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History

2014

Law and Psychology

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Solitary Confinement, Public Safety, And Recdivism, Shira E. Gordon Jan 2014

Solitary Confinement, Public Safety, And Recdivism, Shira E. Gordon

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

As of 2005, about 80,000 prisoners were housed in solitary confinement in jails and in state and federal prisons in the United States. Prisoners in solitary confinement are generally housed in a cell for twenty-two to twenty-four hours a day with little human contact or interaction. The number of prisoners held in solitary confinement increased 40 percent between 1995 and 2000, in comparison to the growth in the total prison population of 28 percent. Concurrently, the duration of time that prisoners spend in solitary confinement also increased: nationally, most prisoners in solitary confinement spend more than five years there. The …


Feeling Another's Pain: Sympathy And Psychology Saga Style, William I. Miller Jan 2014

Feeling Another's Pain: Sympathy And Psychology Saga Style, William I. Miller

Articles

Progress is hardly a given in the humanities or the suspect sciences. In many ways we are not quite as astute as our grandparents, and they not as much as theirs, and so forth in an infinite entropic regress. Would I trade Montaigne or Stendhal’s psychological acumen for even the best work that comes from social psychology departments? In this short essay I want to show just how good some medieval people, medieval Icelanders to be exact, were at understanding the mental and emotional states of others, and if of others then presumably, though not necessarily, also of themselves. And …