As Jacki Lyden reported on NPR recently, America leads the world, not only in the number of its citizens who are behind bars, but in the number of inmates in long-term solitary confinement.
Her interview with surgeon and writer Atul Gawande, on the effects of solitary confinement, was interesting not only because Gawande’s research suggests that solitary confinement causes severe mental illness and exacerbates violence in prison. It was also interesting because Gawande provides insight into a very stubborn political reality.
During the interview Gawande quotes an unnamed prison commissioner:
He would stop the use of solitary confinement except for short periods because it is producing people who are mentally ill and that is making the violence he has to cope with worse rather than better. And that is what the data shows as well.
The majority of state prison commissioners feel this way as well. But they spend the majority of their lives defending the use of solitary confinement because even when they try to move one prisoner out of those conditions, they have the tabloids all over them and their legislators calling for their heads. It is fruitless he argues for him to end solitary confinement because the public won’t let him
We have a tendency to think that bad policies are the product of bad leadership or bad administrators. But the persistence of a kind of authoritarian conservatism—exemplified by our willingness to torture prisoners despite its ineffectiveness—is in part explained by a lazy, thoughtless, distracted public with a callous disregard for anyone they think undeserving and a simple-minded belief in punishment as a mechanism for improving people.
