Solitary Confinement: Wasteful, Useless

The front page of the USA Today on June 14th featured an article on solitary confinement by Kevin Johnson. The article describes how studies have shown that an increased use of solitary confinement fails to make society safer, despite much higher costs.

It's no surprise that a mouthpiece for the American Correctional Officer Intelligence Network, an association of correctional officers, disputes the finding and makes the dire prediction that less reliance on solitary confinement is a threat to public safety.  What threatens society's safety, I think, is a corrections system that conditions people for perpetuating failure.

Solitary confinement is a costly system for taxpayers to support. Correctional officers and the lobbyists who represent the prison system love solitary confinement because of the increased public expenditure. Locking a prisoner in solitary confinement requires significantly more man hours by prison guards because the guards must chain prisoners up anytime they leave the cell. More man hours translates into more staff overtime expenditures. Those who lobby for prison guards will object to any change that threatens to diminish expenditures on staff, regardless of the overwhelming costs to society as a whole.

Prison administrators waste billions in taxpayer funds on ineffective human warehousing programs. Public resources should be used for more worthwhile programs.  Ironically, those who favor such wasteful spending are frequently the same people who criticize "big government" and clamor for reform-except where the prison system is concerned. For prisons, they continue to demand as much waste as possible.

The problem with such a flawed public policy is that essential public programs suffer because the prison system siphons an ever increasing portion of taxpayer resources. Education budgets, healthcare budgets, social services, even resources that could be available to fund clean energy and preserve our environment-these critical programs have been decimated by a lack of funding. I submit that taxpayers have much better places to invest resources; as they're run today, prisons waste human lives and public dollars.

The states are suffering from financial crises, and it is the budget crises that have brought about this diminishing reliance on solitary confinement. But the federal government has not yet seen the light. Solitary confinement is alive and well, with prisoners serving months in a locked cell for such troubling behavior as possession of an extra pair of socks.

Photo Credit: notsogoodphotography