Do you know how much people suffer if their house is broken into, if they are robbed at gunpoint, if they are raped, etc? Not just the direct harm, but the ongoing psychological harm?
If you don't care about the people in solitary, why not at least care about their psychological state once they get out? Imagine someone who was in solitary being freed, and then deciding to harm some people. Don't you think the person from solitary, who has had a bunch of psychological issues from solitary, would be even worse than someone who hasn't been in solitary?
P.S. your original Iron Man framing makes me want to respond in kind with a strawman: imagine a person hooked on cigarettes goes to prison for a crime they didn't even commit, and then they are caught with cigarettes and put in solitary. I'd say that's also truly awful
It seems inherently fair to our animal instincts that a victim of violence should received "satisfaction" for their unjust suffering. But do the victims gain anything from this supposed satisfaction? Maybe some of them do experience a reduction in their ongoing suffering; I doubt it makes the pain of loss go away entirely for most.
But more importantly, how does the system of retributive justice impact society beyond the perpetrators and victims? I would argue that its impact is almost entirely negative. The perpetrators are themselves repeatedly victimized, often disproportionately to their original crimes - by the general dehumanization of jailing, violence at the hands of other prisoners and guards, social humiliation and pariahdom, economic and political disenfranchisement. But their victimizations are largely considered just and legal, and thus they cannot redress their grievances through the law. So what do they do? Leave jail wounded, aggrieved and with further criminal training, even more likely to commit crimes (and worse ones at that) than when they went in. Thus they create more victims, and the cycle of suffering is perpetuated and amplified.
The simple reason for retribution is deterrence: there should be a negative incentive to committing crimes. The deeper reason is to make the kind of world people can live in. When everyone sees that criminals are punished, it tells would-be criminals to think twice, and it tells law-abiding citizens that someone is looking out for them.
I don't think punishment should be excessively cruel, prison is probably sufficient, and excessive solitary confinement is probably unjustified. But many people on this thread seem to think punishment in general is always unjust.
I think the underlying this is the modern belief that no-one is responsible for their actions, and that criminals are the product of social forces who need compassion and understanding. The argument against that is the standard argument against any form of determinism - if people are determined by outside forces, so are judges and prison guards, who similarly cannot help themselves from punishing criminals, and so should not face moral judgement. It's contradictory to judge judges but forgive criminals.
Deterrence is commonly cited as a justification for retributive justice, but does it actually work that way? We obviously don't have a great control since we've had this system of justice for centuries so it's hard to imagine a radically different system. But the data we do have suggests that increasing the severity of punishments does little to increase the deterrence factor [1]. So we could likely make our criminal system significantly less cruel without reducing the degree of effective deterrence.
Also I wasn't arguing for moral judgements of judges and prison guards for working within the current retributive justice regime (though those who wantonly exacerbate the cruelty of the system should certainly be judged for doing so). It's a systemic issue that retribution and cruelty are the implicit end goals of the US criminal justice system.
[1]http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent...
Rehabilitation makes sense for petty criminals and economic criminals, and possibly "crimes of passion". Some individuals are simply beyond redemption, though. I'd say attempting to "rehabilitate" anyone at category 11 or above on the following scale [1] is an injustice to their victims. People like Charles Manson [2] are capable of retreating into a delusional fantasy world and never acknowledge what they've done.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_Evil#Scale_and_criminals (warning: no graphics, but extremely unpleasant content)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-qWLlER1N0 (Manson starts one of his monologues at about 8:20)
false equivalency. people are determined by very different outside forces, and thats precisely why some people aren't deserving of the same levels of "moral judgement".
(This will probably be a controversial point on HN so to expand a little: I think consciousness is both non-mystical and non-material - the mind is entirely natural, mind and matter interact, but the mind is not the same as the brain, and is not made of atoms. Qualia and the binding problem [1] cannot be explained in material terms. Furthermore, if our thoughts are merely deterministic neurons firing, then we don't have any reliable knowledge of reality, making any debate meaningless).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem#The_combinatio...
In reality we have free will. If every action was predetermined, there'd be no point judging people.
This is not even touching on the fact that a lot of these solitary inmates never commmitted heinous offenses. They just misbehaved in prison or were mentally ill and ran afoul of prison regs.