Miami, Florida, more than doubled the national average of prisoners in isolation, with 10% of its prison population subjected to this punishment, including young and mentally ill, denounced on Thursday Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) .
The organization criticized the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) for violating the confinement of some 10,000 inmates, despite the worldwide trend that considers this practice “ineffective”.
“It provides little or no prison benefit and, in the worst case, it is torture,” the SPLC stressed.
In that sense, he called for “prohibiting” solitary confinement, which isolates prisoners “for 22 hours or more a day in an individual cell.”
According to the report “Solitary confinement: inhuman, ineffective and wasteful,” Florida more than doubled the national average, which was 4.5% of the total prison population in the country subjected to this punishment during 2018.
“Prisoners face this punishment” regardless of age, developmental disability or mental illness, despite the growing recognition that isolation is especially harmful to these categories of people, “the report emphasizes.
Details that almost half of the people imprisoned in Florida in solitary confinement suffer from mental illness.
According to SPLC, the state allows children and young adults to be held in solitary confinement, where they endure “long periods without exercise, education, contact with their families or programs or rehabilitation services.”
On the isolation of young people, the report notes that an investigation by the federal Justice Department found that those who had been subjected to isolation even for short periods of time experienced symptoms of paranoia, anxiety and depression.
A national study also found that among incarcerated youths who die by suicide, half were isolated when they committed suicide, and 62% had been in solitary confinement at some point.
However, the practice continues in some states, with Florida on top of the table, since it has more young people, more than a hundred, imprisoned in their prisons for adults, a figure higher than any other state in the country.
The analysis also notes that racial disparities are “generalized”.
He noted that in addition to the “excess” of African-Americans in prisons, they are also more subject than their white peers to solitary confinement.
While 16.9% of Floridians are African-American, 47% of Florida inmates are of that race, as are more than 60% of the isolated people in prisons.
In the case of whites, the figures are 77.4% of Floridians, 40.1% of people in prison and 34.5% of those subjected to solitary confinement. (EFEUSA)
