Re:First Maine inmate enrolled in graduate school conducts r...
by monoideism on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @10:27AM
(#22181530)
Happily, your efforts will likely be for naught. Even if most people don't care about the many incarcerated victims of prisoner violence, powerful people do care about violence against prison wardens and staff, so solitary is unlikely to go away.
I'm 100% for significant prison reform. We have far, far too many nonviolent offenders, or offenders who made a one-time really poor decision in a bar fight or something similar, housed together in prison with psychopaths, gang members, and ultra-violent inmates. But until the day comes when only habitually violent prisoners are housed together in prison, facilities for solitary confinement are needed, not only for violent prisoners, but for people in protective custody.
Yes, but that's irrelevant to the conversation at hand. That solitary is torture and hurts people far more than it helps them. That that's what the science says.
As I've said, anecdotes are irrelevant. Data is.
> But what is the alternative? Let those inmates live in open population?
> ...
> Maximum security prisons have many of them. Where do they go with no solitary?
Maximum security prisons don't just have the two extremes of solitary and open population. Normal prisons usually have more than gen pop and solitary.
If rehabilitation is the goal, and not just punishment, then prisons tend to be less violent overall. These statistical outliers who go around attacking everyone also reduce in frequency.