Voices from Solitary: A Lose-Lose Situation
The following was written by Pelican Bay SHU inmate Paul Sangu Jones. Jones has been incarcerated since 1969, when he was 20 years old. Sentenced 7-years-to-life, he has been in the SHU since 1988, a situation he refers to as a “state of limbo.” Jones wrote of his extensive incarceration, “At the time many of us were incarcerated, 30 plus years ago, we were irrational and immature young men who had lived our adolescent and limited adult years based on the indoctrination of living by our own personal codes as learned from a criminally-oriented environment. Now after 30 and 40 plus years of self-reflection and self-criticism, we are fully aware of the incorrectness of such a life style… We’ve learned that responsibility is an inescapable burden of manhood and we had ours, which our conscience will not let us ignore. Our continued imprisonment serves no constructive purpose as it is only inflicting more pain and suffering of a physical as well as mental nature.”
In this piece, Jones shares his views of the recently announced Step Down Program announced by the CDCR in the spring. –Sal Rodriguez
“Personality is mysterious, but it’s born in you, not made.” But it can be brainwashed.
The secret to surviving isolation is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less. One learns the wisdom of silence. Prisoners are the people least empowered to advocate for their own safety—how the horror of yesterday became merely the uneasiness of today once you grew accustomed. No one wants any complications in their lives.
Perception being what it is, caring seems to have faded with events. What is supposed to be corrective and rehabilitative—prison—is in reality far from that. Why call it justice system, there seems so little of that…they are more concerned about the perception they convey. In the grand scheme of things perception is all that mattered.
The division of the administrations apparatuses into separate fiefdoms has rendered the Institutional Classification Committee (ICC) utterly dysfunctional. Under such circumstances, it is increasingly doubtful that ICC would be able to act as an effective and responsible committee in any case involving a prisoner put through the four-phase step down program.
The difficulty for Short Corridor Prisoners is not the fact that we find ourselves under pressure, still, to debrief and become an informant for the state; it is the fact that none of the options under consideration are an easy option that promises to deliver any concrete positive results on the prisoners behalf.
It is far too late now to alter the situation radically with this so-call step down program; that is nothing more than a thin disguise for their “six year inactive status program” reduced to “four years.” Policies executed by CDCR will always be intended to preserve and increase the exploitative and repressive powers of their agencies: a policy shift is simply a shift to a new strategy in pursuit of that goal.
Now that we have read their proposal for the SDP it has become increasingly clear to SHU Short Corridor prisoners that escalating intervention by “Officers of Correctional Safety” and IGI will render our attempts for release to general population futile.
In a nutshell, all the options available to Short Corridor SHU prisoners are fraught with unwanted side-effects and uncertainty. To us, the four-phase proposal is a lose-lose situation.
Paul Sangu Jones # B26077
PBSP-SHU D4-107
PO Box 7500
Crescent City, CA 95532
The Washington Post reported yesterday that four dozen inmates at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison have launched a hunger strike in protest of their long-term solitary confinement.
In a letter to Solitary Watch written before the hunger strike, one Red Onion inmate held in isolation reported that the prison was “absolutely primitive…they have me next to an inmate that throws poop on the tier, rubs it all over regularly…the pod has several like that…constant yelling, banging…” Another inmate at Red Onion wrote that the conditions of the isolation unit “would make you truly wonder what the hell is going on in the minds of people who run these institutions…”
Red Onion was the subject of a 1999 Human Rights Watch report, in which it was blasted for failing “to embrace basic tenets of sound correctional practice and laws protecting inmates from abusive, degrading or cruel treatment.”
The prison has received increasing scrutiny in recent months; of its over 500 inmates in solitary, many are known to have been diagnosed mentally ill. Red Onion inmates are isolated for an average of 2.7 years. The conditions at Red Onion State Prison prompted some legislators to ask for a federal investigation of the use of solitary confinement at the prison. The scrutiny has prompted reviews of policies, though the hunger strikers have demanded more sweeping reforms.
