Cynthia Mendoza’s first pregnancy, in the free world, was a time of enveloping love and anticipation. But in 2006, six months into her second pregnancy, Mendoza was arrested and jailed pre-trial in a Lynwood facility overseen by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Once there, she was sent to solitary confinement, where every good thing she remembered about pregnancy became a horror. “I had nobody to talk to, I had nobody to comfort me,” she told me. Cut off from human contact and the warmth of the sun, Mendoza’s mental health quickly deteriorated. Her access to proper nutrition was so poor that her hair started falling out.

Mendoza gave birth shackled to a hospital bed, and she only got to spend three days with her newborn son. On the third day, jail officials handed him off to her father. Then, already suffering from postpartum depression, she was sent back to solitary confinement. “It felt like I was just stuck in this black cloud, and I could not see a foot in front of me,” she said. She would remain there for nearly three more years—all while she was still innocent in the eyes of the law. 

Some 16 years later, in 2022, a broad coalition of organizers in California introduced an ambitious bill to limit the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons, jails, and detention centers—and outlaw it entirely for pregnant people, as well as a few other categories of vulnerable individuals. They called it the Mandela Act after the South African leader, who was held in solitary confinement for at least six of the 27 years he spent jailed. “Solitary confinement, if done a certain way, drift[s] into the area of torture—and these are correctional facilities, not torture camps,” California Assembly Member Chris Holden, the bill’s sponsor, told me. 

Mendoza watched the bill’s progress with excitement. If it passed, she thought, no one else would have to go through what she did. No other children would have to grow up, like her son had, grappling with the realization that the time they spent in their mother’s womb had been, for her, a time of total deprivation and isolation. 

In 2022, the Mandela Act was passed by the state legislature, but California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it. In 2023, organizers negotiated with the governor’s office to try to come up with a compromise of the Mandela Act that he would consider signing into law. Then, this year, a different organization picked up the Mandela Act’s provision banning solitary for pregnant people and included it in a separate bill focused on improving nutritional standards for pregnant and postpartum women in custody.  

While the Mandela Act stayed stuck this year, this new, narrower bill was adopted by lawmakers in August and signed into law by Newsom in September. But by then, it had grown so unrecognizable to its original community sponsor that they withdrew their endorsement.

The initial bill would have banned solitary confinement for anyone who is pregnant in a California jail, detention facility, or state prison. The version that became law no longer applies to local jails and detention centers, meaning that someone like Mendoza wouldn’t be covered. 

And instead of outright banning solitary confinement, it capped the number of days it can be used. But the result is that the new law expressly allows prison officials to put pregnant women in isolation for up to five days at a time in certain cases. Advocates are alarmed that, for the first time, the legislation has codified in California law that it is permissible to use solitary confinement against pregnant women.

The divergent fate of the two bills is a tidy illustration of what can happen to grassroots efforts to change criminal legal policy in the face of two powerful forces: the California prison system, which enjoys great influence over the state’s elected leaders and tends to resist efforts to impose limits on its authority; and Newsom, whose efforts to style himself as a national leader on prison reform have often involved letting that system guide how and when it wants to change. 

Keramet Reiter, a law professor at UC Irvine who wrote a book on the rise of solitary confinement in California, was frank in her assessment of the new law. “This is an abomination,” she told me. “There are categories of people who unequivocally never, ever should be in solitary confinement, and one of them is pregnant women.”

The debate over solitary confinement in California has been a multi-decade battle between the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) on one side, and the prisoners it puts in solitary confinement on the other, alongside survivors of the practice and their family members and supporters. In 2013, a historic prisoner hunger strike organized by four men in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay led to a lawsuit and eventual settlement, Ashker v. Governor of California, that was meant to lead to significant changes, including an end to the practice of indefinite isolation, which left people languishing in solitary for years on end with little recourse.

But in 2022, when Holden introduced the Mandela Act, he told me that the bill was partially a response to CDCR’s failure to abide by the reforms laid out in Ashker. “CDCR, you have been told by the courts to change how this solitary confinement process works and how it’s being utilized—and to no avail. So we write a bill to say, ‘Okay, we’re just asking you to do what the courts ask you to do,’” he said.

In California, 10 percent of all state employees work in corrections, and their union, CCPOA, has a great deal of lobbying power in Sacramento. The association regularly flexes its muscle via political donations, but its spending on Newsom has been especially notable: the union sunk $1 million into TV ads promoting his gubernatorial run in 2018, and they have more recently spent $1.75 million opposing the recall effort and $1 million on Proposition 1, Newsom’s marquee mental health treatment plan. The latter two expenditures alone represent nearly a third of all CCPOA’s political donations since 2001, according to a recent Cal Matters analysis. 

Newsom has championed some aspects of prison reform during his nearly six years as governor, moving to shut down some facilities and placing a moratorium on the state’s use of the death penalty. But he has also overseen raises and perks for prison guards that even California’s office of legislative analysis found unwarranted. And after the same office determined that five more prisons could be shut down, Newsom declined to implement further closures. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story).

Solitary confinement has remained a cornerstone of prison officials’ strategy for managing incarcerated populations, as they insist that they need to be able to continue to separate people from the general population for safety reasons. And Newsom has repeatedly erred on the side of trusting CDCR’s discretion and allowing the agency leeway to shape its own policy on this issue. (The CCPOA officially opposes the Mandela Act.)

Reiter, however, contends that it’s not an all-or-nothing decision. “Certainly people get in situations in prison where they need to be removed from the rest of the population, but there are ways to do that without restricting their access to natural light, to human contact, to time out of their cell,” she told me. To Reiter, Newsom’s willingness to let CDCR guide its reforms casts doubt on his stated commitment to changing the state’s carceral system. “It raises real questions to me when a governor who claims to be so invested in reform defers again and again in these ways,” she said.

In 2022, after the Mandela Act made it to the governor’s desk, Newsom returned it unsigned. In his veto message, the governor called the bill “overly broad.” He granted that solitary confinement in California was “ripe for reform,” but chose to put the prison system in charge of overseeing that reform, directing CDCR to implement changes to its solitary confinement policies. 
The department waited nearly a full year to do so, until the Mandela Act was once again being debated and nearing the final deadline for Newsom to sign or veto bills. Then, it proposed its own policy changes that would reduce the number of offenses that land someone in solitary and raise the number of hours of mandatory out-of-cell time to 20 per week, meaning that someone in solitary confinement could still be held in their cell for more than 21 hours per day.

At the same time, Newsom’s office was seeking to winnow the Mandela Act into a data collection bill that outlawed solitary only for pregnant women. The Mandela coalition refused these changes, considering them an unacceptable compromise that would allow Newsom to tout a seemingly progressive reform while failing to address the structural problems with prison isolation. Instead, they opted to pause on the legislation in order to keep negotiating with the governor the following year. They already had all the votes they needed in the state Assembly to get it back on Newsom’s desk: “We were simply parked right outside the governor’s door,” coalition member Hamid Yazdan Panah, co-executive director at Immigrant Defense Advocates, told me. 

But come 2024, Newsom wouldn’t engage. The coalition tried to negotiate, but they didn’t get far. In late July, a staffer from the governor’s office emailed the coalition to let them know the door was closed, referencing the recent CDCR changes as justification. “Given CDCR’s relatively recent update to their regulations on the use of [solitary] the [Governor’s office] isn’t comfortable making further changes to [solitary] policy this year,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, organizers with the gender justice organization Essie Justice Center, based in LA and Oakland, were trying to advance separate legislation that would improve the treatment of pregnant people in custody. As initially conceived, Assembly Bill 2527 included a blanket ban on solitary confinement for pregnant women in jails, detention facilities, and prisons across the state. 

Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, the bill’s legislative sponsor, had also supported the Mandela Act, but she told Politico that she wanted to ensure these sorts of protections regardless of whether Mandela made it through. But the bill’s focus on pregnant people happened to resemble the narrowed version of the Mandela Act that Newsom’s office pushed in 2023. “Internally within Sacramento or in the capital, I think this bill was pitted against the California Mandela Act,” Essie policy associate Ellie Virrueta Ortiz told me. Virrueta Ortiz believes that legislators and the governor’s office “wanted this to be the smaller, narrower, much more palatable version.”

This summer, as they worked on drafting the bill, Bauer-Kahan’s office called together policy representatives from Essie as well as CDCR. The prison officials were pushing for an exception to the blanket ban: If the move was for their own protection, pregnant women could still be housed in solitary confinement for up to 10 days at a time. 

When I reached out to CDCR asking why they would advocate for this sort of exception, the department’s press secretary responded: “By moving the person from their housing (often a dormitory environment) to a more protective area, CDCR is allowed a window to determine a safe housing alternative. The bill also includes provisions for CDCR works to ensure the pregnant person is allowed to remain enrolled in their programs.”

Essie’s representatives pushed back. The group’s executive director, Gina Clayton-Johnson, told me that their group wasn’t opposed to amending the legislation, but the exception that CDCR was asking for was a bridge too far. 

“No amount of solitary confinement of a person while they’re pregnant is ever fine,” she said.

