Federal Lawsuit Challenges Brutality in Solitary Confinement Unit at North Carolina Prison

May 18, 2013 By 1 Comment

Central_Prison315_280

Lawyers at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services have filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of eight people held in solitary confinement at Central Prison against officers and administrators at the facility. As reported by the Associated Press:

A federal lawsuit on behalf of eight inmates at North Carolina’s Central Prison alleges correctional officers used “blind spots” out of view of security cameras to beat handcuffed and shackled inmates.

An amended complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court by lawyers at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services says the beatings occurred in Unit One, a cell block known as “The Hole” where inmates are kept in solitary confinement for disciplinary reasons.

The inmates’ abuse claims are supported by medical records documenting blunt-force injuries that occurred while they were segregated from other prisoners, including broken bones, concussions and an inmate who is still unable to walk months after his hip was shattered.

N.C. Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Pam Walker said the agency would not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit names as defendants 21 correctional officers accused of participating in the abuse, as well as two wardens at the maximum security prison in Raleigh. The lawsuit alleges that former prison administrator Gerald J. Branker and current administrator Kenneth Lassister knew about the problems.

The suit seeks to eliminate this problem going forward, calling for the Court to order installation of surveillance cameras throughout the hallways of Unit One, stating “Given the history at Central Prison’s Unit One, these measures would benefit prison officials, prisoners, and the taxpaying public, and are required by the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

The article goes on to describe several instances of guard brutality:

One violent beating was Dec. 3, 2012, and left inmate Jerome Peters in a wheelchair, according to the lawsuit.

[Jerome] Peters, 48, was handcuffed and escorted by two correctional officers from his cell to an outdoor recreation area when the lawsuit said one of the guards punched him in the face while the other grabbed a leg and pulled him the ground. The lawsuit said a third correctional officer then helped the other two kick, stomp and punch Peters.

When they were finished, the lawsuit said the officers put shackles on Peters’ ankles and ordered him to walk. He couldn’t, the suit said, because his pelvic bone was broken…

Peters was taken to an emergency room and diagnosed with a broken right hip, and fractured bones in his hand and face. He also had blurred vision and numerous cuts and bruises, according to the lawsuit. He underwent surgery, but more than five months later is still unable to walk.

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Eighth Amendment, human rights, lawsuits/litigation, physical effects, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Seven Days in Solitary [5/13/13]

May 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment

solitaryThe following roundup features noteworthy news, reports and opinions on solitary confinement from the past week that have not been covered in other Solitary Watch posts.

•  Media coverage on the urgency of closing Guantanamo was heavy throughout the past week, with an estimated 100  of the 166 detainees hunger striking. Most recently, Al Jazeera publishes a Guantanamo prison military document exposing the brutality of the force-feeding. According to the story, detainees “undergo a brutal and dehumanising medical procedure that requires them to wear masks over their mouths while they sit shackled in a restraint chair for as long as two hours…”

•  The New York Times reports that New York City is planning to change the way it disciplines incarcerated people with mental illness, creating alternatives to the use of solitary confinement. “[T]he city Correction Department will transfer severely mentally ill inmates to an internal clinic where psychiatrists will administer treatment and medicine, and the less seriously mentally ill will go to counseling programs designed to help them change their future behavior.”

•  The Los Angeles Times publishes an editorial on the harm inflicted on kids who are subjected to isolation, stating “[s]olitary confinement is ultimately a mental health issue for anyone who goes through it, and the practice, if it is to continue, should at the very least be documented for public review and monitored by mental health professionals.”

•  The Seattle Times reports on a new program at Washington State Penitentiary seeking to to ease violence in some of the most dangerous units inside the prison, minimizing the liklihood of reoffending. “Rival gang members — Norteños and Sureños, Bloods and Crips, white supremacists — all brought together to discuss ways to stay out of trouble, both in prison and when they get out.”

•  Angola 3 News reports on a federal lawsuit filed by Russell Maroon Shoatz’s lawyers protesting his 22 consecutive years in solitary confinement. The story also features a recent interview with activist Bret Grote and Shoatz’ lawyer, Dan Kovalik, taking a closer look at the lawsuit and confronting human rights abuses in U.S. prisons.

•  Momentum builds to end the solitary confinement of youth, with The Nation calling for support in urging U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to ban the use of solitary confinement on youth. The post links to an open letter “in support of a call by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and the ACLU imploring [Holder] to ban the practice of holding young people in federal custody in solitary confinement.”

