While there are no concrete numbers, it’s safe to say that
hundreds, if not thousands of children are in solitary
confinement in the United States–some in juvenile detention
facilities, and some in adult prisons. Short bouts of solitary
confinement are even viewed as a legitimate form of punishment
in some American schools. In this first post on the subject, we
address teenagers in solitary confinement in adult prisons. In
large part, this grim reality is simply a symptom of the
American criminal justice system’s taste for treating children
as adults. A study by Michele Deitch and a team of student
researchers at the University of Texas’s LBJ School found that
on a given day in 2008, there were more than 11,300 children
under 18 being held in the nation’s adult prisons and jail.
According to Deitch’s 2009 report From Time Out to Hard Time,
”More than half the states permit children under age 12 to be
treated as adults for criminal justice purposes. In 22 states
plus the District of Columbia, children as young