Soon after, Bauer-Kahan’s staff informed Essie that they had accepted a version of CDCR’s request: The bill was being amended to allow up to two days of restrictive housing at a time for pregnant people. A subsequent draft of the bill raised the time limit from two to five days. Bauer-Kahan’s office didn’t respond to my request for comment.

When Essie’s members saw the new draft that had been submitted to the Senate Appropriations Committee, they learned that it no longer applied to pregnant women held in jail or immigration detention facilities. 

For Essie, this news was a gut punch. “It was something that really, truly was last minute and was unexpected,” Virrueta Ortiz told me. “We know that the real problem is in the jails.” 

Vanessa Ramos, a community organizer with Disability Rights California and a survivor of solitary herself, didn’t mince her words: “The California legislature is viciously and violently co-opting bills from the community, encouraging folks to take obnoxious amendments that not only water down the bill, they create a false narrative that the California legislature is working with CDCR and county jails, to improve conditions—and they’re not,” she told me. 

When organizers with Essie reached out to the coalition supporting the Mandela Act to ask their advice, a member offered language that would enshrine the sort of provisions Reiter outlined: safe isolation that still allowed out of cell time and proper medical care. Bauer-Kahan’s office didn’t accept these amendments.

Finally, Essie made the difficult decision to withdraw their support for the bill. “So many human rights groups had really called us and said, ‘This is not something that we want to see in the state,’ and we really had to listen to that,” Clayton-Johnson said. Over 80 organizations sent a letter to Bauer-Kahan and Newsom expressing their opposition. They urged the governor to veto the bill. A day of action that was originally intended to galvanize supporters of the Mandela Act but became a protest against AB 2527 instead, where Mendoza spoke about her experience in solitary. “It was the most degrading, inhumane thing that I’ve ever gone through,” she told the crowd, her voice shaking. 

But it was too late. The bill breezed through both chambers. “No one paid attention to it, because everyone thought it was the same bill as before,” Yazdan Panah said. On Sept. 27, Newsom signed it into law, leaving the coalition outraged that California had explicitly enshrined into its statutes the use of solitary confinement for pregnant women.

This development “follows a decades-long pattern of nominal reform in this state where the prison system in particular gets just one millimeter ahead of the bare minimum with their policies,” Reiter said. “It feels like reforms that are calculated to avoid actual reforms.”

For now, the fate of the Mandela Act is uncertain, but organizers vow to continue the fight. Ramos credited the veterans of the fight to end solitary confinement in California for refusing to give in to efforts to water down the bill. “The Mandela Act could have very easily been passed, but the receiving end would have been some fucked up bill,” she said. “The Mandela Act has not passed because of the integrity of the people that are leading these efforts.”

“I don’t see the movement slowing down,” Reiter said. She outlined a number of positive changes that have occurred since the days of the 2013 hunger strike: vastly more public attention on the harms of solitary, policy changes that have ended indeterminate confinement. “But are we still overusing solitary confinement? Is the ultimate winner still the Department of Corrections, who’s shown again and again that they’ll set the policies and the terms and that they control the elected politicians?” she said. “So we have a long way to go.”

Holden, the Mandela Act’s sponsor, is termed out of the state legislature this year. I asked him for his reflections on the bill’s future after three unsuccessful legislative sessions and whether he believes that CDCR can reform solitary confinement by itself. 

“If there’s a system that’s working for some, they don’t think that it really needs to be modified to any great extent, then they’re not going to necessarily have the motivation to see that extended change happen,” Holden said. He also noted that CDCR still has never fully complied with the Ashker settlement requiring extensive changes to the state’s use of solitary confinement—and, as of this January, the settlement is now closed. “I think that CDCR is now able to operate in a lane of making the changes that they see appropriate to make, unless directed by the legislature to do something different,” he said. “And that time has not yet come.”

Cynthia Mendoza’s son is 18 now, but the conditions of his birth linger. “It definitely has affected him,” she told me. He has a hard time talking about it, she said, but lately, “we have been working on his feelings and what he went through, having to be born in jail, and then having to visit his mom in prison.”
It remains a tough subject for Mendoza as well, but she told me that she will continue to speak out about her experience despite the difficulty of revisiting the worst moments of her life. “I will never lose hope that my story can help change the narrative for other women,” she said.

The post On Solitary Confinement, California Officials Side With the Prison System—Again appeared first on Bolts.

But whatever the names, Brown and other people incarcerated in these units say they only replicated the punitive solitary conditions that triggered state reforms several years ago, evading the reforms’ goal to reduce prolonged isolation in the Massachusetts prison system. Over the past year, Brown and others incarcerated in state prisons who say they suffer from long-term isolation have gone to great lengths to protest their conditions and advocate lawmakers for reforms—from launching a hunger strike last October to testifying remotely before a legislative committee in January.

“Can you imagine being secluded in a tight space that’s the size of some of your bathrooms?” Brown and nine other hunger strikers described in a letter pleading with the attorney general to investigate SAU conditions. “The Secure Adjustment Unit was put in place in an effort to end solitary confinement, but has mirrored the same conditions as those previous restrictive housing units.” 

People who remain isolated in Massachusetts prisons argue that officials are violating provisions of the Criminal Justice Reform Act, a law the state adopted in 2018 that limited solitary confinement, known as restrictive housing within the state’s prison system. The law limited placement in restrictive housing to no more than six months and prohibited it for anyone with a release date of fewer than 120 days unless that person “poses a substantial and immediate threat.” 

The 2018 law also required that jails and prisons report the number of people in restrictive housing and offer them programming, showers three times a week, and access to phone calls and visits. 

Officially speaking, nobody remains in solitary confinement in Massachusetts prisons. That’s because, in response to the 2018 reforms, the Massachusetts Department of Correction created new units, such as the Behavioral Adjustment Units (BAUs) and Secure Adjustment Units (SAUs), to replace restrictive housing for people who threaten security or orderly operations within prisons. (The DDU and the prison in Cedar Junction closed in 2023.) 

In December 2018, Massachusetts state prisons held 392 people in restrictive housing. It was not until 2020 that the state consistently held fewer than 300 people in restrictive housing and not until the end of June 2023 that the state phased out all of its restrictive housing units. 

But as of mid-February, the BAUs and SAUs isolated roughly the same number of people, over 270, as had been in restrictive housing in January 2020. The Behavioral Assessment Units had 157 people; 18 had been there for more than 90 days. The Secure Adjustment Units confined 120 people, 72 of whom had been there for more than 90 days. 

In response to questions for this story, a Massachusetts Department of Correction spokesperson told Bolts the agency followed the mandate of the 2018 reforms by implementing “a strategic initiative to eliminate restrictive housing, close its disciplinary unit, and stand up new adjustment units that deliver personalized programming plans.” 

While the BAU was meant to temporarily isolate those who pose a possible safety risk, prison officials define the SAU as “a highly structured unit that is not Restrictive Housing which provides access to cognitive behavioral treatment, leisure time activities, and mental health services for those inmates assessed as needing a specific structured program intervention to support positive adjustment.”

People who remain in long-term isolation and lawmakers who want to reduce solitary claim that lockups have simply renamed the practice. 

“What’s clear is that the Department of Corrections is not following the spirit of the law, they just changed the acronyms,” state Representative Erika Uyterhoeven, who toured the SAU this past January, told Bolts. 

Uyterhoeven and other Massachusetts lawmakers are again trying to pass legislation restricting solitary confinement in the state. Last year they introduced a bill to ensure at least eight hours of out-of-cell time without restraints for people incarcerated throughout the state. The bill also seeks to expand visits and access to vocational and educational programming. If passed, this would affect everyone behind bars: state prison data shows that in 2023, only one-third of people in Massachusetts prisons were enrolled in any type of prison programs and over 90 percent were on wait lists. 

The bill languished without action in the Joint Committee on Public safety and Homeland Security for a year until this past January, when the committee finally held a public hearing on it. Nearly 30 people incarcerated inside Massachusetts prisons, including Brown, signed up to testify at the Jan. 23 hearing via video conferencing—marking the first time that the committee ever heard testimony directly from incarcerated constituents. 

During his allotted three minutes before the committee, Brown described not being allowed access to programs or even phone calls—which are now free for people in Massachusetts prisons. Instead, he says he is left with a sense of “repetitive meaninglessness.” 

“I wake when they wake me, I eat when they decide to feed me, [and] the day ends when they say it does,” he said.

Dominic Rezendes also spoke to lawmakers from inside the SAU during January’s committee hearing. The 34-year-old has spent the past 13 years in prison and is slated for release within the next year and a half. But, he told lawmakers, in the SAU, he has been unable to access reentry services or programs despite asking on a near-daily basis. “I have never had a license or apartment,” he testified. “I have nothing but a brand-new start.” 

“The only way to describe this experience is ‘mentally deteriorating,’ (understatement!)” Rezendes wrote in a message to Bolts. “Being sent to SAU has been hands down the most mentally destressing and overall worst part of my 13 years locked down.”

