IN THIS ARTICLE, SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IS ASSAILED BY THE US CATHOLIC CHURCH FOR BEING INHUMANE. IT DEEMS SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, IN ESSENCE, AS AN ACT OF TORTURE.
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The past decade has witnessed an increase in resistance to solitary confinement by human rights and civil liberties groups, mental health advocates, concerned citizens and people of faith, including Catholics.
In 2000 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement on crime and criminal justice, calling on Catholics to “insist that punishment has a constructive and rehabilitative purpose.” The bishops stated: “We oppose the increasing use of isolation units, especially in the absence of due process, and the monitoring and professional assessment of the effects of such confinement on the mental health of inmates.”
“We’re opposed to the inhumane treatment of other human beings,” explained Bishop Howard J. Hubbard of Albany, N.Y. He said that although individuals face incarceration because of their own actions, “Once they are in such a facility, we would expect them to be treated in a humane way…. If they are not, the entire community should be concerned with this, not only people whose friends and family members are affected.”
Bishop Hubbard was spurred to action in the late 1990s after speaking with prison chaplains who served isolated prisoners. The chaplains were very concerned about the effect this was having on the prisoners’ social and mental well-being. Bishop Hubbard brought the issue before other Albany-area religious leaders, who worked together to lobby for legislative change and to increase media attention on the issue.
He and his fellow New York bishops discussed solitary confinement in a pastoral statement on criminal justice in 2000, asserting: “The human dignity of inmates is compromised by extended confinement in such units. Rather than restoration and rehabilitation, such extended isolation threatens to inflict mental harm on inmates.”
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