Is Prolonged Solitary Confinement Torture? | Big Think

Is Prolonged Solitary Confinement Torture?

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Perhaps at no other time in the present generation has prison reform been so close to the surface of our political consciousness. The "tough on crime" policies and mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines of the 1990s have created a pattern of overly harsh punishments and a glut of private prisons, all but abandoning the rehabilitative function of the penal system. Today, that is slowly changing. In prohibiting juvenile solitary confinement in federal prisons, President Barack Obama follows the advice of prison experts like Marie Gottschalk. Here she explains the "degrading and dehumanizing" harm caused by extreme isolation.

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MARIE GOTTSCHALK:

Marie Gottschalk is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in American politics, with a focus on criminal justice, health policy, race, the development of the welfare state, and business-labor relations.

Her latest book is Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014). She is also the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the 2007 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Cornell University Press, 2000).

Professor Gottschalk is a former editor and journalist and was a university lecturer for two years in the People’s Republic of China. She was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and was named a Distinguished Lecturer in Japan by the Fulbright Program. She served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences National Task Force on Mass Incarceration and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration. She is a contributor to the Academy's final report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (National Academies Press, 2014).

She has a B.A. in history from Cornell University, an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Marie Gottschalk: So solitary confinement, you’re in a cell 22 to 23 hours a day. I recently discovered in a number of states on the weekend you’re actually in the cell around the clock for the whole weekend. You don’t come out for meals. You have a slot in the door where your meals are given to you. There’s often very little that’s in your cell. Some states only allow you one book. Some allow a bookshelf worth of things. Some states no TV, no radio. Other states — all right. Many states restrict the number of visitors. The lack of any kind of human contact even when you have those visits. You’re typically allowed out for one hour a day of exercise, which some people say is kind of in a dog exercise yard because it’s a kind of pen that’s attached to the prison. If you want to do your exercise for an hour, that means you probably don’t have time for a telephone call or to take a shower. And you are literally kept in isolation, prolonged isolation from any human contact. Psychologists and other doctors who’ve studied this say that people decompose. They lose their mind. They begin, for example, if they’ve been so isolated for so long then they’re in human contact. Suddenly there can be the stimulation of just a fly in the room and they’ll be staring and looking at that fly and can’t concentrate because they’re overstimulated by that. In some solitary confinement, the lights are kept on all the time. People can be — a number in the South that don’t have any air conditioning so we’ve had a number of deaths in people in solitary and non-solitary because of excessive heat. It’s an unimaginable way of keeping people and it’s extraordinary. And when I tell people this, people think I’m making it up and the fact that we have tens of thousands of people at any one moment who are in this existence. And we’ve had some people who have spent literally decades in this existence in the United States.

So often when we talk about prisons and jails, we talk about the numbers, how many people in prison or how many people in jail. What we overlook is that we have some of the most degrading, dehumanizing prisons and jails in any developed country..........

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