Seven Days in Solitary [3/15/2015]
by Aviva Stahl
The
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.
• A US District Judge has ruled in favor of several plaintiffs
named in an ongoing class action lawsuit against the use of solitary
confinement in California prisons. Incarcerated individuals who were in
long term-term isolation at Pelican Bay – but have since been
transferred – will be permitted to remain eligible as class members in
the case, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights.
• Senator Dick Durbin was interviewed on Peoria Public Radio.
"Ninety-five percent of the people who go to prison end up out of
prison someday, and if you turn a person out who's been damaged mentally
by the segregation, then it's a risk to everyone else outside, once
they're released," he said.
• Juan Mendez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, accused United States authorities
of refusing him entry to state and federal prisons, particularly those
facilities that regularly utilize solitary confinement. "The numbers [of
people in solitary] are staggering but even worse is the length of
terms...It is not uncommon for people to spend 25, 30 years and even
more in solitary confinement," he said.
• The Hill
blog published an op-ed by Antonio Ginatta, advocacy director for the
US program at Human Rights Watch, in response to the internal review of
confinement practices recently published by the federal Bureau of
Prisons (BOP). “The path away from prisoner isolation is clear, and it's
time for BOP to start walking it,” he writes.
• A federal appeals court has reversed a 2013 ruling,
thus allowing the state of Virginia to automatically house those on
death row in solitary confinement. “The district court, perhaps
correctly, described the isolation that characterizes Virginia's death
row as 'dehumanizing.' But the Supreme Court has long held ... that
state correctional officials have broad latitude to set prison
conditions as they see fit,” wrote Judge Motz in the majority opinion.
• A federal judge has ruled that Washington violated the Constitution
by holding people with mental illness in jails for weeks or even months
while they awaited competency evaluations. Many of these individuals
were held in solitary confinement during this time period.
• Debate rages on
in Dane County, Wisconsin, about how to proceed with renovations to the
local jail. Sheriff David Mahoney and others have called for the
creation of additional special needs housing in the jail, since many
people with mental illness are currently housed in solitary confinement;
activists with the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition, meanwhile, have
maintained that jail renovations will not solve the human rights and
racial justice issues that produce overincarceration.
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