of money on its imprisonment system, but fundamentally fails to realize that it has a moral and legal duty to provide those that are so incarcerated with their Constitutional rights. While there are plenty of people, that believe those that have been convicted of a particular crime, deserve no rights, that should be answered by stating emphatically that those people with those beliefs are fundamentally wrong. Two wrongs do not make a right, and it is important to recognize that when the state apparatus instigates a wrong, that they should be held accountable for having done that wrong.
Human beings are social creatures, and solitary confinement, by definition, isolates that which needs socialization into a frightful existence that clearly is not. Life does not always provide us with easy answers or with easy solutions, but to lock a given individual up and to throw away the key is never the right answer, and it is high time that America recognizes and thereby corrects its wrongful behavior.