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The United States’ prison system is growing rapidly every year. According to the article in the Washington Post “The U.S. has more jails than colleges. Here’s a map of where those prisoners live” author Christopher Ingraham states, “In many parts of America, particularly the South, there are more people living in prisons than on college campuses.” The fact that there are more Americans, men, women, and children, in prisons than in college is a huge problem that America needs to address. The only thing worse than the thought of more people in prison than college is that there are people in those prisons that spend twenty-three hours of their day in solitary confinement.
According to Laura Sullivan in NPR the article, “Timeline: Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons,” states, “The first experiment in solitary confinement in the United States begins at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.” This prison was opened in 1829 and America has allowed solitary confinement in prisons ever since. Sullivan goes on to state that in 1995, “A federal judge finds conditions at Pelican Bay in California "may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable" (Madrid v. Gomez).” Pelican Bay Prison was the country’s first …show more content…
Even after the case the federal judge still did not find the inhumane enough to shut down the prison. Now 21 years later in 2016, solitary confinement is still allowed in America, but President Obama