•  The Republic reports on a federal lawsuit alleging that correctional officers at North Carolina’s Central Prison brutally beat prisoners held at the facility, using “blind spots” to avoid being seen by security cameras. “An amended complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court by lawyers at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services says the beatings occurred in Unit One, a cell block known as “The Hole” where inmates are kept in solitary confinement for disciplinary reasons.”

•  NDTV reports on the solitary confinement of Boston marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at a high-security housing unit at a federal medical detention center in Massachusetts. “The only time Tsarnaev gets out of his tiny cell, that contains a sink, toilet, shower and a bed bolted to the floor, is for an hour of recreation every day.”

•  The Colorado Independent reports that Colorado’s El Pueblo Boys and Girls Ranch held Kiondre Davison, a 14-year old with an array of developmental disabilities, in solitary confinement for 25 days. “Of particular concern is imposing isolation on developmentally delayed kids. Kiondre is typical of such cases. He struggled to understand what was happening to him and so only loosely tied his actions at El Pueblo to the consequences they brought.”

•  Alan Prendergast reports that the legal team of Troy Anderson, who is currently incarcerated at Colorado’s supermax prison, has filed court papers contending that Department of Corrections officials have failed to comply with a previous ruling by a federal judge that Anderson is entitled to three hours a week of outdoor activity. Anderson’s attorneys assert that “their client is worse off than before, with less effective mental health treatment, following a transfer from the supermax to solitary confinement at the Sterling Correctional Facility.”

•  In an op-ed published on Times Union, Donn Rowe, President of New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, responds to a recent story on the harm inflicted on mentally ill people who are subjected to solitary confinement.   According to Rowe, “Special Housing Units are for inmates who are a danger to others and themselves.”

•  SFGate reports that Colorado has banned a youth treatment center in El Pueblo from placing teens in solitary confinement. The state found three violations of Colorado regulations in its investigation, which followed complaints by the ACLU that the program was violating the constitutional rights of youth.

•  Black Agenda Report reports that people held in isolation at California’s Pelican Bay may once again go on hunger strike, stating that “more than 200 inmates at the [facility] have been in solitary confinement for between five and ten years and nearly 100 have been shut off from most human contact for 20 years or more.” The story also calls for outside support, emphasizing the importance of having support networks in place beforehand.

•  New York City Councilmember Daniel Dromm denounces solitary confinement as “cruel and unusual” in a recent editorial, stating “[a]s a matter of fundamental human rights, how the DOC uses solitary confinement must radically change.”

•  The Boston Globe reports that the use of segregation units has come under increased scrutiny in Massachusetts, where approximately 500 of the state’s 11,000 prisoners are held in isolation on any given day. According to the story, “Prisoner-rights advocates, legislators, and even corrections commissioners in other states are increasingly denouncing the use of solitary confinement, while others defend the practice as an essential part of prison management.”

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Seven Days in Solitary [4.12.13]

April 12, 2013 By 1 Comment

solitaryThe following roundup features noteworthy news, reports, and opinions on solitary confinement from the past week that have not been covered in other Solitary Watch posts.

• Developments surrounding the systemic failures in California prisons were covered heavily by the media. Most recently, the Los Angeles Times reported on California judges’ threat to find Gov. Jerry Brown in contempt of court if he and the state do not “quickly produce a plan to remove thousands of convicts from California’s packed prisons.”

• In a strongly worded editorial, Bloomberg View denounces on the inhumane practice of solitary confinement in the U.S., stating that its use in “prisons and detention centers has broken the bounds of reason and decency.”

• The Toronto Star reports on the high-profile inquest into the death of Ashley Smith, the teen who died in solitary confinement in Canada. Lawyers representing Smith’s family and advocacy groups “want to ensure the inquest leads to significant reductions in the use of segregation in Canadian prisons, and a ban on it for mentally ill offenders.”

• Susan Greene, writing in the Colorado Independent, reports on a recent statement by fellow Colorado State Penitentiary prisoner Troy Anderson, that Evan Ebel’s suicide note shows he was “‘ruined’ by solitary and ‘bent on revenge.’”

• Writing on The Hill’s Congress blog, Ian Kysel, author of Growing Up Locked Down, urges the U.S. government to ban the use of solitary confinement on children in federal custody. While solitary is harmful to adults, Kysel writes, ”the potential damage to children, who do not have the maturity and resilience of an adult and are at a particularly vulnerable, formative stage of life, is much greater.”

• The ACLU of Colorado calls on the state’s Department of Human Services (DHS) to end the solitary confinement of kids in Colorado’s El Pueblo Residential Treatment Center.

