The Archipelago of Pain - NYTimes.com

We don’t flog people in our prison system, or put them in thumbscrews or
stretch them on the rack. We do, however, lock prisoners away in social
isolation for 23 hours a day, often for months, years or decades at a time.
We prohibit the former and permit the latter because we make a
distinction between physical and social pain. But, at the level of the brain
where pain really resides, this is a distinction without a difference.
Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, compared
the brain activities of people suffering physical pain with people suffering
from social pain. As he writes in his book, “Social,” “Looking at the screens
side by side ... you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.”
The brain processes both kinds of pain in similar ways. Moreover, at
the level of human experience, social pain is, if anything, more traumatic,
more destabilizing and inflicts more cruel and long-lasting effects than
physical pain. What we’re doing to prisoners in extreme isolation, in other
words, is arguably more inhumane than flogging.


The Archipelago of Pain - NYTimes.com