Too depressing to read in its entirety. One straightforward way of evaluating whether there might be anything wrong with practices in American prisons is to compare with other countries -- do other nations with stable democracies use solitary confinement in a similar way?
> do other nations with stable democracies use solitary confinement in a similar way Other countries with stable democracies have universal health care, don't incarcerate almost 1% of the population, have never landed people on the moon, don't spend 5% of their GDP on the military, aren't the home of Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, and so on. America has always been (and will probably always be) an edge case.
What seems to be problematic to me is that the bad ones seem to be on different abstraction level than the good ones. Other countries might not have Apple, Microsoft, and IBM but they certainly have huge globally successful companies. They never landed on the moon but they have explored space and achieved important things related to science or technology.
Which could negate the idea of being an outlier in bad things is somehow related to being an outlier in good things... if anyone would be making such claim.