• The New York World  reports on the torments experienced by Rasaun Bullock during his 49 months in solitary confinement on Rikers Island.

• The Investigative Writing Workshop reports on the government’s review of solitary confinement practices in immigration centers in the U.S. The article referenced new government data (first revealed by the New York Times) showing that “about 300 immigrant detainees are in solitary in the top centers around the country while they wait for a finding of their legal status.”

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Indiana’s Treatment of Mentally Ill Prisoners in Solitary Confinement Violates Constitution

January 15, 2013 By 3 Comments
Isolation unit at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility.

Isolation unit at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility

Just before the new year began a Federal District Court Judge in Indianapolis handed down a decision with important implications for prisoners with mental illness in Indiana and across the country. Stating that “prison walls do not form a barrier separating prison inmates from the protections of the Constitution,” Judge Tanya Walton Pratt ruled that the treatment for mentally ill individuals in Indiana’s state prisons violated their Constitutional right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.

As reported by the Indianapolis Star:

Weeks after a suicidal inmate at New Castle Correctional Facility told a prison doctor his behavior was the result of being placed in a segregation unit, the Indiana Department of Correction put the inmate back in an isolation cell.

Days later, he was dead — one of at least 11 mentally ill inmates who committed suicide while in IDOC segregation units from 2007 through July 2011.

Now, state officials and advocates are scrambling for solutions after a federal court found the treatment of mentally ill prisoners in segregation units at Indiana prisons violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt issued the decision Monday in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana on behalf of the Indiana Protection and Advocacy Services Commission and a group of inmates.

Pratt found “mentally ill prisoners within the IDOC segregation units are not receiving adequate mental health care in terms of scope, intensity, and duration.”

The judge also noted IDOC was aware of concerns about its treatment of mentally ill prisoners and “has been deliberately indifferent.”

Ken Falk, the ACLU of Indiana’s legal director, hailed the ruling as a win not only for mentally ill inmates, but for all Hoosiers.

The majority of inmates with mental illness, Falk explained, eventually will be released, and it is better for everyone if their problems are addressed before they re-enter society. Treatment also can help reduce recidivism, saving tax dollars.

“The ACLU of Indiana is happy the court has entered this decision that will force the Indiana Department of Correction to provide minimally adequate treatment to prisoners who will one day rejoin society,” Falk said.

The judge’s order does not prescribe specific changes needed at IDOC. Instead, Pratt said further court proceedings will be conducted “as to the relief to which the plaintiffs are entitled.” In general, the order says, that means at least basic mental health care…

The piece goes on to discuss the “colliding trends” that have turned supermax prisons and solitary confinement units into the new warehouses for people with untreated mental illness.

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Filed Under: Constitution, Eighth Amendment, Indiana, lawsuits/litigation, mental illness, prison health care, psychological effects, solitary confinement, suicide Tagged With: , , , , ,

Freed from an Iranian Prison, Sarah Shourd Speaks Out for U.S. Inmates in Solitary Confinement

November 6, 2011 By 3 Comments

The New York Times today features an op-ed titled “Tortued by Solitude.” The author is Sarah Shourd, one of three Americans who were imprisoned in Iran beginning in the summer of 2009, when they were arrested and charged with espionage while hiking on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan. Her two male companions, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, were jailed together, but Shourd was placed in solitary confinement in a 10-by-14-foot cell in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, and held there for more than a year.

In her op-ed, Shourd describes the devastating psychological effects of isolation, and decries its widespread use in the United States, which has “the most prisoners in solitary confinement in the world.” An excerpt follows; the full piece can be read here.

…It’s impossible to exaggerate how much the company of another human being means when you’ve been cut off from the world and stripped of your rights and freedom.

After two months with next to no human contact, my mind began to slip. Some days, I heard phantom footsteps coming down the hall. I spent large portions of my days crouched down on all fours by a small slit in the door, listening. In the periphery of my vision, I began to see flashing lights, only to jerk my head around to find that nothing was there. More than once, I beat at the walls until my knuckles bled and cried myself into a state of exhaustion. At one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn’t until I felt the hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I realized the screams were my own.

Of the 14 and a half months, or 9,840 hours, I was held as a political hostage at Evin prison in Tehran, I spent 9,495 of them in solitary confinement. When I was released just over a year ago, I was shocked to find out that the United Nations Convention Against Torture, one of the few conventions the United States has ratified, does not mention solitary confinement. I learned that there are untold numbers of prisoners around the world in solitary, including an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 in the United States. According to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, Juan Méndez, the practice appears to be “growing and diversifying in its use and severity.”

