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
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
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.