Is long-term solitary confinement torture?

[houseofcantor]

3 years at ADC-Yuma has gotta be like an associate's is criminal psychology.

It's all fucking torture. One does not isolate the social animal and call it ethical, in my book. From an inside perspective, criminals should get their own Australia. Their own society. The escape and cause lawlessness in our lawful society - and both societies are forced to evolve.

Im all for banishment of rule breakers..of course, my list of laws could easily be written on ones hand. The type of society I advocate has a near non-existant murder rate as well.

There's one basic problem, and RationalWiki has nailed it on the head:



Banishment...is not a good idea. This is because other people don't want your criminals either. Can you imagine the diplomatic fallout if one of our criminals ended up somewhere else and committed crimes? (And they would probably be immediately banished by whichever state they went to, leading them to become homeless nomads.) Banishment relies on a sense of a "wild space" that, in most of the world, doesn't really exist anymore. Except for certain parts of the Middle East and Central Asia, there are no more "tribal lands" that people can just escape to. Even Mexico has become a fully functioning state (except perhaps in Oaxaca--and good luck trying to disappear to there!) This is an archaic idea with no place in the modern world. (Note: You could try to do it all Heinlein style and set aside a bit of land to banish people too. This would then be a prison.)

RationalWiki obviously has no conception of ADC-Yuma. How is the Big House not banishment? How is it an archaic idea when it is the manifestation of modern prison? When you have communities such as Florence and Chino that strive for a "non-correctional identity?" After tourism, incarceration is the next largest industry in Arizona; what is to be the business, confinement or torture? An ethical society can rationalize one but not the other; should we not be ethical?

When I rolled up on Dakota unit, the coroner was rolling out. There was "diplomatic fallout" concerning the integration of Mexican nationalists and California Latinos. The solution? Banishment in the form of segregation, after six inmates lost their lives while the internal society spiraled outward in cycles of vengeance. Wheels within wheels. The American "criminal element" manifests the same social norms as the greater society. Vengeance.

I'm not an anarchist because I consider "lawlessness rulez! FTW!" Rather, that any form of society is based upon similarity of moral imperative; that a certain amount of ethical standard is coded into interpersonal relationships to such an extent that law may be able to fulfill a more idealized function than "existing only when broken." This is the Arizona Revised Statutes:



And I am an archaist whose only law is the ethical code of "I love." Six years of living at the same address has produced a history of having the cops show up at my door in response to the lawlessness of my neighbors. It is a safe assumption that they would classify me "Christian."