A touch on the shoulder made me flinch and tense up. For some people, particularly teenagers and those with mental illness, this disconnection can be lasting. Kalief Browder was 16 when he was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack in New York City. After his charged were dropped and he went home, he isolated himself, often staying in his bedroom and pacing as he had done in solitary confinement. At the age of 22, he died by suicide. Research over the past few decades has documented the effects of solitary confinement.
Haney gives the example of his study of randomly selected people held at Pelican Bay, the supermax prison in California. Haney found that virtually all of his interviewees reported heightened anxiety, irrational anger and irritability, confused thought processes, and being extremely sensitive to external stimuli.
Some 70 percent felt themselves to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, about 40 percent experienced hallucinations, and just under a third reported suicidal thoughts. According to Haney, these symptoms closely matched other studies of people held in solitary confinement for a period of months to years, and were much more severe than in general populations of prisons and jails.
Haney and other psychologists including Stuart Grassian have long argued that these symptoms develop and increase while people are confined in solitary, rather than merely being preexisting symptoms. The desperation that people feel in solitary confinement can lead to psychological breakdown, self-harm, and suicide. A study of New York City jails found that while only about 7 percent of people spent time in solitary confinement, they accounted for nearly half of all acts of potentially fatal self-harm.
Studies have shown that a quarter of suicides or even more behind bars occur in solitary confinement. The risks of extreme harm to people in solitary are greater for vulnerable groups, such as those with mental illness and disabilities.
In , the American Psychiatric Association released a statement saying that with rare exceptions, people with serious mental illness should not be placed in solitary. Yet prisons and jails very often do just that. Depriving young people of sensory and social contact has a heightened risk of serious and lasting effects. The federal system and many states are restricting the duration of solitary confinement or banning solitary confinement for youth, but in recent years, the practice has still been common in prisons and juvenile detention facilities in some states.
Not all researchers hold the same view about the harms of solitary confinement. Some are more skeptical about past research showing serious harms, and they question how much we can infer from studies that often lack a comparable control group. In recent years, some researchers have also pointed to a study in Colorado that purported to show evidence that those in solitary for months to a year fared no worse psychologically than similar people in the general population of the prison.
They also point to two systematic reviews that combine the results of only studies that directly compare those in solitary confinement to those in a control group. Both reviews claim that after pooling those studies, solitary has only a modest negative impact on mental health. In response, Haney and others have pointed to a number of serious methodological problems with the systematic reviews and with the Colorado study.
Corrections departments have long argued that solitary is effective at maintaining safety and security in prisons. But the evidence does not support this view.
The few studies on the impacts of increased solitary confinement do not show a reduction in violence among people held in the facilities. For example, a study of three states that opened supermax prisons showed no subsequent statewide reduction in violence among those housed at the prisons.
Many who work in corrections believe that solitary confinement plays a role in keeping them safe. However, as in the case with violence in prisons generally, there is no strong evidence that solitary is keeping officers safer. The National Institute of Justice report found that few studies have focused on the effect of solitary confinement on subsequent misconduct including violence against staff.
A large study in Ohio found no evidence of any effect of solitary on subsequent violent misbehavior. As a result, the figures for Texas that made it into the report cite implausibly low percentages of people in prison with serious mental illness 1. In jails alone, there are likely tens of thousands of additional people in solitary. According to a survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in , the most recent period for which the data was collected and published, there were roughly 20, individuals in solitary confinement in jails across the United States.
Earlier surveys have found that as many as 35 percent of children in residential placements had been placed in solitary confinement. The demand for detailed and reliable data on solitary confinement is only bound to increase in the future, as incremental reforms of the practice raise new questions regarding acceptable levels of prison isolation.
Typically, it is the responsibility of government-funded and publicly accountable bodies to track such data and make it publicly available. However, in the case of jails and prisons, correctional departments across the country have proven unwilling to demonstrate transparency and report data to the public. Some states, such as Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Nevada, have enacted laws requiring their departments of corrections to track the use of solitary, and others have introduced similar legislation.
The federal First Step Act , which has passed both the Senate and House of Representatives, has a similar, though vague, reporting requirement for the federal Bureau of Prisons.
Four states said they no longer keep anyone in those conditions. The length of time individuals spent in restrictive housing varied widely. The snapshot reflects that not all jurisdictions keep track.
The 33 states that did use restrictive housing reported that 46 percent of the individuals held in solitary confinement were there for three or fewer months. At the other end of the spectrum, almost 3, people — or 11 percent of all the people for whom statistics were provided — had been kept in solitary confinement for more than three years. Each jurisdiction has its own definition of this term. Using their own categorization for SMI, 33 states reported a total of more than 3, prisoners with serious mental illness in solitary confinement.
Six jurisdictions reported that more than 10 percent of their prisoners in solitary confinement had a serious mental illness. Racial disparities are likewise vivid in prisons. The snapshot provides demographic data from reporting jurisdictions about the racial makeup of their total custodial populations and their restrictive housing populations.
Aggregating the numbers from 32 states and disaggregating by gender, Black and Hispanic men were somewhat more likely to be put into restrictive housing than white men: 43 percent of Black men and 17 percent of Hispanic men were in restrictive housing, compared to 40 percent and 15 percent respectively in the total male custodial population. Regardless, at least 25 states reported in that 3, people were held in solitary confinement for at least 3 years. Other articles Full bio Contact.
Quick action could slow the spread of the viral pandemic in prisons and jails and in society as a whole. Can you help us sustain this work? And our other newsletters: Research Library updates? Prison gerrymandering campaign? Contact us to request a meeting. New data: Solitary confinement increases risk of premature death after release Any amount of time spent in solitary confinement increases the risk of death after release from prison, including deaths by suicide, homicide, and opioid overdose.
Premature deaths — by suicide, homicide, or opioid overdose — after release from prison are more likely for those that spent any amount of time even one day in solitary confinement than those who have never experienced solitary confinement. Stay Informed Email:.
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