[Pnews] The Root of America's Over-Use of Solitary Prison Confinements - and How Reform Can Happen

[Prisoner News]

https://scholars.org/brief/root-americas-over-use-solitary-prison-confinements-and-how-reform-can-happen 



  The Root of America's Over-Use of Solitary Prison Confinements - and
  How Reform Can Happen

Keramet Reiter <https://scholars.org/scholar/keramet-reiter> - November 
2, 2018
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tens of thousands of prisoners across the United States spend months, 
years – and sometimes decades – locked alone in windowless concrete 
rooms the size of wheelchair accessible bathroom stalls for at least 23 
hours a day, seven days a week. Prison officials, not judges or juries, 
decide both which prisoners end up in solitary confinement and how long 
prisoners spend locked in these conditions. The United Nations Special 
Rapporteur on Torture says that more than 15 days in these conditions 
can violate international human rights law. And social psychologists 
argue that these conditions can induce symptoms of psychosis after 
anywhere from just a few days to weeks. Solitary confinement is not only 
psychologically expensive – it is fiscally expensive, too. A year in 
solitary averages $75,000 per prisoner – about three times the average 
annual cost of incarceration in the United States and eight times the 
average annual cost of public university tuition. In spite of these 
investments, solitary confinement does not actually reduce violence or 
prison problems.

My research examines how and why solitary confinement, especially its 
modern iteration in supermax facilities, became widespread and popular 
in the 1980s – and why the practice began to wane in popularity if not 
prevalence in the 2010s. By examining the history of supermax prisons 
and doing interviews with prisoners and staff, my research presents 
possibilities for reform.


      *The History of Solitary Confinement*

In the late 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court presumed that solitary 
confinement would be abandoned as a correctional practice, calling it 
“barbaric.” But, almost 100 years later in the 1970s, courts in 
California and across the country were still chastising prison officials 
for keeping prisoners locked in their cells for months at a time, with 
little access to running water, lighting, or human contact. Yet the 
practice both persisted and expanded. Throughout the 1980s, prison 
officials designed and built supermax facilities to the exact minimum 
specifications courts had delineated for solitary cells – with sinks and 
toilets in each cell, fluorescent lights on 24 hours per day, and 
hyper-sanitized facilities made of easy-to-clean poured concrete.

Prison officials opened the first supermax facilities in California and 
Arizona in the 1980s. California’s Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit and 
Arizona’s Special Management Unit were both technologically advanced 
facilities designed with the sole purpose of imposing long-term solitary 
confinement. No voter, legislator, governor, or judge participated in 
design decisions. In fact, judges and prisoner-rights lawyers first 
learned about the incredibly restrictive conditions of confinement in 
places like California’s Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit when 
prisoners started writing to advocates to complain about the draconian 
conditions. These first letters shocked their recipients – so much that 
within a year of Pelican Bay’s 1989 opening, a federal judge certified a 
class of prisoners there and promised to evaluate their conditions of 
confinement. In 1995, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson found 
that conditions in the isolation unit at California’s Pelican Bay State 
Prison, “hover[ed] on the edge of what is humanly tolerable.”


      *Expanding Solitary Confinement without Clear Reasons*

Although Judge Henderson monitored conditions at Pelican Bay for nearly 
two more decades, the use of solitary confinement continued to expand in 
California and across the United States, often with little to no 
oversight from the public, elected officials, or even the courts. 
Solitary confinement faced renewed national and international scrutiny 
in the 2010s, in part thanks to a series of non-violent prisoner actions 
in which more than thirty thousand California prisoners refused food for 
weeks, specifically protesting conditions in solitary confinement. As 
reporters, elected officials, and scholars started asking questions, 
answers were scarce.

No one knows exactly how many U.S. prisoners are or have been in 
solitary confinement or comprehends exactly what the long-term mental 
health consequences of these conditions might be. Nor are there firm 
answers about whether solitary confinement reduces violence in prison or 
recidivism after release. Early research did reveal one surprising fact. 
In some of the states with big solitary confinement populations, 
hundreds of prisoners per year were being released directly from 
solitary confinement onto city streets. Consequences for individuals, 
therefore, likely spill over into the communities to which they return. 
Only in 2015 did the Bureau of Justice Statistics release the first 
report attempting to estimate the national prevalence of experiences 
with “restrictive housing” – a new term coined to encompass the 
varieties of segregation and isolation conditions used in U.S. prisons.


      *Meeting the Challenge of Reform*

As solitary confinement has faced public scrutiny, advocates, elected 
officials, and even some correctional officials have been working to 
reduce its use. Academics are trying to better understand its short and 
long-term impacts on prisoners, prison staff, and communities, but more 
research is needed. As scholars and prison officials debate the effects 
of solitary confinement, a growing body of research suggests that 
prisoners fare better – in terms of health and behavior in and after 
prison – the less restrictive their conditions of confinement. Advocates 
and policymakers should integrate such findings into their efforts to 
craft reforms.

Indeed, solitary confinement reform has gone forward in various ways – 
by legislation, through the courts, and administratively, independently 
initiated by progressive corrections departments. My interviews with 
prison staff working in solitary confinement facilities suggest that 
prison officials themselves are critical to reform efforts, because they 
make so many of the foundational decisions about where prisoners are 
housed, the privileges prisoners have, and the treatment prisoners can 
access. As conversations around prison reform continue and continue to 
be informed by new research about the effects of solitary confinement, 
prison officials must be brought to the table. With their participation, 
perhaps recognition can spread that in order to be a global leader in 
human rights, the United States can and must end cruel and ineffective 
prison practices that undermine basic human dignity and wellbeing.

Read more in Keramet Reiter, /23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of 
Long-Term Solitary Confinement/ (Yale University Press, 2016).

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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