According to department policy, Massachusetts prison staff and treatment providers are supposed to develop a plan to release someone from solitary conditions whenever they’re sent to an isolated housing unit. Under that policy, officials should make a written progress review for people in solitary housing every 90 days, but several people told Bolts those reviews rarely happen. 

“It’s one thing to be in segregation and be reviewed to see if you still pose a threat,” said Bonnie Tenneriello, who has litigated numerous solitary confinement cases as staff attorney at Prisoners Legal Services of Massachusetts. “It’s another to be in a unit with severe deprivations and be told, ‘This is your housing placement.’” 

Each 90-day placement review requires three staff members—a guard, a program officer, and a mental health clinician—thus requiring overtime from existing staff. This poses major demands on the prison system, when the Department of Correction stated in a February court filing that it had a shortage of 744 guards and program officers and an unspecified shortage of mental health staff. 

Even then, people say they go much longer than three months without review. Over the past two years in solitary housing, Brown says he received one progress review—and only after he and other men repeatedly inquired about them.

“These reviews are designed to be a sham,” he told Bolts. “It seems their only interest is what a person has done in the past.” 

By October 2023, Brown had had enough and embarked upon a hunger strike, joined by at least 18 other men in the SAU. In their letter to state Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell that month, the hunger strikers demanded that the office investigate their living conditions, a demand echoed by both advocacy organizations and lawmakers. In a separate letter to the attorney general, Brown accused prison officials of sweeping both the hunger strike and SAU conditions “under the rug” and stated that nothing has changed despite their protest. 

At least he was able to testify. Jensen Peraza-Rivera, who was placed in the BAU in August 2022 and assigned to the SAU in March 2023, said that he would have signed up had he known about the hearing and that incarcerated people could testify via video. Peraza-Rivera’s description of his conditions illustrate the extreme isolation: He’s allowed two and a half hours outside his cell each day, 90 minutes of which is outdoor recreation alone in a large cage and an hour inside, seated with one arm handcuffed to a table and both legs restrained. Sometimes another person is restrained across from him at the same table; occasionally, they might even be given a chess set with missing pieces. Sometimes, all the men can do is talk to each other or shout to the handful of men shackled to the other tables for an hour.

Even then, Peraza-Rivera said few men choose to undergo the required strip search before and after each recreation period simply to sit restrained at a table. He himself has not gone to indoor recreation for a year, he told Bolts. No staff has ever told him what steps he needs to take to be released from the SAU and, he says, they often skip his cell when taking people to the programs that are offered. 

Jesse White, policy director with Prisoners Legal Services of Massachusetts, said that the organization collaborated with other prison advocacy groups to do outreach inside Massachusetts prisons ahead of the legislative hearing in January. Eighty people throughout the prison system expressed interest in testifying. After the committee limited testimony from prisons to 90 minutes total, the group asked incarcerated people to collaborate and choose spokespeople to deliver testimony.  

Even then, not everyone was able to speak. Champree Dinkins, who was incarcerated in the BAU inside the state’s only women’s prison at Framingham, says she put in a request to testify at the hearing, but never received a response. On the day of the hearing, prison officials told Prisoners Legal Services that Dinkins, as well as a man in another prison, would not be allowed to testify because of their placement in the BAU. 

Dinkins told Bolts that she “suffered from deep anxiety” during her 30 days inside the prison’s BAU, saying she was allowed outside her cell three hours a day—90 minutes indoors to watch television or play cards, and another 90 minutes outside in a cage. She says that many days she had to choose between going outside or eating breakfast, saying prison staff would throw out her meal by the time she got back from rec. Now in the SAU, Dinkins says she’s allowed two more hours of out-of-cell time, five hours total, but says she still cannot participate in educational programs. 

“I have one semester left of Babson [College] and I haven’t been given the opportunity to finish from the SAU,” she wrote in a message to Bolts. 

The inability to testify wasn’t the only barrier to publicizing conditions that some people inside faced. Bolts also had difficulties corresponding with people in isolated housing. The Massachusetts prison system contracts with CorrLinks to provide electronic messaging. But Brown and others in SAU who testified at the January committee hearing say they never received numerous messages with questions for this story.

After over a month of silence from Rezendes, Bolts learned that, in a fit of desperation, he had set a fire in cell in early February and was placed on mental health watch, where he had no access to his tablet to send or receive electronic messages. CorrLinks automatically deletes messages after 30 days, whether they have been read or not. By the time Rezendes was returned to the SAU and allowed access to CorrLinks, Bolts’ many follow-up messages had been erased.

Tenneriello notes that people confined to higher security units have fewer opportunities to participate in educational, rehabilitative or therapeutic programs. But in prison, the inability to participate in programs translates to not earning time off one’s prison sentence. It can also negatively impact chances at parole. “It also means that they’re not being prepared to succeed when they get out,” she added, setting them up for a higher risk of recidivism. “The whole system is a vicious cycle. This legislation aims to reverse that vicious cycle and help people get out and stay out successfully.”

Rezendes echoed the need for more programming in his testimony to the legislative committee in January, urging lawmakers to pass the bill and telling them, “When you give people the resources and access to do better, they usually will.” 

The bill to expand programming and out-of-cell time for all people incarcerated in Massachusetts is still sitting in the same committee where it’s been stalled for a year; lawmakers took no action after February’s hearing. The committee, which is chaired this year by Democratic Senator Walter Timilty and Representative Carlos González, both of whom are Democrats, has until April 8 to vote on the bill, which would then still have a long voyage to pass through both chambers. The legislative session ends on July 31.

The solitary reforms, which would also apply to jails, face sharp criticism from sheriffs who run local lockups. Carrie Hill of the Massachusetts Sheriffs’ Association testified that, while the association supports the bill “in theory,” she stressed that it remained “crucial that the sheriffs’ office have flexibility [for programming requirements]” and that “eight hours may not be the best for the safety and security of the institution.”

Uyterhoeven, a co-sponsor of the House bill, refutes that assertion. “It’s not actually about security,” she said. “Is putting someone in a deeply traumatizing environment really going to help them when they are released? There are other ways that we could be helping address those underlying issues that led to why they were punished in the first place. But we’re not addressing any of that by throwing people in solitary confinement.”

White with Prisoners Legal Services says the bill builds on the reforms that state lawmakers passed in 2018 to establish baseline standards for living conditions. “It’s asking the Commonwealth to make a commitment to baseline human dignity, to meeting people’s needs and to lifting up a culture that will focus on the potential for human and community growth and safety,” she told Bolts. 

Massachusetts law allows legislators access to its correctional facilities. In early January, a week before the public safety committee hearing, Uyterhoeven and Steven Owens, another representative who supports the bill, made a surprise visit to Souza, the maximum security prison, to examine the isolation conditions themselves. 

One week before their visit, a man had set his cell on fire after receiving no response to his repeated requests for medical care. Uyterhoeven said the stench of smoke still lingered inside the halls. Men they encountered in the SAU complained about the lack of medical and mental health care and said they rarely received the mandated 90-day reviews of their placement in solitary. Uyterhoeven says everyone they encountered in isolation was Black or brown except for one man.

The lawmakers decided to measure the outdoor recreation cages after hearing the men call them “dog kennels.” They ranged between about 200 and 300 square feet, with nothing inside and a covering overhead so that you can’t see the sky. 

“What I saw on the visit was truly mortifying,” Uyterhoeven recalled. “It’s just such a clear violation of the law.” 

The post After Reforms to Solitary Confinement, Massachusetts Prisoners Say Officials Just Renamed It appeared first on Bolts.

Cheh, who was a Washington D.C. City Council member at the time, says a tour she took of the D.C. Jail that summer that led her to introduce the Inmate Segregation Reduction Act of 2015, which attempted to limit solitary confinement throughout the District’s correctional facilities. 

In December of that year, advocates with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture erected a full-size replica of a solitary confinement cell in the Foundry United Methodist Church in Northwest D.C. to raise awareness for Cheh’s bill ahead of a council vote. Cheh, who visited the church one Sunday that month to speak about the proposed reforms, says the image of the cell’s cramped confines has stuck with her ever since.

“It really took the activism of groups to point out to me the ills—the absolute horror, even—of solitary confinement,” she told Bolts. 

But Cheh’s bill never made it to a vote. In fact it never made it out of the judiciary committee where it was first referred. Cheh tried twice more to pass laws reducing solitary confinement before leaving the council in 2022, but those proposals died as well. 

Then in September 2023, D.C. Council member Brianne Nadeau took up the baton by introducing the ERASE (Eliminating Restrictive and Segregated Enclosure) Solitary Confinement Act. Nadeau’s office worked with the local chapter of Unlock the Box, a coalitional advocacy campaign seeking to end solitary confinement nationwide, in drafting the language of the bill. It aims to comprehensively ban solitary practices in the D.C. Department of Corrections’ facilities, but it remains to be seen whether Nadeau and her co-sponsors on the Council will be able to generate the political will to get it passed this time. 

Despite calls to end it over the intervening years, solitary confinement has remained a regular practice in the D.C. Jail, which holds between 900 and 1,300 residents at any given time. Most are pretrial defendants or people serving short sentences for misdemeanor convictions. 

