What it’s like to spend four and a half years in solitary confinement (2015)
fusion.tv
fusion.tv
But I have a feeding tube. That is how I ended up down here. We thought it would be the safest place to be while I was going through chemo. For six months while my immune system was garbage I just stayed down here and would only go up to get groceries or go to chemo/radiation. So I always joked that I think I could deal with solitary. I prefer being alone.
All that changed about a month ago.
The balloon on my PEG tube (DDG it) had deflated. And one night I went to change the gauze and while I pulled the gauze out it just started pouring out blood. In a matter of seconds my boxers had blood all over them. I was terrified. This much blood on the outside, how much blood is going into my stomach? Am I going to bleed to death? On the ride to the ER I was feeling faint..
I am getting to the solitary part.
But I saw a nurse right after checking in. And she determined I wasn't bleeding to death. I was going to have a bit of a wait to see a doctor. 4 hours to be exact. But they wanted me out of the ER waiting room due to being on pembro and there had just been a case of C-19 8 hours away.
So I was being walked to a room and she said they were low on places to put me. I was going to be in a "mental health" room. But they got a bed in there for me. White walls, a bed, no problem..
Huge problem!
It is so hard to describe. It was basically a cinder block box and a massive metal door. Everything tucked away so you couldn't kill yourself. And it was so loud since the air had to be pumped in. And I had a bed they wheeled in for me. And the door was open so I could go to the bathroom when I wanted. If that door was closed and I couldn't get out I would have lost my shit. And I nearly lost it anyway. Something about that room was just unlike anything you can imagine. It was like being buried alive.
I would imagine solitary is about a million times worse. I would classify it as torture.
And my feeding tube had slipped between my stomach and the "outside skin" tearing up everything making it bleed. Just shoved it back in and loaded up the balloon with more saline and went home. And then had the tube replaced the next day during normal hours.
Obviously it means nothing over the internet but I'm sitting here hoping the best for you. Good luck, man.
How about 27 years and counting? [1] That Guardian article was written in 2003 and he's still in there. I can't help thinking there is more that could have been done for him.
Historically said mental facilities (mental asylums) were themselves inhuman and barbaric. The out cry against them lead to their closure. Yet if that just drove the prison system to new levels of inhuman and barbarism then that itself a regression.
Do other countries have more successful mental services? I know Japan did not close down their asylums during the same era America did. Are those facilities acceptable?
So there is a whole spectrum of classification these days so only who are truly harmful get locked up when necessary.
As I say, I don't know anything about the asylums here but the idea that they could be any good seems incredibly unlikely to me, based on my general experience (and what I've heard from other foreigners here).
Edit: typo
EDIT: forgot the word "jail"
It was about defunding and kicking the problem between the federal level and the states.
thelastpsychiatrist.com has criticism of modern psychiatry as well.
American prisons are a shame and there is absolutely no way that convicts come out of it ready to participate to society.
This youtube channel gives a good perspective on how inhumane life is in American prisons: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzmkeda2XiYpETOP5MjotrQ
Its why convicts cannot vote in elections even when they get released.
Its why they still have the death penalty. And why victims families can watch them being executed. Its eye for an eye, punishment and not forgiveness and rehabilitation. Its much deeper than the quality of life behind bars.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Petraeus#Criminal_charge...
Just felons, not anybody who's been convicted of a crime. Not justifying it, just making the distinction. I still believe it's wrong.
She was 97 when I knew of her and even though she was ageing, her faculties were sharp (Extra Pepperoni is the only way to have a Slice, she said).
I asked her what lessons from the Solitary confinement stayed with her. She said "The value of knowing that there was no yesterday and probably there will be no tomorrow. And somehow I need to resist the urge to use, the intentionally left behind blunt knife to cut my veins. And the value of dressing warm".
I cannot even imagine what it must have been. She was some human.
In this regard, America is profoundly sick and defective.
It is of course true, instead of rehabilitating, they are breeding criminals in prison. It's an abomination.
