The Pros And Cons Of A Correctional Facilities

A correctional facility is intended to be a place of rehabilitation for convicts. In practice, however, it is used as a mean to control and break down the sentenced individuals When it is time for their release, inmates are not prepared to live a successful life, but they are released with the notion that they will soon return. Our prison system is a recipe to keep criminals incarcerated, and its practices to punish inmates rather than rehabilitate them are leading to a country wide epidemic of mental health issues in our prison system. It’s even worse for prisoners with prior existing mental health problems. The lack of attention to the sanity of these prisoners during their incarceration is daunting. Due to the punitive nature of our prison
There is no need to use severe isolation on prisoners. We need to start considering merging the agendas of both the mental health institutions and our correctional facilities. This would help inmates receive proper care so that they may be released back to society in better mental health than when they arrived. The idea of isolation of prisoners began in Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. The premise of this is to mollify prisoners that were dangerous or disruptive. They would isolate these prisoners from the general prison population where the goal was for these inmates to self-reflect on their actions. The inmates that were subject to this isolation, “became violently insane, suicidal, were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community” (Kerri Schulz, 2016). Even though this particular practice was discontinued in 1890, in recent years, this cruel form
Instead of getting the proper care in prison to help treat their problems, they are being subject to complete isolation which only leads to the increase of psychological problems. Maureen L. O’Keefe, M.A., researched the topic of how mentally unstable inmates fair in isolation compared to other inmates. The study was conducted at Colorado State Penitentiary where 270 inmates were asked to partake in this year long study. The inmates were separated into four groups: one population of inmates in administrative segregation with mental illness, one in administrative segregation without mental illness, one in the general population with mental illness, and one in the general population without mental illness. Each group was given an assessment that tested a wide range of psychological symptoms. O’Keefe found that after a year of evaluation, the group with mental illness in isolation showed more symptoms than that of the group with mental illness in the general population. Furthermore, the inmates without mental illness in isolation started to show psychological symptoms compared to those without mental illness in the general population. This study shows two things regarding solitary confinement. First, that already mentally ill inmates struggle even more with their illness while in segregation. They are isolated and are not getting any treatment and are living in deprived