Solitary confinement – the isolation of a prisoner from meaningful human contact for twenty-two or more hours per day – remains one of the most institutionally resilient practices in contemporary penology. This article proceeds from a methodological repositioning: whether solitary confinement is harmful has been definitively resolved. Its destructive impact upon physical and mental health, its failure to achieve any declared penological objective, and its role in provoking self-harm, suicide, and psychological disintegration constitute an empirical axiom. The central inquiry shifts to the structural: why, despite more than a century of clinical and criminological ev ... Читати далі »