The Holeâ€A look into the prisons within the prisons Essay Example for Free

The HoleA present into the prisons within the prisons EssayIn the United States today at least 80,000 pris starrs be being held in some sort of isolation unit, commonly called l whizzsome(a) project. Prisoners in hermit are isolated in a 6X8 foot concrete agency for 23 hours a day. This is how the United States government favors to regulate the prisons, by locking prisoners in this cell for weeks, months or so far years on end. Most prisoners are allowed 1 hour a day for recreation where they are allowed to go outside, alone, in a fenced area well(p) near the size of their cell. It is a dirty, cold, concrete room with only a metal slot in the approach that they receive meals through. The room contains a bed, envisioner, and toilet, as well as a very small fare of personal items. They receive no educational classes, rehabilitative programs or other transitional services to suffice them prepare for their return to society, nevertheless off when they are going to be released soon.They hit absolutely no social organisation to their day. Since I was a child I have al offices been interested in the Criminal umpire System. I have long hoped to execute a prosecutor and have always been curious about prisons and criminals. My original curiosity with nongregarious toil specifically came from a Law and Order episode I saw. The chief(prenominal) investigator asked to be put in solitary confinement for a weekend to evidence that the criminals defense was fake (the criminal was claiming he pushed the detective off the roof because of the psychological suffering he endured in solitary confinement). Throughout the episode I watched, as the detective easy started hallucinating and got very anxious and angry. I assumed that the show was exaggerating for entertainment value however I demanded to find out whether that was true.Throughout my research process I have anchor that the symptoms the detective displayed are the same symptoms that thousa nds of real prisoners have. Through out my quest to learn more about the dress of Solitary confinement, my opinion has changed dramatically. At the beginning of this project I thought of this topic the same way I think about almost everything else, very black and white. I had itty-bitty sympathy for prisoners, even those held in solitary confinement. I didnt think of it as torture and didnt understand what the caper was. Throughout my research my opinion has started becoming grayer, creating an internal tension for me between two conflicting views.I have a strong held belief that prisons provide justice and safety. I hope to become a prosecutor to execute law and order. However, I have become conflicted throughout this assignment because I have found that this way of punishment has been understandably sh have got to be immoral and inhuman. For my site trim down I visited the Valhalla county jail. I was struck by the number of wives, parents, teenagers and young children who were there to visit loved ones. I listened in on defense attorney KLs chats with two of his clients and was shocked to find that I really did feel that one of them was being charged too harshly.I am of course non defending what the prisoners did, and umteen of them merit to be locked up, but the thought these people are treated so inhumanly, I feel disgraces our e separate and what it stands for. America, which supposedly stands for freedom, justice and the pursuit of happiness, locks up thousands and thousands of men, women, and teenagers sometimes as young as 14, in a cage. How could America, the land of freedom and opportunity, take dissociate in such an appalling practice? Most of us wouldnt treat our dogs the way the prisons treat the criminals, especially those in solitary confinement.Solitary Confinement was low gear used in the Auburn state prison during a two-year experiment in 1821, during which scientists ascertained people in extreme isolation. They housed a group of prisoners in individual cells without any labor or other adequate provisions for physical exercise. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont account, This trial, from which a happy result had been anticipated, was fatal to the greater disassociate of the convicts in order to reform them, they had been submitted to complete isolation but this absolute solitude, if nothing interrupt it, is beyond the strength of man it destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity it does not reform, it kills. The unfortunates, upon whom this experiment was do, fell into a state of depression, so manifest, that their keepers were struck with it their lives seemed in danger, if they remained longer in this situation. This experiment was done almost two light speed years ago and although the results were horrendous, solitary is still used today.It is sometimes necessary however. According to solitarywatch.com, Solitary confinement is used for collar main reasons protection, puni shment and rehabilitation. Through out my research I have found very little data to suggest solitary confinement is the least bit rehabilitative, so I have come to the conclusion that it is really only used for punishment and as a tutelary measure. Certain inmates such as former police officers