In fact, D.C.’s Department of Corrections has been shown to use solitary confinement more than many other correctional systems around the country. An agency memo reported that eight percent of its population were held in solitary confinement in 2018, and nine percent in 2017—three times the national average, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report released in 2015. And at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the agency reportedly held 1,500 people in prolonged isolation for nearly 400 days.

Solitary confinement—defined as prolonged isolation with little to no human contact—has been decried by governments and activists the world over for exacerbating the harmful behaviors that often land people in solitary in the first place. In 2015, the United Nations classified solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days as torture for the damage it does to inmates’ physical and mental health. Studies have shown that some residents held in solitary confinement become “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.”

“It creates a situation where if somebody is already suffering from a mental illness, it exacerbates those conditions,” Jessica Sandoval, national director of the Unlock the Box, told Bolts. 

“All of the research out there and all of the personal experience we hear people share shows that putting someone in solitary is likely to make them more violent, not less,” said Emily Cassometus, former director of government and external affairs at DC Justice Lab, part of the Unlock the Box D.C. coalition. “Towards themselves, towards other people in the facility, staff and residents included, and more likely to be victims of violence, to be victims of self-harm, and to commit violence once they’re released.”

The D.C. Jail has leaned on isolation as a strategy to deal with inmates experiencing mental health crises in particular, yet publicly contends that it doesn’t put people in “solitary confinement.” In 2022, then-DOC spokesperson Keena Blackmon told a local outlet that the D.C. Jail “does not operate solitary confinement within its facilities,” and only uses “restrictive housing” for suicide prevention. 

These are known as “safe cells,” designed to keep suicidal inmates from environments that could endanger their safety. But advocates have argued that these restrictive housing units are just isolation by another name, and say these units more closely resemble punishment than medical care. 

“Jail authorities are very clever and they give different names to solitary confinement, but it’s still solitary confinement,” Cheh told Bolts. “They could call it whatever they want.”

A lawyer representing people formerly incarcerated in the D.C. Jail told Bolts of numerous complaints emanating from the restrictive housing cells over the past decade. People incarcerated in these units have complained of being held for 23 hours of each day isolated inside their cell; that they had no access to showers or running water; that they slept on plastic blocks due to a lack of mattresses; that bright fluorescent lighting blazing all day inside their cell made them lose track of time; that they were stripped of all their clothes and personal belongings, including religious material, and even thrown in cells with feces on the walls—likely from past residents who’d covered themselves in it trying to force officers to let them shower. 

Between November 2012 and August 2013, four residents of the facility committed suicide, which jail officials at the time said was three times the national average. So the department commissioned suicide prevention expert Lindsay Hayes to survey the area in order to prevent further self-inflicted harm.

In his report published September 2013, Hayes found the conditions “overly restrictive” and “seemingly punitive,” and suggested that the agency avoid isolating at-risk residents to prevent further self-harm.

“Confining a suicidal inmate to their cell for 24 hours a day only enhances isolation and is anti-therapeutic,” he wrote.

While the jail has updated their practices based on Hayes’ suggestions, residents are still reportedly held for up to 22 hours a day in severe conditions. And the suicides haven’t stopped.

Nadeau’s bill makes note of the “deplorable conditions at the District’s jails and restrictive housing units—including flooding, lack of grievance procedures, lack of mattresses, and more.”

The bill seeks to prohibit “segregated confinement” outright within the D.C. Jail. But it still makes an exception for safe cells; it would “strictly limit” their use for suicide prevention, allowing for people on suicide watch to be put in “safe cells” only if “immediately necessary”, and sets a 48-hour maximum limit for holding a person there continuously. It also puts in place other guardrails, such as frequent checks by a medical professional. 

This stripped back version, which didn’t include juvenile detention facilities the way Cheh’s bill did, was introduced in an attempt to ease its way to passage.

But even if the bill is passed, the reforms would need to be regularly enforced by an independent oversight body or risk becoming toothless. The D.C. Corrections Information Council was created for such oversight, but in recent years it has received sharp criticism for its inattention to conditions in the D.C. Jail.

“Sixteen years on the Council taught me a few things,” Cheh told Bolts, “and one of them is that you can pass all the laws you want, but if people aren’t enforcing them, then they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.”

The legislation hasn’t progressed much in the new year. In fact, the city council seems to have moved in the opposite direction on criminal justice, passing an omnibus anti-crime bill in early February that would among other things create harsher penalties for gun crimes and theft, with a focus on retail theft in particular. The ERASE Solitary Confinement Act was referred to the judiciary and public safety committee back in November, but there hasn’t been any movement on the legislation since.

Cassometus says she fears that to many D.C. leaders, the invisible nature of solitary confinement is a feature, not a bug. “It’s really hard to draw attention to an issue that no one can see, hear or smell,” she told Bolts. “Solitary confinement has been talked about as a solution to problems but it’s not. It’s locking our problems in a smaller box inside the jail and wishing that they would go away without actually proposing any solutions.”

The post “An Issue No One Can See”: Watchdogs Fault D.C. for Ongoing Solitary Confinement appeared first on Bolts.

Belladonna lives in protective custody inside a men’s prison, a housing assignment for people at higher risk of victimization that separates her from the rest of the prison population. She calls the isolation excruciating. “[Protective custody] is so locked down that the world doesn’t know it’s actually a form of solitary confinement,” she told Bolts by email. She said the prison does little to help her deal with the devastating mental health effects of the isolation. When she does get recreation time, she says she spends it in tiny one-person enclosures that she says are known as “dog cages.”

Trans women in New Jersey prisons say they are routinely isolated for all but one or two hours a day, despite recent reforms to reduce solitary confinement in the state. Gia Abigaill Valentina, another trans woman inside NJSP, said she’s usually locked in her cell for almost the entire day and similarly is given little help coping with the near total isolation. “There is no programming for the transgender women here. The only counseling provided is routine mental health services, in which someone from mental health comes around every two weeks,” Valentina said in an email from the prison. “In this lock down unit I am made to stay in my cell for 23 hours a day. I am allowed out for kiosk and shower.”

The isolation that trans women endure inside New Jersey prisons demonstrates the limits of a landmark reform law that state lawmakers passed in 2019 to reduce solitary confinement. The law, the Isolated Confinement Restriction Act, hailed as the most progressive solitary reform at the time, put strict limits on “isolated confinement”, which it defined as holding someone in a cell for 20 or more hours each day with “severely restricted activity, movement and social interaction.” The law also prohibited isolation of vulnerable groups, including LGBTQ+ people, but still left corrections officials with broad discretion over when to use isolation, including for protective custody. While the law spells out specific guidelines related to vulnerable populations like pregnant or disabled prisoners or those under 21 and over 65 years old, there are none regarding those who are or perceived to be LGBTQ+.

When prison officials do use isolation, the law says it cannot go longer than 20 consecutive days or 30 days in a 60-day period. But Belladonna says she has been isolated since early February—roughly ten months, as of the date of publishing. 

Isolation of trans women in protective custody is just one of the ways solitary conditions persist in the New Jersey prison system despite the reforms. A recent investigation by HuffPost and the Inside/Out Journalism Project found that more than three years after the 2019 law was passed, the prison system’s main alternative to isolated confinement—so-called Restorative Housing Units (RHUs), where incarcerated people are isolated as punishment for breaking prison rules—is largely solitary by another name and seems to defy the reforms. Days after that investigation was published, in early October, New Jersey’s Office of the Corrections Ombudsman, a state prison watchdog, published a report echoing those findings.  

“We found that on any given day, 700+ people are confined to a prison cell for 22-23 hours per day,” Terry Schuster, the New Jersey Corrections Ombudsperson, said in an email. “People spend months or years in these disciplinary tiers, called Restorative Housing Units (RHUs), and reached out to our office in large numbers to draw attention to the apparent violations of state law.” The office confirmed to Bolts that it has also received reports from transgender people about the extent of their isolation. 

A spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC) did not respond to questions for this story, including how many transgender people are in isolation conditions inside the state’s prison system. 

Research has consistently shown that solitary confinement has disastrous consequences on mental and physical health. According to psychiatric experts, isolation can both exacerbate existing mental health issues and even cause the onset of mental illness. And according to a recent study, time in isolation can also increase someone’s risk of death in the first year after release from incarceration, namely from suicide, homicide and opioid overdose. 

There is also overwhelming research to indicate that LGBTQ+ people face egregious and disproportionate violence behind bars. More than half of respondents to a 2022 national survey by legal advocacy group Lambda Legal and prison abolitionist organization Black & Pink said they had been sexually harassed by jail or prison staff, while 1 in 6 said they had been sexually assaulted. A stunning 87 percent reported verbal assault. 

Alongside this pervasive abuse, trans people in prison often land in isolation. A recent report in The Nation detailed how trans people disproportionately face isolation in federal lockups, citing data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 2017 to 2022 that showed incarcerated trans people are typically two to three times more likely to be put in “restrictive housing” than cisgender people.

