Several months ago, activists in California began a series of actions opposing the torture of solitary confinement, held on the 23rd of each month to mark the 23 hours a day that people spend in isolation while in solitary. This month, they were joined by others around the country. In New York City, dozens of activists from the New York Campaign for Isolated Confinement, including several survivors of solitary confinement, rallied in Union Square, spoke out against solitary confinement, and handed out information and collected petition signatures in support of the HALT Solitary Confinement Act. The rally was captured in the following news report.
NEWS: With Loved Ones in Prison, Women Become Leaders in the Fight Against Solitary Confinement in New York
July 3, 2015 by
By Keri Blakinger. Reprinted from Solitary Watch.
Jessica Casanova’s nephew wrote her a letter: “I”m here in a steel coffin. I’m breathing but I’m dead.” Casanova recounted, “I didn’t know what that meant so I got on a bus and I found out.”
That was in 2012, and three years later, she’s still finding out. As it turned out, Casanova’s nephew, Juan, was in solitary confinement. He was spending 23 hours a day alone in a cell and deteriorating quickly.
Juan had entered the New York State prison system as a teenager with mental health issues. Casanova said, “He suffered from antisocial personality, borderline personality, severe depression, and addiction.”
His first trip to solitary was in 2001, for allegedly smoking a joint. Although Juan was only isolation for a matter of months, Casanova said, “He’s never been the same after that.” While his first stay was brief, at this point the 33-year-old has now spent a total of about 10 years in solitary. Casanova went on to explain that her nephew now suffers from extreme bouts of depression, paranoia, and mood swings. She added, “Sometimes in the letters it seems like he might be hallucinating.”
“Seeing someone in solitary confinement,” Casanova said, “is like you’re watching them die right in front of your eyes. … I have never in my life experienced another human being being reduced to nothingness.” She added, “I just don’t understand how this can happen in the world.”
Although her nephew’s experience opened Casanova’s eyes, the 43-years-old East Harlem resident is not the only one coming to such realizations. Nationwide, there are at least 80,000 people in solitary confinement on any given day – and most have families who watch them suffer.
Leah Gitter, a retired New York City schoolteacher, is another of those suffering relatives. Her godson, Robert, has spent time in solitary both in Attica and Green Haven, maximum security prisons in New York State.
Gitter said that, during the time Robert was in solitary confinement, “I saw him becoming more unstable and more isolated and sicker. It was like he was withdrawing.” She added, “You get into this mindset where you can’t function because of all that isolation and he wasn’t well to begin with.”
As is perhaps evident from Casanova’s and Gitter’s stories, despite the documented mental health impacts, individuals with existing mental health problems are routinely placed in solitary confinement, a practice which may be counterproductive to any perceived public safety goals. Gitter observed, “I don’t know who benefits from punishing people like that.”
Robin Goods can relate. Her son, George, has spent more than a decade in solitary confinement in California. She said, “I have been visiting with my son George E. Jacobs for the past 10 years behind a glass window. When I look into his eyes I can see the progression of the effects of torture. The first year George had a distance look in his eyes. After the second year in the SHU he had a vague look in his eyes. Now after ten years in the SHU, George has a hollow empty look in his eyes. I am witnessing my son being slowly and deliberately tortured to the point of … devastating mental health deterioration.”
Initially, her son was isolated for a small infraction – Goods said she was told that he refused to take out his shoe laces before a visit. He was sentenced to two years in solitary, but prison officials gradually extended his stay longer and longer. She said, “When he goes for the review they say it’s small infractions like refusing to eat, sharing food.” Recently, George was let out of SHU, but instead of being moved to general population, he was just placed in another type of solitary confinement know as Administrative Segregation.
Goods said, “The deterioration is so profound that it almost affects me. You feel like you want to scream at the top of your lungs, because how can you help? What can you do?” Answering her own question, she continued, “I felt so depressed and helpless and anything I tried wasn’t going anywhere. Then I became angry and decided to stand back up and fight.”
That urge to fight is something Goods has in common with Casanova and Gitter. As a result of their family connections, all three women have become crusaders against solitary confinement.
Gitter said that, knowing about the conditions of her godson’s confinement, “I was so frustrated. This was the only way I could survive — to think that I could do something, to save his life.” She became active in Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement (MHASC) and “fought like hell” to get the SHU Exclusion Law passed in 2008. The law is meant to bar most people with serious mental illness from being placed in isolation in New York’s state prisons. Gitter said, “We had press conferences and lobby days. We were relentless, even though it took eight years – a human rights bill [took] eight years to get passed.”
Jennifer Parish, the director of criminal justice advocacy at the Urban Justice Center’s Mental Health Project, said, “Leah in some way is the godmother of the movement. She’s been a force for speaking to policy makers at all different levels … She had really done so much to gather people around addressing the problem of people with mental illness in our prison system and in solitary confinement.”
While Gitter has been involved in solitary confinement activism for over a decade, Casanova got into it more recently. In 2013, she joined the New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement (CAIC) and in 2014 spoke at the first press conference announcing the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act. The HALT Act, which is graduallygaining momentum in both the Senate and the House, would ban solitary confinement in New York’s prisons and jails to 15 days, the limit suggested by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture. Individuals requiring more secure housing over the long term would be placed in new Residential Rehabilitation Units with increased therapy and programming.
Parish said of Casanova, “She’s a tremendous advocate. When she talks about what her nephew has gone through it’s just incredibly powerful.”
Though Goods lives in New Jersey, she’s also been active in CAIC, a New York-based group. Parish said, “Robin has a leadership role within CAIC she’s one of the co-chairs of the legislative committee. She’s been part of taking trips to communities upstate to help form branches of CAIC. She’s done presentations upstate. Her son is in California so the fact that she’s working so strongly here is amazing.”
