[Pnews] What Will It Take to End Long-Term Solitary Confinement in America’s Prisons? Colorado Could Be the First to Find Out.

[Prisoner News]

    Opening the Door <http://solitarywatch.com/2016/04/29/opening-the-door/>


by Jean Casella and Aviva Stahl - April 29, 2016 
<http://solitarywatch.com/?author=10834>
*http://solitarywatch.com/2016/04/29/opening-the-door/*

For 13 of his 22 years in prison, Cero Smith spent 23 hours a day alone 
in a small concrete cell. Three times a day, a corrections officer would 
pass his meals through a slot in the solid steel cell door. A CO would 
also take him to exercise alone for one hour in a small recreation room 
at the end of the pod. Otherwise, he had no contact with other human beings.

Through a Plexiglass window in a visiting booth at the Colorado State 
Penitentiary (CSP) last fall, Smith described his time in solitary. A 
tall African American man with tattoos covering both arms, he wears a 
serious expression that never cracks, and seems to choose his words 
carefully.

“People find activities to drown it out,” he says of the loneliness and 
monotony of solitary confinement. Now 38, Smith was 16 years old when he 
was sent to adult prison after being convicted of second-degree murder 
in a gang-related killing. Accused of assaulting a corrections officer, 
he was branded a dangerous prisoner and placed in Administrative 
Segregation, or Ad Seg.

“The good thing is, I read a lot, and I learned to write in there. The 
bad thing is that you are stuck with yourself, with nothing to do but 
think. After a while, you can’t even sleep.” The worst, he says, was not 
knowing if and when it would end, since assignment to Ad Seg was 
open-ended. The longest term on record in Colorado had been 24 years. 
Now, there’s supposed to be a one-year cap on how long someone can spend 
in solitary confinement.

Smith officially left solitary when he was chosen for a new “step-down” 
program, instituted by the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) in 
2014 to move individuals out of Ad Seg. When we visited him at CSP, 
Smith was is in the second “step,” a Close Custody Transition Unit 
(CCTU), where he was allowed out of his cell for 6 hours a day with the 
15 other men in his “pod.” He has since rejoined general population at a 
medium security facility in Buena Vista.

But things don’t always go this smoothly. Some men get into fights or 
other kinds of trouble, and get stuck in the first “step,” called the 
Management Control Unit (MCU). Others maintain good behavior, but are 
reluctant to progress back to the chaos of General Population after 
years or decades of forced isolation and de-socialization.

When we met him, Smith said he was “excited” to get into General 
Population, but also anxious—worried about the constant need for 
interaction with others, and the constant threat of confrontation. In 
GP, he says, “Everybody else is always watching.”

*«»*

FOR CLOSE TO thirty years, the United States has been carrying out a 
massive experiment in human isolation, unlike anything that had taken 
place before it anywhere in the world. Its unwilling subjects have been 
drawn from the millions of men, women, and children incarcerated in 
America’s prisons and jails.

The growth of solitary confinement tracks closely with the advent of 
mass incarceration, beginning in the 1980s. It also reflects the 
abandonment of any notion of rehabilitation in favor of piling 
punishment upon punishment. Today, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people 
languish in solitary confinement in state and federal prisons on any 
given day. The number who have served time in solitary over three 
decades is impossible to calculate.

Thanks to the work of a handful of clinicians, scholars, and advocates, 
the outcomes of this experiment in isolation are at last being made 
known. Prolonged solitary causes psychological, physical, and 
neurological damage 
<https://www.aclu.org/other/stop-solitary-resources-advocates-updated-november-2015> that 
is profound and, in many cases, permanent. Unsurprisingly, it also 
appears to increase levels of both prison violence and recidivism.

Spurred by activists on both sides of the prison walls, the damage 
wrought by solitary confinement has begun to penetrate the consciousness 
of the press, the public, and policymakers—not to mention the President 
and the Pope. A growing number of states and localities, as well as the 
federal government, have announced or instituted reforms 
<http://solitarywatch.com/resources/timelines/milestones/>, most 
designed to “reduce” the “overuse” of solitary.

Among prison systems held up as models of reform, none is more prominent 
than Colorado’s. In less than five years, the state says it has reduced 
the number of people it holds in Administrative Segregation from a high 
of 1,500—7 percent of the prison population—to approximately 160 of its 
just under 20,000 prisoners, which would give Colorado the lowest rate 
of solitary confinement use in the nation.

