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.
“When we talk about solitary confinement, the common assumption is that prisons use it to control the worst of the worst, men and women who committed such horrific crimes that they will probably never walk out of those facilities. The letters from this inmate show that is not the case. They show that what happens behind those barbed-wired fences will be carried outside of them on the backs of those who are released.“
Washington Post
May 30, 2019
Read More“One prisoner was not seen by a doctor after collapsing and complaining of shortness of breath; she died that day of heart failure. A second woman’s rapid weight gain and severe chest pain were ignored until her heart also failed. For a third, it was sudden weight loss, wheezing and back pain; she was found dead during her dialysis, after a nurse left her unattended. A fourth died at a hospital; her neurological disorder went undiagnosed until she had a stroke.“
Washington Post
January 4, 2019
Read More“However, the state’s apparent progress is marred by a lack of transparency and by troubling signs suggesting the reforms may not be all they are cracked up to be. In September, a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of an inmate at Red Onion said he had been held for more than 12 years in solitary confinement, suffers from severe and deepening mental illness, which has gone untreated, and has been unable to access less restrictive housing owing to his inability to speak English and illiteracy in Spanish, his native language.“
Washington Post
December 11, 2018
Read More“This conduct shocks the conscience; our country’s Constitution simply cannot tolerate this type of discriminatory treatment, where all free citizens evacuate to save their life, but inmates are placed in dire straits at a local jail because they are incarcerated — noting that many inmates are pretrial detainees who have merely (been) accused of a crime.“
Charlotte Observer
September 14, 2018
Read More"In 2016, 242 inmates were still in isolation at Red Onion and another facility, Wallens Ridge State Prison. And the ACLU’s research suggests that the spirit of reform has not permeated the state’s Department of Corrections. The advocacy group collected harrowing prisoner accounts of their time in solitary."
Washington Post
June 3, 2018
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