The Abuse of Solitary
Confinement
June 20, 2012
Solitary confinement
in this country has devolved from a short-term punishment imposed infrequently
for violating prison rules into a routine form of prison management. Today,
tens of thousands of local, state and federal prisoners are held in prolonged
abusive isolation — in tiny, windowless cells for up to 23 hours a day.
On Tuesday, a Senate judiciary subcommittee met to consider the
many costs of this practice — the
first time that Congress has even acknowledged the problem.
More than 80,000 of
the nation’s 2.3 million prisoners are held in isolation, noted the
subcommittee’s chairman, Senator
Richard Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois. While defenders claim
that solitary confinement is needed to control the most violent prisoners,
prolonged isolation is known to induce suffering and mental illness. About half
of prison suicides take place in isolation units.
A 2006 study of prison safety and abuse led by a former
federal court of appeals judge, John Gibbons, and a former attorney general,
the late Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, raised concerns about higher recidivism
rates when prisoners are released directly from solitary to the community. High
rates of security segregation can actually increase incidents of violence.
Some of the most moving testimony at the hearing came from
Anthony Graves, who was wrongly convicted of murder and served a decade of his
18 years in incarceration in brutal solitary confinement in Texas before his
exoneration and release from prison in 2010. He described the agony of living
in the “worst conditions imaginable” and the continued psychological toll.
The committee also
heard from Christopher Epps, who is the commissioner of the
Department of Corrections in Mississippi, one of a growing number of
states that have reduced prison violence and reaped millions in budgetary
savings by steeply cutting back on solitary confinement. Discouragingly, the
director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Charles Samuels Jr.,
expressed scant interest in pursuing similar reforms even though 15,000 federal
prisoners — 7 percent of the total population — are currently serving time in
solitary. That compares with just 1.4 percent in Mississippi, a state hardly
known for being soft on crime.
Senator Durbin says he
is working on legislation that would require greater transparency about
state and federal use of solitary confinement and looking at ways to remove
barriers that make it nearly impossible for inmates held in solitary to protect
their rights in court. The first step, though, should be clear standards
minimizing the use of this form of punishment, including an immediate, strictly
enforced bar on holding children and mentally ill inmates in severe conditions
of isolation.