He doesn't really seem to want to take responsibility for killing someone. I am sure solitary is terrible, but so is being killed by someone like him.
It's probably an issue of poorly chosen words, but compare
> fourteen months later I shot a man and unfortunately caused his death.
with
> fourteen months later, I shot and killed a man.
The way that it's currently written sounds like an accident: "I, a victim of PTSD, shot a man and, in a bizarre twist of events, he died from it". The passive voice there paints a disconnection between the cause and the effect.
Of course, judging a man's life from two sentences is nonsense. It just so happens that those two sentences are very unfortunate. But that's on the editor.
1. If you go to prison, innocent or otherwise, you're not getting hired afterward. This leads to desperation, desperation leads to...
2. In prison, you become socially reliant on criminals to simply get by. This results in cultural transference. Someone getting in trouble for shoplifting learns about the joys of [insert more lucrative criminal activity here]. Combine this with point 1 and you get repeat offenders who become 'hardened' criminals. Basically, they get better at crime, because crime involves skills just like everything else in life.
3. Poor prison conditions result in psychological trauma. This, in turn, leads to anti-social behavior.
In short, we pay a lot of money to create better criminals who are highly motivated to commit more crimes.
How to “disrupt” the American prison system?
I definitely agree with your comment. But for the sake of the discussion, I would like to point out that Europe also has prison problems, but at a way lower scale:
- UK's Belmarsh prison has been criticized extensively and regularly compared to Guantanamo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3714864.stm. As an aside, Julian Assange spent the past 1 year there.
- France and Norway prisons have very high suicide rate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6066090/. Though no country is even close with the USA. Citations from the article: "We excluded the USA in one analysis (for incarceration rates) because it was an outlier, with an incarceration rate of more than eight times higher than the majority of other countries." and "Rates of prison suicide compared with rates of incarceration - Data are for men and women combined. USA was not included in this analysis because it is an outlier (appendix p 17)."
The fact that there are issues in European prisons doesn't change the situation in US ones. You also also say no other country is close - which is just an indirect way of affirming the parent post (that Europeans find the American system hard to understand). They're hardly going to agree and understand with the American prison system if their own is equally as bad?
You're right, they're not a dichotomy - so why bring them up?
Animal rights aren't dichotomous to the problem of the American prison establishment either. They're also irrelevant to the discussion except as a diversionary tactic too
That's definitely not irrelevant to whatever discussion you feel the need to enforce, if people from the US want to improve fight against their prison system by promoting the European models, they should be aware of its shortcoming. In any case that's worth discussing.
Anyway, I'm not that interested in justifying my previous comments, I don't see why I should have to. So I will stop here. Have a good time for the rest of the day.
I don't see how getting killed by a former honor-roll student who left an abusive household two years before he was legally allowed to drive, had already been shot, and was left on the streets paranoid, mentally-ill and traumatized before he was even past the age of majority, is any worse than getting killed by just about anyone.
Pretty much no one (under normal circumstances) wants to be killed or die. I'm not sure why you even mentioned it?
However, if you'd take those hellish elements away & ensure silence, I think long solitary confinement might work if you teach people how to meditate. That's just not being done enough in prisons right now. See "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkxSyv5R1sg
EDIT: I know this is probably a controversial opinion to non-meditators, but if you're going to downvote, at least provide an argument for why you don't agree.
I'm guessing it's the pretense that you can simply teach anyone to meditate whether or not they want to learn. Also, it suggests a system where a form of torture is potentially justified because you shift responsibility to the person being tortured. "They took the class on meditation and signed on the line that they understand how to endure solitary, so their suffering is their own fault!"
Well, that is the core insight, no matter the external circumstance. (Though, of course, it’s not about blame, and more like “here is the door.”)
Get deep enough, and yes, being in a shitty version of solitary is the same as being in a positive fantasy of your choosing.
Meditation techniques aren't hard to learn, they're comparable to any form of exercise. The hard bit is in doing them sincerely, just like any form of exercise.
Can you teach someone press-ups? Then you can teach them meditation. You just can't make them do it, or effectively.