Colorado has “reclassified” hundreds of individuals out of solitary and 
into general population, and placed hundreds more in its step-down 
program. It has also removed from administrative segregation people 
diagnosed with serious mental illness, who traditionally make up a 
disproportionate number of those in solitary, and placed them in 
Residential Treatment Programs in separate prisons or units.

Much of the credit for this change goes to Rick Raemisch, who since July 
2013 has served as executive director of the CDOC. In an interview with 
Solitary Watch late last year, Raemisch said that he did not seek to 
merely “reduce” prolonged solitary confinement, but eventually to 
eliminate it altogether—something that sets him apart even from other 
reformers in the corrections community. Shortly afterwards, when he and 
his deputy director published a report about the changes in Colorado, 
they titled it /Open the Door/, a phrase Raemisch also uses frequently 
in public speeches.

The CDOC is clearly proud of the changes it made, and unusually open in 
allowing the press inside its facilities to see them firsthand. During a 
series of prison visits by Solitary Watch, Raemisch and other prison 
officials and staff showed us the new types of housing that have 
replaced supermax prisons and solitary confinement units for those 
prisoners traditionally deemed dangerous or disruptive.

But the rollback of solitary confinement in Colorado is more complex, 
and less complete, than might appear at first glance. Interviews with 
advocates, reviews of public records, and letters from incarcerated men 
reveal a reform effort that has encountered plenty of problems and 
pitfalls. Some say these problems are being glossed over in pursuit of 
the narrative of Colorado’s singular progress toward eliminating solitary.

Colorado’s reforms clearly remain a work-in-progress. The task of doing 
away with prolonged solitary confinement involves breaking down policies 
and practices that have prevailed for three decades—along with the 
prison culture they have created, and the damage they have done to the 
men and women who endured them.

In his interview, Raemisch acknowledged that much work still remained, 
but pointed out that Colorado’s prisons are attempting to do something 
that has never been done before. “When we started this,” he says, “not 
only was there no roadmap--there was no road.”

*«»*

RICK RAEMISCH’S tenure at the Colorado Department of Corrections—and his 
mandate to reform solitary confinement—are predicated upon the terrible 
events of March 19, 2013. At 8:30 that evening, Tom Clements, just into 
his third year as CDOC executive director, was shot to death after 
answering the door of his family home in Monument, not far from the 
CDOC’s offices in Colorado Springs.

The presumed killer, Evan Ebel, died two days later after a high-speed 
car chase and shootout with police in Texas. He had been released on 
parole that January after spending seven years in solitary in Colorado’s 
prisons, and had also murdered a Denver man who delivered pizzas in 
order to steal his uniform, which Ebel was wearing when he showed up on 
Clements’s doorstep.

As reported by the /Colorado Independent/ 
<http://www.coloradoindependent.com/127520/ebel-friend-suicide-note-shows-parolee-ruined-by-solitary-bent-on-revenge>, 
testimony from other prisoners who had served time with Ebel, as well as 
letters and texts and prison grievances written by Ebel himself, 
revealed that he was “unhinged by his abrupt release from solitary 
confinement and seeking revenge for years of humiliation and torture 
behind bars.” In one grievance 
<http://www.coloradoindependent.com/127596/clements-murder-suspect-ebel-was-anxious-about-walking-free-documents-show>, 
Ebel had written: “Do you have an obligation to the public to 
reacclimate me, the dangerous inmate, to being around other human beings 
prior to being released and, if not, why?”

The tragic irony of Clements’s murder was that in the two years prior to 
his death, the DOC head had become deeply concerned with precisely the 
same question. He often cited the fact that nearly half of all 
individuals housed in solitary confinement were being released directly 
to the streets, some after years of extreme isolation and sensory 
deprivation. In 2011, he told the /Independent/ 
<http://www.coloradoindependent.com/128438/co-prison-officials-acknowledge-chiefs-murder-tied-to-solitary-confinement-policies>: 
“Forty-seven percent of these guys are walking right out of ad-seg into 
our communities...That’s the number that keeps me awake at night.”

In fact, under Clements the use of Administrative Segregation in 
Colorado was reduced by more than 40 percent. Bolstered by the 2011 
passage of a bill 
<http://www.safealternativestosegregation.org/resources/view/colorado-sb-11-176> in 
the Colorado legislature that encouraged alternatives to solitary, the 
CDOC reviewed and “reclassified” about 700 men, women, and children from 
Ad Seg back into the general population prior to Clements’s death.

