every time i think this i feel like a stupid kid who must be missing somehting but it seems weird to me that the usual defense of solitary confinement is "they have to be solitary because otherwise theyll hurt other prisoners" because like. there are ways to allow people contact with other people, without them being able to attack those people. like. yknow. put people in adjacent cells with bars between them. or something. yknow? like this is so obviously not an insurmountable thing. its a very weak excuse for torture
I thought of it mostly as “the social and administrative order of prison is greatly easier to maintain if the prisoners can be directed to behave on threat of being sent more to prison”. Like, in much the way that the threat of being sent to first-order prison is important to the maintenance of order on the outside, only as applied against a population already selected on “may not actually obey under mere threat of imprisonment and need to be actually sent”?