Amy Fettig at the American Civil Liberties Union told me: “In the U.S. we use solitary as a routine prison administrative practice. It’s not something that’s used as a last recourse, as it should be.” Last summer, prisoners at Pelican Bay prison in California went on a hunger strike to end the practice of isolating some prisoners for more than 22 hours a day. The strike spread until thousands of prisoners were participating. Only when officials agreed to review the use of solitary confinement did the prisoners accept food.

Such a review is needed for prisons everywhere, and particularly in the United States, the country with, according to Ms. Fettig, the most prisoners in solitary confinement in the world. One of the problems, according to Mr. Méndez, is that there is no universally accepted definition of solitary confinement. Mr. Méndez and his staff defined it as “more than 22 to 24 hours isolated from anyone else except for guards.” They are calling for clearer standards regarding “what is disciplinary and what moves into the category of ‘severe pain and suffering, either physical or mental,’ which is definitely prohibited under international law.” He has called for a ban on prolonged solitary confinement, and I very much agree. Any case that lasts more than 15 days should be carefully investigated.

You don’t have to beat someone to inflict pain and suffering; the psychological torture of prolonged solitary confinement leaves no marks, but its effects are severe and long-lasting…

It’s wonderful to begin my life again, and every day I feel more free, but I can’t help thinking about the thousands of others who are alone right now. I believe the excessive use of solitary confinement constitutes cruel and unusual punishment — that it is torture. The United Nations should proscribe this inhumane practice, and the United States should take the lead role in its eradication.

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, human rights, international, psychological effects, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Cruel and Usual: U.S. Solitary Confinement

March 19, 2011 By 3 Comments

The title above is the title of the article we wrote for Al Jazeera English, which ran as a feature today on their web site. It begins as follows; please use the link at the end to read the full piece.

The spectre of Bradley Manning lying naked and alone in a tiny cell at the Quantico Marine Base, less than 50 miles from Washington, DC, conjures up images of an American Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, where isolation and deprivation have been raised to the level of torture.

In fact, the accused Wikileaker, now in his tenth month of solitary confinement, is far from alone in his plight. Every day in the US, tens of thousands of prisoners languish in “the hole”.

A few of them are prison murderers or rapists who present a threat to others. Far more have committed minor disciplinary infractions within prison or otherwise run afoul of corrections staff. Many of them suffer from mental illness, and are isolated for want of needed treatment; others are children, segregated for their own “protection”; a growing number are elderly and have spent half their lives or more in utter solitude…

Click here to read the full article on Al Jazeera English.

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, due process, federal prisons, human rights, juveniles, legislation, mental illness, older prisoners, physical effects, political prisoners, psychological effects, race, retaliation, sexual assault, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , ,

On Bradley Manning, Solitary Confinement, and Selective Outrage

January 2, 2011 By 12 Comments

For the past few weeks, progressive online media sources have been burning with outrage over the conditions in which accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning is being held. Manning (as we first noted on Solitary Watch back in July) is in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement at a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, denied sunlight, exercise, possessions, and all but the most limited contact with family and friends. He has now been in isolation for more than seven months. The cruel and inhuman conditions of his detention, first widely publicized by Glenn Greenwald on Salon and expanded upon by others, are now being discussed, lamented, and protested throughout the progressive blogosphere (ourselves included). Few of those taking part in the conversation hesitate to describe Manning’s situation as torture.

Meanwhile, here at Solitary Watch, we’ve been receiving calls and emails from our modest band of readers, all of them saying more or less the same thing: We’re glad Bradley Manning’s treatment is getting some attention, but what about the tens of thousands of others who are languishing in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails? According to available data, there are some 25,000 inmates in long-term isolation in the nation’s supermax prisons, and as many as 80,000 more in solitary in other facilities. Where is the outrage–even among progressives–for these forgotten souls? Where, for that matter, is some acknowledgment of their existence?

To be fair, a few of the writers who champion Manning have mentioned in passing the widespread use of solitary confinement in the United States. A very few have gone further: One powerful piece by Lynn Parramore on New Deal 2.0, for example, uses the Manning case as an opportunity to document and denounce the brutal realities of solitary confinement. She urges readers to “remember the thousands of people being tortured in American prisons, including Bradley Manning, and let us send our own message back to our government: We are Americans…Most assuredly, we will not accept torture in our name. Not of the accused. Not of the mentally ill. Not even of convicted criminals.”