Rick Raemisch arrived in Colorado in July 2013 after a nearly 40-year 
career in law enforcement and corrections in Wisconsin, which culminated 
in leadership of that state’s department of corrections. He was 
immediately supplied with a bodyguard.

Raemisch has pale eyes behind frameless glasses and serious, 
square-jawed face that is transformed by his rare smiles. Interviewed in 
his Colorado Springs office on a sunny fall day, he speaks with a strong 
Midwestern accent, and the quiet fervor of a true believer.

After Clements’s assassination, Raemisch said, “It would have been easy 
to say we should have been tougher. But we decided instead to be 
smarter.” That meant continuing—and dramatically expanding—the solitary 
reforms he had inherited.

In February 2014, Raemisch literally made headlines when he volunteered 
to spend 20 hours in an isolation cell, and wrote about it in a /New 
York Times/ op-ed entitled “My Night in Solitary 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/opinion/my-night-in-solitary.html>.” 
Raemisch described the “drone of garbled noise” and the constant bright 
lights, which he said left him feeling “twitchy and paranoid.” By the 
next morning, he wrote, “I felt as if I’d been there for days. I sat 
with my mind. How long would it take before Ad Seg chipped that away? I 
don’t know, but I’m confident that it would be a battle I would lose.”

In our interview, Raemisch asserted that the explosion in the use of 
solitary reflects an essential error in judgement on the part of 
corrections departments. Prolonged isolation is “used—and overused—to 
run a more efficient institution,” he said. “You shut the door on 
someone who’s creating a problem—end of problem. Or at least that was 
the thinking at the time. But it didn’t solve the problem. At best it 
suspended it, and it probably multiplied it.”

He continued, “Running an efficient institution is a noble goal, but 
we’ve lost sight of our mission. Our mission is community safety—period. 
And to do that we’ve got to ensure that we’re not putting people out 
worse than they were when they came in.”

To achieve that goal, Raemisch said, he and Colorado Governor John 
Hickenlooper agreed to focus on three areas: first, “to look at every 
Administrative Segregation case” with eye toward transitioning isolated 
prisoners back into general population; second, to “look at trying to 
get the mentally ill out of segregation”; and finally, to “stop the 
process of putting people directly back into the community from 
segregation.”

Since 2014, no one has been released directly to the streets from what 
is now officially considered solitary confinement. In the other two 
areas, a road has clearly been carved out—but it is not without its 
bumps and detours.

*«»*

AT THE HEART of the CDOC’s solitary reforms is the work being done at 
Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP), which sits just below the foothills 
of the Rocky Mountains, 120 miles south of Denver. It is one of 14 state 
and federal prisons in and around the high desert town of Cañon City 
<http://solitarywatch.com/2010/10/11/the-colorado-files-leaving-canon-city/>, 
which also boasts a Museum of Colorado Prisons housing an actual disused 
gas chamber, as well as balls and chains, cattle prods, and a kind of 
whipping horse that was known as the “Old Gray Mare.”

Opened in 1993 at the height of the supermax boom, CSP became known for 
a more modern form of cruel and unusual punishment. Its 756 cells were 
built expressly for the extreme isolation of Administrative Segregation.

For twenty years, the men who lived at CSP spent 23 hours a day in 
solitary confinement in 7 x 13-foot cells, with one hour out to exercise 
alone in a slightly larger cell on the tier. The average term in Ad Seg 
when Raemisch arrived in Colorado was nearly two years. In a 2012 ruling 
in a suit brought by a man who had spent years in solitary, a federal 
court 
<http://www.westword.com/news/troy-anderson-lawsuit-supermax-must-provide-outdoor-rec-judge-rules-5858765> called 
CSP’s failure to provide outdoor recreation, fresh air, and sunlight “a 
paradigm of inhumane treatment,” and ordered the CDOC to provide him 
with outdoor exercise areas.

Today, outdoor areas are under construction, but not much else has 
changed in terms of the physical plant of the prison. As with all 
purpose-built supermaxes, CSP was originally constructed without 
any large congregate spaces—no prison yards, no mess halls, and no day 
rooms. And as with all supermaxes, the physical construction of CSP 
itself presents a daunting challenge to anyone who seeks to “open the 
door” to its isolation cells.

