In any given year in the United States, the juvenile detention system incarcerates over 100,000 juveniles in detention, correctional or shelter facilities. These facilities often implement the use of solitary confinement on these juveniles as a form of punishment or segregation. Solitary confinement is a practice used widely throughout the United States, and is not only an international human rights violation and in contravention of the Constitution of the United States, but is also mentally and
Roughly 15 percent of inmates in state prisons have a serious mental illness; this means that there are approximately 356,000 inmates with serious mental illness in jails and state prisons. This is a serious problem, and the rehabilitation that goes on in prisons do not always help those inmates who are mentally ill. The use of solitary confinement has increased throughout the years, and has many negative psychological effects. Prison involvement itself can contribute to increased suicide (Hills
One of the most well-known and controversial studies in the realm of psychology was conducted by Phillip Zimbardo in the 1970s to study the effects of prison conformity on a sample group of college students. This study, known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, was scheduled to continue for two weeks, but it had to be cut short to six days due to the horrendous events that occurred during procedures. Although the majority of researchers currently agree that Zimbardo’s experiment was completely unethical