and child molesters are more managely to be attacked by other inmates while in prison and are therefore put there for their own protection. Solitary confinement is overly used as a way to regulate the prisons. When a prisoner gets into a fight with another inmate or violates a prison rule, they are put in solitary confinement, or what the guards call, the bing, as punishment.It is called the bing because many of the prisoners start going crazy when placed in solitary confinement. Some common side affects are hallucinations, hypersensitivity to noise and touch, insomnia, paranoia, feelings of rage and fear, distortions of time and perception, depression, anxiety, PTSD and an increased assa y of suicide. When these side affects occur, the prisoners often start screaming and become very incoherent and manic.In 2009, Robert Foor, an Illinois inmate with moral illness, was placed in isolation and became more cordially ill, mutilating himself by cutting and biting, and attempted to hang himself. He at long last died in solitary confinement at Tamms Correctional Center. Another Tamms inmate whose mental health had been notably declining, faced increasing isolation and longer sentences, due to incidents of throwing feces and urine at guards. One report card even found that the people held in solitary developed were more likely to become psychopaths than those in the general population (28% vs. 15%).The isolation unit at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois has been expound as consisting of gray walls, a solid steel door, no window, no clock, and a light that was unplowed on twenty-four hours a day. Living in those kinds of conditions, its heavy(p) to imag ine someone not going crazy. Another comparison I make to my own life was that I draw ind that when I spend even 5 hours in my room alone, I become anxious and sometimes depressed. My room is clean, not made of concrete and has a bed, light, desk, laptop and phone. Although I choose to keep my door disagreeable I could come out at any time I want, I just choose not to. If I become anxious and depressed after only several hours alone in a small room, with conditions oftentimes nicer then the solitary cells, then I cant even begin to imagine how the prisoners in solitary feel.Furthermore, I have found that solitary confinement is not only harmful for the prisoners, but for our society as a safe and sound. It is detrimental for our society for two main reasons. The first is that it is much harder for prisoners who spend a prolonged period in solitary confinement to incorporate into society. Many of the prisoners suffer from PTSD and other mental conditions because they have very l imited human give for months or even years. This makes it dangerous for them to then be released into the general population, especially when they have very little guidance before being released or after. Many prisoners are released directly into society from solitary confinement. query done by the human rights watch, show that prisoners in solitary have a much high rate of re-incarceration because of their anger and depression. With little education, classes or skill training, it is difficult for them to become mathematical productive members of society. They are otiose to get jobs because of their limited skills and because of their arrest record. People are judgmental very few people want former criminals working for them. I have found that many people dont realize that people make mistakes and go to jail only to suffer, probably more then than the suffer they at one time caused. Prisoners are beaten, raped, and isolated, causing severe physical and psychological damage.Anot her disadvantage for the society as whole is that housing prisoners in solitary confinement cost approximately three times as much as it does to house a prisoner in the general prison population. According to a discussion article published by the Daily News, it costs American taxpayers $75,000 per inmate in solitary confinement per year as opposed to $25,000 dollars per inmate in the general population per year. It also came to my attention that solitary confinement has long been called a human rights violation. America is violating the Geneva Convention by lay people in solitary confinement. The psychological harm that the prisoners undergo in solitary is considered torture.Sister Marion Defeis who worked as a Chaplain for 23 years at Rikers Island wrote, When I would make visits, walking cell by cell, I was overwhelmed by the lethargy and depression of the inmates. Thats not how our system is supposed to work. We have prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. slice thi s is true, no alternative to solitary has so far been put to action. I conducted a phone consultation with Marion Defeis who was explaining her work at Rikers as well as her current work at a non-profit organization in Brooklyn for oneness mothers previously incarcerated.The alternative she proposed was that when there is an altercation in the prison the prisoner should be stranded to a contrary area and should receive psychological help to try to improve their mental state, instead of locking them up which will ultimately worsen the situation. She also felt that the punishments that the prisons use do not always fit the