Counterpunch - The federal government is quietly moving ahead with a plan that would significantly increase its capacity to house individuals in long-term isolation. The 2015 Omnibus Appropriations bill passed by Congress in December contained funding for the continued activation of Thomson prison, a currently disused facility in northwest Illinois.
It has been years since Thomson dominated the headlines with news of mainland-bound Guantanamo detainees. Yet its activation remains significant because of the prison’s potential to alter the landscape of solitary confinement on the federal level. Reliable sources indicate that the Bureau of Prisons plans to use the facility to add 1,500 Special Management Unit beds and 400 more Administrative Maximum-rated cells. The latter increase would double the number of people held in conditions of extreme isolation like those at ADX Florence, a place that has been denouncedby UN officials and human rights groups, and described by one former warden as a “clean version of hell.”
2 comments:
Are there no readers? Or is it too early in the day? This revelation is probably "mind numbing", in that the individual out there in digital reader land, may feel powerless to deal with this kind of info. Ultimate betrayal of the public trust, that these policies expand. If I could, I would personally strangle any official directly implicated in promoting and expediting this kind of thing! That may render me no better than the perpetrators, but so be it!
Isolation is a far better deterrent than the relative mercy of the death penalty. There are those who should live a thousand years and never see another living creature. If one's own company is torture, so be it.
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