The Derek Chauvin solitary confinement predicament

Solitary confinement.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day following his conviction for the murder of George Floyd. He's held in a small cell with "a bench with a mattress pad, a combination toilet and sink, and a tiny shower." A guard checks on him every 30 minutes.

Chauvin's solitary confinement is protective, and he's hardly languishing in a dank hole. He has writing materials, and potentially reading materials, too. The Count of Monte Cristo this is not. He's also perhaps the most notorious man in the country at this moment — hardly a sympathetic test case for arguing against solitary confinement.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.