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Drawing on interviews with 76 prisoners, 47 prison staff, and 14 experts, we document lived experiences of punishment in the Danish prison context. We argue that, regardless of “humanizing” elements of normalization and humanity, prisoners and staff may experience the power of the carceral state in Denmark in ways similar to those under more obviously harsh confinement regimes, as exist in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in the United Kingdom. Ultimately, macro-level theories like Scandinavian Exceptionalism serve as a rhetorical tool, implying that harsher prison systems are fixable, but fail to reflect the micro-level realities of incarceration.

Research on the mental health consequences of solitary confinement has contributed to restrictions on its use, particularly for people with serious mental illness. However, solitary confinement continues to isolate people with physical and mental health problems, even where its use has been restricted. This mixed-methods analysis seeks to evaluate the practice of solitary confinement on mental and physical health using data from a sample of 99 men in Pennsylvania. We first describe patterns of multimorbidity among men in solitary confinement using a latent class analysis to group individuals with shared demographic attributes and mental and physical health conditions. We then use thematic analysis to explore how men from each of these groups experienced and managed health concerns in solitary confinement. Our findings describe significant physical and mental health burdens and unmet healthcare needs. Over three-quarters of respondents reported a physical health diagnosis such as heart disease or diabetes, and over half reported a mental health diagnosis, including anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia. Those with pre-existing, often multiple, health issues struggled to maintain their health given restrictions to daily living, isolated idle time, and limited healthcare access in solitary confinement. These aspects of solitary confinement also challenged those who entered solitary in relatively good health. These findings demonstrate the struggle for self-advocacy in maintaining health and healthcare access under extreme conditions of confinement and point to the need to prevent the health harms of solitary confinement by further restricting its use.

Risen from sleep, her only true respite, a young patient Louise is led by nurse Genevieve, who instructs her on conduct, even hair style, as she has done countless times before. Eugénie, heroine of the novel, is a middle-class girl, whose strong will and social aspirations, including an interest in the then fashionable spiritualism, falls out of favour with her family, who trick her into admission. One inmate (a real person), an abused young teenage, was Louise Augustine Gleizes, who regularly performed for Charcot and whose anatomist colleague remarked, "the camera loves her". [Extracted from the article]

This article is a single case analysis of trouble talk taking place between teachers and care workers at a Swedish special residential home for boys and young men (aged 12–20). The topic of the talk is a potentially unwarranted solitary detention of a student. Using sequential- and Membership Categorisation analyses, we examine the participants' methods for talking about the event as institutionally problematic while avoiding to blame the teacher responsible for the disciplinary action. Specifically, we demonstrate how the grounds for the confinement were initially disputed by the care workers and how an extended negotiation with the teachers eventually lead to a jointly acceptable account of the event. This involved recasting the event as a real-life experience that should afford the student important opportunities for socialisation into the social and institutional orders which inform daily life at the residential home. More generally, the analysis demonstrates how presumed knowledge of social and institutional structures and practices is mobilised and negotiated – through 'categorial ordering work' (Hester & Eglin, 1997) – in the service of coming to terms with the complex accountability arrangements of the special residential home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resulting in pervasive feelings of despair, the culture of incarceration in the U.S. relies on punitive correctional strategies such as solitary confinement to control the behavior of incarcerated individuals. Inevitably, correctional culture which focuses primarily on punishment is dysfunctional, rife with gang violence, drug use, suicide, and violence perpetuated by and against staff. Our dialogic essay is voiced by (a) a currently incarcerated, Native American person who has survived solitary confinement and the spiritual drain of castigating correctional culture; and (b) a music educator who founded a prison choir for both non-incarcerated and incarcerated individuals in an effort to erode and transform some of the revengeful structures of US incarceration. We draw from Indigenous educator, language specialist, and member of the Lil'wat First Nation, Dr. Lorna Williams' research on Indigenous Knowledge in our efforts to understand the relationships among group singing, spirituality, and our experiences in the Oakdale prison choir. Our dialogue charts a search for spiritual healing in the unsympathetic atmosphere of prison and offers an experience-based account of ways in which group singing can function as a medium of spiritual healing and growth in environments of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several Palestinian women and girls have witnessed the experience of detention along the years of the Israeli occupation. Despite that, they resisted the prisons with faith and steadfastness, and maintained their right to resistance after their release. This study aims to realize the Israeli practices against the female prisoners, and highlight their social role after their