But at CSP, the doors have in fact begun to open—within a strict set of 
limits. Our tour of the facility last November, in the company of Warden 
Travis Trani and Associate Warden Sean Foster, provided a glimpse of how 
Colorado is easing people out of solitary confinement.

Colorado now limits Disciplinary Segregation for routine rule 
violations—which in some states can run to months or years—to no more 
than 30 days. Individuals who commit more serious acts or are deemed a 
threat to safety and security can be sent to Restricted Housing Maximum 
(RH Max), which has replaced Administrative Segregation, for up to one 
year. For several hundred men who are deemed to need 
re-socialization—some after years of solitary under the old system—there 
is the step-down program at CSP.

The first step takes places in Management Control Units (MCUs), which on 
the day of our visit held 261 men. In each of the cell “pods” in the 
MCUs, eight men at a time are supposed to be released from their cells 
for four hours a day—two hours each morning, and two hours each afternoon.

For most of that time, they don’t go very far. Each 16-cell pod on the 
unit is walled off from the central guard station by reinforced glass. 
It is within these glass-walled areas that the prison has created 
makeshift “day rooms” where unshackled men are allowed to congregate.

Within each pod’s day room, small groups of men talked or played cards 
on tables and benches bolted to the floor. A large clock on the wall 
allowed them the rare opportunity to keep track of time, and the space 
held some stationary exercise equipment. New electrical wiring was being 
put in place in the day rooms, Warden Trani explained, to allow 
installation of televisions and microwaves. Some programming now takes 
place within the MCUs, including literacy, GED, and some academic 
classes, anger management, gang awareness, and customer service.

With the exception of occasional loudspeaker announcements, the unit was 
fairly quiet, with none of the screaming or door-banging that 
characterizes most supermax prisons and solitary confinement units. “Pod 
groups” were carefully chosen to minimize conflict, Trani said, but 
fights were far from unknown. When that happened, corrections officer 
remained safely behind the glass walls until a team could be assembled 
to intervene.

In the pods around the unit, some of the men seemed engaged in what they 
were doing, while others appeared somewhat bored. What they were not was 
alone.

The next step “down” from Ad Seg takes place in Close Custody Transition 
Units (CCTUs), which held 156 men on the day of our visit. In the CCTU 
pods, all 16 men come out of their cells simultaneously for a total of 
six hours each day. Staff here enter and leave the day rooms and 
interact more freely with prisoners. And the men leave their pods for 
GED and other educational classes, as well as for programming aimed at 
improving their behavior and reducing risk when they are returned to 
general population. The CCTU step is designed to last for up to six months.

The primary program used in Colorado is Thinking for a Change 
<https://www.crimesolutions.gov/ProgramDetails.aspx?ID=242> (T4C), a 
course designed by the federally funded National Institute of 
Corrections and described as “a cognitive–behavioral curriculum…that 
concentrates on changing the criminogenic thinking of offenders…[It] 
includes cognitive restructuring, social skills development, and the 
development of problem-solving skills.” The program’s cycle of 25 
lessons have titles like “Thinking Controls Our Behavior,” “Recognize 
Risk,” “Understanding the Feelings of Others,” and “Responding to Anger.”

Other programs include Moral Reconation Therapy 
<http://www.moral-reconation-therapy.com/> (MRT) and a CDOC-created 
Conflict Resolution program aimed at members of gangs. They are taught 
to groups of eight at a time. Both T4C and MRT claim studies show that 
they improve prison behavior and reduce post-prison recidivism. But it 
is too early to say precisely what impact they will have in Colorado.

One problem, Trani says, is that “we have handful of guys who do not 
want to progress…they want to stay here because its single-celled. If 
they progress they have to go into a double-celled situation, they have 
to deal with more offenders.”

Prison staff and leadership, he says are developing strategies for how 
to deal with these men. But the dilemma points to an inconvenient truth 
for any solitary opponent: The goal of most reforms is to return 
individuals to General Population, which in most American prisons is in 
itself a nasty, dangerous, and inhumane environment.

Some advocacy groups have pointed to other problems with Colorado’s 
step-down units, particularly the MCU. In a 14-page letter sent to Rick 
Raemisch in January, the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado 
outlined what it perceived as the CDOC’s successes and shortcomings in 
reducing the use and severity of isolation. Solitary Watch obtained the 
letter, and Raemisch’s response, through a Colorado Open Records Act 
(CORA) request.

