Confinement In Prisons

The United States, with only 5% of the world’s population, holds 25% of the world’s prison population. There are currently 2.23 million juveniles and adults incarcerated in American jails, prisons, detention centers, and the like (Wagner and Rabuy 2015). With record-high rates of incarceration, it is not surprising that there is a great deal of controversial debate around the subject, including the ways in which incarcerated individuals are treated within prisons. While inmates all face different challenges while being imprisoned, one fear they all share is the fear of solitary confinement. While it varies from prison to prison, solitary confinement is “the practice of isolating people in closed cells for 22-24 hours a day, virtually free of
human contact, for periods of time ranging from days to decades (Wagner and Rabuy 2015).” This practice is used for a plethora of reasons and, for many people who may never have to experience solitary, it is often seen as an effective form of punishment. Even in American movies and television shows, prisoners beg not to be sent to solitary and are completely changed once they return. This is because, for decades, solitary confinement has proved to have negative psychological and physical effects on prisoners and could lead to negative results for society. Why do we continue a practice that is not only detrimental for the inmate, but also detrimental for society as well? Education about solitary confinement, specifically its effects on teenage and mentally ill inmates, and understanding effective alternatives, is of great significance when considering prison reform.
Interestingly, the use of solitary confinement as a form of punishment is not a new practice.
In the late eighteenth century, penal reformists, in an effort to stray from the vicious and public forms of punishment that America had adopted from British rule, pushed for the creation of penitentiaries (Guenther 2013:3). They privatized punishment because they believed that prisoners, isolated from all contact in a cell within these penitentiaries, would be forced to confront and reflect upon their bad behaviors (Guenther 2013:4). At these early penitentiaries, inmates would eat, sleep, and work in these cells, in complete silence, with no contact with any of the prisoners around them or the outside world. (Guenther 2013:14). By disconnecting them from their old neighborhood and their old way of life, criminals were expected to redeem themselves and re-enter society as a “tabula rasa”, or a blank slate (Guenther 2013:14). While reformists believed that this would work in theory, they quickly learned that solitary confinement, in practice, proved to hurt the inmate more than it helped. Critics of the penitentiary believed that there was no chance for redemption in such conditions. In fact, they saw that “prisoners emerged from this machine with eyes like blanks, a deranged nervous system, and a diminished capacity for coherent thought or conversation (Guenter 2013:15).” In 1890, after discovering the haunting and damaging conditions that existed within such prisons, the Supreme
Court found that such punishment violated the Constitution and thus, a shift away from solitary began (Browne, Cambier and Agha 2011:46). However, as the federal government opened Alcatraz Prison in 1934 and the United States Penitentiary in 1963 to house the nation’s “worst” criminals, the shift back to solitary began (Browne, et al. 2011:46). State prisons began to use the same segregation technique to house the inmates that they believed to be threatening to the functioning of the prison and, in 1989, America opened Pelican Bay State Prison in California, the first supermax, or solely solitary confinement, prison (Browne, et al. 2011:46). In 2004, some form of supermax housing was reported by more than 40 states (Browne, et al. 2011:46).
Solitary confinement is still a widely used form of punishment within the American penal system.
According to the Bureau of Justice, as of 2005, the last year that such statistics were found, there were 81,622 people in restricted housing in the United States. This figure is difficult for many scholars as research on solitary confinement is difficult to obtain simply because it exists differently in each prison. Firstly, there are many terms for solitary, such as “segregated Housing Units” or “SHU’s”, or “Intensive Management Units” or “IMU’s” and each follow similar, but not always the same, guidelines, which makes it difficult to gather concrete data ((Wagner and Rabuy 2015). While conditions in each housing unit also vary, they all tend to have similar An example of the design of a segregated cell at Pelican Bay is as follows:
Each cell is 80 square feet and comes equipped with two built-in bunks and a toilet-sink unit. Cell doors are made of heavy gauge perforated metal; this design prevents objects from being thrown through the door but also significantly blocks vision and light. . . . [The] interior is designed to reduce visual stimulation. . . . The cells are windowless; the walls are white concrete. When inside the cell, all one can see through the perforated metal door is another white wall (Browne, et al.
2011:47).

The design of these prisons are carefully thought out; reducing stimulation to the most minimal state intensifies the powerlessness and loneliness prisoners must feel. All around them is nothing. Inmates are made to stay in these “holes” for anywhere from 22 to 24 hours a day; there are no visits, meals are slid through the door, and the only time, if at all, they may leave their cell is for an hour of highly surveilled exercise (Browne, et al. 2011:47). Time in solitary is indefinite; an inmate could be there for a week, a month, or a year. For example, Alfred Woodfox has been in solitary confinement in prisons in Louisiana for over 40 years for the murder of a police officer, a crime he was convicted of twice that he saw twice overturned (Quandt 2015). All of these elements, the secrecy, the emptiness and loneliness of the cell, all date back to the early penitentiaries; these are the same tactics that were supposed to “reform” the criminal.