Hell Is a Very Small Place

It is well recognized that over the past several decades US prisons and jails have become the nation's largest inpatient psychiatric hospitals. This is not surprising when you realize the majority of the US correctional population, the largest in the world at well over two million, suffers from mental illness. 1 Leaving aside the question whether it is appropriate to incarcerate the mentally ill, at least those with serious mental illness, how we choose to treat a significant percentage of mentally ill inmates is to place them in solitary confinement. 2 This means how we treat a significant percent of the mentally ill in this country is to torture them.