Goods said that, if there’s one thing she’s learned through her activism, it’s that if you’re a family member of someone in solitary, “You are the extended voice on the outside and you should use it as loudly as you can. There’s nothing worse going to happen than what’s already happened.”
Although Casanova, Gitter, and Goods are all important figures in the movement against solitary, they aren’t the only ones – there are wives, girlfriends, parents, siblings, and children scattered throughout activist groups.
“I think,” Parish said, “one of the most important roles that family members play in the movement is reminding everyone who’s involved about the urgency of changing these policies. Because every day their family members are facing solitary or have the potential to face it, and it reminds us that this is not an abstract problem. I think that for people are in the movement it can sometimes be far away. Prisons are closed institutions. But the families constantly keep the fire burning in all of us to make the changes.”
NEWS: Legislation Limiting Solitary Confinement in New York Gains Momentum
April 29, 2015 by
By Marco Poggio. Reprinted from Solitary Watch.
A bill to significantly limit the use solitary confinement in New York state prison and local jails gained momentum last week, after nine Assembly members and two state senators agreed to support the legislation. The new sponsorships, secured after a day of lobbying that brought more than 120 activists to Albany from around the state, brought the total number of co-sponsors to 33 in the Assembly and 11 in the Senate.
Citing the words of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Méndez, who condemned long-term solitary confinement as torture, advocates convinced the legislators of the urgency of a sweeping bill called the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act, which would limit the maximum time of isolation to 15 consecutive days, and a maximum of 20 days over any 60-day period.
The bill would also completely ban the use of isolation on individuals with mental illness, as well as youth, seniors, pregnant women and nursing mothers, and members of the LGBTQI community—groups that are particularly vulnerable to the effects of solitary, or prone to abuse while in solitary, or both
“The practice of solitary confinement is subject to widespread abuse,” Méndez said in a videotaped statement, which was played at an educational event held on the morning of April 22 in the Legislative Office Building. “It leads to the violations of fundamental human rights, including the right to personal, physical or mental integrity, and may constitutes cruel and inhumane treatment, and even torture.”
Scientific evidence shows that people who are held in isolation for 22 to 24 hours a day suffer severe irreversible psychological damage, Méndez said, adding that long-term solitary confinement “must be absolutely prohibited.”
Studies have shown that people held in isolation often develop acute forms of paranoia and psychosis that cause them to mutilate themselves, and in many cases, to commit suicide.
Figures obtained by the Correctional Association of New York from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) indicate that the rate of suicide in New York state prison is 59 percent higher than the national average for incarcerated persons.
Among the individuals who took his own life while being held in isolation was Benjamin Van Zandt, whose mother, Alicia Barraza, also spoke at the morning event.
Van Zandt was arrested and charged for arson when he was 17. Despite being diagnosed with mental health problems, he was placed in solitary confinement multiple times over the course of three years. He reportedly also endured repeated physical and sexual abuse at the hand of other incarcerated with him at Fishkill Correctional Center. At some point during his downward path through despair and acute depression, Van Zandt decided his life wasn’t worth living, and hanged himself in his cell at the age of 21.
Since her son’s death, Barazza has become a passionate advocate for the HALT Solitary Confinement Act. “There is absolutely no reason that another family should have to endure what we went through,” Barazza said
“I think we should put an end to the number of suicides that come from solitary confinement” said Selestina Martinez, a social worker born and raised in the Bronx who joined in the lobbying, which was organized by an advocacy group called the New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement (CAIC).
Martinez’s cousin, who has completed 23 years of a 25-year sentence, spent large portions of his time in solitary confinement. Now that he only has two years left before he will be released, Martinez said, her cousin is frightened to come home because he doesn’t know how he will be able re-enter society after a long time spent in isolation.
“It’s kinda like throwing somebody into the water and expecting them to swim when they don’t know how,” she said, referring to people who have done time in solitary confinement.
“I’ve Known Men Who Lost Their Minds”
Across the country, at least 80,000 people are being held in some form of isolated confinement, locked down in one- or two-person cells for 23 to 24 hours a day. In New York State prisons, the number is about 4,500 at any given time. Each year in the state of New York, the Corrections Department sentences over 14,000 people to terms in so-called Special Housing Units (SHUs).
About 8,000 of those sentences, roughly 57 percent, result in three or more months in the ‘box,’ as solitary confinement is commonly called by those who experience it. About 3,900 of the sentences, nearly 28 percent of the total, send people to isolation for six months or longer. Some individuals are kept in “disciplinary segregation” for years at the time, while “administrative segregation” can last for decades.
“I’ve known men who lost their minds,” said Tyrrell Muhammad, who spent seven consecutive years in solitary confinement, and spoke of his experiences at the morning event. During each day in isolation, Muhammad said, he had to fight hard to stay sane.
A few week after entering solitary confinement, Muhammad began suffering the consequences of extreme isolation and idleness.
First, he began having hallucinations while staring for hours at the flaking paint on the walls, which he saw transforming into the faces of famous people. One time, Muhammad said, he recognized Dr. Jay, a basketball star who played during the 1970s. Another time, he saw the face of Abraham Lincoln.
“This is how you could tell you’re slipping,” Muhammad told Solitary Watch. After more time spent in complete isolation, Muhammad said, he often would not realize he had been talking to himself loudly for hours until a guard outside his cell told him to be quiet.
Contrary to what is commonly thought, only in a small number of cases people are put in isolation because of violent behaviour inside prisons or jails. Most of the time, they end up in solitary confinement for minor actions that are considered to be in violations of prison regulations, for example having too many postal stamps, occupying the wrong side of the cell, or talking back to a correctional officer.
Pushing Legislation to Limit Solitary Confinement
The April 22nd morning press event featured sponsors of three bills to limit solitary confinement. A bill introduced by Assembly Correction Committee chair Daniel J. O’Donnell would ban solitary for youth and people with developmental disabilities, as well as individuals with mental illness, and states that solitary confinement sanctions be imposed as a measure of last resort, and for the minimum period necessary. . A bill already passed by the Assembly, after being introduced by Nily Rozic, bans solitary for pregnant women.
The lead sponsors of the HALT Solitary Confinement Act also spoke at the event. Assembly Member Jeffrion Aubry and State Senator William Perkins originally introduced the bill in January 2014.
“We have a human rights crisis here in New York State. The cost of solitary confinement as a state and a society are immeasurable,” said Perkins, a democrat from Harlem. “The encouraging news is that legislators, advocates, and the public have finally come together.”
The HALT Solitary Confinement Act does more than simply reducing the use of solitary confinement. It also seeks to create alternative Residential Rehabilitation Units (RRU), which would substitute the isolation and deprivation of the SHU with treatment and programs of rehabilitation that would help incarcerated people prepare for their transition back into the general population and the outside world.
On April 22, advocates for the bill met with legislators and staffs throughout the day. Organized in teams of four or five, activists spelled out the key features of the bill to Assembly members and state senators, some of whom were not yet familiar with the issue of solitary confinement. In some of the meetings, activists directly affected by incarceration system were able to share their life stories with the legislators.
Tama Bell, the mother of a 23-year old man who’s currently in jail, told Assembly Member David Weprin her son ended up in solitary confinement despite a long history of mental illness and after being diagnosed with a serious form of bipolar disorder.
After only month locked up in a cell alone the size of an elevator, Bell said, her son began talking about suicide. She reached out to the elected officials in her district, and contacted both the state’s Department of Correction and the Office of Mental Health to let the officials know about her son’s situation. Finally, her son’s solitary confinement sentenced was reduced from 18 months to three.
“I can’t even imagine him making it through beyond the three months,” Bell said, adding how lucky she feels that his son is still alive. Were the HALT Solitary Confinement Act in place, her son would have never walked inside an isolation cell in the first place.
While her intervention helped improving the condition of her son, there are large numbers of less fortunate children whose families have no means to get them out of isolation.
Weprin was among the first Assembly members last week to add his name to the list of those who sponsor the legislation. By the end of day last Wednesday, six more Assembly members had decided to co-sponsor the bill, a sign that advocates have been effective in getting the attention of the elected officials on the issue of solitary confinement.
“So many people did so much to make this day a success,” Scott Paltrowitz, Associate Director of the Prison Visiting Project at the Correctional Association of New York and an organizer of day’s events.
“I feel honored, inspired, blessed, humbled and excited to be part of a movement that is challenging such horrific practices with such fierce advocacy, passion, dedication, energy, and love,” Paltrowitz wrote in an email to the activists who took part in the lobby day.
The dozens of activists coming from all across the state, organized by the Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement (CAIC), included a heterogeneous mix of people from different walks of life. While individuals cited different motives for taking part in the day, all of them share the belief that solitary confinement is inhumane and degrading.
“I’m here just because I don’t want to live in a country where we treat anybody like this,” said Shirley Ripullone, who lives in Columbia County.
“As an American who believes in the stated values of our country, I hate to see us acting [in a way] that if it were happening anywhere else we would be wary and self-righteous about it,” said Kenneth Stahl, a man who had no direct experience with solitary confinement but decided to mobilize in favor of the bill out of his own moral principles.
Social workers, lawyers, members of religious communities, and people from the general public were joined by formerly incarcerated people and families of currently incarcerated people in an action that defied demographics.
A Long Road Ahead
Although lobbying efforts in Albany were successful, there are still significant obstacles that sweeping legislation like the HALT Solitary Confinement Bill will have to overcome before it will be able to make it to the floor of the Assembly, much less the Republican-controlled Senate.
Partisan divisions are only part of the problem. Geographic and demographic splits also play a role in opinions on solitary confinement. As illustrated in an infographic distributed by CAIC, African Americans are even more over-represented in solitary confinement than they are in the prison population. In addition, while a majority of incarcerated people come from New York City, most prisons are located upstate, and most prison staff are white.
Political support for solitary confinement is still large around the state, especially in those counties where the local economy relies heavily of the business of correction facilities, and where correctional officer unions have powerful connections inside the state legislature.
Even in a liberal stronghold like New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to fix a correction system plagued by violence and dysfunction, reforms have taken place amid a climate of caution and sometimes skepticism.
“I don’t think it is cruel and unusual,” said Correction Department Commissioner Joseph Ponte in regard of solitary confinement, during a hearing at City Council last month.
But people who have done time in “the bing,” the nickname for the Rikers Island’s Central Punitive Segregation Unit, see it differently.
“Once you go into solitary confinement, all privileges are gone,” said Hallie West, who has twice been in solitary confinement at Rikers. “Privileges mean: telephone calls, food commissary, your books, your music and all that extra stuff. They take it away from you, and they put it on the side. You might get your clothing if you’re lucky.”
Since she first ended up in a SHU on Rikers Island in 1993, West said, things have gotten worse. Today, she said, people held in solitary confinement are never allowed out of the cell for any reason. Visits are heavily restricted, and inmates are denied the chance to make phone calls for several days at the time.
In March, De Blasio and Ponte co-announced a 14-point anti-violence agenda that includes a set limit of 60 days as the maximum amount of time that a person can spend in solitary confinement within any six-month period, and a ban on isolation for all inmates who are 21 or younger.
Despite being a step forward towards a more humane approach to incarceration, it is not yet clear how significantly the agenda will actually reduce the use of solitary confinement.
For opponents of solitary across the state, April 22 gave cause for encouragement, but also served as a reminder of the long road ahead.
“Many don’t believe as we believe, and it’s our job to convince them that they’re wrong,” said Jeffrion Aubry, the democrat from Queens who first introduced the HALT Solitary Confinement Act in the Assembly.