Valentina said she landed in isolation at NJSP after being transferred from the state’s only women’s prison, the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, earlier this year after Governor Phil Murphy announced his plans to shutter it following years of scandals there. Her path out of isolation isn’t as simple as moving to a women’s prison, particularly in light of a policy NJDOC quietly enacted late last year that gives prison officials greater leeway to override trangender prisoners’ housing preferences. Under the new policy, prisoners have a “rebuttable presumption” that they are housed according to their wishes, but officials now can override that preference based on factors including “reproductive considerations.” 

The new policy was enacted months after another trans woman, Demi Grace-Minor, impregnated two women at Edna Mahan during what NJDOC officials said were consensual sexual relationships. A resulting media firestorm and transphobic criticism preceded the policy change, which now bars many trans women from easily obtaining housing that experts say could make them safer while behind bars.

The new housing policy could also put the New Jersey prison system at odds with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, which tasks prison officials with giving serious weight to a trans person’s housing preferences; still, recent reporting shows that trans women are almost always housed in men’s facilities. PREA also requires housing to be decided on a case-by-case basis, which Valentina said isn’t happening for trans women in New Jersey prisons. 

Valentina alleges that under the new policy, prison officials won’t send trans women to women’s units until they get bottom surgery—referring to surgeries that often include an orchiectomy and vaginoplasty—to eliminate any “reproductive considerations.” Valentina, Belladonna, and other trans women have repeatedly said that they face agonizing, oftentimes bureaucratic, delays in actually obtaining these surgeries, leaving them trapped not just in men’s prisons but in continued isolation. Trans women in New Jersey prisons also allege that medical and mental health care are grossly lacking.

“I truly suffer every second of every day with not having my full surgery, although I feel so much better since my first gender affirming surgery,” Belladonna said. 

“I can honestly express with truth and sincerity that I have NEVER in my life encountered or felt such discrimination, hatred and transphobic opposition as I have experienced since coming out here in the NJDOC,” Valentina said. 

Some trans people have been pushed to extremes to alleviate their suffering. Belladonna has thrice mutilated herself, including trying to cut off her penis, and recently tried to remove her testicles, in order to relieve herself of the debilitating dysphoria she faces without gender affirming procedures. 

Belladonna said that even if she were to be offered less restrictive housing, she would still have to turn it down out of concern for her own safety—meaning she will likely stay isolated until she can move to a women’s prison. 

“I signed into protective custody because in a man’s prison PC is the safest place versus the prison’s ‘male population’ for someone as advanced in her transition as me,” she said. 

Like Belladonna, Valentina also detailed efforts to remove her penis herself amid delays in obtaining gender affirming care and a lack of adequate mental health care. 

And when weeks after Grace-Minor was sent back to Garden State Youth Correctional Facility after the pregnancies at Edna Mahan, she similarly tried to remove her testicles. At the time of the incident, Grace-Minor was housed in isolation and said she felt unsafe surrounded by men. Grace-Minor is now incarcerated in Northern State Prison in Newark. 

“It has been pure hell back here in solitary: lack of food, being sexually harassed and housed around men who flash their genitals and refer to me as ‘he-she bitch,’” Grace-Minor wrote on a public blog in September 2022. “I doubt that I will survive all of this.”

Surgeries aside, trans women in New Jersey prisons say they’ve also had to fight for months to get basic necessities like hair ties, proper underwear and even deodorant. Their complaints mirror allegations from a lawsuit filed against NJDOC in 2019. The plaintiff in that lawsuit alleged that corrections officers misgendered her, denied her female commissary items and failed to prevent harassment against her, all of which trans women say still happens in New Jersey prisons. 

That lawsuit, brought by the ACLU of New Jersey on behalf of an anonymous trans woman, ended with a settlement in June 2021 and a change in NJDOC’s housing policy to give trans prisoners a “presumption” that they would be housed in line with their gender identities, a policy it had to maintain for at least a year. Four months after that time period lapsed, NJDOC rolled back the policy to give prison officials greater discretion over housing assignments for trans people.

Amid the constellation of struggles these women face behind bars, they agree that moving to a women’s prison would make them feel safer, but that likely won’t happen until they obtain bottom surgery, which all of them are desperately waiting for. And until then, their isolation and the anguish that comes with it—compounded by their continuing dysphoria absent gender-affirming surgery—will continue.

Belladonna called her situation “agonizing,” writing in a recent email, “It is torture for me because I only have half of my bottom surgery and so I’m stuck in the room all day with this part that doesn’t belong to me.”

The post New Jersey Prisons Isolate Trans Women Even After Reforms to Reduce Solitary Confinement appeared first on Bolts.

By international human rights standards, Jack Morris was tortured by the state of California for almost four decades. 

Morris mostly lived in solitary confinement from the time he went to prison in 1978, the year “Grease” was released, until he got out in 2017—alone 23 hours a day inside a cell the size of a parking space, shut off not just from the outside world, but also from the bonds and makeshift society that develop behind prison walls. He was only allowed phone calls whenever a close family member died. Over time, his sensory perception changed and small sounds made him jump. He stopped caring to watch TV, and eventually shifted from desperately craving human contact to withdrawing into himself and no longer wanting to speak with others. 

“It’s a slow, torturous event that slowly deteriorates you, both physically and mentally, emotionally and spiritually, until you no longer exist,” Morris told Bolts.

In 2013, while still imprisoned, Morris took part in a historic hunger strike protesting the pervasive use of solitary confinement inside the California prison system. “We all understood that if there wasn’t something done, we would all simply die inside those cells,” he said. Pelican Bay State Prison, the supermax facility where Morris spent much of his incarceration, had around 1,100 solitary cells in its “Secure Housing Unit,” or SHU, at the time of the hunger strike, with more than 500 people confined there for over a decade. People accused of belonging to a gang could be held in solitary indefinitely. The 2013 strike, organized by four prominent gang leaders who had been isolated for decades inside the SHU, saw some 30,000 prisoners from around California participate on its first day. Some managed to stretch the protest out for sixty days and ultimately helped push the state to agree to new limits on the use of solitary confinement, like more out-of-cell time and programming. 

Morris still remembers the morning the 2013 hunger strike began. It was early, and he was still lying in bed when a friend yelled through the bars and told him to look at the TV. 

“I look at the ticker tape at the bottom, and right there it said on national news, ‘30,000 California prisoners on hunger strike,’ and it was—it was amazing,” Morris told Bolts. It was their third hunger strike in recent years, but this one felt different, he said, with more coordination between prisoners and allies on the outside. With the whole country watching, change finally felt possible. “We were fortunate to have litigation taking place and family members yelling at the top of their lungs on the street corner and we finally got legislators to listen when the news broadcasted that 30,000 prisoners were not gonna eat no more,” Morris said. 

Last year, the California legislature took action to restrict the use of solitary confinement in the state by passing the Mandela Act, legislation that would curtail solitary beyond 15 consecutive days and no more than 45 days in a 180-day period. The bill seeks to codify the United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rules, adopted last decade to define solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days as torture, so named in honor of the South African leader who spent 18 years languishing in isolation while imprisoned.

But California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the Mandela Act last September, arguing in his veto statement that the new restrictions “could risk the safety of both the staff and incarcerated population within these facilities.” Newsom, who acknowledged “the deep need to reform California’s use of segregated confinement,” said that he would also direct the state’s prison system, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), to “develop regulations that would restrict the use of segregated confinement except in limited situations.” 

That still hasn’t happened. CDCR told Bolts that the department merely plans to file a draft of new solitary regulations with the state by the end of 2023.

With no movement since lawmakers passed the solitary reforms last year, advocates for ending the practice—including Morris and other survivors of prolonged solitary confinement—are once again urging Newsom to support the Mandela reforms, which have been filed again for this legislative session under Assembly Bill 280.

Pasadena Assemblymember Chris Holden, who sponsored both bills, said he wants to bring California in line with international standards on imprisonment. His bill, like last year’s version, aims to end prolonged solitary in state prisons as well as local jails, which are run by county sheriffs, and immigrant detention centers, which are often run by private companies. 

Holden told Bolts that he has been discussing the bill’s language with Newsom’s office and that the legislation could still change depending on what the governor supports. As written, the bill would ban the use of solitary entirely for young and very old prisoners, people who meet the state’s criteria for physical or mental disability, and those who are pregnant or recently postpartum. But Holden said that he was willing to budge on some of these categorical exclusions after Newsom’s office communicated that the governor would still not support them. 

While Holden said he’s open to “reasonable” proposals from Newsom or CDCR to tweak the bill, he vowed to persist in making significant changes to solitary confinement as it is presently used. “The current system, as we speak, it meets the definition of torture,” Holden told Bolts. 

Experts who have studied the decade-long movement to end solitary in California prisons say it’s unrealistic to expect CDCR, which resisted full implementation of policy changes wrought by the 2013 hunger strike, to reform the practice on its own. “Day to day, when you look at solitary confinement use, the state is still putting big numbers of people in solitary confinement for long periods of time, under new names, in new places,” said Keramet Reiter, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who wrote a book about long-term isolation at Pelican Bay. “In practice, these institutions are just incredibly resistant to reform.” 

