An inmate looks out a window in his solitary confinement cell at the Santa Clara County Main Jail Complex in San Jose, California, in December 2019.
In April, criminal justice reform advocates in New York celebrated the signing of a new law that limits solitary confinement to fifteen days. The law—called the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act—puts New York among only a few other states that have restricted solitary to a significant degree for everyone in prison. (Other states have banned solitary for vulnerable people such as youth and those with mental illness.)
But shortly after the law passed, the New York City Board of Correction—which monitors and inspects the city’s jails—approved a separate policy in June that would, advocates believe, reimpose solitary confinement. It is set to go into effect in November.
“Once they saw that we had family and friends building that movement on the outside, they realized they needed to make some changes, because the public was being exposed to what was going on.”
The board, along with the mayor, insists the new rule is in compliance with the new state law. Advocates argue that it simply reinstates solitary by another name. The policy, called the Risk Management Accountability System, creates new levels of separate disciplinary housing, where people would be released from their cells for ten hours per day and moved into an adjacent individual cell. While the time in these levels is capped at thirty days, this can be extended on a case-by-case basis.
Melania Brown, an advocate and sister of Layleen Polanco, who died while in solitary confinement at Rikers Island in 2019, says the new system “would not have saved my sister’s life.” Anisah Sabur, who endured solitary at Rikers for more than sixty days and is now an organizer with the HALT Solitary Campaign, recently urged the New York City Council to end the “fake ‘ban’ on solitary.”
Jennifer Jones Austin, chair of the Board of Correction, tells The Progressive that the board disagrees with advocates’ claim that the new policy keeps solitary in place. She says that people in cells will be able to interact with others (in other cells). Austin adds that the board aimed to “ensure greater safety” both for detained people and correction officers.
Advocates against solitary have reason to be wary: In Massachusetts and California, corrections departments have found ways to circumvent state reforms. And in Texas, Michigan, Virginia, and elsewhere, it’s common to hold incarcerated people in near-constant isolation—often as a form of punishment—while denying that this qualifies as solitary confinement.
Jessica Sandoval, national director of the Unlock the Box Campaign, a nationwide coalition of organizations that aim to end solitary, tells The Progressive that corrections departments use jargon to keep the system opaque, using such names as “special management unit” or “special housing unit.” But, she adds, “when you talk to people there, they say ‘We’re in solitary.’ ”
About 60,000 people are held in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons nationwide, according to a 2019 report by the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale University. That total is likely much higher, as the study did not include people in other institutions, such as jails and juvenile detention facilities. During the pandemic, Unlock the Box reported, that figure jumped to roughly 300,000 people.
“This work takes years. And even then once you make a significant change, the systems in place seem to find loopholes around it.”
Decades of research have shown that extreme isolation can cause severe psychological harm and brain damage. The United Nations has decreed that holding an individual in solitary for more than fifteen consecutive days is a form of torture. And evidence shows that solitary does not make prisons and jails safer.
In 2011, Dolores Canales received a letter from her son, John Martinez, who was being held in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. Martinez and others in the prison were planning a hunger strike to end indefinite solitary confinement, he wrote, asking her to share the letter widely.
Soon after, Canales and others with loved ones in solitary founded the nonprofit California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement. The group supported people in prison through two further hunger strikes, including a 2013 hunger strike that included more than 29,000 people in state prisons throughout California, and helped raise awareness about solitary confinement. “People could not believe this was happening in America,” Canales says.
Paul Redd, who spent forty-four years in prison including more than thirty years in solitary confinement, participated in the hunger strikes. At first, he says, “prison officials took us as a joke and thought that we weren’t serious.” But when incarcerated people staged further hunger strikes, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) started releasing some people from solitary.
Among them was Redd, who was finally released from solitary in 2014. He says that outside support was crucial in forcing prison officials to take the hunger strikes seriously: “Once they saw that we had family and friends building that movement on the outside, they realized they needed to make some changes, because the public was being exposed to what was going on.”
Redd was also part of a class-action lawsuit, Ashker v. Governor of California, which was settled in 2015, resulting in many people in solitary being released back into the general prison population. They included Canales’s son, John Martinez. She says being able to visit and hug him was “like a dream,” one she’d hoped for because her son “made me believe that the day was going to come.”
But the struggle against solitary in California continues. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the Ashker lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people, has argued that the state’s department of corrections violated the agreement.
