The media spotlight is once again on the issue of prison conditions, as sentencing looms for Erin Patterson – convicted for three murders after serving a beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms.

The prosecution has called for a sentence of life imprisonment.

The defence has drawn attention to the harmful conditions of prison isolation, which Patterson has endured for approximately 400 days.

Supreme Court Judge Beale has said he would give “weighty consideration” to her prison conditions in determining the sentence, noting Patterson’s prison conditions do not “sound very humane”.

A principle of modern democracies where the rule of law prevails, such as Australia, is that people are sent to prison as punishment – not for punishment.

For more than a year Patterson has been held in the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, a maximum-security women’s prison in the western suburbs of Melbourne.

For most of this time, she has been in the Gordon Unit. This is a protected area where women are held in solitary confinement without meaningful human contact for almost the entire day.

Patterson has been locked in her cell alone for between 22 and 24 hours, and can only speak to one other inmate.

Jenny Hosking, the assistant commissioner for the sentence management division at Corrections Victoria, provided the sentencing court with details about Patterson’s........

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