Zocalo - Slashdot User

Submission + - Inside Chris Anderson's Open-Source Drone Factory

Submitted by the_newsbeagle on Wednesday February 26, 2014 @03:57PM

Submission + - The Science of Solitary Confinement

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com on Wednesday February 26, 2014 @02:48PM

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Joseph Stromberg writes in Smithsonian Magazine that although the practice of solitary confinement has been largely discontinued in most countries, it's become increasingly routine over the past few decades within the American prison system and now it's estimated that between 80,000 and 81,000 prisoners are in some form of solitary confinement nationwide. Once employed largely as a short-term punishment, it's now regularly used as way of disciplining prisoners indefinitely, isolating them during ongoing investigations, coercing them into cooperating with interrogations and even separating them from perceived threats within the prison population at their request. "We really are the only country that resorts regularly, and on a long-term basis, to this form of punitive confinement," says Craig Haney. "Ironically, we spend very little time analyzing the effects of it." Most prisoners in solitary confinement spend at least 23 hours per day restricted to cells of 80 square feet, not much larger than a king-size bed, devoid of stimuli (some are allowed in a yard or indoor area for an hour or less daily), and are denied physical contact on visits from friends and family, so they may go years or decades without touching another human, apart from when they're placed in physical restraints by guards. A majority of those surveyed experienced symptoms such as dizziness, heart palpitations, chronic depression, while 41 percent reported hallucinations, and 27 percent had suicidal thoughts and one study found that isolated inmates are seven times more likely to hurt or kill themselves than inmates at large. But the real problem is that solitary confinement is ineffective as a rehabilitation technique and indelibly harmful to the mental health of those detained achieving the opposite of the supposed goal of rehabilitating them for re-entry into society. "We are all social beings, and people who are in environments that deny the opportunity to interact in meaningful ways with others begin to lose a sense of self, of their own identity," says Haney. "They begin to withdraw from the little amount of social contact that they are allowed to have, because social stimulation, over time, becomes anxiety-arousing." Rick Raemisch, the new director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, voluntarily spent twenty hours in solitary confinement in one of his prisons and wrote an op-ed about his experience in The New York Times. "If we can’t eliminate solitary confinement, at least we can strive to greatly reduce its use," wrote Raemisch. "Knowing that 97 percent of inmates are ultimately returned to their communities, doing anything less would be both counterproductive and inhumane."