paradoxically, there would be less total suffering (including inmate suffering) if prisons were more humane. That reduces your statement to "Should the victims

paradoxically, there would be less total suffering (including inmate suffering) if prisons were more humane. That reduces your statement to "Should the victims be the only ones suffering?" after a violent crime. The part you miss is that there's no PSA video warning the perpetrators about the misery of solitary they face before they choose to commit the acts. They are either mentally ill or high when most of those crimes were committed. The only way you'd have a valid argument is if the criminal had a huge ctrl-z button, and once solitary "broke" them , and caused them to hit CTRL-Z, undo the victims' suffering, and everyone goes home. Then solitary would be an amazing, 99.99% effective punishment. This is not even touching on the fact that a lot of these solitary inmates never commmitted heinous offenses. They just misbehaved in prison or were mentally ill and ran afoul of prison regs.