The inmates have issued ten demands. Among them is a demand for “an end to torture in the form of indefinite segregation through the implementation of a fair and transparent process whereby prisoners can earn the right to be released from segregation.”
According to Virginia Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Taylor,
“I am unable to confirm a hunger strike at Red Onion,” said spokesman Larry Traylor. “I am aware of a press conference this morning that they are beginning a hunger strike. Our response … is that Red Onion has always operated constitutionally and has protected the 8th Amendment rights of offenders, and it has been nationally accredited by the American Correctional Association.”
“The hunger strike to protest conditions at Red Onion State Prison, including prolonged solitary confinement, indicates a need for increased transparency of the Virginia Department of Correction’s recently proposed changes to solitary confinement policies.
Currently, nearly 500 inmates at Red Onion spend 23 hours a day in a cell by themselves, with limited access to a caged pen for solitary exercise. Some Virginia prisoners, including those with mental illnesses, have been kept in isolation for years.
Our faith traditions recognize the inherent dignity of every human being, a quality that should not disappear behind prison gates. Prolonged isolation violates individuals’ God-given dignity by destroying prisoners’ minds and the opportunity for genuine rehabilitation.
Many studies have documented the detrimental psychological effects of long-term segregation, such as hallucinations, illusions, perceptual distortions, and hyperresponsivity to external stimuli.
More often than not, prisoners held in segregation return to society as less functional human beings, and studies indicate that isolation increases prisoners’ risk of recidivism. Housing prisoners in solitary confinement also costs the Commonwealth significantly more than housing prisoners in general prison population.
In light of the high cost of solitary confinement and its diminishing returns, states around the country are reducing their use of segregation and finding that there are safe alternatives. Both Mississippi and Maine have drastically reduced the use of solitary confinement and as a result, have not only saved millions of taxpayer dollars, but actually experienced a decline in violent incidents within their prisons.
NRCAT applauds Virginia’s Department of Corrections for its internal plans to reform the use of isolation at Red Onion, including appointing a team of experts to examine each prisoner and design personalized case plans, and adding additional levels of review before inmates are placed in solitary confinement. However, we remain convinced that independent review using expert data analysis methodology is essential to successfully implement alternatives to solitary confinement. Publicly announcing such an independent review would also demonstrate the Department’s good faith to reform its isolation policies. We urge the Department to provide transparent reporting of its plans and progress.”
During and after his own two-year incarceration for “gross indecency,” Oscar Wilde wrote several works on the cruelty and degradation of prison life. Among them is a lengthy letter to the editor of the London Daily Chronicle, written in 1897 shortly after his release from Reading Gaol and self-exile to France. It concerns the treatment of children in Britain’s prisons, including their solitary confinement. Wilde does not specify the ages of the children in question, but at one point he argues that children under the age of fourteen should not be put in prison at all–so it is safe to assume that the children he refers to were younger still.
What follows is an excerpt from Wilde’s letter, highlighting those practices that have changed relatively little since his day. Today, children as young as ten can be locked up in the UK, though they are placed in juvenile facilities rather than adult prisons, and solitary confinement is rare. In the United States, on the other hand, an estimated 10,000 juveniles are in adult prisons and jails. There, they are far more likely than adults to be beaten by guards, sexually assaulted, or end up in solitary confinement. They are also 36 times more likely to commit suicide than children in juvenile facilities. –Jean Casella
The cruelty that is practised by day and night on children in English prisons is incredible, except to those that have witnessed it and are aware of the brutality of the system. People nowadays do not understand what cruelty is. They regard it as a sort of terrible mediæval passion…[But]ordinary cruelty is simply stupidity. It is the entire want of imagination. It is the result in our days of stereotyped systems, of hard-and-fast rules, and of stupidity…Authority is as destructive to those who exercise it as it is to those on whom it is exercised. It is the Prison Board, and the system that it carries out, that is the primary source of the cruelty that is exercised on a child in prison…
The present treatment of children is terrible, primarily from people not under standing the peculiar psychology of a child’s nature. A child can understand a punishment inflicted by an individual, such as a parent or guardian, and bear it with a certain amount of acquiescence. What it cannot understand is a punishment inflicted by society. It cannot realise what society is…
The child consequently, being taken away from its parents by people whom it has never seen, and of whom it knows nothing, and finding itself in a lonely and unfamiliar cell, waited on by strange faces, and ordered about and punished by the representatives of a system that it cannot understand, becomes an immediate prey to the first and most prominent emotion produced by modern prison life — the emotion of terror. The terror of a child in prison is quite limitless.
