Summary: The debate over solitary confinement brings us back around to a basic question about prisons: do we lock people up to correct their behavior, or only to punish them? Roughly 100,000 people are locked up alone in small cells every day, a situation Terry Allen Kupers explores in the book Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It . Our region is home to California's only state "supermax" prison (Pelican Bay), so this is not a remote issue.