According to the letter, “on average, prisoners in at least some MCUs 
are getting much less than four hours of out-of-cell time per day,” in 
part a result of frequent lockdowns reported on the units. (When we 
visited, a three-week lockdown had recently followed the loss of a 
handcuff key.) In addition, the letter stated, people were spending too 
much time in the MCU; as of September 2015 over eighty men had spent 
more than a year there. The ACLU acquired the data cited in the letter 
through records requests to the CDOC.

Several letters to Solitary Watch from men currently or formerly housed 
in the MCUs also said they were frustrated at how little programming was 
offered on the units, and echoed concerns that people on the units were 
sometimes placed in 24-hour lockdown after violent incidents, even if 
they weren’t suspected of being involved.

Based on its findings, the ACLU wrote, “we are concerned that the 
current policy and practice in the MCUs create a risk that the units 
will devolve into ‘administrative segregation’ by another name.” The 
group recommended “implementation of stricter limits on the use of MCUs 
and greater oversight and accountability for the out-of-cell time on 
these units” in order to “prevent such an unwanted outcome.”

In a February letter of response, Raemisch contested the ACLU’s 
characterization of the MCUs, and asserted that the CDOC was already 
closely monitoring lockdowns and had instituted 90-day reviews to 
determine when those held in MCUs were ready to move on. He rejected the 
suggestion of a strict six-month cap on time in the MCUs.

The ACLU letter had deeper concerns about the 160-odd individuals who 
remain in solitary confinement in what is now called Restrictive Housing 
Maximum, at Sterling Correctional Facility (which we did not visit). 
Individuals held in RH Max spend at least 22 hours a day in their cells. 
They have extremely limited access to televisions, books, phone calls 
and visits, and are not allowed to purchase food off the canteen. 
According to a letter received from one man who is currently 
incarcerated at Sterling, RH Max is “ten times worse than ad-seg used to 
be,” a perspective echoed by several others who wrote to us.

Raemisch responded in his letter that the initial 90 days in RH Max were 
meant to “demonstrate an austere environment,” and that thereafter, the 
individuals had opportunities, through good behavior, to earn privileges 
like televisions. Under the old model, he wrote, offenders had “no 
incentives to motivate them to progress to general population 
environments.” He also pointed out that “Colorado is the only State that 
has set maximum length of stays in extended restricted housing, which do 
not exceed 12 months,” and that year-long sentences are only handed out 
for the most serious, violent offenses in prison.

Yet by any measure, a year in solitary confinement is a long time, and 
more than sufficient to cause the kind of psychological damage Raemisch 
himself is concerned about. Additionally, some individuals have been 
returned back to the isolation unit from the MCUs, suggesting that in 
the aggregate, people could end up spending more than a year in RH Max. 
And the overall number of men held in RH Max has not dropped in the past 
year. (There are no longer any women in long-term solitary.)

These 160 men clearly stand between current practice and Raemisch’s 
pledge to eventually eliminate prolonged solitary confinement from the 
Colorado prison system. He is aware that what happens to them, and 
others like them, in the next few years will put that pledge to the test.

*«»*

IN JUNE 2014, the Colorado legislature passed a bill banning the 
placement of people with “major mental illness” in solitary confinement. 
In this case, law actually lagged behind policy, since the CDOC had 
instituted the same ban nearly six months earlier.

“We basically adopted the philosophy that you can’t take someone with a 
mental illness, put them in a 7 x 13-foot cell, and let them stay in 
there 23 hours a day letting the demons chase them around,” Raemisch 
said in his interview.

According to Raemisch, about 34 to 36 percent of Colorado’s prison 
system has “some type of mental health problem,” while 10 to 12 percent 
of those individuals are “what we would term seriously mentally 
ill”—generally meaning they have schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or 
major depressive disorder.

The numbers are fairly typical. In the United States today, according to 
a 2014 study 
<http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/storage/documents/catalysts/tacatalyst%20fall%2014.pdf> by 
the Treatment Advocacy Center, there are 35,000 individuals in the 
nation’s psychiatric hospitals, and 350,000 in its prisons and jails.

