‘There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that solitary confinement is bad for people.”
I am not trying to be harsh, but to keep prisoners physically safe.
Personally I don’t want any other prisoners at liberty to mess with me. I don’t mind seeing them, talking to them, whatever, but I don’t want them having access to my body.
So you’re saying that mental health should take a back seat compared to physical safety?
Leave them in solitary long enough, and they might bash their brains in, or go insane in some other way. Wait, we do want to let them out eventually right?
I think you’re assuming that isolation is tolerable, just because it sounds less scary than being in prison with other people.
“He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”
“Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.”