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The New Yorker: Annals of Human Rights Hellhole The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

Annals of Human Rights Hellhole The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture? by Atul Gawande March 30, 2009, The New Yorker Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people. Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on March 24, 2009 (boomark / email).