Thoughts on solitary confinement?

[Yukaphile]

While rewatching Shawshank Redemption, I came across an online article about solitary confinement. The article had a human rights activist talking about the conditions and insisted that it's a human rights abuse, that "this is the United States" and it's against the Constitution. Honestly, I rolled my eyes. It's views like this which really strike me to how arrogant so many of our citizens are. We can't even take care of our own people! We can't clean up our own communities, improve our lives for the better! Yet we still care about this shit? When crime is everywhere? We are not God's gift to Earth. I will say this. If a sex abuser received the same thing in kind, that is what I'd be opposed to. But if that same criminal got solitary confinement, I wouldn't feel sorry if he got it for a decade or more. I mean, maybe it's just me, but there is only SO FAR you can stretch the human abuses angle here. The excesses, sure. Those should be clamped down on, I agree. But let's not try and humanize these people more than is needed, okay? I mean, granted, solitary for something like a guy who had gone there for not paying his parking tickets, that would fall under the excesses I mentioned, and I'd vehemently condemn that. Even somebody who stole a car. Or beat somebody up, even his wife - okay. I'd be willing to even stretch it as far as that. I'm talking strictly the most violent, personal, intimate crimes. Let's not forget these people willingly CHOSE that and so I think in that moment, they have FORFEITED any claim to "human rights" and must be treated accordingly. That to not descend that far into barbarism, to sink to their level, is less for them than us, so that we don't wind up the same way, and in that same situation - as the damned, with nothing but poison smeared onto our soul.

Thoughts?

[Rocketboy1313]

I don't like solitary confinement.
It is a form of torture.
There are some individuals who are so dangerous that allowing them to freely interact with other people is impossible, I still do not think they should be completely isolated.

Side note: You have to break your post into more paragraphs, I find that block of text physically hard to read. Formatting information is important

[Yukaphile]

And so? It's not branding somebody, putting them up against hot coals, setting them on fire, shocking their nuts, or worse, which we have done in the past. I think solitary confinement is absolutely justified for some people I've read of in human history. That said, they are outliers, granted, and far and few in between so as to, in an ideal world, make solitary confinement merely for them alone and not common petty criminals, of which the system of power is so rife for abuse, as I'd noted above, a guy who mispaid his parking tickets might be hit with it. Sadly, I could see this form of punishment (I refuse to call it torture unless it is in excess, which I've already noted) as well as the death penalty going the way of the dinosaur someday. Just gotta keep pampering those mass murderers and serial rapists, eh?

[AlucardNoir]

I'm against solitary confinement and prisons. I'm for rehabilitation and the death penalty. If someone can be rehabilitated then they should be, not taken out of circulation for anywhere between half a decade to 50 years. If they can't then there's no reason to waste resource keeping them alive.

Also, I agree with the statement that solitary confinement can be torture, but disagree with the blanket it is torture.

[Rocketboy1313]

And so? It's not branding somebody, putting them up against hot coals, setting them on fire, shocking their nuts, or worse, which we have done in the past. I think solitary confinement is absolutely justified for some people I've read of in human history. That said, they are outliers, granted, and far and few in between so as to, in an ideal world, make solitary confinement merely for them alone and not common petty criminals, of which the system of power is so rife for abuse, as I'd noted above, a guy who mispaid his parking tickets might be hit with it. Sadly, I could see this form of punishment (I refuse to call it torture unless it is in excess, which I've already noted) as well as the death penalty going the way of the dinosaur someday. Just gotta keep pampering those mass murderers and serial rapists, eh?

Putting people in prison is not pampering them.
If you somehow feel that a typical prisoner is more comfortable than a typical citizen, that is a more damning statement of the society's inability to provide for its citizenry than a call to treat prisoners worse.
Solitary confinement is a form of torture, as protracted periods of solitary confinement is damaging to mental health.
Your standards of hot coals or whatever else in order for it to be considered torture is too high, and you should instead look at diminishing harm even to those people who have committed heinous crimes.
The objective of the American legal system is supposed to be rehabilitative in addition to punitive.
Moving toward rehabilitation and further away from punitive has been shown to be more effective in reducing crime rates.
As solitary confinement is punitive and harmful it should be done away with.

The Death Penalty is not inherently a bad sentence, there are individuals who are too dangerous or too far beyond rehabilitation that death is the only way to treat them.
However, the process of the death sentence (and let's be clear, the American legal system in general) has been abused too often to allow the Death Penalty to be entrusted to the various states for implementation.
Too many innocent people have been put to death.

[Yukaphile]

I would prefer not to try and rehabilitate serial sex offenders, tbh. It's impossible. I think reforming a murderer could be easier. And hell, you have to address the systematic flaws at the heart of any society before you can TRULY cut down on crime.

Putting them in prison strikes me merely as loss of liberty. And there are literally some crimes you can't come back from. Oh they may try to claim they have, but I sincerely doubt their word. Again, murder would be one of those I think, with time, you could come back from. Others? Not so much.

