Sixteen, Alone, 23 Hours a Day, in a Six-by-Eight-Foot Box

https://medium.com/editors-picks/26ab1e09632d

by sgpl • 12 years ago

74 82 12 years ago

sp332• 12 years ago

“You’re giving all of these young people to us, and we have to determine what’s wrong with them,” he says. “You can’t do it. It’s impossible.”

...Of the teenagers in solitary, almost three-quarters had diagnosed mental health problems.

“We don’t have the experience to deal with a person with psychological problems,” Seabrook says. “We’re not doing enough because they shouldn’t be brought to us.”

a8da6b0c91d5• 12 years ago

I wonder how much this has to do with the involuntary commitment legal developments of the 1970s.

diogenescynic• 12 years ago

Once the mental institutions were closed incarceration rates increased dramatically. It's fairly safe to conclude we're treating the mentally ill as criminals. It reminds me of The Onion article, '15 Years In Environment Of Constant Fear Somehow Fails To Rehabilitate Prisoner': http://www.theonion.com/articles/15-years-in-environment-of-...

skyebook2• 12 years ago

Or the process of releasing those in need of treatment during the 80's. Its amazing how we're capable of so much as a society but can't get it together to help those most in need.

(Interesting piece from the time on how it came about that the mental hospitals started being emptied: http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-men...)

adamwong2468• 12 years ago

Jeez, how much longer until we can codify into law that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual?

alaskamiller• 12 years ago

Young and cynical me would say when and if justice is served to the children of the rich and famous.

Old and wiser me would say when people stop asking such fake questions and take heart going into careers of law or public administration.

adamwong2468• 12 years ago

What is the emoticon for "What you just said made me throw up in my soul?"

American justice does serve the rich. American justice does discriminate against all manner of individuals. And I should not have to pursue a career in criminal law to point out that these conditions are useless, wasteful and absolutely barbaric.

JonFish85• 12 years ago

Disclaimer: partially just playing devil's advocate here.

There are circumstances where you need to keep someone in solitary, whether it's for their own safety or for the safety of others. You can't well put a hated prisoner in with the general population without expecting that they'll be murdered. On the other hand, you have prisoners who have made a living out of murdering prison guards.

What do you do with Thomas Silverstein[1]? Terry Nichols? Members of the mafia? Caught spies? They'd likely either kill or be killed. I don't really see a better option than isolating them. These aren't people who are there to be rehabilitated.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein

DanBC• 12 years ago

I suspect you have listed a teeny tiny subset of the general prison population.

While it's true that those people need protection I'm not sure it's true for everyone else.

adamwong2468• 12 years ago

Fair enough. But this article is about children being encaged en masse by a bloated bureaucracy, not a judicious selection of individuals that must be protected for their, or our own, safety.

robinh• 12 years ago

Even in those extreme cases (which I hope we all agree are the exception rather than the norm), I would still consider putting someone in a few-square-meter box "cruel and unusual punishment" by any reasonable standard.

bradleyjg• 12 years ago

There's many options between general population in 1970s style block prisons and supermax style solitary confinement. At the very least, those that fall in the first case (for their own safety) don't need to kept in the punitively isolating conditions of the latter.

vacri7• 12 years ago

Solitary confinement is cruel, but it's not unusual. If you read the article in full, you'll see that it's also one of the only ways you can threaten someone already incarcerated, to try and keep them behaving well. If there was nothing to threaten them with, then there's nothing to keep violent inmates in line. Is it overused? That's the question.

But really, if you follow your 'five whys', the solution to this problem is not treating the symptom that lies at the very end of the chain. Measures that stop people even being incarcerated in the first place are what should be supported. This article is describing one of many of the foul symptoms of the US having a ridiculously high incarceration rate.

And I'm not using that adjective as a throwaway - the level of incarceration in the US truly deserves ridicule. It is a national disgrace.

happyscrappy3• 12 years ago

Surely there can be some middle ground between giving people who murder 70+ people their preferred gaming system and putting troublemakers in solitary.

vacri7• 12 years ago

If you want a middle ground, you can start by not arguing from outliers. Out of the several million people imprisoned in the US, how many of them in total "murdered 70+ people"? How many of them murdered even 10?

Why base your argument for moderation around such an extreme outlier?

happyscrappy3• 12 years ago

Do you claim that most juveniles are in solitary in the US?

fuzzix• 12 years ago

"How many of them murdered even 10?"