As solitary confinement grew more controversial in recent years, California prison officials have labeled prolonged isolation “administrative segregation” or a host of other terms that have helped conceal the reality and scope of the practice. The Mandela Act seeks to cut through this obfuscation by clearly defining it: isolation without programming for more than 17 hours a day. 

“What’s really interesting and almost comical if it wasn’t so horrific is the way that [authorities] and law enforcement play this like cat-and-mouse game about solitary confinement and pretend like solitary confinement doesn’t exist because they call it all these different names,” said Hamid Yazdan Panah, an attorney and the advocacy director at Immigrant Defense Advocates, which has been pushing for the Mandela reforms. 

In the years leading up to the 2013 hunger strike, nearly 12,000 people were held in solitary at any given time across the California prison system. Immediately after the strike forced some changes, prisoners at Pelican Bay filed a class action lawsuit trying to end the practice of indefinite isolation for alleged gang members, who were named as such via a shadowy process called “validation” that could take as proof a person’s tattoos, clothing, or someone else’s confidential testimony. While the prison system technically re-evaluated such prisoners every six years, the plaintiffs said that there were only three ways out of isolation—snitch, parole, or die —and one of those routes, becoming an informant for CDCR, could carry fatal consequences.

That lawsuit ended in a settlement with the state prison system, which promised to end the practice of indefinite isolation and release almost all of the people in prolonged solitary confinement back into the general population. But today, though there are many fewer people in prolonged isolation than before, advocates point out that solitary confinement is still widely used in California. As of the end of April 2023, CDCR reports that 3,446 people are in some form of isolation, and that’s not counting the many people in jail or immigration detention who also find themselves in solitary. 

While opponents of the Mandela Act argue that solitary is a necessary tool to protect prisoners and guards from violent individuals, advocates for ending it say isolation is imposed on an array of vulnerable people behind bars. Eric Harris, director of public policy at Disability Rights California, one of the organizations leading the fight for the Mandela Act, says isolation is often a default response to people seen as different or disruptive, including people with mental illness, physical disabilities, and gender-nonconforming people. 

“When you look at folks who are often mistreated in these settings, or misunderstood in these settings, most of them have some form of disability, whether it’s been diagnosed or not,” Harris told Bolts.

It’s not uncommon for prison guards to wield solitary confinement as retaliation against people who agitate for their rights on the inside. “A lot of the folks that I’ve seen that were put in solitary were jailhouse lawyers to silence them,” Mike Saavedra, who was held in long-term isolation for over a decade, told Bolts. “They’d threaten you once you file a 602 [complaint about prison conditions] or any type of lawsuit to throw you in the hole.” Once there, he said, “they can control your litigation because now you have minimal access to the law library…you’re only allowed a small number of books.” 

Saavedra, who is now the co-director of legal support at the Los Angeles-based abolitionist organization Dignity and Power Now, says he was put in isolation after he was elected to an advisory council tasked with communicating fellow prisoners’ concerns to prison leadership. “Those that got that position were typically then labeled as shot callers and sent to solitary,” he said. Undeterred, Saavedra kept filing lawsuits disputing the conditions of his confinement, as well as the validation process that kept him there.

As hard as it is to track isolation practices in CDCR, it’s even more challenging in California’s jails, which are overseen by the state’s 58 county sheriffs rather than one state department, and have no shared guidelines or metrics for the use of solitary confinement. Sacramento and Alameda counties are both under federal consent decrees owing in part to their use of solitary confinement for people in jail with mental health conditions, with the practice emerging as a focal point in last year’s election for Alameda sheriff. 

The Mandela Act would make California the first state to restrict solitary confinement inside immigration detention, where it is also frequently used, and bring the practice into compliance with international standards. “They just put people back there for any reason,” said Salesh “Sal” Prasad, who was turned over to ICE for deportation after being released from CDCR custody, despite having lived in the U.S. since he was six years old. Prasad spent around four of the 15 months he was in immigration detention in solitary confinement, including a time when guards put him there “for his own protection” after his mother got COVID-19 and passed away suddenly. He never got to see her. 

In solitary, Prasad found himself overwhelmed by grief, and unable to suppress a fountain of traumatic memories from his childhood. “The negative thoughts start coming in and it takes over your mind,” he told Bolts. 

Isolation can also be used to quell protests inside immigration detention. Last summer, guards responded to a labor strike by Prasad and other immigrants detained at two facilities in California’s Central Valley by throwing some of them in solitary. And both Prasad and Yazdan Panah say that isolation is often employed to encourage people to give up fighting their immigration cases. “We see that time and time again—people are placed in really inhumane conditions, in part because they want to build pressure to get people to self-deport and to continue to sort of keep the conveyor belt going,” Yazdan Panah told Bolts. 

Last session, Yazdan Panah said, opponents of the Mandela Act were able to sow doubt about the bill by advancing the narrative that the only two options for incarcerated people are solitary confinement or the general population. “The hypothetical that they love to give is that according to our bill, someone can kill their cellmate and the facility can put that person in solitary confinement for 15 days, and then after that, they would have to go back to the general population to ‘kill again,’” he said. In fact, Yazdan Panah said, someone who engaged in violence toward others could still be housed individually; the bill merely stipulates that the prison must increase the person’s amount of meaningful human contact and out-of-cell activities. 

The bill was also hampered by high-cost estimates and the charge from detractors that it would require massive new construction across CDCR. “It’s sort of an interesting and diabolical argument because no one in California wants to expand or build new prison space,” said Yazdan Panah, whose organization has countered that the bill would only require an expansion in programming, and would save the state money in the long term.  

Advocates for reform say that continuing to lean on solitary confinement only perpetuates the harms from which it claims to shield people. Reiter noted that the emotional and psychological damage that isolation engenders, especially the way it has been used in juvenile facilities, contributes to a more dangerous and volatile environment for people in prison. Harris told Bolts that no one makes it out of solitary unscarred. “Every single person that we’ve been working with who’s a solitary survivor, has said that they have some form of mental health disability, whether it’s PTSD, whether it’s anxiety, depression,” he said.

Though Prasad has been out of ICE detention for nearly six months and recently won his asylum case, he’s often brought back to those long months in isolation—the cold, the walls closing in, the smell of human beings living confined in such small spaces. “It weighs on you,” he said. “Those are four months that I can’t get back.” Prasad called his months in solitary confinement “dead time.” 

As the 10th anniversary of the 2013 hunger strike approaches this summer, Newsom’s veto of the Mandela Act last year looms over discussions for how to curb solitary confinement. Advocates maintain the veto doesn’t necessarily mean Newsom won’t budge on the issue this time around, stressing increased attention on curtailing solitary both in Sacramento and around the country. 

“We have over 20 states working on legislation or litigation around the use of solitary confinement, in some states even holding bipartisan support,” said Dolores Canales, the co-founder of California Families Against Solitary Confinement, who is herself a survivor of solitary confinement. Canales’ son was also in the Pelican Bay SHU during the 2013 hunger strikes. 

Newsom’s office didn’t answer questions about how he’s approaching the Mandela reforms this year or whether his position has changed since last year, with a representative for the governor telling Bolts that his veto message “speaks for itself.” CDCR told Bolts that the department “anticipate[s] filing draft regulations with the Office of Administrative Law by the end of the year,” but did not respond to a follow-up question asking for more detail on the content of the regulations. 

To Yazdan Panah, these promises were cold comfort. “The issue of solitary confinement has been front and center in California now for more than a decade,” he said. “CDCR has been unable—or unwilling is maybe a better term—to comply with the terms of the Ashker settlement that they themselves agreed to in 2015.” And the governor, he said, had “completely punted on the issue of jails and private detention facilities.”

Even if the Mandela Act becomes law, enforcing it will present considerable challenges. In 2021, New York’s HALT Solitary Confinement Act outlawed solitary confinement for more than 15 consecutive days, and otherwise greatly limited the practice, but today, over a year after it took effect, the law is far from fully implemented. The same year, voters in Pittsburgh overwhelmingly approved a ballot referendum to ban solitary in the county jail, which has been accused of continuing the practice in violation of the new law. 

“The good that the act is doing is keeping the conversation going and the spotlight shining on them,” said Reiter. “In practice, it’s a sweeping reform that will be hard to implement and track.” 

Enforcing the law in immigration detention, which is technically overseen by the California attorney general but generally operates farther outside the purview of the state, would be particularly challenging. And, as it has done again and again, CDCR could always find new ways to skirt the definitions imposed by the Mandela Act if it passes. But activists for ending solitary take the long view, saying the Mandela Act is a critical next step in their much longer fight against a tortuous and intractable practice. 
“When we first got involved, I remember families used to tell us, ‘Oh, my loved one’s never gonna get out’ or ‘My loved one says nothing’s going to change,’” recalled Canales. “And I thought to myself, it has to change. And as long as we keep thinking that it’s not, that’s how it will be.”

The post Survivors of Solitary Confinement Face the California Governor’s Veto Pen appeared first on Bolts.

K.S., 17, was incarcerated at Georgia’s South Fulton Municipal Regional Jail for about four months, unable to pay $2,000 in bond for simple battery and misdemeanor theft charges. Like many others at the jail, she lives with mental illness—bipolar disorder and depression, according to her declaration submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. 