“They may not agree with us at the moment,” Aubry said about those legislators that are unconvinced about the bill. “But information and right ultimately win out.”
NEWS: New York Advocates Offer Testimony to Assembly Hearings on Mental Health in Prisons and Jails
November 16, 2014 by
Several key supporters of CAIC presented or submitted testimony to the New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Corrections and Assembly Standing Committee on Mental Health, which held a joint hearing on “Public Hearing on Mental Illness in Correctional Settings” in Albany on November 13, 2014. A collection of testimony appears below, and will be permanently archived on the Resources page.
Correctional Association of New York
Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement
New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement
New York City Jails Action Coalition
For more on the hearing, see the following news accounts:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ny-lawmakers-probe-care-mentally-ill-inmates-26878665
http://m.timesunion.com/local/article/Learning-to-treat-prisoners-with-signs-of-mental-5891924.php
NEWS: New York Lawmakers Probe Care for Mentally Ill in Prison
November 16, 2014 by
By Michael Virtanen. Reprinted from the Associated Press.
The head of the troubled New York City jail system said Thursday it’s critical to send mentally ill inmates to treatment programs instead of a lockup.
Department of Corrections Commissioner Joseph Ponte told state lawmakers that Rikers Island is poorly equipped to be a mental health treatment center. The primary goal, one he shares with the medical staff, is to keep staff and inmates safe, he said.
“Violence at Rikers Island the past five or six years has gone through the roof,” Ponte said, adding that assaults on his medical staff have tripled.
Dr. Homer Venters, head of the jail’s health services, testified alongside Ponte. He said admission medical screenings done on every incoming inmate show about 25 percent have mental illnesses, though that diagnosis applies to about 38 percent of the daily population of about 11,500. Those inmates tend to stay twice as long.
Ponte said they’ve taken steps, like limiting solitary confinement, to improve treatment at Rikers, but acknowledged many issues remain. The city also has recently established some courts, including one in Manhattan, focused on handling cases involving the mentally ill.
“We’ve become the de facto mental hospitals,” Ponte said of the jails. “Diversion is critical.”
New York City jails have come under increasing scrutiny since The Associated Press earlier this year first exposed the deaths of two seriously mentally ill inmates — an ex-Marine imprisoned in Rikers who an official said “basically baked to death” in a 101-degree cell and a diabetic inmate who sexually mutilated himself while locked alone for seven days inside a cell last fall.
Lawmakers called the joint hearing of Assembly committees on correction and mental health following these and other reports of afflicted prisoners getting inadequate care.
The hearing also examined other local jails, where suspects go while awaiting trial or serving shorter sentences, as well as the state’s prisons that house about 52,250 inmates with longer sentences.
About 9,300 state inmates have been diagnosed with a mental illness, with 2,300 considered seriously mentally ill, said Donna Hall, director of forensic services at the state Office of Mental Health, which provides treatment. She said the clinicians seldom, if ever, remove or lower those designations.
Jack Beck of the Correctional Association of New York testified that most remain in the general prison population and get limited services. Fewer illnesses now are judged serious, which would give those inmates more care and keep them from the “torture” of solitary confinement, he said.
Alicia Barazza tearfully told legislators that her 21-year-old son suffered from severe mental illness and committed suicide two weeks ago in solitary confinement at Fishkill state prison. He’d gone off his psychotropic medications and had been in crisis, she said. He was sent to prison from Albany County at 17 for third-degree arson. His mother said he’d been abused by another inmate in prison.
Corrections officials declined to comment, citing the potential of a lawsuit.
Advocates said one recurring problem is defendants not allowed by police to take their medications after they’re arrested.
Glenn Leibman of the Mental Health Association called for presumptively enrolling inmates in Medicaid so they can get needed prescriptions when they leave.
Damian DePauw, 35, said he went to Washington County Jail on an assault charge after a violent psychiatric episode. In jail, when he felt symptoms worsening, he said he told a guard he needed medicine and was told to wait for the nurse that night, who said she’d need a prescription from the jail psychiatrist three days later. Over the weekend, he became more delusional, assaulted another prisoner who had threatened him, was stripped and put into a solitary cell, where he rammed his head into the metal door repeatedly, in an effort to knock himself out, until he split open his scalp and was taken by ambulance to a hospital, he said.
NEWS: New York City Officials and Advocates Push for Change to the “Culture of Brutality” on Rikers Island
August 26, 2014 by
By Savannah Crowley. Excerpted from Solitary Watch.
Update, 8/22/14: On Thursday, August 21, the New York City Council passed legislation introduced by Councilman Danny Dromm of Queens that would require corrections officials to release quarterly reports documenting information about inmates being held in solitary confinement at Rikers Island jail. Presenting this information to the New York City Board of Corrections would create increased transparency and oversight concerning the jail’s use of punitive segregation. The legislation is now awaiting the signature of Mayor de Blasio, who has said he supports the bill.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
New York City advocates and public officials gathered on the steps of City Hall on Monday to demand an end to the “culture of brutality” emerging from New York City’s Rikers Island, the second biggest jail in the country. The demand followed recent reports released by the United States Department of Justice and the New York City Board of Corrections, as well as months of investigative reporting by the New York Times, exposing brutality, violence, and excessive use of solitary confinement by officers specifically against mentally ill and teenage inmates. One previously incarcerated advocate that spoke at the event described Rikers as “worse than Dante’s Inferno.”
At the press conference, organized by the New York City Jails Action Coalition, speakers expressed support for legislation introduced by Councilman Daniel Dromm of Queens that would bring about much needed transparency and oversight to Rikers. The bill will be voted on this Thursday in the City Council. Speaking at the event, Dromm recounted his tour of Rikers saying, “I saw the horrible conditions inside of solitary people have to endure—a very small cell, the smell of urine, graffiti, a bed that was rusted, a mattress that had mildew on it, a blower of heat directly on top of the bed blowing down.” Strong criticism of Rikers Island has surfaced most recently after a series of exposes in the New York Times covering the staggering rise in violence at Rikers since 2009.
