LOS MARGINADOS: BioEdge: Is solitary confinement ‘cruel and unusual’?

domingo, 18 de noviembre de 2018

BioEdge: Is solitary confinement ‘cruel and unusual’?

BioEdge: Is solitary confinement ‘cruel and unusual’?
Bioedge

Is solitary confinement ‘cruel and unusual’?

by Michael Cook | 17 Nov 2018 | 1 comment

About 80,000 Americans are incarcerated in solitary confinement on any given day, a practice that has been deemed cruel and unusual punishment by the United Nations Committee on Torture. Those in solitary confinement typically have no physical contact and little interaction with others. This extreme isolation can be damaging and may cause or worsen depression, anxiety, and other mental illness.

A roundtable including a prisoner held in solitary for 29 years explored the psychological and neurobiological burdens of solitary confinement at Neuroscience 2018, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Robert King was held in solitary in Angola Prison in Louisiana from 1972 to 2001, when his conviction for killing a fellow inmate was overturned. Since then, he has been an activist for the abolition of solitary confinement. Speaking about his own experience, King told the meeting:

“People want to know whether or not I have psychological problems, whether or not I’m crazy — ‘How did you not go insane?’ I look at them and I tell them, ‘I did not tell you I was not insane.’ I don’t mean I was psychotic or anything like that, but being placed in a six by nine by 12–foot cell for 23 hours a day, no matter how you appear on the outside, you are not sane.”

Meals for these prisoners and communications with prison staff normally come through slots in the solid steel doors of their cells. Some are permitted an hour of daily exercise day, alone. They can be denied visits, telephone calls, television, reading materials, and art supplies.

Neuroscientists, lawyers and activists such as King have joined forces to get solitary confinement described as cruel and unusual punishment.

The Neuroscience 2018 conference highlighted some physical damage experienced by isolated prisoners. “Social deprivation is bad for brain structure and function. Sensory deprivation is bad for brain structure and function. Circadian dysregulation is bad,” said Huda Akil, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Michigan who was also on the panel. “Loneliness in itself is extremely damaging.

Social isolation has been shown to heighten stress hormone responses and change structures within the brain. It may also lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. While solitary confinement is an extreme example affecting a relatively small portion of the population, social isolation and persistent loneliness are a growing problem in the United States. As the population ages, so does the number of individuals living in nursing homes, where isolation and loneliness are common. Social isolation and loneliness are associated with depression, hostility, heightened stress response, sleep fragmentation, and increased mortality.

Sunday, November 18, 2018

Occasionally we tag one of our articles “reproductive revolution” because it exemplifies how far law and technology take us once sex has been detached from reproduction. This week’s tale comes from India. A team at Galaxy Care Hospital in Pune has performed India’s first successful uterus transplant. A 45-year-old mother donated her womb to her 28-year-old daughter who eventually gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
Arrangements like this are no longer newsworthy, but what made the transplant necessary? It turns out that the young woman had had at least two abortions and these had damaged her uterus. Frankly, I find this fertility-at-any-cost approach a bit bizarre.
But not more bizarre than some of the other stories: the Dutch sperm donor who may have fathered 1000 children, the Japanese man who is raising 13 children by commercial surrogates from Thailand, the 65-year-old German grandmother who gave birth to quads, the German zoophile who is in a “relationship” with his Alsatian because “Animals are much easier to understand than women” and so on.
The reproductive revolution was originally intended to give loving couples the joy of having children of their own. How differently it has turned out. As they say, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children."