freedom. The researcher uses the historical methodology. Also, the study addresses two claims: 1) the Israeli Violent Measures against Female Prisoners, and 2) Role of Female Prisoners in the Struggle and Community. This study has found that the Israeli arrests increase during the Palestinians' confrontation to the occupation's attacks against the citizens and holy places. Also, the female prisoners suffer from different ways of physical and psychological torture, as well as they provide a model of national unity by supporting every prisoner exposed to the prison's administration's arbitrary measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the two thousand Americans living under a sentence of death spend twenty-three hours a day in a concrete box the size of a parking space. Often the only human touch they feel is being handcuffed and the only natural light comes from a small grill at the top of an exercise cell. However, change is at hand. The Supreme Court has emphasized that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments draws its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society. To date, there has been a dearth of information available regarding the historical and modern conditions on death row. This Note addresses this gap. Part I provides, for the first time, a complete historical narrative of the development of the American death row from the Colonial Era to the Twenty-First Century. Part II reviews the findings of a survey of every jurisdiction with capital punishment to capture a national snapshot of conditions on America's death rows. The findings in both Parts suggest that the system of permanent solitary confinement on death row has neither the weight of history nor the support of the majority in either contemporary practice or social values. Indeed, there is an accelerating trend away from the practice. Part III places this evidence in constitutional context and argues that the twelve states that retain permanent solitary death rows are out of pace with America's evolving standards of decency and violate the Eighth Amendment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory and logic suggest that placement in restrictive housing (RH) may affect prison visitation, which may be counterproductive given the potential benefits of visitation. The goal of this paper is to examine the potential correspondence between RH and visitation. We use data on incarcerated people in Ohio to conduct two related analyses. One analysis assesses whether the first incident of short-term disciplinary segregation impacts prison visits shortly after segregation. The second analysis examines longitudinal patterns of RH stays and visits to understand the interplay of the two throughout a prison term. Findings suggest that disciplinary segregation might reduce the odds of visitation immediately. RH early in a prison term may also operate to "cut off" future visitation. These results highlight an important knowledge gap and suggest that more research is needed that disentangles how RH may lead to the dissolution of social ties. Implications for research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The punitive era in the United States and other countries has included reliance on long-term restrictive housing (LTRH)—consisting of solitary confinement with few privileges—as a means of managing violent and disruptive individuals in prison. We examine how work in such housing may influence how personnel, including officers and staff, view individuals in prison and assess two hypotheses. First, those who work in LTRH will be more likely to hold a dehumanized view of these individuals. Second, the theoretical mechanisms through which such a view may arise involve brutalization, organizational context and culture, role conflict and distancing, and empathy fatigue. We assess these hypotheses using a mixed-methods study, analyzing data from a large-scale prison personnel survey (n = 9,656) and qualitative focus group and interview data (n = 144). Implications of the study's findings for theory and research on restrictive housing, corrections, and the punitive era are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional thinking proposes that naming and shaming pushes publics to oppose government policies that are claimed to violate human rights. We explore the extent to which international organizations' (IOs') efforts to name and shame target governments can be frustrated by the target governments' efforts to advance a counter-narrative. We test this using a survey-based experiment that focuses on the use of prolonged solitary confinement in US prisons. The results suggest that government messaging has powerful effects on public opinion. These effects are more readily discernible than the effects of IO signals. We also find some limited evidence to suggest that messages from international nongovernmental organizations can, by themselves, elicit a backlash among the respondents. Surprisingly, we found similar effects among both Democrats and Republicans. This demonstrates important limitations to IOs' naming and shaming tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solitary confinement is the harshest method of social control that can be applied to a prisoner. There is considerable research which establishes that prolonged solitary confinement may have profoundly negative effects. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the "Mandela Rules") stipulate that solitary confinement should only be used "in exceptional circumstances as a last resort for as short a time as possible" and that solitary confinement should be "subject to independent review and only pursuant to the authorization by a competent authority". In Owen-D'Arcy v Chief Executive, Queensland Corrective Services [2021] QSC 273, a prisoner had spent over six and a half years in continuous solitary confinement. The Queensland Supreme Court held that the decision to continue the solitary confinement was not compatible with the prisoner's human rights pursuant to s 30 (humane treatment when deprived of liberty) of the Human Rights Act 2019 (Qld). