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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

The US prison system is so brutal and things like solitary confinement, which is torture, totally normalised. We need to call attention to these things.

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Call attention? It's already known and public information; clearly, awareness alone does nothing. No, this needs sweeping political reform. Elect better leaders. Make the police, prison guards, military, politicians and rich people accountable.

Which politician campaigns on prison reform?

This needs Freedom Protests in the street.

Well one issue is that people who have been in prison often cannot ever vote again, so the only people left to make decisions about the prison system are those who have never experienced it firsthand

Just as a note, the majority of states give voting rights back right away or after awhile.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-...

The knowledge and attention to the subject is there, the problem is that a large swath of the US is authoritarian and celebrates such brutal treatment.

You don't have to look much farther than the Facebook page a small town sheriff's department. In the rural midwest-usa county where I live, the sheriff posts mugshots on Facebook and then people just pile on with all kinds of comments celebrating the fact that these awful lowlife drug offenders will finally get the punishment that they deserve. Oh but they are innocent until proven guilty, don't forget.

There's a video on YouTube of a prison warden who went into solitary for 48 hours. He said it was painful - but that, considering how violent some of the prisoners he had to hold were, he would still not rule out its use. It's not an ideal option in any way, but sometimes it's just the least-bad option.

In my opinion, we should focus on overuse and abuse of solitary confinement, but elimination is not possible for some prisoners.

I feel like there's probably a pretty big difference in how it feels between voluntarily going into solitary for 48 hours by your choice, only for 48 hours, and being in there for months (or years!!), with no known end.

There's also a big difference between "ruling out it's use entirely", and having hundreds of thousands of people in it every day.

It is not treated as a last resort in the current US incarceration system.

Solitary obviously seems very bad. Being locked in a congregate living setting with someone aggressive, brutal, much stronger than you, with all the time in the world and no better entertainment option than you, also seems very bad.

What will you do with someone who has beaten the shit out of another inmate?

I suppose they could be housed in individual cells that are open, so they can interact with other prisoners without physical interaction.

The guys that can't stop getting picked on have to 'check in' which means they are the ones who have to voluntarily go to the SHU (segregated housing unit or solitary) and do their entire sentence their until Obama passed a law limiting how long someone could be kept in the SHU, so now they get sent back to general population :( yay for good intentions.

Solitary confinement is far beyond physical separation of violent people.

Being able to see sunlight and other people isn't a risk of violence.

The overuse of solitary confinement is a symptom of a raging prison industrial complex that relies on political corruption/kickbacks and a national culture that thinks punishment is more valuable to society than rehabilitation.

One would need to alter both in order to resolve this. Given their interlocking/reinforcing nature, it seems infeasible without some kind of revolutionary change in US politics.

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