Hellhole

Since we're on the subject of prisons I might as well follow up the prior post with this.

I'm not a "soft on crime" kind of guy but I do think that prisons should rehabiliate as well as punish. The U.S. is great at the punishment side of the equation but the rehabilitation side, not so much. The failure to fund and implement rehabilitation programs is one if not the main reason for recidivism.

A few excerpts from excellent article from the New Yorker, entitled "Hellhole"...

EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement.

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction.

[A]fter months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

It wasn’t always like this. The wide-scale use of isolation is, almost exclusively, a phenomenon of the past twenty years. In 1890, the United States Supreme Court came close to declaring the punishment to be unconstitutional.

Fortunately, Jim Webb (D-VA) has launched an effort to reform the country's prison system. I hope his effort includes a strong look at rehabiliation as well as the drug laws that have led to the U.S. having the highest incarceration rate in the world.