Even that is extreme. How many committed acts of violence at all? How many are "three strikes" or prohibition victims?

jobu• 12 years ago

"Only the U.S., Somalia and South Sudan have declined to ratify the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits juvenile solitary confinement as a matter of international law."

Nice.

happyscrappy3• 12 years ago

Never mind Russia, the US is the real evil.

cobrausn• 12 years ago

If you're going to view the world through such a simple-minded lens, I've always preferred hearing us called 'The Great Satan'. At least that acknowledges our greatness. :-D

altero4• 12 years ago

How about both?

vixen99• 12 years ago

This is the kind pointless opining we get from too many abysmal contributors to the Guardian comment columns.

xenophanes5• 12 years ago

Did you bother checking what else it says and what the U.S.'s stated reason for not signing is? Or do you prefer to post ignorant sarcastic criticism?

mcintyre1994• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the...

Does that seem accurate? It reads as if the lack of ratification is basically an old political statement at this point and there's no real policy there they object to now?

Mithaldu2• 12 years ago

For cultural context, i live in germany.

Are you american and really think this is a sane path of action: "The Convention is unlikely to be ratified in the near future because it forbids both the death penalty and life imprisonment for children [...] threatening national control over domestic policy"

To be honest, to me this sounds exactly like immigrants to germany claiming a right to honor slayings because it's part of their culture.

If that's not the statement you tried to make, please clarify what exactly you think is the US' stated reason for not signing it.

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

Being in this sort of shitty company is pretty common for the US when it comes to human rights treaties.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/05/17/america_the_e...

There isn't a "US's stated reason for not signing". Instead, there's lot of "yeah that'd be great, we'll get on that later" from the various administrations, and what sounds like paranoid whining from religious conservatives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_ratification_of_the_Conventi...

On 16 February 1995, Madeleine Albright, at the time the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, signed the Convention. However, though generally supportive of the Convention, President Bill Clinton did not submit it to the Senate. Likewise, President Bush did not submit the Convention to the Senate. President Barack Obama has described the failure to ratify the Convention as 'embarrassing' and has promised to review this. The Obama administration has said that it intends to submit the Convention to the Senate, but there is no set timeline for it.

EliRivers• 12 years ago

Did you? Have you got anything to say other that an attack on the person rather than an exposition of fact?

altero4• 12 years ago

Trust me, it is not normal to handcuff 6 years old children. You have "dangerous criminals" rest of the world has "children".

adamwong2468• 12 years ago

Ok, here's a solution: Private prisons are corporations. To ensure that they act in good faith towards the goal of a better society, instead of motivated by sheer profit, let us make a laws that compensate private prisons, not by the number of bodies they house, but instead on the recidivism rates. We should not be paying these entities to house humans indefinitely. Instead, motivate them to rehabilitate and return these people to society.

jack-r-abbit2• 12 years ago

The only (well not the only) problem with that is then they would have an incentive to just get people out as quickly as possible to get paid. We would have to set up some sort of standards for what it meant to be "rehabilitated" and that would be pretty difficult.

adamwong2468• 12 years ago

If the person re-commits a crime, then the prison must re-pay the government back. Perhaps we can do away with mandatory sentencing as well! Let the prison decide when a person has paid their debt to society.

wwweston• 12 years ago

Difficult indeed. As they say "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Still, we could do better than paying by prisoners housed. Perhaps prison profits should be based on the income of released inmates.

gruseom2• 12 years ago

Wow, that is a great idea.

I wonder how such a thing could ever get started. Perhaps as an experiment in one of the smaller states?

adamwong2468• 12 years ago

If only there was some sort of business incubator to pair moon-shot ideas, ambitious young professionals and the funding needed to succeed... hmmm, if only...

bigs204• 12 years ago

Your proposed solution ignores the reality of the situation, where private corporation's goals are misaligned with the goals of the society.

Until there is a fundamental change in how much influence special interest/private corps carry in deciding law & regulations of industries, with little regards to best interest for the society, such tragedies will continue to unfold.

mfisher87• 12 years ago

Or we could make torturing inmates illegal. Solitary confinement is torture.

noblethrasher• 12 years ago

I like the way you're thinking, but that's a little too easy to game unfortunately.

Here is my proposal:

1. Require something like 40% of the prison guards to have four-year degrees from accredited institutions, preferably in the humanities and the science.

