Solitary Confinement and Prison

¶ … Confinement

There is little argument, at least in general, that people that commit wrongful acts and crimes should be punished for what they have done. One of the common methods used to punish people for committed crimes is confinement in jail and/or prison. However, there are many people that suggest or assert that confinement has wide-ranging and long-lasting effects on the people that are subjected to it. They assert that this happens to the point that the method is counterproductive and just makes a bad situation worse in terms of whether the person will recidivate, how/when they will transition back to life outside of prison and mental health concerns in general. While people that do wrong should obviously be punished to some degree, the possible and perceived effects on confinement should give people pause before they act like they know what the best answer and methods happen to be.

Analysis

To drive home the caution just explained in the introduction, the author of this brief report shall draw on three scholarly sources that extend that same advice. One such work shall be a book that was written by Travis et al. (2014). Travis and his colleagues did not approach the topic at hand casually. Indeed, they touched upon a lot of important things related to confinement and the effects thereof. They included criminology, law, penology, program evaluation, psychiatry, psychology and sociology. Regardless of the situation, prisons are usually the same in that they are isolated and closed off areas that preclude and remove an inmate from society in many important and major ways. Even with the variations that are seen from prison to prison, there are six overall trends and/or effects that are impossible to ignore or miss. These include prison overcrowding, a huge preponderance of people with mental illness, a population that is increasingly ethnically/racially diverse, reductions in the use of lethal violence in prisons, litigation-induced improvement movements and the rise of the "penal harm" movement. The key recommendation made by a lot of people is that prisons need to be dialed down and reformed in terms of the level of foreboding and punishment that exists. Many counter this argument by saying that doing so would just endanger inmates and guards alike and make prisons more violent unsafe. The champions of the suggested reforms, on the other hand, say that the opposite is what ends up happening and there is already proof positive that this is the case. Not only does violence fall, the same is true of suicide and other measures that have strong bearings and implications on the safety of everyone involved and what happens with the inmates after they get out (Travis, Jeremy et al.).

Another source that is important to draw upon is an autobiographical experience that has become the basis for a wildly popular Netflix show, that being Orange is the New Black. In a nutshell, the book is written by Piper Kerman and it depicts a woman who had a sharp fall from grace after she was nabbed for trying to deliver a suitcase full of drug money. She was caught and sentenced to more than a year in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. The introspection and feelings emoted in the book are extremely telling. The introduction to the book openly questions and speaks about what happens to a person when they are committed to the prison system in question. Just one of the thoughts that could be pointed to in the book includes what precisely was going to happen to Piper in the next fifteen months as she served her sentence. She speaks about other people in the prison including people that are seemingly in there for minor offenses. Just one of those people was a nun that was ostensibly in jail for trespassing near a missile silo. She also witnessed the incredulity that Italians in the jail had for such a circumstance being a reality. The obvious question to pose is whether some of the people that are put in prison, even for a short time, should be there in the first place (Kerman).