Thank you, Robert for posting this NYTimes editorial against solitary confinement. I would like to share with all of you a letter on this same subject that went out recently from Quaker Meeting in Urbana to Attorney General Eric Holder: <div>
<br></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">Attorney
General Eric Holder</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">U.S.
Department of Justice</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">950
Pennsylvania Avenue, NW</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">Washington,
DC 20530-0001</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT">Dear Attorney General Eric Holder,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">
We, as Quakers, are writing to express our deep
concern about your use of the instrument of torture called "solitary
confinement" in violation of the Geneva Conventions concerning treatment
of prisoners of war. (1) </span><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT;color:#171E24"><b>Quakers</b></span><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24"> made that
mistake a few hundred years ago. </span><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT">In 1790, Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia was
built by the Quakers and was the first institution in the United States
designed to punish </span><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT"><i>and</i></span><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT"> rehabilitate criminals.
It is considered the birthplace of the modern prison system. <span style="color:#171E24">The thinking then was that time alone in silence with a
Bible would allow prisoners to contemplate their sins and arrive at repentance.
The results were quite otherwise, and when Quakers realized the deleterious
effects of months of solitary confinement upon a person, they had to work to
re-reform the penal system they had recently championed. (2)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">
A couple of centuries later we find that, without our
paying attention, this practice of "prolonged" solitary confinement
for prisoners has taken hold as a punishment for prisoners in detention in the
U.S., as well as in our military brigs abroad. The same results occur:
self-mutilation and mental illness, not correction or a desire to rehabilitate.
Today, however, we have a body of </span><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT">scientific psychological study and data to show
what solitary confinement does to human beings. (3)<span style="color:#820000">
</span><span style="color:#171E24">It has now become classified as
"Torture." (4)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">
Quakers, along with the National Religious Coalition </span><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT;color:#171E24">Against</span><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24"> Torture </span><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT">(over 300 member
faiths), <span style="color:#171E24">believe that torture is always wrong.
However, those that have justified it, do so on the grounds of obtaining
crucial information that can save other lives. But what could possibly
justify punishing people serving their sentences in prisons across our land, by
locking them up in solitary confinement for months and even years at a time
until they are driven mad? Not only is this inhumane cruelty, but it is
exceedingly costly: it costs more money to put a person in a cell alone and
feed them there. In Illinois we have Tamms, a state prison where there are
close to 300 prisoners in 24/7 lockdown solitary confinement for years and the </span>Average
Annual Cost Per Inmate: $64,116.00.<span style="color:#171E24"> (5) The average
per prisoner for our 49,000 state prisoners, excluding Tamms, is in the low
$20,000 range. </span><span style="color:#333333">State budget writers looking
for cash to balance the books have stripped a cumulative $1.8 billion from
mental health services over the last 2 1/2 years, putting the public at risk as
the mentally ill crowd emergency rooms and prisons, according to the nation's
largest mental health advocacy group, NAMI. Apparently, we as a country wo</span><span style="color:#171E24">uld rather spend that money on prisons and the expensive
solitary confinement that makes people mentally ill.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">
Of course, the public will not recall being presented such
a choice as it has not been framed as such. Anything having to do with
prisoners is passed off as making the un-incarcerated public "safer."
As greater and greater portions of our population experience
incarceration, and with the prisoners returning to our communities much more
often than not, it affects our entire society to have them returning in
significantly worse mental condition. In fact, solitary confinement for long
periods of time makes the public distinctly less safe. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">
We wish to point out such factors as cost to engage
the argument as it is framed, but as Quakers, we are concerned on the deeper
level of the moral/spiritual effects on each of us: the torturers, the
administrators or legislators who prescribe and oversee it, the prisoners who
undergo this "cruel and unusual punishment," the members of families,
including children, who must live with (and somehow make sense of) the
knowledge that one of their own is locked up by him or herself for an
indefinite period, and the rest of us, complicit by our silence. As Quakers,
our silence is over. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24">
We wish to close with an excerpt from the New Yorker
article of March, 2009, called "Hellhole." </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT;color:#171E24"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT">"....... With
little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own
citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our
willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to
discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign
prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the
world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans
countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized
torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine
use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities, in a
supermax prison, " </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT">Respectfully, </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT">U-C Friends Meeting (Urbana-Champaign,
Illinois). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"">Footnotes:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:"Times New Roman""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:23.3pt;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"">(1) <span style="color:#292929">In 1994, the U.S. also adopted the <a href="http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm"><span style="color:#9E18BA;
text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">U.N. Convention against Torture</span></a>,
which defines torture as "any act by which severe pain, whether physical
or mental, is intentionally inflicted" to gain information, extract a
confession, or as punishment. In addition, it requires state signatories to
prevent acts of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which
do not amount to torture."</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#171E24">(2) <a href="http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/solitary-confinement-brief-natural-history"><span style="color:#5497B1"><i>http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/solitary-confinement-brief-natural-history</i></span></a>.</span><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:"Times New Roman""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman"">(3)<span style="color:#444444"> Red Cross in a
2004 report … states that “strict solitary confinement in cells devoid of
sunlight for nearly 23 hours a day constituted a serious violation of the Third
and Fourth Geneva Conventions.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#444444"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman"">(4) Stephen Eisenman, The Resistable Rise and
Predictable Fall of the U.S. Supermax, Monthly Review, Nov. 2009.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#333333">Craig Haney, Mental Health Issues
in Long Term Solitary and “Supermax” Confinement, 49 Crime and Delinquency 124,
132 (2003)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#333333">Thomas B. Benjamin & Kenneth
Lux, Solitary Confinement as Psychological Punishment, 13 Cal. W.L. Rev. 265,
268 (1977)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#333333">Stuart Grassian, Psychiatric
Effects of Solitary Confinement, 22 Walsh U.J.L. & Pol’y 325, 347 (2006)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#333333">Human Rights Watch, Locked Up
Alone: Detention Conditions and Mental Health at Guantanamo, June 9,
2008.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#333333">UN Press Conference by Special
Rapporteur on Torture. Retrieved 11th of June, 2009 <a href="http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2008/081024_Torture.doc.htm"><span style="color:#5497B1;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2008/081024_Torture.doc.htm</span></a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:15.5pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"">(5)
<i>Illinois Department of Corrections website. <span style="color:#333333"> </span>.
<span style="color:#333333"> </span></i></span></p>
</div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Robert Naiman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:naiman@justforeignpolicy.org">naiman@justforeignpolicy.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/opinion/cruel-isolation-of-prisoners.html" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/opinion/cruel-isolation-of-prisoners.html</a><br>
<br>
August 1, 2011<br>
<br>
<br>
--<br>
Robert Naiman<br>
Policy Director<br>
Just Foreign Policy<br>
<a href="http://www.justforeignpolicy.org" target="_blank">www.justforeignpolicy.org</a><br>
<a href="mailto:naiman@justforeignpolicy.org">naiman@justforeignpolicy.org</a><br>
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