For about two months, she was allowed out of her cell for one to two hours a day and, after attempting to kill herself, was sent to suicide watch at another jail. After a few days, she was returned to the South Fulton Jail where, again, she was confined to her cell for about 23 hours a day, according to her declaration. 

“I tried several times to call the officer in the booth using the intercom in my cell to request free time so I could speak with my mother. The officer ignored me and I was not allowed out of my cell,” she said in her declaration, dated April 22. “I attempted to strangulate myself again.”

Her declaration is part of an ongoing class action lawsuit against the Fulton County sheriff and jail staff. (Theodore Jackson was sheriff when the suit was filed in 2019. Patrick Labat replaced him in January.) 

The Southern Center for Human Rights and the Georgia Advocacy Office filed the suit on behalf of women with mental illness who are incarcerated at the jail. The plaintiffs allege that the sheriff’s office and its representatives in the jail are harming the mental health of these women by placing them in isolation. (Initials are used in the plaintiffs’ statements to protect their privacy.) 

“The sheriff holds the keys to each and every cell in the jail, and can decide whether they house people humanely, or in around-the-clock isolation with little to no human contact, fresh air, and natural light,” Atteeyah Hollie, an attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, wrote to The Appeal: Political Report in an email. “The sheriff is a named defendant because solitary confinement would not be occurring in the jail without him.”

At the local and national level, formerly incarcerated people and their families, along with civil rights activists, are demanding an end to solitary confinement in prisons and jails. On June 3, more than 130 organizations sent an open letter to President Joe Biden, urging him to end long-term solitary confinement in federal jails and prisons, ban the practice for certain vulnerable populations, and create incentives for state and local governments to follow suit. 

“Ending the practice of solitary confinement would end the pain, torture, and trauma of tens of thousands of people languishing in harsh and harmful conditions,” they wrote. 

But even without federal intervention, there are local elected officials who can take action. For most of the approximately 630,000 people locked up in local jails across the country—people like K.S. and the other women at the South Fulton jail—authority over the use or elimination of solitary confinement falls to the sheriff. 

“Sheriffs have nearly unfettered authority in their jurisdictions. Sheriffs essentially run their own fiefdoms,” said Tammie Gregg, the deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project and the head of the group’s Stop Solitary campaign. The ACLU was one of the signatories on the letter to Biden.

This edition of The Badge, a series by The Appeal: Political Report on the role of sheriffs, explains the power they have to uphold or undo the rules of solitary confinement.

Sheriffs dictate the use of solitary confinement inside most jails 

Across the country and within a state, jail policies vary in terms of why someone is sent to solitary, for how long, and how restrictive the confinement will be.

“Sheriffs set policies for the county jails,” said Alan Mills, executive director of the Chicago-based Uptown People’s Law Center. “They can develop whatever policies they want to within the bounds of the Constitution.”

Inside jails, symptoms of mental illness are often treated as rule violations.

In Marion County, Indiana jails, “self-mutilation,” “causing injury to oneself,” or “failure to maintain personal hygiene” — all of which can be symptoms of mental illness — can land someone in solitary confinement for up to five days, according to the jail handbook posted on the sheriff’s website. Talking in hallways or “making loud and/or boisterous noises” can also result in up to five days in isolation. Sheriff Kerry Forestal, who was elected in 2018, runs the county’s three jail facilities. 

“The Sheriff reserves the right, at his sole discretion, to modify the rules, policies, and practices presented in the Inmate Handbook at any time in the interest of enhancing the security, efficiency, and effectiveness of the operation of the jail system,” reads the handbook for the Marion County Jail.

Misuse of the suicide hotline—what, precisely, that entails is not defined—can result in up to 30 days in solitary confinement, according to the handbook. 

Isolation can also exacerbate (or cause) mental illness, which can lead to additional violations, and more time in solitary confinement, according to numerous studies, medical experts, and formerly incarcerated people. 

J.N., an autistic prisoner in the South Fulton jail, was in its mental health treatment program, but she was terminated from the course against her wishes for “failing to make progress,” according to a declaration she filed to the court dated April 22. She has bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and temporal lobe epilepsy. She was accused of disobeying an officer’s order, and placed in isolation where she says she was allowed out of her cell for an hour a day. 

While at the jail she has tried to kill herself twice. “I attempted to kill myself by swallowing pieces of a plastic spoon,” she said in the declaration. “I was feeling so tired of being locked down.” 

People held in solitary confinement may also be more likely to die soon after they come home. A study of more than 200,000 people released from North Carolina prisons between 2000 and 2015 showed that those placed in solitary confinement were 24 percent more likely to die in their first year of release compared with those not placed in isolation. They were 78 percent more likely to die from suicide and 54 percent more likely to die from homicide. In the first two weeks after release, they were 127 percent more likely to die from an opioid overdose. 

“The punishment is meant to break you down, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually,” said Johnny Perez, director of the U.S. Prisons Program for the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, which was a signatory on the letter to Biden. Perez spent about three years in solitary confinement while incarcerated in New York. 

“Solitary is one of the tools used to make you assimilate to this upside down kingdom,” he said.

Sheriffs can scale back or halt solitary confinement by ending a culture of isolation

As the harms of solitary confinement come into public view, some sheriffs have made changes to their jails. In Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), Sheriff Tom Dart announced in a Washington Post commentary in 2019 that he had eliminated the use of solitary confinement at the county jail starting in 2016. 

“Sheriff Dart has been an ardent advocate for the elimination of solitary confinement because of the adverse effects on mental health,” the sheriff’s office told the Political Report in an email.

People can still be held in restrictive conditions at the Chicago jail. Those who commit disciplinary infractions and are not suffering from serious mental illness are housed in the Rehabilitation Unit. They are able to be out of their cells for at least four hours a day, during which they may be shackled, in addition to time out for court or medical appointments, Dart’s office told the Political Report. 

“The Sheriff’s Office has structured the RU to allow for increased time out of cell while still ensuring the safety and security of other confined persons and staff,” the sheriff’s office wrote to the Political Report.

Solitary confinement has also become a campaign issue in some sheriffs’ races. Last week, Kim Beaty won the Democratic primary for sheriff in Erie County, New York, after promising to “end solitary confinement” at the local jail. 

Advocates warn that the changes that are needed are substantive. 

Limiting or abolishing solitary confinement is not only about the number of hours out of a cell, said Jennifer Peirce, a research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice and a co-author of a Vera report on solitary confinement in jails released in April. 

“Shifting that number of hours doesn’t necessarily get away from that experience of isolation,” said Peirce. “It really depends on, what are the meaningful activities and interactions with people?” Part of the experience of isolation, she said, is having limited access to programs, health services, phone calls, visits, or the library.

Many people are held in housing units that, while not labeled as restrictive housing, still confine people to their cells for at least 22 hours a day, according to Vera’s report. In half of the jails that responded to Vera’s survey, mental health units held people in their cells for at least 22 hours a day. 

Rare legislative reforms have mandated more out-of-cell time and capped the number of days a person can be held in solitary confinement. This year, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the HALT Solitary Confinement Act. The legislation, which applies to prisons and jails and imposes statewide standards that sheriffs and corrections officer must follow, limits stints in isolation to 15 continuous days, and mandates seven hours of out-of-cell time a day, with the exception of facility-wide emergencies or in the course of providing mental health or medical treatment. 

The bill was championed by a coalition of formerly incarcerated people, including Five Mualimm-ak, executive director of the Incarcerated Nation Network. Although these reforms are important first steps, they do not truly end the practice of solitary confinement, said Mualimm-ak.

“No reforms work,” he said. “You have to abolish the punishment model.”

Mualimm-ak was in solitary confinement for more than five years while incarcerated in New York. Among the reasons he was sent to solitary, he said, were: having 52 stamps when he was only permitted to have 50; having two aspirin; and cutting his hand.

People, especially those with mental illness, are in need of more services, not more punishment, said Mualimm-ak. A person with mental illness may be sent to solitary for not following an officer’s orders when they just needed more time to process them, he said.

“You need more support, you need more programs,” he said. “We just have to start prioritizing our most marginalized.”

Sheriffs can reduce the jail population

In the letter to Biden, the signatories wrote that reducing the number of people in solitary confinement could be accomplished, in part, by incarcerating fewer people in jails, prisons, juvenile detention facilities, and immigration detention centers. 

“Part of the work is not sending these folks to jail,” said Perez. 

Like ending solitary confinement, sheriffs can play a role in decarceration as well. Previous reporting in The Badge series noted the powers that sheriffs have to not make arrests for minor offenses and to reduce pretrial detention. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, sheriffs have also granted release to people charged with minor offenses.  

If these policies are to continue after the pandemic, they could significantly drive down jail populations, since most people in jails are held pretrial for low-level offenses. 

Out of the 270 jails that responded to Vera’s survey, approximately 23 percent reported that they hold some people in the general population in their cells for at least 22 hours a day. This is largely due to space constraints, they say, but expanding or building more jails is not the solution, said Peirce.

