Worse the Auschwitz? Solitary confinement and the American torture state

Comment published on New York Times blog, in response to op-ed essay by Ian Manuel, “I Survived 18 Years in Solitary Confinement,” March 25, 2021:

If you had the choice of being a prisoner in a Nazi death camp, with its degrading conditions, followed by almost certain death by painful asphyxiation, or being a prisoner in an American prison or jail placed in solitary confinement, which would be worse? Our solitary confinement is clearly more painful. It destroys the brain and mind, and more fully. It is very painful to live without contact with other people or opportunities to occupy one's own thoughts with anything interesting. It is not only a horribly cruel and unusual punishment; it is a form of torture. America leads the world in this torture, as with imprisonment generally.

Our society and its leaders casually do with so many individuals what the Nazi state apparatus did to people as members of certain social groups. Prison guards generally seem to hate the people they manage; they are violent and extremely hostile. While many men are raped in American prisons (about as many men there are as are women in liberty), solitary confinement is the worst.

In America, punishments are given those suspected of disobedience, especially if they are black. The merely disaffected or deviant may be excluded from 'society' as 'mentally ill,' and then arbitrarily sent to de facto prison wards in hospitals. In 2016, the police arranged to have me so threatened by 'health care' workers, mentioning my political views, and suggesting it was because of what I write.

Will only a revolution end this scourge?