Our Prisons Reveal Our Values (and lack of)
by Meia Geddes
We are social beings. Solitary confinement takes a part of our being. Here is an article on a hearing that took place Tuesday on solitary confinement.
Anthony Graves: In response to people who claim it has no psychological effects, “I say, ‘Go live there for 30 days, and then tell me that.’…Solitary confinement makes our criminal justice criminal…It dehumanizes us all.”
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I’m afraid I don’t have much pity for those whom our society has found guilty and the prison system places in solitary confinement.
Thank you for commenting! It makes me think more deeply about why I have such gut feelings about things, and to develop the logic behind my thoughts. (This is also an excuse to write something very lengthy and brooding because I want to keep my posts simple.) So to start with, I believe in a rehabilitative approach. I also believe that pity is not necessary to recognize the inhumanity of placing someone in solitary confinement (even if we have little of it), and that doing so “dehumanizes us all,” as Graves puts it, for we share an existence together and become guilty ourselves of betraying that connection in violating others’ rights (including the birds’ and the bees’ rights). To put more economically (and selfishly?), when I hurt you, I am really hurting myself. But I am not an economist or at all religious! So what it comes down to perhaps is this: In trying to create/maintain a peaceful society, our prisons ironically ignore peaceful approaches. Perhaps, also, it all begins with the origins of guilt — the effects of society are no doubt at the heart of many prisoners’ situations. It is too easy to presume guilt and embrace punishment, to place people on the margins and out of sight than to consider prevention and look at a killer with kindness and hope. Also, social psychology has taught me much about how the power of situation (i.e. society in all its unfairness) may not be given its due credit — the fundamental attribution error.
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