I remember once in Reading, as I was going out to exercise, seeing in the dimly lit cell right opposite my own a small boy. Two warders — not unkindly men — were talking to him, with some sternness apparently, or perhaps giving him some useful advice about his conduct. One was in the cell with him, the other was standing outside. The child’s face was like a white wedge of sheer terror. There was in his eyes the terror of a hunted animal. The next morning I heard him at breakfast-time crying, and calling to be let out. His cry was for his parents. From time to time I could hear the deep voice of the warder on duty telling him to keep quiet.
Yet he was not even convicted of whatever little offence he had been charged with. He was simply on remand. That I knew by his wearing his own clothes, which seemed neat enough. He was, however, wearing prison socks and shoes. This showed that he was a very poor boy, whose own shoes, if he had any, were in a bad state. Justices and magistrates, an entirely ignorant class as a rule, often remand children for a week, and then perhaps remit whatever sentence they are entitled to pass. They call this “not sending a child to prison.” It is, of course, a stupid view on their part. To a little child, whether he is in prison on remand or after conviction is not a subtlety of social position he can comprehend. To him the horrible thing is to be there at all. In the eyes of humanity it should be a horrible thing for him to be there at all.
This terror that seizes and dominates the child, as it seizes the grown man also, is of course intensified beyond power of expression by the solitary cellular system of our prisons. Every child is confined to its cell for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. This is the appalling thing. To shut up a child in a dimly lit cell, for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, is an example of the cruelty of stupidity.
If an individual, parent or guardian, did this to a child, he would be severely punished. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children would take the matter up at once. There would be on all hands the utmost detestation of whomsoever had been guilty of such cruelty. A heavy sentence would, undoubtedly, follow conviction. But our own actual society does worse itself, and to the child to be so treated by a strange abstract force, of whose claims it has no cognisance, is much worse than it would be to receive the same treatment from its father or mother, or some one it knew…
As regards the children, a great deal has been talked and written lately about the contaminating influence of prison on young children. What is said is quite true. A child is utterly contaminated by prison life. But the contaminating influence is not that of the prisoners. It is that of the whole prison system — of the governor, the chaplain, the warders, the lonely cell, the isolation, the revolting food, the rules of the Prison Commissioners, the mode of discipline as it is termed, of the life…In this, as in all other things, philanthropists and people of that kind are astray. It is not the prisoners who need reformation. It is the prisons…
A reader alerted us to an excellent article that appeared in March in the Missoula Independent under the headline “For the Mentally Ill Behind Bars in Montana, Life Goes from Bad to Worse.” This long article tracks the stories of several young men who landed in prison–and ultimately, in the hole–due to their erratic and sometimes violent behavior while living with mental illness. One of those stories begins this way:
Colton Wilson has a tombstone tattooed on his right forearm. On a recent late-winter day, the 21-year-old moves constantly inside the visitor center at Shelby’s Crossroads Correctional Facility. He picks at his fingers, clenches his hands and shifts his feet. He runs his hands through his dark, wavy hair.
The worst part of prison, he says, is being put in administrative segregation. Wilson and the other inmates call it “the hole.”
“There’s no distraction, it’s just you and the walls, everything goes through your mind,” Wilson says. “Some people it doesn’t affect very badly…But it’s hard for me.”
Wilson’s always had a hard time taking direction. That’s why he lands in the hole.
In 2005, he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity and bipolar disorders. “I flipped out,” he recalls.
His parents hospitalized him after he threatened to kill himself. Psychiatrists put him on a series of medications that made him tired, incoherent and, sometimes, more angry.