But Parramore’s piece is an anomaly. More often, progressive writers–and their readers, if comments are any measure–have gone to some lengths to distinguish Bradley Manning from the masses of other prisoners being held in similar conditions. Whether explicitly or implicitly, they depict Manning as exceptional, and therefore less deserving of his treatment and more worthy of our concern.

Frequently, writers and readers make the point that Manning is being subjected to these condition while he is merely accused , rather than convicted, of a crime. Perhaps they need to be introduced to the 15-year-old boy who, along with several dozen other juveniles, is being held is solitary in a jail in Harris County, Texas, while he awaits trial on a robbery charge. He is one of hundreds–if not thousands–of prisoners being held in pre-trial solitary confinement, for one reason or another, on any given day in America. Most of them lack decent legal representation, or are simply too poor to make bail.

We have also seen articles suggesting that the treatment Manning is receiving is worse than the standard for solitary confinement, since he is deprived even of a pillow or sheets for his bed. Their authors should review the case of the prisoners held in the St. Tammany Parish Jail in rural Louisiana. According to a brief by the Louisiana ACLU, “After the jail determines a prisoner is suicidal, the prisoner is stripped half-naked and placed in a 3′ x 3′ metal cage with no shoes, bed, blanket or toilet…Prisoners report they must curl up on the floor to sleep because the cages are too small to let them lie down. Guards frequently ignore repeated requests to use the bathroom, forcing some desperate people to urinate in discarded containers.” The cells are one-fourth the size mandated by local law for caged dogs.

There is, rightly, concern over the damage being done to Manning’s mental health by seven months in solitary. Seldom mentioned is the fact that an estimated one-third to one-half of the residents of America’s isolation units suffer from mental illness, and solitary confinement cells have, in effect, become our new asylums. Witness the ACLU of Montana’s brief on a 17-year-old mentally ill inmate who “was so traumatized by his deplorable treatment in the Montana State Prison that he twice attempted to kill himself by biting through the skin on his wrist to puncture a vein.” During his ten months in solitary confinement, the teen was tasered, pepper sprayed, and stripped naked in view of other inmates, and “his mental health treatment consists of a prison staff member knocking on his door once a week and asking if he has any concerns.”

Finally, many have argued that the nature of Manning’s alleged crimes renders him a heroic political prisoner, rather than a “common” criminal like most others. Those who take this line might want to look into the “Communications Management Units” at two federal prisons, where, according to a lawsuit filed last year by the Center for Constitutional Rights, prisoners are placed in extreme isolation “for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, or in retaliation for challenging poor treatment or other rights violations in the federal prison system.” Or they might investigate the aftermath of the recent prison strike in Georgia, in which several inmates have reportedly been thrown into solitary for leading a nonviolent protest against prison conditions.

All of these cases are “exceptional,” but only in that they earned the attention of some journalist or advocate. Most prisoners held in solitary confinement are, by design, silent and silenced. Most of their stories–tens of thousands of them–are never told at all. And solitary confinement is now used as a disciplinary measure of first resort in prisons and jails across the country, so its use is anything but exceptional. 

All across America, inmates are placed in isolation for months or years, not only for fighting with other inmates or guards, but for being “disruptive” or disobeying orders; for being identified as gang members (often by a prison snitch or the wrong kind of tattoo); or for having contraband (which includes not only weapons but a joint, a cell phone, or too many postage stamps). In Virginia, a dozen Rastafarians were in solitary for more than a decade because they refused to cut their dreadlocks, in violation of the prison code. In many prisons, juveniles and rape victims are isolated “for their own protection” in conditions identical to those used for punishment. And for more serious crimes, the isolation simply becomes more extreme, and more permanent: In Louisiana, two men convicted of killing a prison guard have been in solitary confinement for 38 years.

Moreover, if solitary confinement is torture–or at the very least, cruel and inhuman punishment–then it shouldn’t matter what a prisoner has done to end up there. As Lynn Parramore writes, “The placement of human beings in solitary confinement is not a measure of their depravity. It is a measure of our own.”

The treatment of Bradley Manning, which has introduced many on the left to the torment of solitary confinement, may present an opportunity for them to measure their own humanity. They might begin by asking themselves whether prison torture is wrong, and worthy of their attention and outrage, only when it is committed against people whose actions they admire.

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, Eighth Amendment, featured posts, federal prisons, juveniles, media, mental illness, political prisoners, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons, terrorism cases, torture Tagged With: , , , ,

Federal Lawsuit Challenges 27 Years of Supermax Confinement

March 26, 2010 By 11 Comments

A suit brought by law students on behalf of one of the nation’s most most notorious supermax prisoners could break new ground in challenging long-term solitary confinement on Constitutional grounds.

