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href="https://scholars.org/brief/root-americas-over-use-solitary-prison-confinements-and-how-reform-can-happen">https://scholars.org/brief/root-americas-over-use-solitary-prison-confinements-and-how-reform-can-happen</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Root of America's Over-Use of
Solitary Prison Confinements - and How Reform Can Happen</h1>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr"
style="text-align: left;"><a
href="https://scholars.org/scholar/keramet-reiter">Keramet
Reiter</a> - November 2, 2018<br>
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<p><span><span><span>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.</span></span></span></p>
<p><span><span><span><span><span>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. </span></span></span></span></span></p>
<h3><span><span><span><strong>The History of Solitary
Confinement</strong></span></span></span></h3>
<p><span><span><span><span><span>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. </span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p><span><span><span><span><span>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.” </span></span></span></span></span></p>
<h3><span><span><span><strong>Expanding Solitary
Confinement without Clear Reasons</strong></span></span></span></h3>
<p><span><span><span><span><span>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. </span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p><span><span><span><span><span>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. </span></span></span></span></span></p>
<h3><span><span><span><strong>Meeting the Challenge of
Reform</strong></span></span></span></h3>
<p><span><span><span><span><span>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.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p><span><span><span><span><span>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.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
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<p><span><span><span>Read more in Keramet Reiter, <em>23/7:
Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term
Solitary Confinement</em> (Yale University Press,
2016).</span></span></span></p>
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