Even if an inmate's sentence is not oppressively long, their treatment while incarcerated can still constitute subhuman treatment. Prisons are not medical facilities, but they regularly are forced to deal with mental health problems and care for elderly and terminally ill inmates. Food, if it's even edible, usually lacks enough nutrition for inmates' health to not deteriorate. Plus, with a lack of opportunities to see family, read, or gain skill sets, inmates are placed in buildings which lack any resemblance of the civilized world.
“Twenty-five former cells have been converted to rooms. Instead of bars, each room has a door and its own bed, sink, toilet and television. Clients will eat in a communal dining area and receive services and some training. It will be a “one-stop shop” for people experiencing homelessness and job loss or living with poorly or untreated substance use disorders or mental illness.“
New York Daily News
September 17, 2019
Read More"I spent the next five years in isolation. Some days, the walls of my cell seemed to close in on me. Imagine being stuck in an elevator — for years. All day and night, people would bang on their lockers and scream in agony."
New York Daily News
August 18, 2018
Read More"The city’s efforts to close Rikers Island are commendable and long overdue. But as the de Blasio administration’s new blueprint to shutter the jail complex reflects, New York is still struggling, as are cities and states across America, to manage the many people with mental illness who are thrown in jails and prisons that, for all intents and purposes, have become psychiatric hospitals without the services."
New York Daily News
August 16, 2018
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