How we define cruel and unusual punishment has changed over the years, and wisely so. Prisoners are taken out of their life and away from their families and friends to serve their sentence, do the time for their crime. If we intend to actually rehabilitate these human beings, we cannot torture them to insanity!
There is plenty of reliable research out now that shows solitary confinement is incredibly deteriorating to the mind and can cause mental health issues. Why would anyone think it is sensible to send those that one day will be released from their cages, into a chamber that makes them crazy? What lesson are we teaching them? What lesson are we teaching society?
In "What Does Solitary Confinement Do To Your Mind?" Frontline's Jason M. Breslow quotes a psychologist, Craig Haney, who conducted a study on the inmates of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, saying that prisoners “lose the ability to initiate or to control their own behavior, or to organize their own lives." as a result of solitary confinement.
This cruelty must stop! Please sign this petition to urge the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the United States to put more restrictions and significant limitation on time people spend in these pens of torture.
Please support humane, holistic rehabilitation of the convicted, so they may be productive and healthy upon release and less likely to re-offend.