“We found that a lot of our clients were being moved out of solitary confinement and put into Level IV ‘general population’ units,” says Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer at the center. “They had the same or even less out-of-cell time than they had had in solitary confinement.”
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation also created a new “walk alone” status, Meeropol notes, where people were also experiencing solitary by another name. A district court judge ruled that the state had violated the 2015 settlement, but a Ninth Circuit judge overturned the ruling; the Center for Constitutional Rights has petitioned for a rehearing.
“This work takes years,” Canales says. “And even then once you make a significant change, the systems in place seem to find loopholes around it.” She says that she and other advocates will continue to push to abolish solitary.
In 2018, Massachusetts passed a law that aimed to reform solitary confinement, which was defined as twenty-two hours or more in a cell. The following year, however, the Massachusetts Department of Correction created new units that held people in cells for twenty-one hours per day. The department contended that these units were not “restrictive housing” under the law.
“The intent of the law was to have people in [the general prison] population more than in solitary,” Bonnie Tenneriello, a lawyer with the nonprofit Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, tells The Progressive. “But instead, we’ve had the creation of a lot of capacity that’s very close to solitary.” Not only is out-of-cell time extremely limited at just over two hours, Tenneriello says, but “when I last saw the SMI unit [created for people with serious mental illness], they were all chained in these chairs facing in the same direction, not even facing each other.”
A November 2020 Department of Justice investigation found that Massachusetts had violated the Constitutional rights of people on mental health watch, subjecting them to prolonged isolation without appropriate treatment. In a thirteen-month period, the probe found, more than half of the prison system’s 1,200 self-injurious behavior incidents and half of its eight suicides occurred among prisoners on mental health watch, which comprises only 1 percent of incarcerated people.
Massachusetts state Representative Liz Miranda sponsored a bill this year that would limit solitary to fifteen days for disciplinary infractions. She notes that people of color in Massachusetts are incarcerated and placed in solitary at disproportionate rates.
Meanwhile, state Senator Jamie Eldridge has sponsored a bill to require that people on mental health watch be transferred to outside facilities after twenty- four hours if they are at continued risk of self-harm.
Leslie Credle and Romilda Pereira, advocates with Massachusetts Against Solitary Confinement who both spent months in solitary, stress the importance of having impacted people weigh in on legislation restricting solitary (as they did for the new bills). This “allows people to be aware of what the DOC is actually doing, versus what they’re telling you they’re doing,” Credle says.
Pereira, who serves as the group’s interim coordinator, urges lawmakers to visit prisons regularly. After visiting solitary confinement, she says, some “can’t believe we’re treating humans like this.”
While she hopes the new legislation improves conditions, Credle is afraid that Massachusetts “will find a new loophole and we’ll be back at the drawing board again.”
At the federal level, nearly 10,000 people are held in solitary confinement—around 8 percent of people incarcerated in federal facilities—a higher rate than the national state average. President Joe Biden, during his 2020 campaign, promised to end solitary at the federal level, and a newly formed Federal Anti-Solitary Task Force is now pushing him to fulfill this pledge.
The task force recently released a blueprint for ending solitary at the federal level, emphasizing that this means ensuring that all alternatives to solitary are the opposite of solitary “regardless of what they are called.” It defines the opposite of solitary as “access to full days out-of-cell (at least fourteen hours) and congregate, meaningful programming and activities (at least seven hours),” without restraints.
Jessica Sandoval of Unlock the Box, who contributed to the task force’s blueprint, says members aimed to “close as many loopholes as possible.” The task force also calls for much more transparency in solitary confinement reporting, as well as independent oversight.
Jean Casella, who co-founded the watchdog organization Solitary Watch in 2009, says that during the past decade, advocates have put ending solitary on the public agenda. These include grassroots organizations, incarcerated people, and also national organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
Casella says it is “really important to have people who have been in prison involved, who can anticipate the ways that [corrections departments] are going to try to get around new laws or regulations.”
In August, more than seventy New York state legislators signed a letter arguing that the New York City Board of Correction’s new rules violated the HALT Solitary Confinement state law. They urged the New York City Council to pass new legislation ensuring that the city does not institute solitary by another name.
Until solitary confinement is truly over, and not just in name alone, advocate Melania Brown says, “we will continue to fight.”
