Arguments Against Solitary Confinement

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Solitary confinement should never be used as a punishment against inmates of any degree. There are many inhuman crimes that are committed by people daily, and those criminals deserve to be held accountable for those actions, yet the punishment of solitary confinement is only adding fuel to the fire. Many of the criminals are already psychologically impaired and depriving them of true help to isolate them will only lead to harm. Although the severity of the crimes vary, the jail sentence will incarcerate them no matter what. Everyone who is human must be given a punishment suitable for a human. One psychologist, named Craig Haney, from UC Santa Cruz did research on how solitary confinement affects prisoners, and Haney states, “"We are all social …show more content…
The effects of solitary confinement deteriorate the human decency of criminals, therefore; The punishment only causes them to become more vengeful, angry, scared, and aggressive than there were before. The way people in jail are treated already makes them feel abused, and that little interaction being their only communication with other humans only adds to their damage. People who have experienced prison compare it to hell and only imagine how solitary confinement would be beyond traumatizing. Thomas Bartlett Whitaker, a man who was in solitary confinement and on death row, is one of the people who compared prison to the underworld and while explaining his experience he pleads, “This place ruins people. Some of it makes me insane. Some, like [him], it forces them to go so deep that they aren’t ever able to crawl back out again. Some people get so hard that discipline simply can’t ever imprint on them again.The irony is that they built these places to house a theoretical super-predator that didn’t really exist at the time, and ended up actually building that very individual.[The men on death row] have seen through that to the truth, that it’s just one group applying power over another, and this just makes them laugh”(Qtd.
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