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In reply to the discussion: Thoughts on the Death Penalty [View all]F4lconF16
(3,747 posts)39. Here's what that "nothing" causes:
Researchers have demonstrated that prolonged solitary confinement causes a persistent and heightened state of anxiety and nervousness, headaches, insomnia, lethargy or chronic tiredness, nightmares, heart palpitations, and fear of impending nervous breakdowns. Other documented effects include obsessive ruminations, confused thought processes, an oversensitivity to stimuli, irrational anger, social withdrawal, hallucinations, violent fantasies, emotional flatness, mood swings, chronic depression, feelings of overall deterioration, as well as suicidal ideation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-americas-toughest-federal-prison.html?_r=0
Over the next decade, Powers, by any rational accounting, lost his mind. He cut off both earlobes, chewed off a finger, sliced through his Achilles tendon, pushed staples into his face and forehead, swallowed a toothbrush and then tried to cut open his abdomen to retrieve it and injected what he considered a pretty fair amount of bacteria-laden fluid into his brain cavity after smashing a hole in his forehead. In 2005, after slicing open his scrotum and removing a testicle, Powers was sent to the medical center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Mo., for treatment, where a psychiatrist determined he was not in need of inpatient psychiatric treatment or psychotropic medication and that his behavior was secondary to his antisocial disorder. When he was returned to Springfield four years later, after slashing his wrists and writing American Gulag in blood on his bedsheets, the doctor wrote, Considerations that (Powers) has some form of psychosis, thought disorder or mental illness are unfounded.
...snip...
On the morning of May 1, 2010, Vega was found dead in his cell. He had hanged himself with a bedsheet. After Vegas death, Powers shaved his head and began decorating his body with what he would describe as his Avatar stripes, a reference to the striped blue aliens in the James Cameron movie. Using a razor blade to make tiny cuts in his skin and then rubbing carbon-paper dust into the wounds, Powers tattooed spiky black slashes along his arms, legs, neck, skull, under his eyes and around his Adams apple. A photograph from 2011 presents an astounding transformation: The smirking, shaggy-haired young bank robber who entered the federal prison system in 1990 no longer existed, and the man who replaced him looked like something out of a nightmare.
...snip...
On the morning of May 1, 2010, Vega was found dead in his cell. He had hanged himself with a bedsheet. After Vegas death, Powers shaved his head and began decorating his body with what he would describe as his Avatar stripes, a reference to the striped blue aliens in the James Cameron movie. Using a razor blade to make tiny cuts in his skin and then rubbing carbon-paper dust into the wounds, Powers tattooed spiky black slashes along his arms, legs, neck, skull, under his eyes and around his Adams apple. A photograph from 2011 presents an astounding transformation: The smirking, shaggy-haired young bank robber who entered the federal prison system in 1990 no longer existed, and the man who replaced him looked like something out of a nightmare.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/30/hellhole
Supermax prisons and solitary confinement are torture. It has been established by experts and human rights organizations the world over. Those were two links out of hundreds.
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I have no reason, other than the debates on DU over the last few days.
JustABozoOnThisBus
May 2015
#10
For decades it's been a fact that states without the death penalty have lower murder rates.........
George II
May 2015
#38
Almost every other country in the world gets along just fine without a death penalty.
SheilaT
May 2015
#14
Almost every other country in the world gets along just fine with the USA picking up the defense tab
seveneyes
May 2015
#18
I guess the notion is that we're the wholesale death merchants to the world.
Jackpine Radical
May 2015
#29
Add one more reason: criminal charges are more often brought against minorities and the poor
jwirr
May 2015
#41