He stopped taking the prescribed medications. In March 2007, Wilson, then 16, was caught with his girlfriend robbing vehicles in his hometown of Charlo. Witnesses tried to apprehend them. Wilson stabbed a man in the neck.
Prosecutors in Lake County charged Wilson with felony assault with a weapon. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a 90-day boot camp overseen by the Montana Department of Corrections and a six-year deferred sentence.
At this point, it would be easy to write off Wilson’s story as typical: A messed-up kid screws up, hurts someone and gets put away, for his own good and others’. Yet it’s what happens next, not just to Wilson but to many others like him, that raises some eyebrows about the fate of people with severe psychiatric problems in Montana’s jails and prisons.
During the past three decades, as state psychiatric hospitals have curbed services, prisons have become home to a record number of mentally ill people. Of the 2,490 people in custody with the Montana DOC, 703, or 28 percent, are taking psychotropic medications.
Experts say prisons and jails simply aren’t equipped to handle people with severe mental illness. Many contend that Wilson and other such inmates actually get worse in prison, leaving communities to foot an even larger tab for jails and hospitals. It also leaves people like Wilson more likely to commit another crime.
In the months before Colton Wilson was slated to attend boot camp at the Treasure State Correctional Training Center, in 2009, he was prescribed three drugs: Lamictal, a mood stabilizer; Abilify, an antipsychotic; and Vyvanse, a stimulant.
The drugs worked. His mother, who had always gone out of her way to fend off her son’s mood swings and paralyzing fear, was shocked. “It took almost a year and a half to get all of the pieces of the puzzle put together,” Donna Wilson says. “Once we got to that point—night and day difference with this kid.”
The judge who presided over Colton’s case ordered that he take the medications while at Treasure State. Colton’s nurse practitioner warned boot camp staff that Colton wouldn’t make it through the Training Center if he didn’t stay on the medications.
Colton’s mother filled his backpack with family photos, a Bible and his prescriptions. The family drove Colton to Missoula. He was then transported to the camp, at Deer Lodge. Colton remembers that day. “They grabbed my meds and my Bible and shackled me up and we hit the road,” he says.
In a lawsuit filed in February against the Treasure State Correctional Training Center, the DOC and the state, the family argues that Treasure State employees withheld Colton’s medications for nearly a week.
The suit alleges that six days after Colton arrived at Treasure State, DOC psychiatrist Dr. David Schaefer prescribed Abilify but didn’t approve the other drugs.
Schaefer did not respond to the Independent’s request for comment. The DOC, citing pending litigation, declined to comment on the specifics of Colton’s case.
Colton again became combative. He called the guards names. His behavior got him kicked out of boot camp and a subsequent DOC program. The court rescinded his plea deal and he was re-sentenced to 20 years in DOC custody, with 15 suspended.
The Wilsons’ suit contends that the DOC’s failure to provide prescribed medications for Colton violated his constitutional right to receive adequate medical care while incarcerated. “It’s just like if you have someone who’s a diabetic…and they need insulin, it’s a serious medical condition,” says Colton’s Missoula attorney, Terance P. Perry, of Datsopolous, MacDonald & Lind.
Colton would not be incarcerated today had he been given his medication, his family argues.
His case is similar to those in two other lawsuits filed since 2000, which allege that mentally ill inmates were punished with increasing severity because they didn’t receive proper mental health treatment…
The problem, says National Association on Mental Illness Montana Executive Director Matt Kuntz, is that prisons are designed to curb the bad behavior of rational people. The premise may seem simple: Behave, and you don’t get in trouble. But people with serious mental illness don’t always think rationally. There’s a tendency to act out, which, in a prison setting, can lead to progressively harsher punishments.
“They commit crimes for different reasons than people who don’t have serious mental illnesses,” Kuntz says. “It’s a disruption of neural circuits. That affects how they think, feel and act.”
