" This move to incapacitate and punish also coincided with the country’s push toward deinstitutionalization. Jail and prison populations swelled from an influx of the undertreated mentally ill. The overcrowding of prisons had a predictable consequence: violence in correctional facilities escalated. Prison systems responded with an unprecedented increase in the number and use of supermax cells, justifying this shift by classifying modern-day criminals as “harder” and “unable to be rehabilitated.” The long-held aim of reforming prisoners was now classified as a fool’s errand and therefore a waste of resources. The grim new management strategy for these “hardened criminals” was to isolate them from one another, often for the duration of their sentences, sometimes for the duration of their lives. This ethos of incapacitate and punish is now dominant in the American corrections system, and its toll is devastating. "

― Christine Montross , Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration