Stop Torture in Our Prisons
- by: No Current Sponsor
- recipient: President Barack Obama
42 of our 50 states have facilities in place where torture is entirely legal. Prisoners and psychologists alike call solitary confinement psychological torture: the worst pain imaginable due to the human need to interact.
Prisoners at Colorado State Penitentiary, a prison exclusively for solitary confinement, have a suicide rate three times those in the general population of Colorado prisons. This vice-grip on one's mind makes prisoners more violent, it causes mental disease, and it's expensive--about $50,000/year/prisoner. We have somewhere between 80 and 100,000 prisoners in solitary confinement today.
Prisoners at Colorado State Penitentiary, a prison exclusively for solitary confinement, have a suicide rate three times those in the general population of Colorado prisons. This vice-grip on one's mind makes prisoners more violent, it causes mental disease, and it's expensive--about $50,000/year/prisoner. We have somewhere between 80 and 100,000 prisoners in solitary confinement today.
Mr. President Barack Obama
We the undersigned write to you in an attempt to solve the biggest problem with the prison system. Torture. Worse than physical, solitary confinement pulls at the strings of what it means to be human. It takes away interaction. This pushes prisoners to attack guards in an attempt to have any interaction--good or bad, it pushes them, in astonishingly high numbers, to suicide and mental illness.
This isn’t our first go-round, either. In 1829 Eastern State Penitentiary was founded, using Quaker beliefs that if a man was left alone with a bible and a view of the sky, he would be free to heal. It didn’t work. In 1890 Supreme Court Justice Freeman stated, “A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community." Due to these horrific and unsettling results, solitary confinement was all but extinguished by 1913.
Then, in 1973, in a prison in Illinois, two prison guards were killed on the same day in separate incidents. The warden, outraged and deeply mournful, developed the first isolation system since 1829—he, because of his loss, started a wave of pain, of mental illness, of death. According to prison records, Colorado State Penitentiary, a supermax prison designed for solitary, has a suicide rate three times higher than that of general prison population in Colorado.
42 of our 50 states have systems in place where citizens are tortured entirely legally. While in many courts it has been ruled barely constitutional, our question is why. Why must we crutch on such gross punishment when our allies across the Atlantic have developed a system of honest rehabilitation, devoted change, and developed compassion that has yielded such strong results a bipartisan team known as the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons urged it in 2006. In the country of England, fewer people are held in extreme care than Maine holds in solitary.
End the suffering of our fellow man, please, Mr. President. Torture does not belong in our prisons.
Thank you for your time and tireless work.
Ký thỉnh nguyện thưKý thỉnh nguyện thưWe the undersigned write to you in an attempt to solve the biggest problem with the prison system. Torture. Worse than physical, solitary confinement pulls at the strings of what it means to be human. It takes away interaction. This pushes prisoners to attack guards in an attempt to have any interaction--good or bad, it pushes them, in astonishingly high numbers, to suicide and mental illness.
This isn’t our first go-round, either. In 1829 Eastern State Penitentiary was founded, using Quaker beliefs that if a man was left alone with a bible and a view of the sky, he would be free to heal. It didn’t work. In 1890 Supreme Court Justice Freeman stated, “A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community." Due to these horrific and unsettling results, solitary confinement was all but extinguished by 1913.
Then, in 1973, in a prison in Illinois, two prison guards were killed on the same day in separate incidents. The warden, outraged and deeply mournful, developed the first isolation system since 1829—he, because of his loss, started a wave of pain, of mental illness, of death. According to prison records, Colorado State Penitentiary, a supermax prison designed for solitary, has a suicide rate three times higher than that of general prison population in Colorado.
42 of our 50 states have systems in place where citizens are tortured entirely legally. While in many courts it has been ruled barely constitutional, our question is why. Why must we crutch on such gross punishment when our allies across the Atlantic have developed a system of honest rehabilitation, devoted change, and developed compassion that has yielded such strong results a bipartisan team known as the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons urged it in 2006. In the country of England, fewer people are held in extreme care than Maine holds in solitary.
End the suffering of our fellow man, please, Mr. President. Torture does not belong in our prisons.
Thank you for your time and tireless work.
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