“Myself and my peers, we all say the same thing,” Raemisch said. “That 
our corrections department is the largest mental health institution in 
the state…There’s that fallacy that we de-institutionalized the mentally 
ill years ago, but we didn’t really. They just moved over from state 
mental hospitals over to the prison system, and that’s where they sit 
right now.”

To deal with these individuals, Raemisch determined that he would 
further develop and greatly expand the Residential Treatment Program 
(RTP) model first utilized under Tom Clements. The CDOC soon had two 
large RTPs for men: one at Centennial Correctional Facility in Cañon 
City, with beds for 240 of the “chronically mentally ill,” and one 
comprising all of San Carlos Correctional Facility in Pueblo, has beds 
for 255 of the “most acutely mentally ill” as well as some men with 
developmental disabilities. A smaller RTP at Denver Women’s Correctional 
Facility has a capacity of 48.

Some of these men and women have been sent to the RTPs from the Denver 
Reception and Diagnostic Center following admission to the prison 
system. Others are moved there after what CDOC calls "a comprehensive 
process of identifying offenders in General Population for mental health 
needs and refer[ring] them for treatment." Some are there because they 
have violated prison rules. “What we do is we look at the individual to 
see if mental illness might have had something to do with that 
violation,” Raemisch said. “If we find that it has, we take that person 
out of the disciplinary process and place them, if needed, in an RTP.” 
The RTPs are meant to prevent anyone with a serious mental illness from 
being sent into RH Max.

Raemisch accompanied us last November when we visited San Carlos 
Correctional Facility, along with clinical and security staff. The low, 
red-brick building in Pueblo is divided into units where men are placed 
based on their conditions and their behavior. We did not see “2 West,” 
where, we were told, the “most violent offenders” with mental illness 
were housed.

On the fourth floor, units hold a mix of individuals diagnosed with a 
major mental illness, all of whom are supposed to be diverted to the 
RTP. In addition, said San Carlos’s Mental Health Supervisor, Joann 
O’Neil, those with lower range diagnoses, such as personality disorders, 
could be placed in an RTP “when symptoms rise to a level interfering 
with their well-being,” such as self-harm or aggressive or destructive 
behavior, or anyone whose mental health needs require an immediate 
intervention.

Major Sean Pruitt, the top-level uniformed staff person at San Carlos, 
spoke gently about the suffering endured by the men in his custody, and 
echoed Raemisch’s assertion that if any bad behavior they exhibited 
had resulted from their mental illness, it should be responded to with 
treatment, not punishment.

The units were clean and quiet, with minimal activity taking in common 
areas. Most of the men were inside their cells, and mental health staff 
were working in their offices, which are within the units. Corrections 
officers walked the corridors, serving as a reminder that this was not, 
in fact, a secure mental hospital, but a prison.

O’Neil stopped to ask a thin, quiet man whether we could view his cell. 
A narrow slit window filtered in a bit of light, revealing a television 
and radio, and a few pictures and other personal items. During a moment 
alone in the cell with its occupant, we asked how he felt about the 
staff at San Carlos. “I like them,” he said tentatively—and then, after 
a pause, “I love them.” We learned later that this man had not spoken 
during his first year in the RTP. He now works as a janitor.

In one treatment room, a clinician and four men were seated around a 
table, talking. The tables are specially designed with holes through 
which prisoners’ shackles can be threaded, if need be, allowing groups 
of men to be in close proximity without being able to attack one another 
or staff.

The RTP program is designed to operate on a “10 and 10” schedule, 
meaning, according to the CDOC, "ten hours of structured therapeutic 
out-of-cell opportunities and ten hours of non-therapeutic out-of-cell 
opportunities per week." The therapeutic hours are supposed to include 
individual therapy as well as groups for various cognitive behavioral 
therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy, anger management, medication 
and self-care, drug and alcohol treatment, and something called the 
Wellness Recovery Action Plans (WRAP), which are individualized plans 
developed by staff and prisoners.

The goal of all the programming, Raemisch said, was to “solve the mental 
illness problem and get them back into general population. Some of them 
unfortunately are so severely mentally disabled that they will do their 
time in the Residential Treatment Program. That’s the safest place for 
them.”

In his interview, Raemisch volunteered that the RTPs had experienced 
significant numbers of prisoners who refused to come out of their cells 
for either therapy or recreation, especially in the units’ early years. 
They had the right to refuse and were never forced, he said, but staff 
worked hard to find ways to engage people and “entice them out of their 
cells,” including art and other activities tailored to their interests, 
and the use of therapy dogs.