Kuntz says stories like Wilson’s and those of other Montana inmates reflect a system that’s ill equipped to handle the complexities of mental illness. “As long as the prisons are a place that we rely on to house our mentally ill, the Department of Corrections is going to fail,” he observes. “It’s like asking someone to hold water with a strainer—they don’t have the right tools…Eventually somebody, and maybe it’s going to be the Wilsons, is going to make the state of Montana pay for it.”
The article, by Jessica Mayrer, continues with a brief history of how society has dealt with psychiatric disabilities, culminating in the de-institutionalization–and widespread criminalization–of the mentally ill. “In 1955, there was one psychiatric bed available for every 300 Americans,” Mayrer points out. “Today, that number is one per 3,000. Warm Springs State Hospital in Montana housed 1,890 people in 1954. Roughly 200 are treated there today. The state’s population during that same period grew by more than 400,000.”
The piece goes on to tell the stories of two suicidal inmates whose “treatment” consisted of being placed alone in a bare cell without a mattress or clothing. The courts intervened in both these cases, but the practice–which the Montana State Prison classifies as a “Behavior Management Plan”–continues. Efforts to improve mental health care in Montana’s prisons have been restrained by lack of funding and concerns for “security.”
You can read the full article here.
Criminalizing Mental Illness: The Story of Adam Hall
When he was five years old, Adam Hall tried to burn down his family home outside Utica in upstate New York. Afterwards, he drew a picture of his family having a happy reunion in heaven. Adam’s mother, Carole Hall, knew the incident was a cry for help–and possibly an early suicide attempt–but she had no money to get Adam decent treatment. Through the rest of his childhood, the boy would be in and out of psychiatric institutions and group homes. Carole Hall says he was molested in two of them, but never effectively treated for what would eventually be diagnosed as a panoply of mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder.
What happened next is all too typical of what happens to young people with untreated psychiatric disabilities in New York and throughout the United States, in an era when psychiatric hospitals have closed and jails and prisons have become the default inpatient facilities for the nation’s mentally ill. Adam Hall ended up in prison for a relatively minor felony, then in solitary confinement. Before long, he would have years added to his sentence for offenses committed in prison–offenses once again stemming from his mental illness. If the pattern continues, he could end up spending decades behind bars.
Hall’s erratic and sometimes violent behavior got him in trouble with the law while he was still a teenager. By the time he was 22, in 2009, he had been convicted of assault after stealing a car and resisting arrest. Sentenced to three years, he joined the estimated 5,000 or more prisoners in New York State’s prison who are suffering from mental illness.
According to correspondence with Adam Hall and interviews with his mother, he bounced around the prison system for a while. And like many people with mental illness, he quickly got in trouble for breaking prison rules and was disciplined by being placed in lockdown. A 2003 report by New York’s Correctional Association found that while inmates diagnosed with mental illness made up 11 percent of the state’s overall prison population, they constituted nearly a quarter of the inmates in isolated confinement in the state’s Special Housing Units (SHUs). Many of the SHU prisoners the CA interviewed for the report were “actively psychotic, manic, paranoid or seemingly overmedicated.”
Eventually Hall landed in the Residential Mental Health Unit (RMHU) at Marcy State Correctional Facility. The RMHU is considered an alternative to long-term solitary confinement for difficult to control prisoners with mental illness. In these units, inmates are locked down for much of the day, but receive they a greater measure of out-of-cell time and mental health treatment. Recent litigation and 2008’s so-called SHU Exclusion Law were designed to reduce the population of mentally ill inmates in solitary, in part by increasing the number of RMHU beds. And considering the alternatives, it was probably the best placement available to Adam Hall within the prison system.
But Adam Hall remained unstable and suicidal, and in 2011 he attempted to kill himself the same way he had when he was five: he set fire to his RMHU cell. Prison officials had the option to treat the incident as a symptom of Hall’s mental illness, and address it through internal disciplinary and classification processes. Instead, they chose to send Hall’s case to a grand jury in Utica, where he was indicted for arson. Facing up to 25 years, Hall let his public defender enter a guilty plea to third-degree arson, and was sentenced to three to six additional years in prison.
