Great blog title, huh? No. It's sad.

As of December 2010 there are 3, 261 individuals still waiting on death row. Of that population, California has the most inmates waiting (697), and Texas is leading with the most executions (17). The average wait is 12 years from time of sentencing to execution, except in California where the average is 20 years!  The longest man served 33 years (from age 24 to 57) in Georgia before being executed in 2008.

This blog is not about arguing for or against execution but of similar characteristics many of us experience who are are in solitary confinement......

What happens to the psyche of the mind when the human touch and contact is taken away? Boredom, loss of a sense of reality, depression, anger, worry, bitterness, impaired concentration, stress, loss of dignity and self worth, loss of motivation with the idea of simply giving up.

Now multiply these characteristics across a population if individuals with no human contact and you get people who are overly sensitive and touchy, abrasive, rude, a loss of cohesiveness, disrespectful, and dissatisfied.

The alienation many individuals experience in a work setting is not from a lack of communication but of the wrong kind of communication. Today one-on-one, face to face contact time that requires both attention emotionally and psychologically is replaced with the plethora of emails, phone messages, text messages, Hey Tell, and on and on.

How many of us have received an email we have misconstrued (or was misconstrued)? Emails have no emotion other than the emotion the reader gives to it which is often not the same emotion the person sent it had. How many relationships have been damaged because two individuals didn't take the time, and energy to speak face to face?

Death row. Solitary confinement.  Both are really, really sad. Never thought about it in the context of  being within the walls of a company, an office, within a team and still more sadly for some within families and friendships.

Death row ends in execution. The solitary confinement we work and live in doesn't have to. All it takes is the real effort of human contact.

rb