Earlier this year, we wrote about the case of Thomas Silverstein, who has now spent 27 years in solitary under a “no human contact” order–and who recently sued the Bureau of Prisons with the help of the Civil Rights Law Clinic at the University of Denver. This week, a decision by a federal district court judge cleared the way for the case to move forward. Alan Prendergast, of the Denver weekly Westword, reported on these latest developments.

When you’ve spent your time since the early days of the Reagan years in a cell smaller than some people’s closets, progress tends to get measured in small, small increments rather than sweeping events.

But Thomas Silverstein, America’s most isolated federal prisoner, got some momentous news today. His lawsuit challenging his decades of solitary confinement is still alive.

U.S. District Court Judge Philip Brimmer has ruled that Silverstein’s case, which raises questions about possible constitutional violations in the way the U.S. Bureau of Prisons consigns prisoners to administrative segregation for years or even decades, can move forward — a decision that could have implications for other federal prisoners in solitary, too.

A bank robber who was convicted of killing two inmates while serving time in the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, Silverstein was put under a “no contact” order after he managed to murder a correctional officer at the high-security pen in 1983. Since that time, he’s been in basement isolation cells with buzzing lights, in his own wing of the Leavenworth pen, and, since 2005, buried in the bowels of the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum (ADX) in Florence…

Prison officials have contended that the extreme degree of isolation Silverstein has endured — including little or no communication with other inmates and entire years spent without leaving his cell — is necessary, in light of his violent history. But in 2007, law students at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law filed suit on his behalf, challenging his long confinement as cruel and unusual punishment and for lack of due process.

Brimmer’s ruling dismisses some of Silverstein’s claims against individual defendants, but leaves intact his Fifth and Eighth Amendment claims against the BOP. Although the case is still a long way from trial, DU law professor Laura Rovner views the ruling as a rare victory in civil-rights activists’ efforts to challenge the nature of solitary confinement itself.

In an email to Solitary Watch earlier this week, Laura Rovner explained the significance of the judge’s decision:

Probably the most significant part is the decision on the Eighth Amendment claim, as it is one of only two or three in the entire country where a court has held that solitary confinement alone is enough to state a claim for cruel and unusual punishment, even absent mental illness or other physical harm. 

We anticipate and hope that this decision will have a positive impact on the ability of litigators across the country to challenge the disturbing trend of holding individuals in solitary confinement indefinitely.

Self portrait by Tommy Silverstein

Silverstein, who is now 57, is believed to have been held in complete and continuous isolation for longer than any other federal prisoner. The suit filed by Rovner and her students alleges that the government’s “deliberate indifference has resulted in Plaintiff suffering deprivations that cause mental harm that goes beyond the boundaries of what most human beings can psychologically tolerate.” 

The full text of the judge’s decision in the case can be found here.

For more on Tommy Silverstein, see Alan Prendergast’s 2007 article “The Caged Life.”

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Colorado, Constitution, Eighth Amendment, federal prisons, lawsuits/litigation, physical effects, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Solitary Confinement Cells Have Become America’s New Asylums

February 20, 2010 By 7 Comments

Our article “Locking Down the Mentally Ill” appeared last week on The Crime Report, the online publication of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College, City University of New York. We’re posting a few excerpts here, but hope you will read the entire piece on The Crime Report‘s site.

“If you want to know where they are all being kept,” said Todd Winstrom, “they’re down in the hole.”

Winstrom, a staff attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin, was talking about what happens to mentally ill offenders when they enter his state’s prison system. Without treatment options—and without anyplace else to put them—these prisoners quickly end up in solitary confinement, where they may remain for months or years.

Since solitary confinement has been shown to cause severe psychological trauma in prisoners without underlying psychiatric conditions, it would be difficult to imagine a more damaging place to incarcerate the mentally ill….

Wisconsin is far from alone in these practices. While there are no national statistics to indicate how many mentally ill prisoners end up in lockdown, a 2003 report from Human Rights Watch, based on available data from states around the country, found one-third to one-half of prisoners held in what are usually called “secure housing units” (SHUs) and “special management units” (SMUs) were mentally ill.

The report concluded that “persons with mental illness often have difficulty complying with strict prison rules, particularly when there is scant assistance to help them manage their disorders….eventually accumulating substantial histories of disciplinary infractions, they land for prolonged periods in disciplinary or administrative segregation.”