Hall was shipped to another RMHU, this one in Attica, where he remains today. The Department of Corrections has charged him for damages to his cell totaling more than $4,000, which he cannot pay. Because of his debts to the prison, his mother says, any money sent to him to buy food and sundries from the canteen is requisitioned by the state. Adam says he has to sell his prison food to get enough to buy postage stamps.
Adam’s situation–spelled out in a rap sheet he sent to Solitary Watch along with health records provided by his mother–appears to fly in the face of the intent of the state’s hard-won SHU exclusion law. The law is designed to protect and help mentally ill inmates who face prison disciplinary proceedings. But it leaves prison officials the option to deal with behavior problems as crimes rather than as mental health issues, and ship them out to the local DA. (Some laws, in fact, appear to have been passed for this express purpose. It is now a felony in New York, for example, to throw feces at a prison officer–and offense that is committed almost exclusively by mentally ill inmates in the SHU, as well as those driven mad by solitary.)
“The part that bothers me,’’ said one attorney with experience representing prisoners, “is: why did DOCCS refer this particular case to the DA for outside prosecution? We don’t have a lot of info, but it appears that if he did have a discipline hearing for this incident it was dismissed, and it may have been dismissed because of his mental health. That they would refer for outside prosecution a case that does not even warrant internal discipline is quite troubling. However, I know of no law that applies. As far as I know, DOCCS simply has discretion to refer cases to local DAs.”
Another attorney who defends prisoners’ rights confirmed that “many disciplinary tickets are written for incidents that could be charged as crimes. If the DOCCS determines to handle it through the prison system, then there is no criminal case. DOCCS does call in the DA for some incidents–this is a discretionary decision.” Under the SHU exclusion law, if the incident is dealt with inside the prison system, “New York State regulations “require that mental health is taken into consideration for the purpose of mitigation and possible dismissal of infractions under certain circumstances. Those regulations are pretty much going to be in effect for anyone who is in an RMHU–meaning that for all disciplinary hearings arising out of incidents in an RMHU, it is likely that the regulations require mental health testimony at the hearing and consideration of mental illness in the disposition.” But if the case is kicked to the local DA–no such protections apply.
She continues: “If the incident is related to his mental illness, the lack of adequate treatment for that illness, and his inability to conform to the prison environment due to his illness–isn’t charging him with a crime the ultimate criminalization of the status of his having mental illness? What purpose does the criminal case serve if these are the facts? It isn’t deterrence or rehabilitation–it appears to solely be retribution–is that a sufficient purpose?”
When we described this case to a veteran former New York State corrections officer, he said people like Hall were often doomed from the moment they arrived in prison, if not before. They tended to rack up small felony charges, one after the other, so that they effectively served a life sentence, shut away out of sight in some form of solitary confinement.
In a letter written on April 9, 2012, Hall said: “It’s hard in here for me. I feel like killing myself most of the time like I said but end up cutting myself to relieve the pain or just do things that help me relieve pain. Cutting myself seems the best way but one day I’m going to really cut myself and not tell no one so I can bleed out. That’s how I am feeling nowadays. My life’s gone down the drain.”
The Buffalo office of Prisoner Legal Services of New York, the small but tenacious nonprofit that acts on behalf of inmates in state prisons, sent a letter to Attica asking the mental health unit to look into the situation. Hall wrote both his mother and us that he was making deeper cuts in his arms, cutting into the muscle, building up to a final suicide slitting. On the advice of Prisoner Legal Services, Carole Hall phoned the head of the mental health unit at Attica and told him about the threats. He told Hall he knew nothing about the case but assured her he would look into it.
Whether Hall is alive or dead, whether he has gotten better treatment or simply had his possessions removed and been thrown nearly naked into a suicide cell, his mother doesn’t know.
Mothers with Sons in Solitary Tell Their Stories
In the run-up to Mother’s Day, the ACLU has unrolled a new feature on its website, called “Justice Mamas.” In it, a series of mothers talk honestly and movingly about what it is like to have a beloved son behind bars and in solitary confinement.
