America certainly knows how to build prisons. It should, mainly because it incarcerates inmates at embarrassingly high levels and seems to delight in treating fellow human beings as something akin to a beast of burden, or worse. The prison experience for all those involved is almost always dehumanizing, because the purposeful construction and conduct within America's incarceration facilities are done typically in a manner of not only of an "us v. them" mentality, but also pretty much conducted in a manner in which the best inmate is always going to be the compliant inmate, and none other.
Not too surprisingly, for those that are incarcerated, rightly or wrongly, and are invariably not profitably engaged in worthwhile activities, they are going to come up against situations in which a fellow inmate or inmates are perceived to be behaving in an inappropriate fashion, and subsequently is considered to be of danger to others or to their own self, or both. Because there are a limited amount of guards within a facility, the go-to solution, is often to separate the alleged troublemaker(s) from the inmate population at large, allegedly for the protection of that inmate(s), and often done as a form of punishment.
That punishment for recalcitrant inmates is solitary confinement, in which social contact with any other inmate is drastically reduced to a bare minimum, and with the exception of a brief break here and there, those inmates in solitary confinement are truly and literally confined within a very narrow space for typically twenty-three hours of each day, with nothing really to do. The fact that some inmates suffer solitary confinement from time-to-time, might be okay, if solitary confinement was somewhat similar to the "timeout" that a child is given at home or within a school system, of which that child's isolation is relatively brief and to the point. However, solitary confinement in prison facilities, don't typically last for part of a day, or even days, or even weeks, but instead, can be and is quite often for months or even years.
The fact that somehow it is legal to incarcerate certain individuals via the cruel and inhumane treatment of being solitarily confined, while doing so for long or seemingly endless periods of time, reflects poorly on American jurisprudence as well as the rules and regulations of what is permitted in incarceration facilities. The bottom line is that solitary imprisonment, first and foremost, should be done only as necessary for the protection of those working within the facility, as well as the inmates so incarcerated, and the inmate so designated as deserving of solitary confinement. That said, solitary confinement, should only be done for a very short period of time, such as a maximum of seventy-two hours, before that inmate is entitled to be released from solitary confinement, or to at least having a hearing in front of some neutral party.
It is absolute insanity, to confine anyone for lengthy periods of time in solitary confinement, and somehow believe, that by doing so, that person will be better off for it. Further to the point, if our incarceration facilities are unable to keep order in their facilities without having to incarcerate into solitary confinement, certain inmates for lengthy periods of time, then however are those inmates that have suffered from such long periods of isolation, going to be able to function in an open and free society when they are eventually released?
The bottom line is if you want inmates to fail, or if your desire is to see a high rate of recidivism, then definitely treat human beings as animals of little worth, and especially isolate indefinitely, those that appear most troubling, and in return, you will do your part in helping to fully raise Cain.