Solitary Confinement Is Cruel and Unusual. It Should Be Outlawed, Even for Paul Manafort.
I was going to write a post chastising some folks for making light of the fact that Paul Manafort is being stuck into solitary confinement in the hellhole that is Rikers Island. (This goes double for any moron using this development as an excuse for prison rape jokes. Grow up.) This is not a matter of ideological rah-rah. Rikers is an embarrassment to the nation, and prosecutors who use that to work on the minds of the prisoners in their charge not only are beneath contempt, but also massive roadblocks to reforming the criminal justice system, which necessarily means closing places like Rikers Island, and eliminating the concept of coercive solitary confinement, which is torture by another name. (Protective custody and segregated confinement are not the same.)
Like I said, I was prepared to write a post on all that but, dammit, AOC beat me to it. From Politico:
“A prison sentence is not a license for gov torture and human rights violations. That’s what solitary confinement is,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Manafort should be released, along with all people being held in solitary.” The freshman lawmaker doubled down on her comments when told that Manafort may technically be placed in protective custody. She tweeted that protective custody is a separate method, but “does not necessarily exclude solitary. If he is in fact not being held in solitary, great. Release everyone else from it, too.”
Not only is this a damned decent thing for AOC to do, it's pretty shrewd politics as regards the fight for criminal-justice reform. Woman's got chops.
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