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In a resolution that could have wide effects, California’s prison system has agreed to change how it handles solitary confinement — and to review the cases of nearly 3,000 prisoners who are currently in solitary. The changes are part of the terms of a newly settled class-action lawsuit.
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LOS ANGELES — California has agreed to an overhaul of the use of solitary confinement in its prisons, including strict limits on the prolonged isolation of inmates, as part of a landmark legal settlement filed in federal court on Tuesday.
The settlement is expected to sharply reduce the number of inmates held in the state’s isolation units, where nearly 3,000 inmates are often kept alone for more than 22 hours a day in cells that sometimes have no windows, and cap the length of time prisoners can spend there. Prison reform advocates say they hope the settlement will serve as a model for other states.
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President Obama spent time at El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison near Oklahoma City that is home to 1,045 male inmates. The stop was part of his campaign to reform the criminal justice system, which includes several policies aimed at life inside the nation’s prisons, including addressing the practice of placing inmates in solitary confinement, changing sentencing guidelines to better reflect the severity of crimes, and implementing programs aimed at helping ex-offenders re-acclimate to life on the outside.
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A recent study done by Joseph Doyle, an economist at MIT’s Sloan School of Business Management, and Anna Aizer, a professor of economics at Brown University, suggests that “other things being equal, juvenile incarceration lowers high-school graduation rates by 13 percentage points and increases adult incarceration by 23 percentage points.”
Click here to read the press release of the study, and here for the full report.
The article, titled “The Missing Statistics of Criminal Justice”, addresses issues of solitary confinement in prisons, inmate on inmate violence, use of force by police officers, and prosecutorial discretion.
For the full article, click here.
The Sentencing Project‘s Marc Mauer, along with Georgetown Law professor David Cole, wrote an op-ed last week in the New York Times, offering a holistic perspective on criminal justice reform, addressing issues of mass incarceration, drug courts, sentence lengths, and recidivism, among others.
Click here for the full article.
“Whatever the label, the experience for the person is the same —confinement in an isolated cell (alone or with a cellmate) for an average of 23 hours a day with limited human interaction, little constructive activity, and in an environment that ensures maximum control over the individual.”
Click here for the report, summary of the report, and the Washington DOC’s grid for solitary confinement, and click here to go straight to the pdf of the report.
On April 23rd, 2015, in an an op-ed published on CNN.com, New Jersey Senator (D) Cory Booker called for large-scale reform of America’s criminal justice system:
“As we reform our criminal justice system at the national level, we will alter the cycles of poverty and recidivism that plague too many American communities … Instead of putting resources toward juvenile detention centers, we can put resources toward afterschool programs that have proved to help keep kids out of the juvenile justice system and in school.”
Click here to read the full article.
“As of late March, over 400 people had been locked up for more than two years without being convicted of a crime … As part of Mr. de Blasio’s proposal, all cases involving defendants who have been incarcerated for over a year — currently more than 1,500 people — are to be put on the court calendar within 45 days.”
Read the full NYTimes article, by Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip, here.
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