The sons themselves represent a cross-section of the kinds of prisoners who are in solitary confinement in American prisons and jails today: One is a juvenile who is in and out of solitary for minor offenses. Another suffers from mental illness and is routinely placed in isolation instead of receiving the treatment he needs. Another has been “validated” as a gang member, and is in his twelfth year of solitary confinement at Pelican Bay.
Together, they offer a sense of how solitary confinement–even more than other forms of incarceration–tears families apart and keeps prisoners separated from what is often one of the only positive forces in their lives–their mothers.
Check out the Justice Mamas page here, and the ACLU’s Stop Solitary project here.
A new report produced by researchers at the University of Texas’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs describes conditions faced by children who are “certified” for transfer to adult criminal justice system. Many of these juveniles are housed in adult jails in Texas while they await trial. The report finds that the majority of youth placed in adult jails are housed in solitary confinement, most with just one hour of out-of-cell time per day. While they are placed in isolation for their own protection, they live in conditions that mirror punitive segregation, and often remain there for months or even years.
“When making housing decisions,” the report states, ”jails are forced to choose between protecting the mental health or physical safety of a juvenile.” If they are placed among adult prisoners, they are at high risk of physical and sexual assault. If they are instead placed in solitary, it is their mental health that’s most at risk–and the damage may be permanent.
The report, titled Conditions for Certified Juveniles in Texas County Jails, surveyed 41 jails, which in the course of 2010 housed well over a hundred juveniles who had been accused of a crime, but not yet convicted. ”Given the broad range of physical risks to youth who are commingled with adult offenders,” the report found, ”the majority of jails surveyed chose to house juveniles in isolation cells. Although these jails are making efforts to protect the physical safety of the juveniles in their custody, this isolation has its own risks.”
It can have a detrimental impact on the juvenile’s mental health, aggravating existing mental illness and augmenting suicidal ideation. Segregation may hurt adolescents’ chance for proper socialization and damage their ability to develop a healthy adult identity. This reduction in socialization and impairment to identity formation may limit the possibility for future mental health recovery.
Even short periods of isolation can produce symptoms of paranoia, anxiety, and depression. In fact, “even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern toward an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium.” The harm caused by isolation does not end at release; prolonged or permanent psychiatric disability may occur, including impairments that seriously reduce the inmate’s capacity to reintegrate into the broader community upon release from detention. Amnesty International has condemned the practice of placing youths in isolation, finding that it both violates international law and is particularly damaging to “children and adolescents, who are not yet fully developed physically and emotionally and are less equipped to tolerate the effects of isolation.”
It is worth noting that certified youth in county jails have not been convicted of any crime, and are merely awaiting hearings or trials on their charges. They must be presumed innocent. Some of these youth will have their cases dismissed; some will be given probation; and others will be given time-served or short sentences. Despite the speed with which these youth may re-enter the community, the effects of detention may be severe. For example, the impact of prolonged isolation may have mental health consequences that will make it difficult for these youth to reintegrate, and may increase the likelihood that they will recidivate…
National research indicates that juveniles held in adult jails have by far the highest suicide rate of any age group in adult jails. Additionally, national data shows that juveniles in adult facilities are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than their counterparts in a juvenile detention facility. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that for every suicide committed by young adults (not specifically incarcerated youths) between the ages of 15 and 24, there were between 100- 200 attempts. This is significant, as the likelihood a youth will harm himself or herself in adult jail is exponentially increased from the already heightened suicide rates for juveniles in adult facilities. Given the significantly increased risk of suicide, self-harm, and aggravation of mental health issues, the choice to separate juveniles from adults only trades physical safety for mental health risks…
There is no good option for the jail administrators who are confronting this challenge. In contrast, juvenile detention centers do not have to make this choice between a youth’s physical safety and mental health, because they have the capacity to house youth with other youth.
For personal stories of children in solitary in adult jails in Texas, see the award winning article “For Their Own Good,” which appeared in the Houston Press in 2010.
