Locked Up

Written By: Julia Lingenfelter

The eighth amendment protects the people from cruel or unusual punishments, but extended periods of solitary confinement are still a common form of prison punishment. While it’s supposed to protect prisoners from themselves or other inmates, it has been proven to harm them in the long run.

Solitary confinement can come in a few different ways: limited phone calls or contact to the outside world, sensory deprivation, restricted reading material, or personal property, and the most problematic, isolation behind a steel door with no windows for twenty-four hours a day. Prisoners are kept in these conditions for days or weeks at a time. Delegates Sophie Ritzenthaler, Kristian Williamson, and Mathew Behary have different plans for solitary confinement reform.

Mathew Behary proposed the Solitary Confinement Act which states that prisoners couldn’t be held for more than forty-eight hours every seven days. Prisons that fail to follow procedure will have their funding cut by five percent until they are evaluated in six weeks. Sophie Ritzenthaler and Kristian Williamson take a more extreme approach. Their bill states that prisoners cannot be put into solitary for more than twenty-four hours over a period of forty-five days. To enforce this, the Department of Corrections will randomly send one staff member to review the prison’s actions. The DOC will also implement staff members to manage the prison, should it fail its review.

After looking at the proven effects solitary confinement has, it’s clear that a change is needed. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that solitary confinement and self-harm were directly correlated. They found that fifty-three percent of self-harm acts were performed in solitary confinement and forty-five percent of these acts were potentially fatal with the most common forms being laceration, ligature, overdose, and swallowing a foreign body.

Despite the effects solitary confinement can have on physical health, the effects on mental health are what make the punishment so controversial. The same study found that as a result of confinement, prisoners developed paranoia, depression, anxiety, and obsessive thoughts. The effects were even worse for prisoners who already had some form of mental illness, to begin with.

Faith Condrick’s “Let’s Get Crazy Act” offers a way to dampen the effects of these mental issues. Inmates recovering from solitary confinement will be offered mandated counseling. The counseling sessions will take place free of guards, staff, and other prisoners. The health professional’s personal safety will be taken into account as well.

While on paper solitary confinement makes sense, in practice it seems more like beating a dead horse. Prisoners are being dragged further toward their own personal demons and inflicting more pain than if they were left alone. Solitary confinement may be a necessary form of punishment, but the practice, regulations, and aftermath still need revisions. Passing these three bills are the key to reform.