Isaac Chotiner takes a look at Atwul Gawande's piece exploring whether solitary confinement is equivalent to torture:
...Gawande never considers the idea of punishment as an end in itself, and it is here, I think, where liberal writers tend to miss a major motivating factor in our crime policy. There are numerous historical and religious reasons for this belief, and without getting bogged down in too many details, it is worth pointing out that many people believe wrongdoers "deserve" punishment for bad deeds. Others like, I would assume, Gawande, see no value in punishing people unless it serves distinct ends (keeping criminals off the street, deterring crime, etc.). Now, I happen to agree with Gawande, and I see no value in punishment for punishment's sake, but it is probably safe to say this is not a majority opinion in America. It also might help explain the sad state of our criminal justice system and prisons.
With corrections, there are number of emotional impulses that override the public interest -- the main one being our appetite for punitive measures at the expense of public safety. Human beings are vengeful; we want people who hurt others to be hurt in turn. And so we tend to turn a deaf ear to horrifying tales of mistreatment in American prisons. It would be one thing if the punitive impulse ended there -- and I want to distinguish between punishment as a deterrent, which is in the public interest, and punishment as retribution, which isn't -- but measures meant to rehabilitate inmates in the interest of public safety are often viewed as some sort of gift to the formerly and currently incarcerated, rather than an investment in our own protection. People who are re-incarcerated have, by definition, hurt someone else to get there, so we want to prevent that from happening.
Anyone who allows themselves to relax their punitive impulse while reading Gawande's piece has to come away fairly certain that long-term solitary confinement is a form of torture: It drives a third of the people who experience it insane. Like other forms of torture, it is rationalized as a necessary measure to protect the public. Military and civilian interrogators who utilized torture no doubt believed that these measures would be effective at gathering intelligence from suspected terrorists. But the law must make other considerations -- punishment meted out by the state must eschew cruelty as a rule. What makes changing this practice all the more difficult is that it's been used for so long; abandoning long-term solitary confinement necessitates an admission that the practice is cruel and anyone whose spent time observing our national conversation on torture must realize how difficult it is for Americans to make such admissions. The other problem is that we are significantly invested in its use as a society given the proliferation of "supermax" prisons. If Obama tries terror suspects within the criminal justice system, these prisons are the most likely destination for convicts.
As with "enhanced interrogations" the empirical evidence on long-term solitary confinement suggests the practice does not make us safer. The SERE techniques on which "enhanced interrogations" were based were not originally designed to extract information, they were designed to elicit false confessions and the like. The Bush administration was aware of this when they authorized those techniques, which belies their true purpose: punishment, even at the expense of our values and even the collection of usable intelligence. As Gawande points out, the bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons found little safety benefit to long-term solitary confinement, and plenty of drawbacks, the most obvious of which is that we are punishing people in a way that may make them insane before releasing them back into society. While the use of rewards and incentives for good behavior has had more success in controlling inmate violence, this is less "punitive" and therefore more politically perilous.
Chotiner is probably correct about the political realities of punishment, but our lawmakers should be guided by more than their emotional impulses or those of their constituents. Public safety must be the overriding interest.
-- A. Serwer
