Confronting California's Abuse of Solitary
By Helen Vera,
National Prison Project Fellow, ACLU, Nov. 19, 2013
Solitary confinement can eat away at someone's mind, making mental
illness worse and leaving many people depressed, suicidal, hopeless or
hallucinating. It's no place for individuals with mental illness.
In 1995, a federal court in California agreed. After a trial
exposing the appalling conditions at Pelican Bay—the state's most
notorious, all-isolation, supermax prison and the site of repeated
hunger strikes—a federal
judge ordered all mentally ill prisoners out of the prison's
security housing unit (SHU) in a case called Madrid v. Gomez.
But, because of the sometimes frustratingly limited nature of legal
decisions, this judge's order only impacted Pelican Bay. While Pelican
Bay has for years been notorious for its conditions of extreme
isolation—leading thousands of prisoners across California to
participate in the
largest prisoner hunger strike in history, some for as long as
two months—it is the only California prison in which prisoners with
mental illness may not be held in solitary confinement as a matter of
law. This means that seriously mentally ill prisoners all over
California continue to be held in long-term solitary confinement, even
though the Madrid order prohibits those conditions for the
mentally ill at Pelican Bay.
It's time to change that. Today in Sacramento, key witnesses,
including experts in psychology and corrections practices, will take
the stand in support of the first statewide case aimed at getting all
mentally ill people in California out of solitary confinement. The case
is called Coleman v. Brown, and beginning today these
experts will help to expose the extreme and sometimes irreversible
damage of holding people with mental illness in solitary confinement.
The Coleman plaintiffs have marshaled stunning evidence to
support their claims that all California prisons must remove mentally
ill prisoners from solitary confinement. Statewide, according to case
filings, about 9 percent of the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation's (CDCR) approximately 123,600 total prisoners are
held in some form of segregated housing—but that number includes 21
percent of mentally ill prisoners system-wide. This means that mentally
ill prisoners in California are held in disproportionately high numbers
in solitary confinement. Even more alarming is evidence uncovered by
the Coleman plaintiffs showing the dramatically heightened
suicide rate among prisoners in segregated housing: in 2011, more than
one third of all suicides in CDCR facilities took place in segregation
units; more than half of the individuals who committed suicide in the
first half of 2012 were housed in segregation; and 58 percent of the 19
people who have taken their life to date in 2013 occurred in
segregation units.
These disproportionately high instances of suicide are unfortunately
not surprising to those familiar with the harms of solitary
confinement. Psychological studies consistently show that solitary
confinement can wreak distinctive harms on prisoners, including
heightened symptoms of hopelessness, depression, hallucinations,
self-mutilation, suicidal ideation, and suicidal acts. And a 2008
study of California prisons noted a striking correlation
between segregated housing and prison incident reports of
self-mutilation and suicide.
Although the harms of solitary confinement for mentally ill
prisoners are well
known, many states, including California, have been slow to
catch up to the growing trend against prolonged solitary. Across the
country, corrections departments, judges, activists, prisoners and
their families alike will be watching to see if the Eastern District of
California holds that the CDRC must forbid the housing of mentally ill
prisoners in solitary confinement. If the court holds that it must,
then California—and the rest of the country—will be forced to rethink
its statewide policies governing the use of solitary confinement.
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Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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Free All Political Prisoners!
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ReplyDeleteThank you Mama Chill thank you for all your support much love to you xx
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