Super Maximum Prisons

Each state utilizes various categories to designate and classify prison security levels, while most states collectively recognize these four in order from the most to least secure and controlling. Super-maximum, maximum-security, medium-security, and minimum-security. Super-maximum prisons are designed to be extremely guarded and constricting, out of all the other categorized prisons. Super-maximum prisons are “reserved for incarcerating the most dangerous and ruthless of offenders, where they tend to be sentenced to longer periods of time in solitary confinement, are under constant surveillance, confined in their cell 23-24 hours a day, and have no access to recreational, educational, religious, or treatment activities” (Rennison, pg.298). …show more content…
I believe it is cruel and a form of torture that should not be allowed or permitted in any prison facility, even super-maximum prisons. Although I understand that, “solitary confinement is used to punish an inmate, protect an inmate from self-harm, or as a way to protect and inmate from being harmed by others,” many mental health professionals and even the newly released offenders believe that solitary confinement in a segregated housing unit, can and may cause irreversible psychological damage in just as little as 15 days (Rennison, pg.292). Research has shown that over the many years an individual is in solitary confinement, it has had no dramatic changes with regards to recidivism, but on the contrary, it has had dramatic effects pertaining to mental and psychological damage on these particular individuals. Many individuals who were in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, end up having very similar symptoms, such as “anxiety, depression, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, paranoia and psychosis, and even self-harm” (. This is enough evidence for me to declare this policy an inhumane and unjustifiable means to punish