The Harmful Effects Of Long Harm Segregation In Prisons

The Harmful Effect of Long-term Segregation in Prisons

If a person convicted of a crime shows no signs of being mentally ill when entering a prison which enforces the long-term use solitary confinement, by the time they completed their sentence and are released, their mental health will have been severely compromised. Studies have shown that the long-term use of segregation in prisons can cause a wide variety of phycological effects such as anxiety, psychosis, depression, perceptual distortions, and paranoia, often leading to a desire to self-harm or in more severe cases suicide. Not only is it wrong to hold a criminal in solitary confinement for any longer then fifteen days, it is unconstitutional. Although many believe the use of solitary

Solitary confinement actively causes mental illness if a person is confined for long period of time, exceeding the maximum of 21 days. Several cases have been documented of individuals with no prior history of mental illness who developed paranoid psychosis, which required medical treatment after prolonged solitary confinement. Explaining why solitary confinement can be damaging is complicated topic, but can often be subject to the fact the basic human needs for social interaction and sensory stimulation are being taken away. The symptoms of long-term confinement can be related to that of a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The extent of psychological damage varies and will depend on individual factors, environmental factors, the reason of isolation, and its duration. According to Diane Kelsall (2014) “on any given day, there are 850 offenders (about 5.6% of the prison population) in solitary confinement in Canadian federal prisons. The main purpose of incarceration is to prepare offenders for their safe, gradual and structured reintegration back into the community, by placing inmates in segregation for long periods of time you cause damage to their mental and physical

Locking a prisoner in a cell the size of a person’s bathroom, for 22 to 23 hours a day, without any human contact, violates every one of those values. The use of long-term solitary confinement is said to be form of torture, a form of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment prohibited by law. Solitary confinement is not only cruel, it tends to be counterproductive, and cause people to become angry, and raged with the system rather then think positively about their reintegration process. After the becoming publicly known the deaths of several imamates while in long-term solitary confinement, in Ontario prisons the Ontario Human Rights Commission has began to investigate several prisons across the province. According to Marie-France Lalonde, Ontario's corrections minister “We really want to see a clear legal framework that not only defines segregation but requires independent oversight of segregation decisions, includes caps for consecutive and aggregate periods of segregation and explicitly prohibits segregation for people with mental health disabilities, physical disabilities and pregnant women” (Porter, 2017, para. 16). The negative effects of the long-term use of solitary confinement in prisons has been under the spot light for years, and has been considered to be broken. The maltreatment of prisoners is a constant