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abstract Solitary confinement is a widespread practice in US correctional facilities. Long-standing concerns about the physical and mental health effects of solitary confinement have led to litigation, legislation, and community activism resulting in many prison systems introducing policies or implementing legal mandates to reduce or eliminate its use. Yet little is known about the nature and effectiveness of policies that states have adopted to reduce their use of solitary confinement and exactly how various reforms have actually impacted the lives of people living and working in the prisons where these reforms have taken place. Methods We conducted an embedded case study, analyzing changes in policies and procedures, administrative data, and focus groups and interviews with incarcerated persons and staff, to describe the circumstances that led to changes in solitary confinement policies and practices in the North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (ND DOCR) and the perceived impact of these changes on incarcerated persons and prison staff. . Results North Dakota’s correctional officials and staff members attributed the impetus to change their solitary confinement policies to their participation in a program that directly exposed them to the Norwegian Correctional Service’s philosophy, policies, and practices in 2015. The ensuing policy changes made by North Dakota officials were swift and resulted in a 74.28% reduction in the use of solitary confinement between 2016 and 2020. Additionally, placements in any form of restrictive housing decreased markedly for incarcerated persons with serious mental illness. In the two prisons that had solitary confinement units, rule infractions involving violence decreased at one prison overall and it decreased within the units at both prisons that were previously used for solitary confinement. Although fights and assaults between incarcerated people increased in one of the prison’s general population units, during the initial months of reforms, these events continued to decline compared to years before reform. Moreover, incarcerated people and staff attributed the rise to a concomitant worsening of conditions in the general population due to overcrowding, idleness, and double bunking. Both incarcerated persons and staff members reported improvements in their health and well-being, enhanced interactions with one another, and less exposure to violence following the reforms. Conclusions Immersing correctional leaders in the Norwegian Correctional Service’ public health and human rights principles motivated and guided the ND DOCR to pursue policy changes to decrease the use of solitary confinement in their prisons. Ensuing reductions in solitary confinement were experienced as beneficial to the health and wellness of incarcerated persons and staff alike. This case-study describes these policy changes and the perspectives of staff and incarcerated persons about the reforms that were undertaken. Findings have implications for stakeholders seeking to reduce their use of solitary confinement and limit its harmful consequences and underscore the need for research to describe and assess the impact of solitary confinement reforms.

On 21 June 2019, the federal government passed Bill C-83: An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another Act with the primary intention of eliminating the use of administrative and disciplinary segregation in Canadian federal prisons and replacing the practice with structured intervention units. This new correctional model would serve as a way to separate unsafe inmates while ensuring they receive appropriate mental health services, increased time outside of their units, and meaningful human contact. The conception of Bill C-83 was largely a result of a history of widespread criticisms that administrative segregation infringed on human rights, posed significant mental health concerns, and violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While the reform mitigated immediate pressure on the federal government to act, several advocacy groups, legal experts, politicians, and other stakeholders voiced negative opinions and indicated the shortcomings of the new units and the impact they will have on the health of prisoners. Bill C-83 has the potential to prompt significant change in the context of prison health reform, but this will be dependent on the federal government’s coordination with Correctional Services Canada. Le gouvernement fédéral a fait adopter le 21 juin 2019 le projet de loi C-83 : transformer le système correctionnel afin de mettre l’accent sur la réinsertion sociale et les soins de santé mental, dont l’intention première était de supprimer le recours à l’isolement administratif disciplinaire dans les prisons fédérales canadiennes et de le remplacer par des unités d’intervention structurées. Ce nouveau modèle correctionnel vise à séparer les prisonniers dangereux tout en garantissant qu’ils reçoivent les soins de santé mentale nécessaires, qu’ils aient du temps hors de leurs unités et des contacts humains significatifs. Le projet de loi C-83 a été conçu largement en réponse à une série de critiques tenant que l’isolement administratif bafouait des droits élémentaires, présentait des risques importants pour la santé mentale et violait la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés. Parce que la réforme atténuait le besoin d’action immédiate de la part du gouvernement fédéral, plusieurs groupes de défense, des experts juridiques, des politiques et autres acteurs ont exprimé leur opposition et souligné les défauts des nouvelles unités ainsi que l’impact qu’elles auront sur la santé des prisonniers. Le projet de loi C-83 peut apporter un changement significatif dans le contexte de la réforme de la santé en prison, mais ceci dépendra du degré de coordination entre le gouvernement fédéral et Service correctionnel Canada.