It's like we're trying to make crazier criminals

USA Today reports that Texas's habit of keeping huge numbers of inmates in solitary confinement really only results in crazier inmates.

After years in solitary, freedom hard to grasp

The inmates typically are allowed out of their cells for no more than an hour a day to exercise alone; their exposure to TV and reading material also is limited.

[...]

He says some of the ex-inmates had reconfigured their new living spaces at home to "recreate" the look and feel of their tiny cells.

"The rooms were always small and dark," Haney says. "The beds were made in the same way. Shoes were always stacked by their bed, just like in prison." One of his clients slept in a bathtub during his first few nights out of prison, Haney says, because the "cold, solid tub felt most like his cell."

[...]

But Stuart Grassian, a Harvard University psychiatrist who has studied the long-term effects of isolation on offenders, says that "if the public understood what kind of condition these people are in when they (are freed), they would be appalled. It's set up for these folks to fail" and "create new victims."

[...]

In the spring of 2004, he got drunk and began firing a gun in his apartment. After he woke up in the local jail the next morning and learned that he had been charged with a new felony, Morales says he panicked and tried to escape from the jail's exercise yard.

Convictions on the gun and escape charges earned him 35 more years in prison. He expects to serve all that time in solitary confinement because of his past association with a gang in prison.

"I wake up today, and I can't believe it," Morales says during an interview at a state prison in Gatesville. "I had so many plans, but I guess it's all over now."

Morales, whose most serious offense may have been the weapons case in which no one was injured, will be 68 when he is scheduled to be released in 2040. Counting his previous prison term, he will have spent 45 years in isolation.

No one deserves 45 years in solitary with limited tv and reading materials. That's torture. That human rights concern aside, this obviously increases crime on the outside and recidivism. It'd be one thing if Texas's draconian criminal justice policies worked, but I guess effectiveness isn't really the point. It's all about showing how tough you are to the folks back in suburban Fort Worth.