The Times managed to uncover an internal report conducted by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene that documented, during an 11 month period, 129 cases of violence by corrections officers towards prisoners yielding injuries so serious they could not be treated at the jail’s clinic. Individuals incarcerated at Rikers suffered fractured jaws and eye sockets, wounds needing stitches, and severe back and head trauma. The report found that 77 percent of those seriously injured had a diagnosis of mental illness. Yet in not one of the 129 cases was a corrections officer prosecuted. Over half of the 80 prisoners interviewed by health department staff admitted to being intimidated by officers during their treatment, making it easier for staff to cover up the violent episodes.
According to the same article, about 4,000 out of 11,000 people held at Rikers have a mental illness. This number is about 40 percent of the jail population, a 20 percent increase from eight years ago. Few corrections officers have received any in-depth training on how to deal with individuals with mental illness.
Criticism of policies at Rikers Island continued to rise after August 4, when the United States Department of Justice unveiled a secret three-year investigation of Rikers conducted from 2011 to 2013. The investigation concluded that there is a “deep seated culture of violence” at the jail and that the New York City Department of Correction (DOC) has violated the civil rights of adolescent males ages 16 to 18, by subjecting them to and not protecting them from excessive force and violence. For example, the report said, “In FY [Fiscal Year] 2013, there were 565 reported staff use of force incidents involving adolescents… (resulting in 1,057 injuries).”Teenagers at Rikers suffered extreme violence by officers including “…broken jaws, broken orbital bones, broken noses, long bone fractures, and lacerations requiring sutures.”
NEWS: Abuses at Rikers Island: Officials and Advocates Call for End to Solitary Confinement and Officer Violence
August 19, 2014 by
By Annie Wu. Excerpted from The Epoch Times.
For Johnny Perez, the horrors of being placed in solitary confinement still remain fresh in his memory. More than 15 years ago, when Perez was a young teen, he was placed in solitary confinement for 60 days at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island.
“It’s second by second, the attack on your soul,” Perez said, who now works as an advocate for the mentally ill at the Urban Justice Center.
Perez recalls having suicidal thoughts and crying so much that “you cry even when you run out of tears.” In addition, corrections officers often turned a blind eye to the violence that occurred among inmates.
“The abuses came out of pure neglect,” Perez said.
Perez was among the group of advocates and elected officials gathered at City Hall on Monday to call for an end to correction officers’ violence toward inmates and the excessive use of solitary confinement at Rikers Island, the city’s largest jail facility.
NEWS: Rikers: Where Mental Illness Meets Brutality in Jail
July 24, 2014 by
By Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz. Excerpted from the New York Times.
After being arrested on a misdemeanor charge following a family dispute last year, Jose Bautista was unable to post $250 bail and ended up in a jail cell on Rikers Island.
A few days later, he tore his underwear, looped it around his neck and tried to hang himself from the cell’s highest bar. Four correction officers rushed in and cut him down. But instead of notifying medical personnel, they handcuffed Mr. Bautista, forced him to lie face down on the cell floor and began punching him with such force, according to New York City investigators, that he suffered a perforated bowel and needed emergency surgery.
Just a few weeks earlier, Andre Lane was locked in solitary confinement in a Rikers cellblock reserved for inmates with mental illnesses when he became angry at the guards for not giving him his dinner and splashed them with either water or urine. Correction officers handcuffed him to a gurney and transported him to a clinic examination room beyond the range of video cameras where, witnesses say, several guards beat him as members of the medical staff begged for them to stop. The next morning, the walls and cabinets of the examination room were still stained with Mr. Lane’s blood.
The assaults on Mr. Bautista and Mr. Lane were not isolated episodes. Brutal attacks by correction officers on inmates — particularly those with mental health issues — are common occurrences inside Rikers, the country’s second-largest jail, a four-month investigation by The New York Times found.
Reports of such abuses have seldom reached the outside world, even as alarm has grown this year over conditions at the sprawling jail complex. A dearth of whistle-blowers, coupled with the reluctance of the city’s Department of Correction to acknowledge the problem and the fact that guards are rarely punished, has kept the full extent of the violence hidden from public view.
