There's a major difference between being forced into being alone (doing nothing) and choosing to spend the evening at home watching Netflix

Lock yourself in the bathroom without a phone or any other entertainment for four hours.

Then, imagine you're a mentally ill person who was already considering suicide as solitary is often how jails deal with inmates threatening suicide because they're understaffed and ill equipped for mental health care.

Get back to me afterwards and let me know if four hours was enough.

The county jail that put me on suicide watch left me naked in solitary for four days because the mental health staff that could clear me only worked part time and a 48 hour hold was mandatory. Three meals a day was the only break from staring at the walls and watching the guards walk by.

I assure you after two hours I was done threatening suicide. Four would have been overkill. Four days was simply humiliation and torture. I'll never forgive that county and still have trauma responses when I visit that town.

There’s alone and there’s alone in a small room designed to be a form of sensory deprivation when you’re in a high emotional state and lack self control.

15 days is well into brain damage long. That’s 15 days of 0 stimulation in a small box. Generally speaking you should see another human face every few days minimum

4 hours is good for the maximum and I’d hope they case by case give 1 or 2 hours. 4 hours in solitary doesn’t have to mean “after 4 hours you have to be let out” it can mean “after 4 hours someone comes by, checks on you and gauges your emotional state via conversation”.

I could also be ok with situations where they have access to positive stimulation (like books) for more than that time. But that gets into the realm of “it isn’t punishment, it’s alone time to calm you down”.

Overall our current prison system needs an overhaul led by psychologists. It isn’t giving us pro social results. It takes people who are overwhelmingly some variant of mentally ill, torturing them while sticking them with other criminals, and then plopping them back on the street with trauma, no life skills, and debt. Many of these people were never free adults when released the first time.