Yesterday, when I was responding to Ross Douthat, I wrote that "there is a distinct difference between what is socially acceptable and what is right, and we often fail to distinguish one from the other." The use of extreme isolation strikes me as one of those things. As Glenn Greenwald points out in his original post on accused leaker Bradley Manning, there's a great deal of research supporting the idea that extreme isolation is a form of torture. As Greenwald wrote:
In 2006, a bipartisan National Commission on America's Prisons was created and it called for the elimination of prolonged solitary confinement. Its Report documented that conditions whereby "prisoners end up locked in their cells 23 hours a day, every day. . . is so severe that people end up completely isolated, living in what can only be described as torturous conditions." The Report documented numerous psychiatric studies of individuals held in prolonged isolation which demonstrate "a constellation of symptoms that includes overwhelming anxiety, confusion and hallucination, and sudden violent and self-destructive outbursts." The above-referenced article from the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law states: "Psychological effects can include anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and psychosis."
The fact that severe isolation serves an additional purpose beyond simple punitiveness, such as minimizing the risk to prison staff posed by extremely dangerous inmates, doesn't contravene the idea that severe isolation is a form of torture any more than waterboarding for the purpose of interrogation does. But as a culture, we're very used to the idea of extreme isolation in punitive settings; we're so used to thoughtlessly dishing out punishment without regard for the attendant social consequences because the human beings we throw in prison are so meaningless to us as a society that we don't think very deeply about it. Of course, what makes the conditions of Manning's imprisonment even more disconcerting is that he's being punished without having actually been convicted of anything.