“Jail administrators should resist the temptation to propose expanding facilities or scope of services, such as expanding mental health units as a potential solution to the problem of this de facto restrictive housing,” she said. “The first priority and, we would say, a better use of resources and a more fair approach would be to prevent people from entering jail in the first place, reducing the number of people who are in jail, and finding appropriate services for those who are vulnerable.”

To reduce the use of solitary confinement inside jails, people, especially those with mental illness, must be provided more support on the outside, according to Hollie. 

“Community-based interventions on the front end that avoid criminalization and incarceration are the best solution for all people,” Hollie wrote. “In the specific case of people with serious mental illness, robust, responsive, and individualized supports and community-based services are desperately needed to thrive in the community.”

Regardless of a jail’s stated policies, it hinges on implementation 

In the South Fulton Municipal Regional Jail, several women held in solitary confinement had been accused of minor offenses, according to the 2019 complaint.  Some were found incompetent to stand trial and waited for months, in isolation, for a hospital bed to open up. 

Shortly after the suit was filed in 2019, a district court ordered the jail to provide a minimum of 20 hours of out-of-cell time per week to women housed in the mental health pods, when possible. Then in February of 2020, the court modified the preliminary injunction to apply to all women with psychiatric disabilities detained at the jail, no matter their assigned housing unit. 

The defendants claimed in a recent court filing that they have complied with the judge’s orders. 

But women with mental illness are still placed in solitary confinement, according to the groups’ motion for contempt filed in March. In one declaration filed with the court, A.S, a 17-year-old girl at the Georgia jail, wrote that she has been in solitary confinement for about six months. She has been diagnosed with a mood disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. 

“I keep getting more time added to my lockdown because I get upset about being alone and treated poorly by the guards,” she said in her declaration, dated April 22. Since her arrest in November, she was sent to suicide watch approximately 10 times, according to her declaration. 

“I do not want to take my life, but I am always so lonely,” she said. “Going to suicide watch is the only way I know how to get in a room around other people.” 

The plaintiffs are pressing the sheriff’s office to meet the terms of the court order, but if the case cannot be settled they anticipate going to trial this year, according to Hollie. Implementation of reforms can often be delayed, given the largely absent oversight of sheriffs’ offices. 

“[The sheriff] is the person who can end this damaging practice,” said Hollie. “We are hopeful the sheriff will choose humanity over harm going forward.”

The post To End Solitary Confinement, Advocates Turn Up the Pressure on Sheriffs appeared first on Bolts.

Andrews got into an argument with two guards and requested to file a grievance, but instead they locked her in a cell alone, causing her to have a panic attack.

“I was a kid in jail. I’m scared,” she said, recalling the painful experience. 

Andrews says her requests for help were met with suspicion, and she was told that she would go in “the hole”—solitary confinement—as punishment if the medical ward found nothing wrong.

“I was about to go to the hole because I wanted to see medical care. Because I said I couldn’t breathe, because I was having a panic attack. And I just couldn’t believe that,” Andrews told The Appeal: Political Report. 

When she was incarcerated at the jail again in 2019, Andrews was placed in solitary confinement. She says if it had happened to her the first time she might not have survived. The Allegheny County jail has a suicide rate more than 1.5 times the national average.

“Going to jail later and finding what all that really meant, if that would’ve happened to me when I was 18 and I first went to jail, I would have not made it. Like it’s that serious.” 

Now Allegheny County voters could ban solitary confinement in the jail. A ballot initiative sponsored by Alliance for Police Accountability and co-signed by over 25 other organizations, would prohibit holding people in a cell for more than 20 hours per day, with limited exceptions for health and security reasons. After receiving nearly 67,000 signatures, the initiative will appear on the ballot in the local election today. 

Brandi Fisher, president and CEO of the Alliance for Police Accountability, says the ballot initiative is the community’s way of addressing concerns about conditions in the jail. “The sole goal is to make sure that people are safe. Just because someone is accused of a crime doesn’t mean that we ignore their health issues and their health concerns. And Allegheny County Jail has a huge issue when it comes to being able to address people’s health concerns, and people are literally dying and losing their lives because of it.”

The jail has come under scrutiny for a range of problems, from reports of cells with frigid temperatures and cool air blowing from the vents during the winter, to COVID-19 outbreaks exacerbated by the notoriously poor medical care, to brutality and abuse. Pittsburgh’s Black residents are far more likely to face these conditions because of the jail’s racial disparities. Out of the roughly 1,700 people incarcerated at the jail each day, roughly two-thirds are Black, despite Black people making up only 13 percent of the population in the county.

Last year, the Abolitionist Law Center filed multiple lawsuits against jail officials over the facility’s lack of mental health care and the mistreatment of people who need it; 70 percent of the people incarcerated in the jail have been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition.

A press release concerning a lawsuit the group filed in September states that “People with psychiatric disabilities are tased, sprayed with [pepper spray], beaten, and placed in restraint chairs for several hours for minor infractions and for simply requesting mental health care. They are commonly placed in solitary confinement for weeks and months on end, often without having a hearing, in conditions universally acknowledged by correctional experts, courts and the United Nations as torture.” 

In response, Allegheny County said that “Force is not used to punish inmates; it is used only when necessary for the safety and security of the staff and inmates.”

The lawsuit alleges that in solitary confinement, people are restricted to a 10-by-7-foot cell, that they can be deprived of soap, toothpaste or a toothbrush, and that they are often restricted from programs and services.  They only receive one hour outside of their cell, sometimes handcuffed to a table. Allegheny County denied that people in solitary are deprived of hygiene products.

According to the Abolitionist Law Center, the Allegheny County Jail’s track record of brutality, especially against women, far exceeds other jails in the state.  In 2019, there were 720 reported use-of-force incidents—a per capita rate twice as high as the state average— and people were confined to restraint chairs 339 times. In 2018, the staff even used pepper spray against a pregnant woman.

People who were placed in restraint chairs told Public Source, a local publication, that they were left without food or bathroom breaks, pepper sprayed, and covered with a spit hood that affected their breathing. Some said they were even left naked and exposed.

Allegheny County Jail warden Orlando Harper did not respond to a request for comment from the Political Report.

Andrews says she has experienced the restraint chair, solitary confinement, and other forms of brutality numerous times during periods of incarceration over the past three years. She believes that the jail’s practices are long overdue for change. 

“Just because you have the power to watch over these people and basically be their authority figure doesn’t mean you can take advantage of that power,” Andrews said. “And that’s basically what happens at that jail.” 

The county jail board, which oversees the facility, has stalled on addressing these problems. And legislation to limit solitary confinement hasn’t made it far in Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature. Fisher says the ballot initiative lets voters take the matter into their own hands. 

“It was a way to make change happen without permission, without the loopholes, without having to go through the institutions and structures that currently exist that we already know are rooted in racism and white supremacy,” she said. “We’re not ever gonna get the changes that we wanna see if we’re dependent on those folks to make it happen.”

Advocates for the ballot initiative acknowledge that incarcerated people could still be isolated for up to 20 hours a day if the measure passes. But Miracle Jones, the director of policy and advocacy at 1Hood Media, says that it is a place to start. “Legislation will not always be as all-encompassing as the most progressive of us want, but sometimes just the compromising solution is getting definitions that will not only allow for a referendum to be passed, but implemented.” 

Activists are rallying around other issues in this election, too. The ballot includes a Pittsburgh Home Rule Charter amendment to implement a version of Breonna’s Law, which banned no-knock warrants in Louisville, Kentucky. The amendment would require law enforcement officers to be in uniform or other identifiable clothing, record video using a body camera, and announce themselves when executing a warrant. They would also be required to physically knock and wait at least 15 seconds before entering a residence.

A high-stakes county sheriff’s primary election features former Pittsburgh police chief Dom Costa. After leaving law enforcement, Costa was elected to the state legislature, where he pushed for tough-on-crime legislation and once called people on death row “animals.” His opponent, Kevin Kraus, also has a background in law enforcement but is seen as more progressive.

In judicial elections, activists are backing candidates seeking to fill a quarter of the seats on the county’s Court of Common Pleas, where they could make a dent in mass incarceration. And organizers have brought issues like policing and gentrification to the forefront of the mayoral primary, where incumbent Bill Peduto faces a strong challenge from state Representative Ed Gainey. 

All of these races could alter the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and shift the political landscape toward racial and economic justice.

“Right now, we have an unprecedented moment to really rewrite and redefine what reform is and what liberation is for Black people in this city,” Jones said.

Fisher says the initiative to ban solitary confinement has catalyzed people who are affected by these issues to get involved. “It really showed people how we can govern ourselves, how we are the ones that make the decisions about our lives and our loved ones’ lives,” she said.

Andrews worked with the Alliance for Police Accountability to put the referendum on the ballot. She says sharing her story and advocating for change in the jail is part of her healing journey.

“I honestly don’t think I will be free from it until something’s done, until I make a difference. I don’t honestly think I will be able to breathe the same until everybody else can breathe the same. Because as of right now, somebody’s in that chair right now. Somebody’s in that restraint chair as we’re speaking. That’s how I look at life every day.”

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