[Yukaphile]

I'm not a fan of rehabilitation for the same damned reason that I rail so viciously against the easily forgiven sins of others - and I'm talking pure bestial level stuff, that you can just shrug off, it seems. Rehabilitation strikes me as society's attempt to forgive these people, when they don't deserve it. Again, for somebody who is in jail merely for breaking the law on illegal drug use, I'm not talking about them. But let's go with the example I mentioned again, above. Shocking somebody's nuts. Some sadistic freaks do that. If it was up to ME, they'd be in jail for LIFE. Why would you wanna try and reform that person? Even if he could one day "be a productive member of society," it can't erase the pain and trauma done to the victim. I've said over and over justice, within our civilization, demands some degree of ruthlessness. If that means we leave some people behind, so be it. I also find it insulting to the victim to try and do that. Loss of liberty seems too harsh and too light in some cases. The guy who electrocuted some other human being's nuts? You want to rehabilitate him, really? What's he gonna be like when he leaves? How can you ever possibly come back from that? And even if you can, how long it's gonna take? A year? A YEAR IN JAIL for that level of sheer inhumanity? How is that possible? Rehabilitation is an effort to take somebody who needs to PAY, to account for it, and just try and impose our values on them. Rehabilitation is indeed just a made-up, politician's word to make ourselves feel better. And it's USELESS to reform one sickening individual until we challenge the systematic rot at the heart of our country. Would people really support the idea of trying to reform Adam Lanza? I wouldn't. While going too far makes me feel uneasy, I also likewise simply do NOT care to try and show mercy to somebody like that. Any kind of redemption they need to find on their own, and it needs to be the genuine, sincere kind. Not the safe, political, "I'm scared I'm going to hell, so I'll say this stuff" crap.

[Rocketboy1313]

Again, can you please format your responses better? I have had to copy and paste two of these into a word document and put paragraph breaks into it at regular intervals so I could read it.

I am having a difficult time answering your points as you seem to jump to too many disparate elements.
You have moved very far away from the topic question of Solitary Confinement.
You seem to jump up to serial sex offenders and then down to parking tickets and it creates a tonal whiplash and does not ground your position in any sort of meaningful spectrum.

Nothing you have said makes me feel that solitary confinement is in anyway a productive or good way of dealing with criminals.
You can bring up whatever monstrous person you like to try and refute this point.
You can try to undercut the idea of rehabilitation.
None of that challenges or refutes my ultimate points of solitary confinement being torture, and that torture is not productive and does not help anyone.

If the prison system is supposed to function toward rehabilitation, which it should, that philosophy must be practiced at all levels of criminal activity, even when dealing with criminals of an exceptional nature.
This is not entirely in hopes of returning them to the community, but also to encourage them to behave themselves in captivity, as many will be there for the remainder of their lives.

Treating our prison populations with dignity and with the ultimat goal of making them into whole and functional people is part of fixing the communities we are trying to improve.
The communities you mentioned here:

While rewatching Shawshank Redemption, I came across an online article about solitary confinement. The article had a human rights activist talking about the conditions and insisted that it's a human rights abuse, that "this is the United States" and it's against the Constitution. Honestly, I rolled my eyes. It's views like this which really strike me to how arrogant so many of our citizens are. We can't even take care of our own people! We can't clean up our own communities, improve our lives for the better! Yet we still care about this shit? When crime is everywhere? We are not God's gift to Earth. I will say this.

The prisoners are "our people".

[Yukaphile]

They are NOT my people are never will be! My people are NOT those who mutilate, maim, rape, murder, torture, and just descend to such other depths of gross bestiality. My people are those who believe in freedom, charity, kindness, striving to be better than you are, and all those moral values. To claim it is the system that drove them to that is a non-sequitur - they chose that. Never undervalue that. And while psychology plays a role for all of us, obviously, in the end, science itself still has no clear-cut answer to this. And if it did, so what? It can't erase what they did. And simple loss of liberty that is structured towards trying to return them to society is too light a punishment for these extreme outliers.

What strikes me is the "devil in plain sight." The "wolf in sheep's clothing." People who have in their private lives such twisted depravities that will never see the light of day, it's a miracle most average people can trust anyone. I don't lump drug users in prison on excessive charges in this category. I put the twisted psychopaths there. Some might uphold the idea of rehabilitating them, in essence, society's version of "forgiveness," as a symbol of strength. I honestly consider it very weak. How would the victim feel to know they are being put through programs designed to "reform" them? How will they react if the criminal then comes over to them once they are out and apologizes? Society is structured to such a degree, if the guilty party seems just a least bit remorseful, to have "seen the light," then for the victim to still spit on them, not forgive them, would be met with scorn! They would be seen as the weak one!

As to "rehabilitation," I personally don't think we know really what the fuck the prison system is anymore. It began thousands of years ago, and it's one of our oldest traditions. In the modern age, it has all sorts of new meanings, new possibilities, new potential, and different people have different ideas. If you're asking what I believe, however, then no. I would say, rehabilitation is useless. Don't waste the taxpayers' money on that. It could be put to better use to prevent these crimes in the first place with more research, and resources invested elsewhere. Fund genuine social programs, improve the economy, and so much more. That removes the potential to end up there, at least to a small degree. I don't consider the prison systems a place to rehabilitate the fallen, merely an older system of laws we still have not grown past. Some may try to do that, others may not. But that is not their purpose overall. It is merely to confine dangerous people, and people who go against the order of civilization. That's it. And we all disagree on how to handle them after that.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

If a sex abuser received the same thing in kind, that is what I'd be opposed to. But if that same criminal got solitary confinement, I wouldn't feel sorry if he got it for a decade or more.

Thoughts?

I think you've toyed with the idea that the only reason we don't do eye for an eye justice is because by default we're better people than the people we punish. I believe that there is more to it than that and that we still have standards of humanity for our penal code, or that that is what is generally agreed upon by civil consideration. It's not the public's role to inflict wicked punishment to prison subjects, and solitary confinement has been determined to be overly abusive on its subjects. Aside from that, it's understandable how it would be abusive to any sort of person, whether a criminal or not, and that violates the function of a prison itself in a developed society.

Deferring the issue on account of decidedly more important issues outside of prison or excusing it on the basis that prisoners are less than human doesn't change how serious the issue of proper prison ordinance is.