Should solitary confinement be banned in the United States Jails and Prison System?

Although solitary confinement for some very disruptive and dangerous convicts (particularly drug cartel and hate group leaders) can cut down on violence inside prison populations, the practice of keeping numerous prisoners in solitary confinement for long periods of time (or indefinitely) has been shown to be both unconstitutional (cruel and unusual) and counterproductive to decreasing violence and recidivism.

While there remains a subset of highly violent inmates within maximum security prisons, and while even low risk prisoners can from time to time need a "cooling off period" in order to prevent reprisals and riots, most studies of long term solitary confinement show that prisoners come out of solitary more mentally unbalanced, more prone to violence, and less able to lead a normal, productive life once they finish serving their sentences.

Therefore, while short term stays in solitary confinement (one or two days) may be appropriate for certain prisoners under certain conditions, the use of solitary confinement as a long term option for prisoners should most definitely be banned. Not only can clever inmates put in solitary to prevent them from sending orders to their lieutenants in the outside word find a way to send messages and rule their organizations from within solitary, but violent offenders with mental illnesses who are segregated from the rest of the prison population have been found to become even more delusional and unstable in the absence of treatment and other human contact. 

Many guards and wardens argue that the increased use of solitary confinement as a means of prison population control reduces gang violence, riots and retributions in prisons and cuts down on the death of prison guards. While that may be true (although many studies have disputed this argument), the bigger issue is overcrowding of prisons and jails. If our jails and prisons were not so overcrowded, prison guards would not need to take such extreme measures to control those populations. Indeed, over the past thirty years, the homicide rate and the rate of violent crimes nationally has plummeted, yet prison populations have skyrocketed. So to argue that prison populations are inherently more violent than they used to be and consequently require harsher tactics like prolonged solitary confinement to keep order, is a specious argument, not supported by facts.

Finally, as mentioned above, the negative effects of solitary confinement on mental health are so great that many prisoners who get "thrown in the hole," as solitary is known, for increasingly minor infractions, come out more dangerous and unstable than when they went in.

In short, solitary confinement as a long term solution should never have been allowed, and should be banned immediately. The ethical and practical reasons against it far outweigh the supposed benefits.