This high refusal rate, however, has become the focus of criticism 
leveled by advocates. According to the ACLU, prisoners on the RTPs have 
reported that many groups “are run so poorly run and of so little 
utility that many prisoners avoid them.”  Average refusal rates have 
actually been worsening over time, exceeding 75 percent between February 
and April 2015 at San Carlos. According the ACLU letter, “on any given 
week, about eighty prisoners [at SCCF] went without any therapeutic 
out-of-cell time at all.”

Staff at Disability Rights Colorado, a public interest organization that 
specializes in civil rights and discrimination issues, said access to 
individual therapy on the RTPs is extremely limited, even though it is 
the most effective form of treatment, especially since being honest and 
vulnerable in group therapy can be difficult—or even dangerous—in prison 
settings.

Understaffing at the RTPs remains acute, with the CDOC struggling to 
compete with the private sector for skilled clinicians, and convince 
them to live in often remote prison towns. The programs had a nearly 30 
percent vacancy rate among mental health staff as of November 2015, 
according to the ACLU letter.  DRC also expressed concern that some 
corrections officers were not adequately trained or screened for dealing 
with people with mental illness, even though many officers 
had volunteered to work in the RTPs, and first received training in 
"first aid, trauma informed care, and working with offenders with 
self-injurious behavior."

The ACLU letter also notes that in the early days of the RTPs—most of 
them before Raemisch’s time—data showed “a major decrease in the number 
and percent of prisoners perceived as having serious mental illness at 
the precise moment when CDOC was considering expanding services to those 
prisoners and excluding them from solitary confinement”—a 7 percent drop 
between February and August 2013.  (Similar trends have been identified 
in other states that have banned the mentally ill from solitary, notably 
New York State.)

In his response to the ACLU letter, Raemisch cited statistics (which he 
acknowledged were based on “raw data”) from the previous year, showing 
that at San Carlos, “use of special controls” such as restraints was 
down 93 percent; forced cell entries were down 77 percent; and prisoner 
on staff assaults were down 46 percent.

In his letter, Raemisch also rejected the idea that high refusal rates 
reflected poor quality group programming; prisoners were simply afraid 
to come out of their cells, he said, and every effort was being made to 
address the problem. He declined the ACLU’s suggestion of bringing in an 
independent team of experts to study the refusal problem and other 
shortcomings in the RTPs. A subsequent statement from the CDOC said: 
"Refusal is driven by mental illness and anti-social behaviors. 
Offenders with mental illness need to feel safe and until their mental 
illness is stabilized, they cannot be forced to come out. "

In his response to the ACLU, Raemisch also enclosed a letter from the 
CDOC’s chief of psychiatry, acknowledging that the state had moved to a 
different system of diagnosis in mid-2013, and defending the empirical 
basis of that shift. In a statement, the CDOC said it "had thoroughly 
explained the refined definitions of SMI [serious mental illness] in 
DSM-V" and had "identified and treated more offenders than in previous 
years."

In an earlier round of criticism, the CDOC’s former director of planning 
and analysis, Maureen O’Keefe, alleged she had been placed on 
administrative leave after claiming the department was manipulating data 
to exaggerate the extent of the solitary reforms for the mentally ill. 
In December, the CDOC—which has characterized O’Keefe as a “dismal” 
manager--agreed to pay $280,000 to settle a whistleblower suit. CDOC 
states that it "stands behind our numbers and always have."

When asked in our interview about the criticisms of the RTP, Raemisch 
said, “These are all the things that come up when you’re involved in 
change.”

“There are always things that we can be criticized for,” he continued, 
“but the fact of the matter is, there are so many things that we’re the 
only one in the United States doing it right now. And I would say to 
those critics that we haven’t stood up and declared success. What we’ve 
stood up and declared is that we’ve made tremendous progress and we’re 
going to keep making that progress.”

*«»*

ALTHOUGH HE positions himself as a pragmatist (“I just want to do what 
works,”), Rick Raemisch comes off as a reformer at heart, whose critique 
of the U.S. criminal justice system at times reaches beyond solitary 
confinement to the punishment paradigm in general.

