So What's the Actual Problem?

This might be a bit dark, but there need to be more prisons like this:

• Around 10 p.m., a haze of gray smoke wafted down a hallway lined with prison cells at the Joliet Treatment Center. The window of cell A9 began to glow red as the fire within grew. Jason Stephens was locked inside. Minutes ticked by, and the smoke became so thick you could not see more than a few feet. No one came to let Stephens out.

  There have been more than 70 fires at the facility in the last three years, according to an investigation by The Marshall Project, WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times. That includes a dozen cases in which men incarcerated there set themselves on fire.

  The Joliet Treatment Center opened in 2017 with the promise of being a new kind of prison in Illinois, designed to provide intensive mental health treatment. But in the years leading up to that night in the summer of 2024, incarcerated men and civil rights lawyers who visited the facility said the conditions declined. Men were kept locked in their cells for long stretches, with nothing to do. They complained about a lack of medical care and mental health treatment, which the prison system is legally obligated to provide. Men reported that guards used excessive force.

  As the men grew more despondent, some became willing to do anything to draw attention to their troubles and resorted to setting their cells — or themselves — on fire.

Sounds like a win. 

Prison is supposed to be restrictive and depressing so that inmates don't want to return to it and they make the effort to not go back. 

If they do go back - and the recidivism rate seems to imply a lot of them do - then the prison obviously didn't make a bad enough impression on them so that they improve their lives, get jobs and contribute to society.

Self immolation seems like a decent outcome....for the taxpayer at least.