2. Offer the prison a bonus for the academic achievements of each inmate.

3. Tie the bonus to the magnitude of the educational achievement so that going from, say, a GED to a bachelor's is much greater than going from a bachelor's to another bachelor's or even a master's. Also, publication in academic journals is eligible for the bonus, as are patent awards.

a8da6b0c91d5• 12 years ago

You are assuming a substantial fraction of prisoners are rehabilitatable. That's probably not true. We're talking about a lot of borderline retarded and very unhinged folks. You aren't going to run them through a class and find them jobs. I dare say you're naive about what the criminal underclass is really like.

julian372• 12 years ago

You are assuming these prisoners should be prisoners in the first place.

In Norway, there are 71 prisoners per 100,000 population. In the US there are 716. This means that if the US had the same incarceration rate as Norway, 90% of the current prison population wouldn't even be there, never mind the need for rehabilitation.

I'm not Norwegian, but I've spent about a year living there and I can tell you that it doesn't feel at all like there are criminals roaming the street. On the contrary, it felt very, very safe over there.

Here is an interesting article on what prison looks like in Norway: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/europe/091017/norway-open...

contingencies• 12 years ago

You are suggesting forgetting about people, real people, instead locking them up and throwing away the key. You are justifying it with some bullshit quip about them never changing since they're part of some TV psychology "criminal underclass". I am not going to suggest that you are locked up as a danger to society (as part of the "bit-twiddling overclass") since I believe you can change to recognize the errors in your ways. You should offer others the chance to reform after their mistakes, too. Let's not forget that the most important thing when growing in a new direction is environment.

pyduan• 12 years ago

Aside from the other problems that have been pointed out, this would provide an incentive for prisons to favor groups that have been statistically linked to lower recidism rates -- not only could it create some kind of favoritism, it would also probably favor those who perpetrated more serious crimes (thieves have by far the highest recidivism rates, much higher than, say, murderers [1]).

The American penitentiary system is fundamentally flawed and is in need of a deep reform; the real shocker to me is that stuff like this can happen before trial:

Nazario first went to Rikers at 16, after an arrest on an assault charge. Before leaving at 19, he says, he had spent more than 300 days in solitary confinement — all before being convicted of a crime.

(on a side note, I was surprised to learn Rikers is actually a jail and not a prison)

[1] http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1134

altero4• 12 years ago

How about making law which would compensate prisoners not prisons?

swombat2• 12 years ago

On a slight tangent, that was an amazingly well-written article, with very professional illustrations, photos, good research, no typos I could see, etc.

How come this is on Medium rather than on, say, the NY Times?

tdees40• 12 years ago

The New Yorker actually wrote a wonderful article on solitary confinement that's a must-read for anybody who cares about the subject.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...

gandalfu• 12 years ago

Couldn't agree more, the illustrations alone convey a great deal of isolation and despair.

listic2• 12 years ago

Who runs this Medium site? Does it use its own engine? My Wappalyzer only recognizes Typekit.

I've heard of this site only recently and I would like to use a design like that for my writing prompt site.

swombat2• 12 years ago

Medium was founded by Evan Williams (who also founded Twitter and Blogger.com): https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48

ludicast• 12 years ago

I am a lifelong liberal but I did work for a year as a correction officer on Riker's Island (a decade ago, at ARDC which is the jail discussed). The "box" was referred to by everyone as the "bing".

This isn't an AMA, but I will say that many like much of law enforcement, there is a discretionary aspect. That is, though inmates can be thrown in the bing for minor offences, almost all were there because of an accumulation of violent activities. In other words, they really were "bad guys" (once again a lot could have changed in a decade).

I would say a bigger problem were the "schools" that the inmates went to in the jail - they were among the most violent places on earth. The teachers obviously could not control the classes and there weren't enough COs to help enough either.

But for the most part things things self-leveled. Inmates had an assigned classification which tended to bunch them together. Kids who honestly were good kids, would usually wind up in a camp-like environments called the "sprungs". And bad kids would wind up with other bad kids, and wind up doing bad things.

Another thing about that jail, was it was about 50% adolescents and 50% adults. The adults were usually sentenced but waiting for a bed available in a state facility.

daedalus_j• 12 years ago

Not to diminish the content of the article in any way, but I couldn't help but be amused when I read the headline and thought "Oh god, stuck on a two dimensional plane, how horrible!"

inDigiNeous• 12 years ago

Jeez, junior programmers should get better work conditions. Oh ..

altero4• 12 years ago

I find it hilarious that those people are old enough to be locked into box, but can not legally drink or have a sex.

Sixteen, Alone, 23 Hours a Day, in a Six-by-Eight-Foot Box

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