But The Times uncovered details on scores of assaults through interviews with current and former inmates, correction officers and mental health clinicians at the jail, and by reviewing hundreds of pages of legal, investigative and jail records. Among the documents obtained by The Times was a secret internal study completed this year by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which handles medical care at Rikers, on violence by officers. The report helps lay bare the culture of brutality on the island and makes clear that it is inmates with mental illnesses who absorb the overwhelming brunt of the violence…
NEWS: Roundup of National News on Solitary Confinement, June 2014
June 24, 2014 by
June 23, 2014
A judge denied bail to a friend of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect who is being held in solitary confinement in a Plymouth county jail while he awaits trial on charges of impeding the investigation into the deadly attack. He is not charged with participating in the bombings or knowing about them in advance. But judge says he is still a flight risk. http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/article/20140623/NEWS/306249983/1994/NEWS
June 19, 2014
A new report says the percentage of incarcerated individuals in Ohio who are members of recognized gangs remains steady at about 16 percent of the overall prison population. The highest percentage are at the state’s supermax prison in Youngstown. http://www.wfmj.com/story/25821431/youngstown-supermax-prison-has-largest-percentage-of-gang-members
The keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Chicano Mexicano Prison Project spoke “passionately” about what solitary confinement does physically and psychologically to incarcerated people. http://www.workers.org/articles/2014/06/19/chicano-mexicano-prison-project-holds-annual-conference/
June 18, 2014
A man who is serving a life sentence at the Supermax prison in Florence for the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania has won a federal appeal, giving him the right to visit and correspond with a larger circle of friends and relatives. He had claimed that restrictions known as special administration measures, or SAMs, that are aimed at preventing communication with terrorists are preventing him from talking with family and friends. http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25986725/terrorist-at-supermax-wins-federal-appeal-against-u
In most episodes of the second season of Orange Is the New Black, solitary confinement looms large. But will people come to think of it as the new normal? https://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights/vee-isnt-scariest-villain-orange-new-black http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jessicalee/-oitnb-season-2-those-day_b_5522884.html
The Box, a new graphic novel tells the story of a man who, as a teen, spent time in solitary confinement in New York City’s Riker’s Island jail. http://cironline.org/reports/graphic-novel-box-6300
West Virginia is beginning a study of its juvenile justice system to find better ways to keep youthful offenders out of detention centers. This was spurred by a lawsuit filed by Mountain State Justice which alleged that the young people at the former Industrial Home for Youth were illegally strip searched, placed in solitary confinement, and denied adequate access to exercise and educational materials. A judge had ordered the home closed. In his announcement of the study, the governor cited successes in the state Justice Reinvestment Act, which focuses on community-based supervision, risk assessments, investment in drug courts and other community-based treatment options for substance abuse. http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/West-Virginia-to-study-juvenile-justice-system-5561368.php
A lawsuit has been filed in Missouri in connection with the death of 36-year-old man, who was being held for trial at the Daviess-Dekalb County Regional Jail. The suit claims that he was beaten severely and shot with a taser gun on multiple occasions and that he was kept in solitary confinement for 12 days in a cell without a toilet, sink or running water so that he was forced to sit in the cell in his feces and urine. http://www.stjoechannel.com/story/d/story/lawsuit-filed-after-inmate-death-at-daviess-dekalb/11990/I-aWL7OYL0KlrLCmrmq3Hg
June 17, 2014
In South Africa, the Minister of Justice and Correctional Services is being sued for torture-related damages. Solitary confinement and other torture methods continue despite progressive laws. http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-06-17-st-albans-tales-of-torture-and-intimidation-continue/#.U6bvIkAcjQw
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is planning to implement new censorship regulations they say are designed to improve clarity about what materials should be considered contraband and which constitute threats to prison security. The rules include censorship of any material deemed “oppositional to authority and society.” Prisoners’ rights groups say the rules are overly broad and meant as retribution for political organizing as they would most likely be used to target the letters of activists, as well as publications that regularly cover prisoners’ rights. http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/state-prisons-institute-new-censorship-rules/Content?oid=3966223 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/21/censored-and-obscene-in-solitary.html
In a Maryland jail, teens charged as adults face isolation and neglect. Young people, thought to number in the thousands across the country, are trapped in a kind of purgatory–facing charges in adult court and held in adult facilities, but kept in involuntary lockdown for “their own protection” from the adult prisoners who surround them. http://solitarywatch.com/2014/06/17/maryland-jail-teens-charged-adults-face-isolation-neglect/
June 16, 2014
Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) is pushing the American Institute of Architects to prohibit the design of spaces that inherently violate human rights in their code of ethics. The organization is collecting, from formerly and currently incarcerated people, drawings of the spaces in which they experienced solitary confinemen. These will be displayed in UC Berkley’s Wurster Hall Gallery in the fall. The architect behind this effort, says he is not advocating that we put the firms that do prisons out of business but would like it if they would foreground human rights in their work. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/meet-the-architect-who-wants-to-build-a-more-humane-prison
June 14, 2014
Man exonerated thanks to DNA evidence after 32 years in Supermax Prison now accused of murder in gambling dispute. http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/17381-man-exonerated-thanks-to-dna-evidence-after-32-years-in-prison-now-accused-of-murder-in-gambling-dispute
June 13, 2014
A new study, Inventing Terrorists: The Lawfare of Preemptive Prosecution details our government’s post-9/11 strategy in domestic terrorism cases, finding that most were unfairly prosecuted. Included in the discussion of the tactical patterns of preemptive prosecutions, is the pre-trial use of solitary confinement and special administrative measures (SAMS). http://www.projectsalam.org/Inventing-Terrorists-study.pdf
June 12, 2014
NYCLU testimony before the New York City Council on the use of solitary confinement in city jails supports the council’s efforts to provide oversight to the practice of punitive segregation and expresses the hope that this will be the first step toward comprehensive reform of the harmful conditions and practices that persist in New York City jails. It recommends complete abolition of the practice of subjecting human beings to extreme forms of isolation and deprivation. http://www.nyclu.org/content/testimony-new-york-city-council-use-of-solitary-confinement-city-jails
A federal court has ruled that the Indiana Department of Correction was wrong to put a man in solitary confinement for using a computer at the request of prison officials. He had been asked to download materials at the request of prison librarians. http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/ffa740a720ee4c6995fb5dff6ec74a2d/IN–Inmate-Computer
