It's the 8th Amendment that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. It's that 8th Amendment that limits how the government can treat a person in their custody, whether in jail, whether in a mental institution, or whether in a prison. Once you're in the Bureau of Prisons, the 8th Amendment applies indisputably and incontrovertibly.
The Supreme Court has recognized that you have a right to adequate food and adequate healthcare. To me, solitary confinement outside of extraordinary circumstances should never be allowed because it is a deprivation and denial of adequate healthcare by definition. We now have massive amounts of data that isolation of the kind that we do in solitary confinement depriving people of social contact, depriving people of recreation, depriving people of interaction with other humans, depriving people of access to pretty much anything, often depriving them of access to the outside world, often having the light on 24 hours, often providing them inadequate food drives them insane. It causes severe mental health problems. It doesn't help. It doesn't improve the quality of custodial control. So that is why outside of the circumstance where you have someone who is so uncontrollably violent that the only alternative to protect other inmates is their solitary confinement. Should anybody be in solitary . . . and that's still not an excuse for why we have these cells that are 24 hours lights on, for why we have these cells with no view of anything. For why we have cells with no basic interaction of any kind. There are ways you can isolate someone without the mental torture aspect.
I'll give you an example. 25 years ago, the federal government did a study to determine whether images that remind parents of their kids or visits with their kids that are inmates, and what impact that had. And what they found was that it had a very negative impact, that it constantly reinforced the parents' failure and cause them to get depressed, have anxiety, and other mental health issues that led to violence and custodial care control issues. So what do you think the Federal Government Bureau of Prisons did? The increased by tenfold the number of images they showed of parents and children in federal prison and jails. Just to torture them that's who runs our prison system. Stephen King's novel that became the great book and movie is representative of who runs our jails and prisons. It is not an exception, it is the norm. It is exceptional when you have a decent style prison guard or warden. Unfortunately they're understaffed. They bring in the bottom level people. These are either people who are sociopaths, more often than not; again, not all. I know people who are after they worked prisons are good people. Not saying every single person is bad I'm saying the system is designed to draw in some of the worst, particularly those in positions of power within the system. And this particular jail in Louisiana, where Owen Shroyer is located, had mishandled COVID so bad that a bunch of people died. So their procedure really was punishment for the prison inmates ever raising the complaint by just routinely sticking them in torture, which is what solitary confinement is, for days upon their arrival. And it shows you how barbaric our prison system is in America.
And Jeremy McKenzie from Canada was in solitary confinement upwards of two weeks.
Tamara Lynch the Coots Four, sporadically thrown into solitary.
Artur Pawlowski the pastor thrown into solitary and the explanation for covid makes absolutely no sense. Then it was just for Behavior issues for punishment and not for to protect inmates from the most violent offenders
4th Amendment is protection from unreasonable search and seizure; 5th amendment self-incrimination and due process sometimes applies in these contexts if the 8th Amendment doesn't. And the 8th Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
And all the state actors are more and more creative at getting out of things. They're like well this isn't punishment yet so now we can be cruel and unusual. I mean this is the dumb logic some of our courts are accepting. And sadly, many of those are usually the conservative courts. They're always trying to find an excuse to cover up for corruption in police offices, prosecutorial offices, and the military. Those are the 3 institutions they are happy to cover for, as well as corruption within religious institutions. Happy to cover for them too, our so-called originalists on the court and the court system. The Wisconsin Wisconsin and Maine is a classic example of this.
People can say callously, "Well, they're in prison. What can you expect?"
Yeah, the callousness that dehumanizes people because they are inmates.
"If you want good treatment, don't break the law," and to some extent good treatment is different than being denied Medical treatment.
It's don't offend the powers that be and you won't suffer this because you're often in prison for reasons that have nothing to do with actual criminal Behavior sadly.
So the Wisconsin is a class action complaint and it's inmates talking about rotten teeth not getting treated and then when they are getting treated infections that are not getting treated One inmate with diabetes that had been under control for 15 years denied medical treatment and has all sorts of issues they're suing for all of these the 8th Amendment violation
Every method available: inadequate food, inadequate Medical Care, . . . This is a Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin that's been on lockdown for almost a year. year. It's like, why? They still can't explain why. I can tell you why. They have inadequate staff and it's a lot cheaper if you just stick everybody in lockdown. It mentally tortures everyone. everyone. It deprives them of social contact. It deprives them of recreation it deprives them of physical activity. They're also giving them inadequate food. They're often stuck with 24-hour lights on. Often with no window access to anything. And many of these inmates are elderly. These aren't gangbangers in their 30s. This is some old guy caught on a burglary charges in his 60s from old sentencing regimes that had long sentences attached to crimes we no longer attach long sentences to. So most of the inmates that are suing are elderly. Elderly inmates that are not getting basic Medical Care, not getting basic food care because the medical system . . . I've sued the Wisconsin system over and over again. It's a complete crock; they just don't fund it. It's the worst possible doctors. It's the worst possible Medical Care, you name it.
Plaintiff Kenneth Dahlberg, 62-year-old inmate who suffers from degenerative joint disease. Artificial implants in both shoulders, diabetic, continued heart disease. After diagnosis of heart disease, plaintive Dahlberg was required required to have coronary angioplasty and stents. They don't say what he was in for is if that might change anything but these
Yeah you have a bunch of old people with basic problems. I mean we know that it almost all cases outside of very select select kind of crimes that old inmates are extremely low risk of recidivism. That the compassionate release makes a lot more sense than in any of these cases. Trump tried to expand the grounds of compassionate release in the federal system, recognizing that us, spending lots of money, locking up derelict, old criminal defendants . . . if they're in there for like drugs . . . . if they're in there for street crime, like burglary, things like that, if they're not in there for severely violent crime or a particular kind of sex crime, their risk of recidivism is very low. And why they are still in there makes no sense. And then they end up being treated worse than a dog is being treated says something very bad about our 8th Amendment enforcement in America. And just as more people on the right are waking up to it just like Owen Shroyer experienced it, and they're like, What in the world is going on? Because they fancy that this only happened to the bad, mean, greedy, violent sickos. No. It often happens to the weakest and most vulnerable and most inconsequential inmates that really probably don't belong there in the first place, or at least not at this point in time in their lives. And so just being exposed on a bigger broader scale to a new political audience that previously ignored it. But there's a reason why the amendment existed. Our founding generation did experience this abuse of power. People who lived through the Civil War did experience this abuse of power. People who lived through parts of World War I and World War II did experience this abuse of power. This is why this law exists. It exists because you cannot trust this power to be used correctly in the hands of the people that that it's given to.
What percentage of the prisons in the states are private and does it make a difference? If it's private versus public and does it make a difference