In the article, we look at what happened in recent years in New York State when the group Disability Advocates sued on behalf of mentally ill inmates, and an organized movement began pressing for state legislation to ban their placement in solitary confinement.

The movement’s ammunition came largely from a 2003 report by the non-profit Correctional  Association of New York. The group had visited nearly all of New York’s 26 SHUs, where some 5,000 prisoners were held in lockdown for periods that in some cases lasted 23-hours-a-day or more.  Its report found that a quarter—and in some units as many as half—of the prisoners were “identified as seriously mentally ill.” The SHUs held about 10 percent of the system’s prisoners, but accounted for nearly half of its suicides.

A third of the SHU prisoners engaged in cutting or other forms of self-mutilation. “Unthinkable to outside observers,” the Correctional Association said, “the Department [of Corrections] issues misbehavior reports to inmates who attempt to kill or harm themselves”—and the punishment was often more time in lockdown. While the state’s prison population had tripled in the previous 20 years, it still had the same number of places—just 200—in its sole psychiatric center. The Correctional Association’s Executive Director Robert Gangi would later describe placing mentally ill inmates in solitary as “state-inflicted brutality.”

The lawsuit was settled in 2007 and the law was passed in 2008–a considerable triumph, relative to other states. But there is, unsurprisingly, continuing controversy over who is classified as mentally ill, how much treatment they are really receiving, and at what pace changes are taking place. More from the article:

While most advocates see the settlement and especially the legislation as what a 2007 New York Times editorial called “a step toward basic human decency,”  Few believe that it goes far enough. “Maltreatment of mentally ill prisoners is a national shame,” the Times editorial continued. “The basic problem is that severely ill inmates should not be held in lockdown at all.” In the eyes of some critics, what New York and a handful of other states have done is simply reduce the frequency and severity of a practice they equate with torture.

The UN Human Rights Committee, European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have all, in various terms, deemed long-term solitary confinement cruel and unusual punishment for all prisoners. A 2003 Human Rights Watch report stated: “Even if they have no prior history of mental illness, prisoners subjected to prolonged isolation may experience depression, despair, anxiety, rage, claustrophobia, hallucinations, problems with impulse control, and/or an impaired ability to think, concentrate, or remember.”

When it comes to mentally ill prisoners, several U.S. Courts have joined in denouncing the use of any segregated confinement. In the most famous of the relevant cases, Madrid v. Gomez, a federal judge in California  declared that solitary confinement “may press the outer bounds of what most human beings can psychologically tolerate,” while for mentally ill prisoners it is “the mental equivalent of putting an asthmatic in a place with little air to breathe.”

No widespread ban on the lockdown of mentally ill prisoners is likely to take place without changes in the trend toward criminalizing the mentally ill, which has been underway for more than 20 years. In 2003, Human Rights Watch concluded that America’s prisons and jails held three times as many mentally ill people as its psychiatric hospitals. The Los Angeles County Jail and New York’s Rikers Island effectively functioned as the nation’s two largest inpatient mental health facilities, and incarceration had become its default treatment for mental illness.

According to Bureau of Justice Statistics data more than half of all prison and jail inmates self-report that they suffer from mental health problems—five times the rate in the general population. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness approximately 24 percent of inmates in U.S. prisons and 17 percent of those in local jails have what would be diagnosed as serious mental illness.

Photo by Jenn Ackerman from "Trapped"

Also, take a look at “Trapped: Mental Illness in America’s Prisons,” documentary photographer Jenn Ackerman’s powerful collection of photos of prisoners in lockdown in a psychiatric treatment unit. (We learned about these from Pete Brooks’s excellent Prison Photography blog.)

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, featured posts, human rights, lawsuits/litigation, mental illness, New York, physical effects, prison health care, psychological effects, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons, torture, Wisconsin Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Louisiana Sues Its Own Death Row Prisoners

February 12, 2010 By 28 Comments

The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections last Friday sued every inmate on death row, in an effort to block any one of them from challenging the state’s lethal injection procedures. Each of the 84 prisoners in the “death house” at Angola State Penitentiary was personally served papers in the suit, said Nick Trenticosta, who has represented numerous clients on Angola’s death row.

Trenticosta, who is also director of the non-profit Center for Equal Justice in New Orleans, knows of no other instance in which a state sued its death row inmates en masse over legal questions relating to their execution. “I’ve been hanging around death penalty cases for 25 years,” Trenticosta said in a phone interview this morning, “and I have never seen anything like this.”

