Rikers to Ban Isolation for Inmates 21 and Younger

[timslash]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/n...ement-for-inmates-21-and-under-at-rikers.html

New York City officials agreed on Tuesday to a plan that would eliminate the use of solitary confinement for all inmates 21 and younger, a move that would place the long-troubled Rikers Island complex at the forefront of national jail reform efforts.

Why people can't understand that jails, were created to let people understand that committing crimes - is very bad?
Why now, they're trying to improve prison conditions?
Our government wanna do like in European prisons or what?
In jail people should think about their "deeds" and understand what they did. they shouldn't play pc and listen to music like in Europe!

 

[Luddly Neddite]

The isolation we use in this country truly is cruel, inhuman and inhumane. We should end it in all prisons.

But then, that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what's wrong with our prison system.

 

[Katzndogz]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/n...ement-for-inmates-21-and-under-at-rikers.html

New York City officials agreed on Tuesday to a plan that would eliminate the use of solitary confinement for all inmates 21 and younger, a move that would place the long-troubled Rikers Island complex at the forefront of national jail reform efforts.

Why people can't understand that jails, were created to let people understand that committing crimes - is very bad?
Why now, they're trying to improve prison conditions?
Our government wanna do like in European prisons or what?
In jail people should think about their "deeds" and understand what they did. they shouldn't play pc and listen to music like in Europe!

That looks like a dorm room!

Stopping the practice of putting prisoners in isolation is just going to end up with dead juvenile prisoners. Either the prisoner poses a danger to others, or others pose a danger to the prisoner.

 

[timslash]

Isolation is necessity, it's time to understand that f.e. thief without isolation will remain a thief!
Our prison system is foolish, everybody knows.
And We should end not "isolation", we should end endless using forces on inmates!
New York City Jail Guards Reported More Use Of Force Than Ever In 2014

 

[depotoo]

Wouldn't ending isolation for those at this age result in more sexual assaults upon them? Just what they don't need, for any hope of reform, in my opinion.

 

[QuickHitCurepon]

Stopping the practice of putting prisoners in isolation is just going to end up with dead juvenile prisoners. Either the prisoner poses a danger to others, or others pose a danger to the prisoner.

Aren't the risks very low or much lower at that age? Why impose such a harsh environment on minors if the risk is so low?

 

[Katzndogz]

Stopping the practice of putting prisoners in isolation is just going to end up with dead juvenile prisoners. Either the prisoner poses a danger to others, or others pose a danger to the prisoner.

Aren't the risks very low or much lower at that age? Why impose such a harsh environment on minors if the risk is so low?

The risk isn't low. These are young sociopaths.

 

[QuickHitCurepon]

Stopping the practice of putting prisoners in isolation is just going to end up with dead juvenile prisoners. Either the prisoner poses a danger to others, or others pose a danger to the prisoner.

Aren't the risks very low or much lower at that age? Why impose such a harsh environment on minors if the risk is so low?

The risk isn't low. These are young sociopaths.

Much lower than adult populations but the risk cannot be zero and avoiding isolation can make a world of difference to many young inmates.

 

[QuickHitCurepon]

Hellhole - The New Yorker

The main argument for using long-term isolation in prisons is that it provides discipline and prevents violence. When inmates refuse to follow the rules—when they escape, deal drugs, or attack other inmates and corrections officers—wardens must be able to punish and contain the misconduct. Presumably, less stringent measures haven’t worked, or the behavior would not have occurred. And it’s legitimate to incapacitate violent aggressors for the safety of others. So, advocates say, isolation is a necessary evil, and those who don’t recognize this are dangerously naïve.

The argument makes intuitive sense. If the worst of the worst are removed from the general prison population and put in isolation, you’d expect there to be markedly fewer inmate shankings and attacks on corrections officers. But the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Perhaps the most careful inquiry into whether supermax prisons decrease violence and disorder was a 2003 analysis examining the experience in three states—Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota—following the opening of their supermax prisons. The study found that levels of inmate-on-inmate violence were unchanged, and that levels of inmate-on-staff violence changed unpredictably, rising in Arizona, falling in Illinois, and holding steady in Minnesota.

Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all. At the same time, other states had just a tiny fraction of their inmates in solitary confinement. In 1999, for example, Indiana had eighty-five supermax beds; Georgia had only ten. Neither of these two states can be described as being soft on crime.

Is there an alternative? Consider what other countries do. Britain, for example, has had its share of serial killers, homicidal rapists, and prisoners who have taken hostages and repeatedly assaulted staff. The British also fought a seemingly unending war in Northern Ireland, which brought them hundreds of Irish Republican Army prisoners committed to violent resistance. The authorities resorted to a harshly punitive approach to control, including, in the mid-seventies, extensive use of solitary confinement. But the violence in prisons remained unchanged, the costs were phenomenal (in the United States, they reach more than fifty thousand dollars a year per inmate), and the public outcry became intolerable. British authorities therefore looked for another approach.

Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.

So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.

The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

In this country, in June of 2006, a bipartisan national task force, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, released its recommendations after a yearlong investigation. It called for ending long-term isolation of prisoners. Beyond about ten days, the report noted, practically no benefits can be found and the harm is clear—not just for inmates but for the public as well. Most prisoners in long-term isolation are returned to society, after all. And evidence from a number of studies has shown that supermax conditions—in which prisoners have virtually no social interactions and are given no programmatic support—make it highly likely that they will commit more crimes when they are released. Instead, the report said, we should follow the preventive approaches used in European countries.

The recommendations went nowhere, of course. Whatever the evidence in its favor, people simply did not believe in the treatment.

Putting convicts in prison is plenty of punishment alone, and everything should be done to avoid putting prisoners in isolation, yet it is the opposite where many are isolated solely for breaking the rules.

It is always painful for me every time I think of so many U.S. prisoners in solitary confinement often for 10 or 20 years, and I do not believe it is right.