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.
“Listening to her speak reminded me of reading de Blasio’s 2016 comment that the closure of Rikers was “unrealistic,” and made me think how little had truly changed since. It fell to the abolitionist Mariame Kaba to warn of the cost of failing to realize what’s possible: “We will be back in this room, I promise you, in ten years, if these four new facilities are built, calling these facilities inhumane.”“
New York Review of Books
October 4, 2019
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