Last year, he was one of only two corrections leaders to be part of the 
US Delegation to meetings in Cape Town and Vienna to re-write the UN 
Minimum Standards for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Mandela 
Rules. Among other things, the Mandela Rules denounce the use of 
solitary confinement beyond 15 days. Raemisch also serves as a founding 
member of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Law Enforcement Leadership 
Group Think Tank, which aims to reduce both crime and incarceration.

Outside of the state of Colorado, Raemisch is widely and deeply admired 
by anti-solitary activists, and by prison administrators and 
policymakers who seek to reduce the use of solitary confinement in their 
own systems. He is in high demand at conferences and symposiums across 
the country and as far away as Australia, where he outlines the dramatic 
changes in Colorado, and encourages other prison systems to “open the door.”

Raemisch’s CDOC has also been unusually open and transparent, both in 
providing data to advocates and in allowing the press to view its work 
around solitary confinement. The department provided rare access to 
Solitary Watch, undoubtedly knowing that we have often been sharply 
critical of prison conditions around the country. “If we had anything to 
hide,” Raemisch said in our interview, “you wouldn’t be here.”

It is surprising, then, that his relationship with prisoner advocates in 
his home state is so much more complicated, and less sanguine. Most of 
the advocates we interviewed remembered the days when Colorado held more 
than 1,500 people in torturous isolation, and all acknowledged the 
significant strides the CDOC has taken under both Clements’s and 
Raemisch’s leadership. But most were also frustrated by what they saw as 
Raemisch’s defensiveness about what they considered constructive 
criticism, and his rejection of opportunities to work together toward 
what they believed were common goals.

"Colorado is doing many, many things right—which I think is clear in our 
letter," said Rebecca Wallace, Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Colorado. 
"It's been disappointing to see that the administration has been closed 
to what I think are well-intentioned and well-grounded criticisms that 
are intended to help move the administration to the next phase."

Part of the disconnect may lie in the fact that, despite his 
protestations that he has not yet declared success, Raemisch is often 
perceived as having done exactly that—and prematurely. In all deep 
institutional change, the devil is in the details. And the details of 
solitary reform in Colorado present a more complex picture—and represent 
a more complex challenge—than the presentations Raemisch gives at 
conferences, and the admiring media profiles of him, would suggest.

“There’s been change, and it’s been substantial—but it’s not enough,” 
said a staff member at Disability Rights Colorado. “If Raemisch has 
these rose-colored glasses on about his programs, even if he’s this 
great guy and he wants to fix it, he doesn’t think there’s anything to 
fix. It’s just frustrating.”

In fact, it is hardly surprising that the reforms remain a 
work-in-progress, less than five years after they were begun. Prison 
systems are vast bureaucracies, with complex hierarchical structures and 
entrenched ways of conducting their daily business. And for nearly three 
decades, solitary confinement has been prisons’ primary method of 
controlling the individuals in their custody.

While Colorado’s corrections officers’ union has not come out against 
the efforts to reduce solitary in their state (as have the powerful 
guards’ unions in California, Illinois, and New York), rank-and-file 
officers are generally reluctant to give up such instruments of power. 
Relinquishing the use of solitary requires a sea change in the way 
prison staff think and operate.

Raemisch praises his staff at all levels for largely embracing this 
change. But a few years is a very short time to bring about such a 
profound cultural shift. And letters from incarcerated people, as well 
as comments by advocates and former prison staff, suggest this shift is 
yet to be fully achieved.

So, too, is the shift taking place for the hundreds of incarcerated 
individuals being released from solitary into new environments. Many are 
deeply damaged by their experience of extreme isolation. 
Others—including many of those who wrote to us—are confused by the 
changes around them, and frustrated by problems in the newly opened 
alternative units. After complaining about frequent lockdowns in the 
CCTUs, Cero Smith wrote: “Just because you preach change, doesn’t mean 
change is coming.”

But after spending a week in the state, we do believe that meaningful 
change has come to Colorado’s prisons, and that more will come in the 
future. We also believe that listening to all voices—including those of 
advocates and the incarcerated—will only hasten and deepen that process. 
By mustering all forces for change, Colorado may be indeed be the first 
state to truly eliminate long-term solitary confinement from its prisons.

It is still too soon to say how much more time and how much more work it 
will take to reach that goal. But for all its difficulties, what 
Colorado has set out to do is well worth striving for, and well worth 
watching. “Come back in a year,” Raemisch said to us as we left, “and 
see what we’ve done.”

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