What do you call placing over 80,000 American prisoners in isolated environments for 22-24 hours a day for months or years or decades causing serious psychological damage that increases recidivism and prison violence and costs upwards of $75,000/annually per inmate?
A complete failure.
Today, the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights is holding the first-ever Congressional hearing on solitary confinement, titled “Reassessing Solitary Confinement: The Human Rights, Fiscal, and Public Safety Consequences” and the ACLU of Maine submitted written testimony detailing Maine’s success in reducing the use of solitary confinement at the Maine State Prison by more than 70% over the last year.
You can read the ACLU of Maine testimony here.
The hearing is a long overdue but encouraging sign that the Federal government is finally taking account of what is a fundamentally inhumane form of punishment.
Nationally, Maine has become a leader in the movement to reduce solitary confinement. As states struggle with rising prison costs and prison populations that are higher than any other country in the world, Maine’s success provides a roadmap for reform.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and keeps more people in prison and jail than any other country in the world including those with most repressive dictators. The vast majority of prisoners in solitary confinement are eventually released back into our communities. Unfortunately, prisoners deprived of normal human contact cannot properly reintegrate into society, resulting in higher recidivism rates.
Solitary confinement causes and exacerbates mental illness. The mentally ill often deteriorate catastrophically in solitary, leading courts to consistently find that subjecting the mentally ill to solitary is cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
For more on what the ACLU is doing across the country, check out Stop Solitary.
June 19, 2012 - 11:14am
