Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande#ixzz18IzC8GKT
Also this:
The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago.
It's becoming more and more difficult to avoid seeing US society as predicated on evil - inflicting savage and unpredictable punishments more or less at random, reliant on duplicity and fraud to sustain its businesses, penalising the poor and incapable and inflicting the same conditions on their children where possible, and trying its best to deny the capable avenues to improve their condition: plus showering rewards on the children of the ruling classes in abundance, as if to taunt those denied it.
Time, and past time, to move - but that will take a couple of years I fear. We just have to hold onto our self-respect and wash our hands frequently in the meantime.
