Is America Torturing Nearly 100,000 Citizens Daily?

Unfortunately the answer is most probably a definitive yes.

Atul Gawande (whose journalism is superb and never to be missed) writing in the March 30 New Yorker describes a wide range of experiences with long term solitary confinement and its single, overarching, and undeniable result. It is torture. Regardless of the captive's status it is torture; it was torture when John McCain was held in solitary confinement in Vietnam and it was torture when US hostages were held in solitary confinement by terrorists in Lebanon and it is torture when at least 25,000 and as many as 100,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement in the American criminal justice system.

America is pretty much alone in the use of extended solitary confinement but that fits right in with our astounding imprisonment rates, and as such sadly should not be surprising. Gawande outline's Britian's success in moving away from the practice in the article. Which is long and way too impressive a piece to be summed up in excerpts, although if forced to pick this bit sums up well...

This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. For a Presidential candidate, no less than for the prison commissioner, this would have been political suicide. 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. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a thirty-minute drive from my door.

In a more heartening counterpoint Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) has introduced much needed prison reform legislation that has recieved a bit of recent praise. Also pushing the prison reform envelope is the current economic collapse, with many states rapidly sucumbing to rising bidget shortfalls the cost of housing prisoners is quickly becoming an enormous burden.

The bottom line seems to be that America's obsession with being 'tough on crime' has pushed us way over the edge as a society.

Update:

Ezra Klein has some interesting thoughts on Webb's proposed legislation, basically that there isn't much to it. And some more interesting thoughts on the fact that there is a whole lot to the fact that Webb is tackling prison and criminal justice reform. Klein also has the floor speech Webb gave as an introduction and links to the new criminal justice reform section of Webb's website.