I have
not read a George Will column that I really loved in a long while, but today’s essay definitely changes that. It is a moving commentary on the commonplace
treatment of putting prisoners into isolation. As you will see, Will quotes movingly from Charles Dickens and the folks at First Things were
also moved by the column and have posted at their site a detailed excerpt from Charles
Dickens. Here, though, are some of the highlights from Will's column:
America,
with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of its prisoners. Mass
incarceration, which means a perpetual crisis of prisoners re-entering society,
has generated understanding of solitary confinement’s consequences when used as
a long-term condition for an estimated 25,000 inmates in federal and state
“supermax” prisons — and perhaps 80,000 others in isolation sections within
regular prisons. Clearly, solitary confinement involves much more than the
isolation of incorrigibly violent individuals for the protection of other
inmates or prison personnel…
Supermax
prisons isolate inmates from social contact. Often prisoners are in their
cells, sometimes smaller than 8 by 12 feet, 23 hours a day, released only for a
shower or exercise in a small fenced-in outdoor space. Isolation changes the
way the brain works, often making individuals more impulsive, less
able to control themselves. The mental pain of solitary confinement is
crippling: Brain studies reveal durable impairments and abnormalities in individuals
denied social interaction. Plainly put, prisoners often lose their minds…
Two centuries ago, solitary confinement was
considered a humane reform, promoting reflection, repentance — penitence; hence
penitentiaries — and rehabilitation. Quakerism influenced the design of
Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened in
1829 with a regime of strict solitude. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited it:
“I hold this slow and daily tampering with the
mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body:
and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and
sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the
surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the
more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not
roused up to stay.”…
Most persons now in solitary confinement will
someday be back on America’s streets, some of them rendered psychotic by what
are called correctional institutions.
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