Why have any soft feelings for those locked in solitary confinement in our prisons, jails and immigrant detention centers? They must be the worst of the worst, right? The unrepentant serial killers, the gang leaders carrying on business as usual behind bars, the criminals with nothing to lose and no problem smashing a few skulls if given the chance?
Personally, I have little sympathy for violent criminals who continue their violence while incarcerated. But like most things with crime and punishment, it turns out solitary confinement is not that clear-cut. Shockingly, or perhaps not, this harshest of measures is often applied arbitrarily, with little or no accountability.
California has a long and troubled history of using solitary confinement with dubious justification, sometimes for years at a time — one reason state prisons have been under court oversight for seven years. In fact, there's not even a standard definition for what counts as solitary in this state or even what we call it — the hole, lockdown, segregation — and little in the way of having to keep tabs on who is being subjected to it, for how long or why.
