[Pnews] New York State to Limit Use of Solitary Confinement
Prisoner News
ppnews at freedomarchives.org
Wed Feb 19 14:45:46 EST 2014
New York State to Limit Use of Solitary Confinement
By BENJAMIN WEISER
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/benjamin_weiser/index.html>FEB.
19, 2014
*http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/20/nyregion/new-york-state-agrees-to-big-changes-in-how-prisons-discipline-inmates.html?hp&_r=0*
New York State has agreed to sweeping changes that will curtail the
widespread use of solitary confinement to punish prison infractions,
according to court papers filed on Wednesday.
Under the agreement, New York becomes the largest prison system in the
United States to bar the use of solitary confinement for disciplining
prisoners under 18, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union,
which represented the three prisoners who
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/nyregion/new-york-state-sued-over-use-of-isolation-in-prisons.html>se
lawsuit
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/nyregion/new-york-state-sued-over-use-of-isolation-in-prisons.html>led
to the agreement.
The agreement says that 16- and 17-year-old prisoners who are subjected
to even the most restrictive form of disciplinary confinement must be
given at least five hours a day of outdoor exercise and programming
outside of their cells.
State correction officials will also be prohibited from imposing
solitary confinement as a disciplinary measure for inmates who are
pregnant and the punishment will be limited to 30 days for those are
developmentally disabled, the court filing says.
The agreement also imposes "sentencing guidelines," specifying the
length of punishment allowed for different infractions and, for the
first time in all cases, a maximum length that such sentences may run,
the N.Y.C.L.U. said.
Judge Shira Scheindlin has been asked to put litigation on hold as
disciplinary reforms are explored. Richard Drew/Associated Press
"New York State has done the right thing by committing to comprehensive
reform of the way it uses extreme isolation, a harmful and inhumane
practice that has for years been used as a punishment of first resort"
in the state's prisons, said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the
civil rights group.
In the court filing, the Department of Corrections and Community
Supervision <http://www.doccs.ny.gov/> says it "recognizes that
disciplinary sanctions must never be arbitrary or capricious or overly
severe and that a sound disciplinary system relies on certainty and
promptness of action rather than upon severity."
The agreement also calls for the N.Y.C.L.U. and the state to each
designate an expert to assess current disciplinary practices in the
state prisons and recommend further reforms.
If the reform process is successful, the lawsuit will be settled in two
years, the civil rights group said.
The joint filing asks the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District
Court in Manhattan, to place the litigation on hold while the process
takes place. The judge gave that approval on Wednesday.
The agreement calls for the creation of a new post of assistant
commissioner and a separate research position to allow the corrections
department to "oversee and monitor the disciplinary system" statewide,
through data collection and tracking performance, with the goal of
"promoting consistency and fairness" in the imposition of such discipline.
Taylor Pendergrass, the lead lawyer in the case for the civil liberties
group, said several states, including Washington, Mississippi and
Colorado, had begun to address the issue of how to reduce the use of
solitary confinement; a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee is holding a
hearing next week on the issue. He said that a handful of states have
also banned or limited the use of solitary confinement for inmates under
18, in adult or juvenile detention facilities.
But given New York's size and visibility, Mr. Pendergrass said, the
agreement places the state "at the vanguard" of progressive thinking
about how to move away from "a very punitive system that almost every
state has adopted in one form or another over the last couple of decades."
There are about 3,800 state prisoners currently being held in "extreme
isolation" cells, known as special housing units or S.H.U.'s, according
to the civil liberties group. The organization's 2012 report, "Boxed
In," <http://www.nyclu.org/files/publications/nyclu_boxedin_FINAL.pdf>
found that from 2007 through 2011, corrections officials issued such
sentences about 68,000 times for disciplinary reasons. The most common
infraction was failure to obey an order, which resulted in 35,000 such
punishments, the data showed.
The average "extreme isolation" sentence was about five months, the
report said, with nearly 2,800 sentences of a year or more.
Such prisoners are held in their cells for 23 hours a day, receive their
meals through a slot in the cell door and are granted one hour of
outdoor recreation in a "walled-in solitary pen," the civil liberties
group says.
Roughly half of such inmates are confined alone, while the other half
are held with another prisoner in a cramped space about the size of a
parking spot, the report says.
"Double-celled prisoners experience the same isolation and idleness,
withdrawal and anxiety, anger and depression as do prisoners living
alone in the S.H.U.," the report said. But such inmates also must
"endure the constant, unabating presence of another man in their
personal physical and mental space," it added.
--
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