Many prisoners tortured this way become so psychologically fractured they can no longer defend themselves in court, such as the case of Jose Padilla, kept in solitary for years, and who went completely insane as a result.
Burning someone with hot irons leaves marks on the outside, but you can get over it. The damage done from solitary confinement doesn't go away.
Another article on the practice - http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/03/2011371259...
Interestingly, at the time that was written a year and a half ago they stated "In Europe, solitary confinement has largely been abandoned, and it is widely viewed as a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, in violation of international human rights conventions".
And yet here is Sweden implementing this practice, recognized in Europe as torture, for someone accused of copyright infringement. Certainly not a violent crime.
The Ashley Smith case up in Canada is also terrible - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Smith_inquest - the girl killed herself in solitary while guards watched as they were instructed not to intervene. It would be nice if there were a point where prisoners were guaranteed transfer to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.
According to http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2009-2010/out_of_control/ the crab apple flinging charge ended up resulting in a total of 4 years hard prison time.
The methods used against this child by the Canadian authorities are quite interesting. In this article we find that they would transfer her from place to place wearing a black hood, CIA torture/Guatanamo Bay style, and drugged with powerful sedatives administered without oversight of competent medical authorities: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/10/31/ashley-smith-.... From this it is clear her abuse was not something that just happened at a single rogue facility.
If you beat your dog everyday and it finally bites you, is it a bad dog? Is the dog mentally ill?
I see she was adopted and is obviously from her appearance an indigenous first nations child. It's quite common for these children to be kidnapped from their nations by the canadian government in order to be resocialized away from their culture under the guise of protecting them and the premise that first nations people are incapable of caring for their own children and exposure to their own culture is a form of abuse. It's a racist and genocidal policy the goal of which is to exterminate their ethnicity and culture. This has been called "The Lost Generation". http://www.akha.org/content/missiondocuments/thelostgenerati...
I'd say it's a dog with a spiritual dis-ease that did something violent.
Just think of all the money, power and influence behind intellectual property. It's a huge tool of wealth concentration. A few companies literally own almost all human culture: literature, music, movies, even science papers. For ever.
They're setting an example. It's like messing with the kings of old (and not that old). You'll end with your head on a spike, for everyone to see.