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Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: partially just playing devil's advocate here.

There are circumstances where you need to keep someone in solitary, whether it's for their own safety or for the safety of others. You can't well put a hated prisoner in with the general population without expecting that they'll be murdered. On the other hand, you have prisoners who have made a living out of murdering prison guards.

What do you do with Thomas Silverstein[1]? Terry Nichols? Members of the mafia? Caught spies? They'd likely either kill or be killed. I don't really see a better option than isolating them. These aren't people who are there to be rehabilitated.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein

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There's many options between general population in 1970s style block prisons and supermax style solitary confinement. At the very least, those that fall in the first case (for their own safety) don't need to kept in the punitively isolating conditions of the latter.

I suspect you have listed a teeny tiny subset of the general prison population.

While it's true that those people need protection I'm not sure it's true for everyone else.

Even in those extreme cases (which I hope we all agree are the exception rather than the norm), I would still consider putting someone in a few-square-meter box "cruel and unusual punishment" by any reasonable standard.

Fair enough. But this article is about children being encaged en masse by a bloated bureaucracy, not a judicious selection of individuals that must be protected for their, or our own, safety.

No, it's not about 'children'. It's about 16-year-olds. Teenagers. The actions in the article are not applied to people below 16. Absolutely no-one calls 16-year-olds 'children' unless they're trying to load their language to make a political argument.

The one exception is parents comparing offspring, where 'children' applies to your offspring regardless of age - ask an 80-year-old about his children, and he'll talk about 60-year-old people.

This doesn't mean the actions aren't inhumane or don't need evaluation or correction, but please avoid the inflammatory language.

How about this: Teenagers are citizens who do not have the full rights and representations of a full citizen.

Cant vote, cant smoke, cant drink, cant fight in the military. People keep trying to speak on your behalf, and waive your rights without asking them.

I'm only for punishing 16 year olds as adults IF they are also given the rights and responsibilities of adults. At least start with representation (voting).

Sure. Call them minors, because legally they are - they don't have full rights. But when the term 'children' is used for mid- to late- teenagers, it's being used an an emotive term.

Perhaps the solution is the creation of a legal area of 'semi-responsibility'? That between young childhood and adulthood there is a period where you're considered responsible, but at a reduced rate. This concept is clearly already in place - for example in my state, you simply cannot try someone under the age of 10 for murder, so you get 'minors under 10', 'minors over 10', and 'adults' - but it appears to be an administrative hodge-podge managed differently for different laws. Perhaps making an interstitial 'semi-responsible' range more codified might assist when making laws?

I honestly don't know - IANAL, let alone one that deals with juvenile law.

There is some incremental responsibility already. (In the US) You can drive a car at 16. You can vote and buy tobacco at 18. You can buy alcohol at 21. Not to mention, there is such a broad range of maturity in people at different ages. It doesn't surprise me that we have a bit of a hodge-podge.

Then lets cut right to the chase then.

We don't treat animals that bad. Putting people, at whatever age, in small boxes and throwing away the key for an arbitrary amount of time IS TORTURE.

I don't care if you stole a loaf of bread. I dont care if you assaulted a classmate. Nor do I care if you raped and murdered multiple people. Torture is NEVER an acceptable answer to committing crimes. If someone's that bad, file for a capital case and attempt to have the state murder them.

Plenty of people treat animals that badly and worse. Battery chickens in particular are generally socially acceptable.

In any case, solitary is not a judicial punishment. The court doesn't say "shove this person in solitary for 90 days, then a regular sentence for the next 180". Solitary is punishment for not behaving yourself once you're in prison. It's not pleasant, but it's one of the few options available to control inmates without resorting to physical violence (which is also torture).

If you're going to take away solitary, you need to come up with a viable mechanism for ensuring the good behaviour of prisoners. And given the overcrowding in the US system, it has to work without a lot of resources. I agree with your sentiment - I'm a rehabilitation-not-prisons guy - but solitary serves a function that still needs to be performed if you take it away.

As I say above, the first step is to simply just not put as many people in prison to begin with - fewer inmates means fewer people in solitary from a straight numbers perspective, and I imagine it'd drop again due to reduction in overcrowding.

If they are not children, why do we give them no say in the laws they are incarcerated for violating?

I was unaware that the general public's working definition of "children" was "unable to vote". I guess that means that the severely mentally disabled, felons, and visiting foreigners are all children?

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