Even today criminals are put alone in a jail cell - and the ultimate punishment: solitary confinement.
"The Protect Children Project utilizes the First Amendment to protect public school students from being subjected to corporal punishment, solitary confinement, physical restraints, and the deprivation of bathroom access as these abusive practices violate our religious belief of bodily inviolability," according to the press release.
The pendulum has swung from rehabilitation to harsh punishments and confinement, and recently back again -- this time based on science.
A few days after he spoke with the Guardian, Mendoza and 19 other inmates were transferred to solitary confinement – punishment, activists said, for a renewed hunger strike.
Year after year of solitary confinement, punishment imposed for endlessly angrily asserting his innocence, movement without notice from prison to prison, often just when his mother was using her one week's holiday to visit her husband and her son at different ends of England, humiliation, degradation and fear nevertheless fuelled an insistence that he could and would take charge of his own fate.
However, because Stroud had killed a federal officer, his punishment in solitary confinement remained intact.
Punishments included solitary confinement or "shot drill", where an inmate was made to carry 24 pound cannonballs from one end of the yard to the other.
In Guantánamo, he is still confined to a 6ft by 8ft windowless cell, forced into solitary confinement – his punishment for being "noncompliant".
The years in prison that the law promises with so much generosity must be viewed with a consternation that goes beyond the fear of confinement and punishment.
Detainees can be held in confinement for punishment for an offence committed while in detention, or for regression; a regime used for the "good order and security" of the prison.