As to signing up for solitary for an extended period, I wish I could, but only if it was humane (e.g. no violence, feces flung at me etc), which I'm willing to bet (and the article seems to back up my suspicion) prison solitary isn't.
The way I understand what you describe: "We will torture you, you can either have it better by doing this meditation thing _we teach you_ or you can suffer"
The issue here is the torture itself, not the fact that the torture is difficult to deal with.
In no way have I done that.
Addendum: If I describe that a technique is easy to teach or simple to learn, why does that imply forcing someone to do it?
What a bizarre inference to take.
A way simpler argument would be that it‘s unrealistic to expect this level of discipline for a stretch of time like this from people who couldn‘t even stop themselves from killing someone.
However, if you‘ve ever read „Papillon“, I think the methods he describes as using in dealing with his sentences seem to me to be pretty close to meditation.
Work to achieve what? To whom? At what economic cost?
You can do away with solitary confinement and still provide access to skills and space to learn and practice meditation.
The solitary confinement component is quite disagreeable.
I think that arguing for meditation to make your stay in jail tolerable is similar to throwing people into the sea and arguing they should learn how to swim - it's focusing on the wrong part of the problem. Extended isolation is torture. Arguing in favor of "making the torture less awful" (the "when life gives you lemons" approach) diverts resources from the actual problem, namely, let's stop torturing people.
Obviously, because they indeed torture them by making the conditions so horrible, as described in the article. Nor do they provide guidance in how to actually cope with isolation and put this time into good use to train the mind.
> Extended isolation is torture.
That's entirely subjective and dependent on the conditions.
In good faith, we can assume we're talking about the context of this article. Let's step beyond the literal and discuss the entire conversation. If we do this, yes it is torture. Even if we don't consider the entire conversation, just within the cultural context of the article we can assume that it would be for most people. Continuing to focus on changing the victims instead of the perpetrators is the wrong initial avenue of approach.
By all means, campaign for teaching people your preferred form of meditation. Just do it in a context where everyone is already free.
You can't make actual change to an individual. You can give them an opportunity of course, but not change them. Some will harden their person and some will just break, you want neither.
Show them humanity, love and give those treatment that need it. Focus on the positive parts and lift those up. Solitary confinement can only be of good if it's chosen, much like any personality change.
Admit that it's not the prison that is a problem, it's that youth problems is not properly dealth with. (as pointed out in the article)
I don't see any focus on this in neither local or global politics. It's odd that it's still given today that we could possibly bully each other to a better behavior.
When will we learn? Punishment does not lead to improvement.
> There is a popular documentary on YouTube called “Doing Time, Doing Vipassana” on the introduction of Vipassana into Tihar Jail (probably the most populated prison in the world with a current population of 17130 prisoners), and how Vipassana improved several measures of psychological well-being among the inmates that undertook it — things like anxiety, depression, sense of alienation from mainstream society, etc. This has become such a success story for Goenka Vipassana that Kiran Bedi — Inspector General of Delhi Prisons at the time — is invited to speak at major public events organised by the Goenka Vipassana organisation. Having become a Vipassana enthusiast herself, she praises it freely in TV interviews and even the odd TED talk.
> But to me this is yet another example of bad science in which meditation seems to get a free pass. Introducing Vipassana was not the only improvement Bedi made to Tihar; she arranged vocational training for prisoners, introduced Yoga classes, organised sports events and celebrations for religious festivals, established petition boxes and went on daily inspections, interacting with prisoners and listening to their problems. Just like patients who feel better after homeopathic treatment, what may have mattered more to prisoners was that Bedi was actually trying to help them; they knew this and therefore already expected things to improve in their lives. Also, there seems to have been no control group in the Vipassana Tihar research. Prisoners who volunteered to learn Vipassana were segregated from the rest and may have been treated better overall. There should have been a control group that was also segregated and in all respects treated the same as the Vipassana group except for the Vipassana part.
[1] https://karanvas.com/posts/adventures-at-the-vipassana-enlig...