So you’re saying that mental health should take a back seat compared to physical safety?
Leave them in solitary long enough, and they might bash their brains in, or go insane in some other way. Wait, we do want to let them out eventually right?
I think you’re assuming that isolation is tolerable, just because it sounds less scary than being in prison with other people.
“He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”
“Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.”
“So you’re saying that mental health should take a back seat compared to physical safety?
Leave them in solitary long enough, and they might bash their brains in, or go insane in some other way. Wait, we do want to let them out eventually right?”
How about we have mental health AND physical safety?
I think it can be done. A prisoner should be able to be protected from abusers and molesters. Without being in some sort of hole that forbids any human interaction.