The Corrections Department’s litigation is a countersuit, filed in response to an earlier lawsuit claiming that Louisiana’s lethal injection procedure is in violation of state law. That suit was filed by the Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana (CPCPL) on behalf of death row prisoner Nathaniel Code. It stated that Louisiana had not met the requirements of its own Administrative Procedures Act in creating guidelines for execution by lethal injection. The state procedure ought to specify exactly what drugs should be used to kill prisoners, the CPCPL argued, rather than simply calling for the administration of drugs. Without such stipulations, Trenticosta said, “They’re saying if we want to pour boiling oil into your veins, we can do it.”

Just over a month ago, on January 8, a state district court in Baton Rouge dismissed Nathaniel Code’s suit, which would have halted all executions in Louisiana until the Corrections Department brought its procedures in line with state law. Attorneys for the state argued that Louisiana’s three-drug lethal injection protocol was not subject to the Administrative Procedures Act; the judge agreed, and threw out the suit.

All this happened the day after Gerald Bordelon was executed by lethal injection in Angola’s death chamber for the murder of his 12-year-old stepdaughter. The execution on January 7 was the first to take place in Louisiana for eight years, and proceeded after Bordelon chose to waive post-conviction appeals. According to the Associated Press, the hearing on Code’s suit “was purposely scheduled the day after Gerald Bordelon’s execution,” because Bordelon’s attorneys had told the judge “he did not want anything to disrupt his execution.”

Nathaniel Code’s attorneys said they would appeal the judge’s ruling to Louisiana’s First Circuit Court of Appeal. “The law is being violated. It was violated yesterday,” CPCPL director Gary Clements said, referencing Bordelon’s execution.

The state of Louisiana, however, has already initiated offensive maneuvers against further challenges to its methods of execution. Immediately after the ruling in Code’s suit, the Corrections Department filed its countersuit against all death row inmates. The department’s attorney, Wade Shows, told the Baton Rouge Advocate that Louisiana was asking the court “to formally declare—‘once and for all’—that the state’s lethal injection protocol is not subject to the Louisiana Administrative Procedure Act.” Such a ruling, Shows said, “‘means you don’t have to go through the rule-making process….It’s sort of an internal management decision.’”

Similar challenges in other states have yielded mixed results. According to the AP, “Courts around the country have split over whether states should have to follow the administrative procedures in adopting a lethal injection protocol.” Courts in Maryland, Nebraska, California, and Kentucky have ruled that the procedural requirements do apply to the execution method. In these states, executions were suspended while proper procedures were carried out, often including public hearings. Courts in Missouri and Tennessee have ruled that the procedures do not apply. Only Louisiana, however, has dealt with the issue by suing the residents of its own death row.

On a larger scale, execution by lethal injection–which is used in 35 states–has faced several legal challenges in recent years, on the grounds that it violates the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. These challenges were propelled in part by several horribly botched execution attempts, in which prisoners were stuck with IV needles numerous times over periods of up to two hours, and in a few cases returned to their cells when attempts failed. Opponents have also argued that the later drugs in the three-drug protocol may cause excruciating pain, which dying prisoners cannot express because the initial drugs have paralyzed them.

In April 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that lethal injection was not unconstitutional; it is the “method of execution believed to be the most humane available,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “If administered as intended, that procedure will result in a painless death.” The decision put an end to a de facto six-month moratorium on death by lethal injection, but some states have yet to resume their execution schedules.

Louisiana seems determined to have the choice to execute if and when it wants to, without interference from prisoner lawsuits alleging administrative technicalities. This despite the fact that in recent years, the state has shown relatively little zeal for carrying out executions, compared to neighboring Texas. While Angola’s death chamber has been made famous by the films Dead Man Walking and Monster’s Ball, only three executions have been carried out there in the last ten years.

Angola Warden Burl Cain, who oversees all executions in Louisiana, has indicated that it causes him pain to put prisoners to death. But Cain, famously, appears more focused on heavenly justice than on the earthly variety. Cain executed his first prisoner in 1995, and later said, “I felt him go to hell as I held his hand.” He told the Baptist Press, “I decided that night I would never again put someone to death without telling him about his soul and about Jesus.”

If executions were ever to resume in Louisiana at the rates common in the 1980s, heavenly justice might be all that’s available to some of the inmates on death row. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “Since the United States reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Orleans Parish juries have condemned 38 defendants to death. But a recent tally by attorneys for death-row inmates calculated that courts have found errors in 25 of those sentences, or nearly two-thirds. In some cases defendants were retried, resulting in convictions on lesser charges, while in others defendants were released.”

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, death row, Eighth Amendment, human rights, lawsuits/litigation, Louisiana, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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