[Peace-discuss] NYT editorial: End routine use of Solitary Confinement

Wed Aug 3 13:34:17 CDT 2011

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:

Attorney General Eric Holder

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General Eric Holder,

          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) *
Quakers* made that mistake a few hundred years ago.  In 1790, Walnut Street
Jail in Philadelphia was built by the Quakers and was the first institution
in the United States designed to punish *and* rehabilitate criminals. It is
considered the birthplace of the modern prison system. 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)

        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 scientific psychological
study and data to show what solitary confinement does to human beings. (3) It
has now become classified as "Torture." (4)

         Quakers, along with the National Religious Coalition
AgainstTorture (over
300 member faiths), 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 Average Annual Cost Per Inmate: $64,116.00. (5) The average per prisoner
for our 49,000 state prisoners, excluding Tamms, is in the low $20,000
range. 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 would rather spend that money on
prisons and the expensive solitary confinement that makes people mentally
ill.

         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.

         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.

         We wish to close with an excerpt from the New Yorker article of
March, 2009, called "Hellhole."

"....... 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,  "

Respectfully,

U-C Friends Meeting (Urbana-Champaign, Illinois).

Footnotes:

(1) In 1994, the U.S. also adopted the U.N. Convention against
Torture<http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm>,
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."

(2) *
http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/solitary-confinement-brief-natural-history
*<http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/solitary-confinement-brief-natural-history>
.

(3) 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.”

(4) Stephen Eisenman, The Resistable Rise and Predictable Fall of the U.S.
Supermax, Monthly Review, Nov. 2009.

Craig Haney, Mental Health Issues in Long Term Solitary and “Supermax”
Confinement, 49 Crime and Delinquency 124, 132 (2003)

Thomas B. Benjamin & Kenneth Lux, Solitary Confinement as Psychological
Punishment, 13 Cal. W.L. Rev. 265, 268 (1977)

Stuart Grassian, Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement, 22 Walsh
U.J.L. & Pol’y 325, 347 (2006)

Human Rights Watch, Locked Up Alone:  Detention Conditions and Mental Health
at Guantanamo, June 9, 2008.

UN Press Conference by Special Rapporteur on Torture. Retrieved 11th of
June, 2009 http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2008/081024_Torture.doc.htm

(5) *Illinois Department of Corrections website.  .  *

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Robert Naiman
<naiman at justforeignpolicy.org>wrote:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/opinion/cruel-isolation-of-prisoners.html
>
> August 1, 2011
>
>
> --
> Robert Naiman
> Policy Director
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org
> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
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