The tragic suicide of 22-year old Kalief Browder shocked the country. Browder was arrested at 16 and spent years at the Rikers Island jail, including 800 days in solitary confinement. He was never tried or convicted of a crime.

I, however, am no longer surprised by any connection between solitary confinement and death.

In recent years, I have interviewed scores of young people who were held in jails and prisons alone for 22 to 24 hours a day. These children were kept in solitary confinement for days, months and even years. This treatment can be devastating for anyone. But it is particularly dangerous for children and teens, whose brains and bodies are still developing and who are therefore atparticular risk of physical and psychological harm. Dozens of young people told me about losing control while in solitary, about harming themselves and even attempting suicide.

What has always disturbed me most about the solitary confinement of children is its connection to self-harm and to death. Indeed, the best researchavailable suggests that solitary confinement is highly-correlated with suicide in prisons, jails and juvenile facilities, and even more so with children and adolescents. Suicide of children is also highly correlated with imprisonment in adult jails and prisons: the Department of Justice has found that the rate in adult prisons is nearly twice that of adults. Children should never be held in adult jails or prisons (a report by the National Academies of Science suggests that, “punishing juveniles as adults is not likely to reduce recidivism and is likely to increase the social costs of crime&rdquo. But it is especially perverse that the solitary confinement of children is not banned across the United States. Ending the solitary confinement of children and strictly regulating isolation practices anywhere they are detained promises to save lives. There is an urgent need for reform.

[For more of this story, written by Ian M. Kysel, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/...to-ban-the-practice/]