crime committed. The chart below shows how many isolation sentences there were because of diametric violations.During an interview with Mr. L he explained that a lot of times when there is an altercation it is the victim of the plague that is put in solitary confinement. Although it is for their own protection, he feels that it is unjust for the victim to ha ve a worse penalty when it was the offenders that committed the violation. A lot of times minors are also put there to protect them from the adult prisoners which he felt was unfair that they should get a worse penalty just because they were younger and therefore more vulnerable. These two instances both dramatically changed my views on solitary confinement and made me more sympathetic to what the prisoners held in solitary go through. Although Mr. Lawrence did feel solitary confinement is overused, he did clearly find it necessary in some situations. This was surprising because as a defense attorney I expected him to be very against it.Another essential moment throughout my research process was during my conversation with former prosecutor Mrs. Levine. She really only dealt with solitary as a protective measure, when there was a witness that was going to be put in jail with the person they were testifying against, they would need to be separated to insure they would not be injured or killed in jail. She explained that when she was going through the training to become a prosecutor she had to visit a solitary cell. She told me that she would really have to feel that she was in unsafe danger to be willing to be put in those kinds of horrible conditions. One researcher who took part in a report conducted by the New York Civil liberties union stated, It doesnt take one-half a brain to realize were not going to get a good product out of this. This was a very powerful quote for me that landmarked a shift in my thinking.When a single researcher can so clearly see the affects of solitary confinement after only one study, how can the rest of the country not see the detrimental affects after all the research undisturbed? non only are thousands of people held in solitary confinement, but so many different kinds of people are put in solitary as well. Prisoners as young as 14 years old to as old as 70, men and women, whites, blacks and Hispanics as well as a lot of time s, the mentally ill. According to the American Friends service committee, An independent investigation from 2006 reported that as many as 64 percent of prisoners in SHUs were mentally ill, a much higher percentage than is reported by states for their general prison populations.Frequently, mentally ill prisoners who are placed in the general prison population commit crimes and are put in solitary, which only exacerbates the problem. Once their punishment is over they are put back into the general prison population but at that point they have even more severe mental problems and once again end up in solitary. Furthermore, it has been reported that a disproportionate number of black people are in jail or in solitary compared to the NYS population. This is represented in the chart below. For the community service portion of this project I volunteered at the Childrens Village in Dobbs Ferry NY with boys ages 8-12, many of whom have parents currently detained.I spoke with several stave me mbers who explained that incarceration is an everlasting cycle. The staff works hard to break this cycle by helping to indoctrinate the boys necessary skills to succeed in life. It was shocking to me to realize that jail and solitary confinement would ever meet so directly to my life. When I found out that many of the parents of these children who I have been tutoring for the last three years are in jail, I thought differently of the children. I became more sympathetic and dread of what they have lived through and realized that they werent just out of control kids who didnt feel like learning their multiplication table. Their parents were living in cages.Thats why they were so angry and depressed and refused to learn. It also discovered that just 10 minutes away from my house was a maximum-security prison called the Bedford Correctional Facility. Not only are their hundreds of women housed there, but about 25 of them are held in solitary confinement. Their children come to visit them with their foster parents and have to kiss their mothers through glass. My struggle throughout this assignment has been withholding judgment about the topic. If I were not required to keep an open mind, this would have been a very different process. on that point is still much to be learned about the practice of solitary confinement.I have instantly recognized how harmful solitary confinement is to the prisoners, country and society as a whole, however it is hard to put an end to solitary confinement without coming up with an alternative solution. This project has also made me wonder why they call prisons correctional facilities. I have found no evidence to show that these facilities help correct anything. Sister Marion Defeiss alternative is certainly a possibility, however it would require a lot of time, effort and certainly money that I am not sure society would be willing to pay for people who have been found to have committed such horrific offenses.