Isolation Confinement (Super- Seg)

[Jims]

NPR has an interesting 3-part article on Isolation Prisons, i.e., SHUs or Supermax type confinement. Here is the link for the summary and today's article:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5582144

[webmari]

Well, it's so obvious that nothing much good can come out of this long term isolations of human beings. it was intended for punishment of bad behaviour for a few weeks or months at the most and now what has become of that. So many people locked away and everyone should know what this does to a person's psyche, to be isolated, noone to talk to and to touch, everything is taken from you. I correspond with someone who was at Tamms, lucky only for a few months from Oct. last year until the end of May. He was sent there because he was accused to have beaten up a counselor at another prison and the same day was shipped to Tamms where he was told they did not know what he was here for but were willing to keep him there and the earliest he could count on getting out was about 5 years and we all know that hardly anyone got out of there that soon. Well, it so happened that all of his grievances did some good as they decided in Springfield that there was no proof whatsoever to link him to this assault. So they ordered that he should be shipped out of Tamms immediately. So, miracles do happen, he is now at another unit but they gave him some more months to stay in segregation there instead of apologizing for doing him wrong and trying to make up for it. Instead all of his belongings even got "lost". But well, he is still lucky he got out of there that fast. He told me about some of the things that he was treated to and I really tried hard to just help him to keep sane in there by sending him lots of pictures and cards and letters to keep his mind occupied a bit. But all of this solitary confinement has run out of control and has been applied so many times for no apparent reason. Maybe it is necessary for some really dangerous people. But what I read in some of the articles, like to offer them possibilities to earn their way back to general population this makes sense and will motivate people to become less violent. It is obvious that this is the only way to reduce the amount of those kept in isolation. I read the article about this CO who worked in there and it makes it clear that this is also very hard on those working there. They are subjected to all kinds of things those inmates do out of frustration or out of going insane without even knowing anymore what they are doing. If it continues, they will run short of prison staff who will subject themselves to working at places like that. So it would make sense to work on reducing this sort of isolation to a few months if needed and prepare those in long time segregation slowly for a life in general population again and just use this harsh treatment for those where it is not safe to have them in general population. And also there are many who need treatment in psychiatric units rather than isolation which makes their situation even worse. So, I just hope and pray that state by state they will look for alternatives to this kind of torture.