Getting cabin fever after spending weeks constrained to your home?

Ok. Now imagine you had to do it in a room slightly larger than your shower.

Without internet.
Or human contact.
Or sunlight.
Or a choice of food.
For months on end.

Welcome to solitary.
We do this to people.

Think about all the things you have done over the past few weeks to keep your mind occupied, to keep from feeling alone, from behind depressed, from being scared, from anxiety.

Imagine having none of that
Not a single comfort.
Not even a sense of time.

That is solitary.

Consider how deeply unsettling it is to have no idea what happens next or how long it will continue for.

Consider the feelings of helplessness that we distract ourselves from with Tiger King and Animal Crossing.

And imagine having nothing to contend with those feelings.

We think of prisons and solitary as abstractions, but now as we experience the distress of even a mild form of involuntary confinement for a short period of time, perhaps we might take a moment and consider that we routinely subject each other to this trauma but turned up to 11.

Its not limited to solitary confinement though.

Hundreds of thousands of people are in prison and jail environments only slightly less restrictive for months or years just WAITING to have a jury decide if they're actually guilty or not.

We do this to people at the drop of a hat

The same citizens clawing at the walls after a few weeks at home with family and creature comforts and entertainment(or outright refusing to curtail their freedom at all) are the same ones who support casually subjecting people to much worse for much longer.

We are all feeling trapped and confined after weeks but we toss around sentence years like they are meaningless.

1 year here.
5 years there.
40 years give or take 10

The simple fact is that healthy human contact is one of the single most necessary things to healthy human functioning and our societal response to unhealthy human functioning is to remove any access to the thing necessary to correct it, and opt instead to inflict existential pain

It should obvious to all of us as we are sequestered and isolated how important human connection is to keeping us mentally and emotionally functional.

And it should give us considerable pause when we decide that denying this to people is at all humane.

The idea we have of solitary is where we keep the Hannibal Lechters of the world.

In reality it's where we keep people who were assaulted, trans people, people guards don't like, kids, people caught trying to survive in a corrupt prison economy and so forth.

Solitary confinement is simply the answer to the question:

How do we make people's lives more miserable when they're already in hell?

Prison is where we put people to forget about them.

Solitary is where prisons put people to forget about them.