Solitary Confinement, Public Safety, and Recdivism

Older Prisoners and the Physical Health Effects of Solitary Confinement.

Cruel and usual punishment: solitary confinement in Canadian prisons.

On any given day, there are 850 offenders (about 5.6% of the prison population) in solitary confinement in Canadian federal prisons.1 Some of these inmates have been isolated for more than four months. Many are young. Many have serious mental health problems. Is this acceptable practice or is this torture? Solitary confinement, defined as physical isolation for 22 to 24 hours per day2 and terme...

Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement

PREFACE .......................................................................................327 I. OVERVIEW .......................................................................................327 II. SOLITARY CONFINEMENT CAN CAUSE SEVERE PSYCHIATRIC HARM .......................................................................................333 A. Solitary Confinement Can Cause a Specific ...

Effects of Solitary Confinement

Psychopathological reactions to solitary confinement were extensively described by nineteenth-century German clinicians. In the United States there have been several legal challenges to the use of solitary confinement, based on allegations that it may have serious psychiatric consequences. The recent medical literature on this subject has been scarce. The author describes psychiatric symptoms t...

The cruel and unusual phenomenology of solitary confinement

What happens when subjects are deprived of intersubjective contact? This paper looks closely at the phenomenology and psychology of one example of that deprivation: solitary confinement. It also puts the phenomenology and psychology of solitary confinement to use in the legal context. Not only is there no consensus on whether solitary confinement is a "cruel and unusual punishment," there is no...