June 11, 2014
A man with mental illness and a low IQ who was held in solitary cell in the Durango, Colorado city jail claims his psychological condition was worsened and he became suicidal. Prison officials argue he was in “protective custody” and it was not solitary confinement because he could talk to other men in the cell block through the door. Advocates point out that individuals who need protection should still be able to participate in programs. http://durangoherald.com/article/20140610/NEWS01/140619937/-1/s/Criminalizing-the-sick-
June 9, 2014
The secretary of the Department of Corrections of New Mexico went undercover to experience solitary confinement. He notes that the most dangerous individuals must be kept in segregation, but other methods, like taking away privileges should be used when punishing those who are less dangerous. He says that as a result of his time behind bars, the system is already seeing changes. http://www.koat.com/news/prison-official-goes-undercover-to-experience-solitary-confinement/26422416#ixzz34Y4Y4koM
The ACLU has issued a new report, Warehoused and Forgotten: Immigrants Trapped in Our Shadow Private Prison System, which documents the ACLU’s multi-year investigation into the five CAR facilities (Criminal Alien Requirement contracts) in Texas. The issues raised include: evidence of shocking abuse and mistreatment, families torn apart, and the excessive use of solitary confinement. https://www.aclu.org/warehoused-and-forgotten-immigrants-trapped-our-shadow-private-prison-system https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/060614-aclu-car-reportonline.pdf
June 8, 2014
The Daily News says that only a very few of the people at the Rikers jail who are mentally ill are in the special mental health unit and receiving needed services. Efforts to eliminate the use of solitary confinements have led to others being in the general population where there is now more violence. They argue that “Corrections must give up the illusion that it’s ending solitary until the department actually has the means to manage its … population without it.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/retake-rikers-article-1.1820493#ixzz34XxPoy8y http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/exclusive-rikers-island-violence-increases-article-1.1828360
According to U.S. military officials, Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl suffered harsh treatment at the hands of his Taliban captors, including long periods of solitary confinement. They kept him in a metal cage in the dark for weeks after he tried to escape. He is reported to be struggling with emotional issues. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/08/us-usa-afghanistan-bergdahl-idUSKBN0EJ0HL20140608
A NY Times editorial praises the recent settlement between the DOJ and Ohio re: juveniles in solitary, supporting treatment as the best alternative. But a letter to the editor from the Executive Director of the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance adds the view that the single most effective way to end the practice of solitary confinement for children is keep them out of adult jails and prisons. Many are tried as adults, sent to adult jails and prisons and put in solitary for their own protection. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/opinion/a-model-for-juvenile-detention-reform.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C[%22RI%3A7%22%2C%22RI%3A16%22 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/opinion/keeping-troubled-youths-out-of-solitary.html
June 7, 2014
The solitary confinement units in East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Meridian, Mississippi, privately run by Management and Training Corporation, are described by civil rights lawyers and medical and mental health experts, noting that: the people held in those units spend months in near-total darkness; illnesses go untreated or inappropriately treated; dirt, feces and, occasionally, blood are caked on the walls of cells; and, many individuals were forcibly injected with an antipsychotic drug, even though they were not acutely psychotic. A lawsuit against the corporation and DOC officials also notes corruption amongst officers and failure to stop violence. Later this year, a judge will consider whether to grant the plaintiffs class-action status. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/us/seeing-squalor-and-unconcern-in-southern-jail.html?_r=0
June 6, 2014
A report on some of the real stats related to women in prison shows: more than 600% increase since 1980; most of the women are there for non-violent drug related offenses; many are pregnant when admitted to prison; Black and Latina women are most effected; and the women are more likely than men to be the victims of staff sexual abuse. http://fusion.net/justice/story/real-life-stats-women-prison-orange-black-748144
An article in the Atlantic praises Colorado’s rule restricting solitary confinement for the mentally ill, but warns about the abuse of classifications. The article also discusses the federal standards and the discretion they give to prison officials. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/12/colorado-will-no-longer-send-the-major-mentally-ill-to-solitary-confinement/282366/
Jails are not part of the solitary confinement bill passed in Colorado. The ACLU-Colorado now intends to turn its attention to the isolation of mentally ill people in county jails, but acknowledges that a policy change there may be more difficult because practices there are “a hodgepodge of different activities not very well regulated by the state,” and because a shortage of psychiatric beds and a lack of funding for alternative mental-health treatment may put a huge burden on the jails. The point is made that, “Communities have to find the resources.” http://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/local/2014/06/06/colo-solitary-confinement-bill-extend-jails/10087867/
The Colorado governor signed a bill banning the use of solitary confinement for mentally ill people. http://durangoherald.com/article/20140606/NEWS01/140609647/0/NEWS01/State-revises-confinement-regulations-
June 5, 2014
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit unanimously ruled that the American Civil Liberties Union and the Prison Law Office can move forward with a lawsuit against the state of Arizona as a class action. The attorneys had argued that the state had long ignored the mandate to provide adequate health care and that individuals in the prisons have suffered unnecessarily and even died while waiting for basic care. In addition to seeking adequate medical, mental health, and dental care for Arizona’s prisoners, the lawsuit challenges the state prisons’ use of solitary confinement because of the harm it creates. https://www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights/33000-arizona-prisoners-now-can-sue-state-over-health-care-solitary-confinement http://www.jewishaz.com/opinion/commentary/state-s-criminal-justice-system-needs-reform/article_0bbc9b4c-f0f7-11e3-8bef-0017a43b2370.html
Counterpunch features an article on how the US is spreading mass incarceration around the world, exporting systems of abuse in programs that are reflections and extensions of our own internal situation. Reports of physical and psychological torture, include isolated confinement. Although the reported reason for this effort is the war on drugs, the reports sees social and political control as the real reason as many of the people held in these US funded facilities are political prisoners, striking farmers, indigenous leaders, union leaders and human rights advocates. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/05/empire-of-prisons/
June 4, 2014
Attorneys for a man accused of kidnapping and murder but not yet tried asked the court to have him removed from solitary confinement. The judge ruled that he should not be treated differently in jail. http://www.wbbjtv.com/news/local/Zach-Adams-to-appear-in-court-for-status-hearing-261854551.html
June 3, 2014
The Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) will issue new standards which prohibit the use of room confinement for discipline, punishment, administrative convenience, retaliation, staffing shortages, or reasons other than as a temporary response to behavior that threatens immediate harm to a youth or others. The change is expected to have national impact. The revised detention standards also call on JDAI sites to comply with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), to protect the rights of youths with disabilities, and to accommodate those with limited English skills. JDAI also pledges a reinvestment in juvenile justice into early intervention and better prevention efforts. http://jjie.org/revised-jdai-standards-call-for-end-to-unnecessary-solitary-confinement/
In Florida, trial is to begin for mentally ill Muslim man. Advocates say there are government videos showing FBI informants teaching and pushing the man into committing acts of terrorism. He was held in solitary confinement for two years before his trial, but is now in the medical area of the Pinellas County jail under suicide watch. http://www.fightbacknews.org/2014/6/3/us-government-lies-sami-osmakac-trial-begins
June 2, 2014
A federal judge allowed hundreds of California incarcerated individuals to join a lawsuit (Ashker v. Brown) challenging prolonged solitary confinement in California prisons. The court also denied the California Correctional Peace Officers Association’s (CCPOA) motion to intervene in the case. The lawsuit applies only to individuals in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay; people held in isolation at the state’s three other security housing units are not included. Several articles question if this will bring the end of solitary confinement. http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/hundreds-of-california-prisoners-isolation-join-class-action-lawsuit http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/us/judges-decision-to-hear-inmates-case-threatens-practice-of-solitary-confinement.html?_r=0 http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/approaching-end-solitary-confinement-84101/
May 30, 2014
A federal court official says that treatment of California’s most severely mentally ill prisoners is haphazard and often inadequate, delivered by a fractured, understaffed system in which doctors discharge patients back to prison because they are afraid not to. The investigation of conditions at two state psychiatric hospitals and the psychiatric hospitals run within four state prisons was ordered by a judge after he rejected California’s bid to end federal oversight of prison psychiatric care. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-pol-ff-prisons-20140531-story.html
In Massachusetts, two men who had been tried as adults and sentenced to life in prison when they were still youth are going before the parole board to ask for their freedom, under a controversial 2013 state Supreme Judicial Court ruling granting dozens of teenagers convicted of murder eligibility for parole. One of the men had spent 7 of his 20 years in prison in solitary confinement. http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2014/05/two_teen_killers_beg_for_release_in_first_shot_at_parole
May 29, 2014
A bill that would change policies regarding solitary confinement has been passed by the CA state senate. The bill’s author says it will lead to safer prisons. But, while it may have some desirable provisions, both people in prison and advocates for their rights oppose this bill because for the first time in history it would put into state law authority for CDCR to place individuals in solitary confinement for mere alleged gang membership without any accompanying serious misconduct. They would also want it to incorporate a provision that would prohibit CDCR from using the testimony of an informant to place someone in a SHU unless that person’s testimony was corroborated by independent third party evidence. http://www.kfbk.com/articles/kfbk-news-461777/bill-to-change-solitary-confinement-policies-12406556/#ixzz344GV94Bk http://sfbayview.com/2014/prisoners-and-advocacy-groups-oppose-sen-loni-hancocks-prison-reform-bill-sb-892/
NEWS: New York City Council Hearing Probes Jail Violence, Mental Health Care
June 23, 2014 by
By Jake Pearson, Associated Press. Reprinted from ABC News.
New York City lawmakers peppered correction and health officials with questions about how to reduce violence and better care for a growing mentally ill inmate population in the nation’s second-largest jail system during a specially called oversight hearing Thursday.
In three hours of testimony, the commissioners for the departments of correction and health and mental hygiene detailed both the bureaucratic inner-workings of how their two agencies, tasked respectively with both the custody and health care of roughly 11,000 daily inmates, interact now — and what they can do better to reform a jail system advocates, lawmakers and even the department of correction commissioner himself have called troubled.
“These long-term trends, years in the making, are clearly unacceptable, and reversing them is my top priority,” Department of Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte, who started running the $1 billion agency in April, said of the violence. “But as a correction professional with 40 years’ experience, I must assure you that the process will not be quick. And it will not be easy.”
Their testimony comes following reports by The Associated Press detailing two grisly deaths of inmates with psychological problems on Rikers Island.
DOC statistics show that between 2010 and 2013, use-of-force incidents have increased by 59 percent, from 1,871 to 2,977; slashing and stabbing incidents doubled, from 34 to 58; and assaults on staff jumped by 30 percent, from 500 to 646.
At the same time, the number of inmates with a mental health diagnoses has soared as the jail population has declined, accounting for about 24 percent of the nearly 14,000 inmates in 2007 to about 40 percent of mentally ill inmates today, according to the statistics. Officials estimate that about a third of those inmates suffer from serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Mayor Bill de Blasio last week appointed a task force charged with rethinking how the criminal justice system treats the mentally ill.
Lawmakers argued Thursday the challenges facing reform at Rikers are vast, and include not just safety and mental health measures, but also new facilities, more security staff and bail reform.
Mary Bassett, the department of health and mental hygiene’s commissioner, told lawmakers that mental health and violence in the jails are intertwined. She said correction officers and mental health workers have already begun to discuss certain inmates’ behavior at the end of every tour, being mindful of medical privacy laws, so as to better recognize potential problems before it’s too late.
Officials have started to reform 19 so-called mental observation units, where the recent deaths of two inmates with psychological problems occurred, she said.
Those deaths, reported by The Associated Press, called for top-down change, said City Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley.
The AP was first to report on suspicions of a mentally ill former Marine’s February death inside a 101-degree cell. A city official speaking on the condition of anonymity told the AP then that Jerome Murdough “basically baked to death.” His family, who said the veteran suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, plans to file a $25 million wrongful death lawsuit.
Last month, the AP detailed the September 2013 death of 39-year-old inmate Bradley Ballard, whose family said was diagnosed with schizophrenia who died after sexually mutilating himself while locked up alone for seven days. His death was recently ruled a homicide.
Prosecutors are investigating both deaths.
New York University psychiatrist Dr. James Gilligan, who authored a report last year that was critical of the department’s then approach to using solitary confinement for mentally ill inmates, said Thursday the hearing was an encouraging sign that the city was taking the issue seriously.
“I think this is a move toward greater transparency in what’s going on at Rikers Island both with the problems and with the reforms,” he said.
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