Is long-term solitary confinement torture?
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. 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.
The real question is how is it not torture and how is it not a violation of the 8th Amendment? Ignoring the psychological effects (which the DOP does professionally) of 30% developing psychosis and the very real neurological atrophy/brain damage, that follows, it’s another example of providing an answer that doesn’t solve the problem at all and usually makes it worse. It’s cheap and easy, that’s why they do it.
So, advocates say, isolation is a necessary evil, and those who don’t recognize this are dangerously naïve.Advocates of long-term SC have are severely ignorant of the science, research and statistics behind this treatment (the effects, ramifications, costs and comparable alternatives). Where are all those squeaky wheels that get fussy because inmates have to wear pink underwear with no cable tv, when real human rights are being violated?
