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State and federal prisons are holding as many as 100,000 inmates in solitary confinement or isolated housing, a figure that poses a “grave problem” for the criminal justice system, a study released Wednesday said.
The report by the Association of State Correctional Administrators and researchers at Yale Law School comes amid increasing criticism of the practice by Supreme Court justices, lawmakers of both parties and the corrections establishment itself, who say it is cruel and damaging to prisoners’ mental health.
But current data on solitary confinement—which goes by various names including administrative segregation, security housing and intensive management—has been scarce, said Judith Resnik, a Yale law professor and co-author of the study.
The new figure amounts to roughly 6% of the prison population, and is significantly higher than some previous estimates, such as the 25,000 inmates cited by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in a June opinion.
Wednesday’s report relied on survey responses from dozens of corrections departments housing about three-quarters of the 1.5 million inmates in U.S. prisons. It didn’t include local jails, which hold about two million prisoners, juvenile institutions, military installations or immigration facilities.
Because policies and labels vary across prison systems, researchers focused on administrative segregation, which is used to impose order, rather than isolation for protective or disciplinary reasons. They defined segregation as removing a prisoner from the general population to spend at least 22 hours a day in a cell for at least 30 days.
Some inmates have spent years in solitary confinement; Texas, for instance, said 44% of 6,491 inmates in administrative segregation have been housed that way for at least three years.
The study found wide variation between states, and that officials had broad discretion in when to use solitary. The criteria often were vague, with some policies requiring only that officials see an inmate as “a threat” to life, property or security.
A cell row in the security housing unit at the state prison in Corcoran, Calif., in 2013.PHOTO: ROBERT GALBRAITH/REUTERS
Arkansas reported about 7.5% of its 13,703 male inmates were being held in administrative segregation. New York reported that only 23 of 51,217 male prisoners—less than 0.1%—were confined that way, but said 7.8% of that population was held in other forms of restrictive housing.
Male prisoners were substantially more likely to be held in isolation than women inmates, the study found. Kentucky posted the highest rate for women, 6.4% of 1,332 prisoners, while several systems, including the federal Bureau of Prisons, whose female population of 12,431 was the largest surveyed, reported no women in administrative segregation.
Extrapolating from figures provided by participating institutions, researchers estimated that 80,000 to 100,000 inmates are in some form of restricted housing, which includes administrative segregation as well as isolation for other reasons.
“There is widespread agreement this practice must be drastically curtailed, and this study gives us a benchmark or baseline against which to measure our progress,” said Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies incarceration. “It also underscores the fact that we have a very long way to go.”
Colorado corrections director Rick Raemisch, who helped oversee the study, said use of solitary confinement had gotten out of control, as officials found it a convenient way to maintain order in their prisons.
“The original purpose was to take those who were deemed too violent or too dangerous in the institution and to isolate them so no one got hurt,” he said. “But as it evolved, if you didn’t follow the rules in a particular area—no violence but you didn’t act the way you were supposed to act—you were placed in solitary confinement.”
For inmates with mental illness or emotional disorders, such isolation only exacerbates their problems, making them a greater safety risk when eventually released, Mr. Raemisch said.
The report’s authors, like many prison officials and other experts, don't oppose administrative segregation in all cases. But they say it must be done carefully and for specific reasons, with regular opportunities for review.
Solitary confinement has a long history in the U.S., beginning in the early 19th century as a progressive reform. Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was designed with individual cells to provide each inmate space to contemplate his crimes and promote penitence. Charles Dickens, who visited the institution in 1842, said it drove inmates mad. “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body,” he wrote.
By the early 20th century, the Pennsylvania system, as it was known, was largely abandoned. In the 1980s, however, tough-on-crime policies brought solitary confinement back into widespread use throughout American prisons, Ms. Resnik said.
“For better or for worse, the old idea of the Philadelphia system was about contemplation,” she said. “The new isolation that came into being in the 1980s didn’t suggest for a moment it was doing something rehabilitative for people.”
In a June dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called solitary confinement “dehumanizing.” He cited research showing that the practice “can cause prisoners to experience ‘anxiety, panic, rage, loss of control, paranoia, hallucinations, and self-mutilations,’ among many other symptoms.”
The evidence against solitary confinement isn’t unequivocal. A 2010 study funded by the U.S. Justice Department involving some 250 Colorado inmates found, unlike most research, that segregation for up to a year wasn’t harmful to mental health.
Prison guards say isolation is important in managing dangerous institutions.
“Today’s disciplinary confinement policies have evolved over decades of experience, and it is simply wrong to unilaterally take the tools away from law enforcement officers who face dangerous situations on a daily basis,” said Michael Powers, president of the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association.
Robert Blackmer, legislative director for the Arizona Correctional Peace Officers Association, said that his state’s system, which reassesses each inmate in solitary confinement every six months, works well as is.
“Our correctional officers have some of the most difficult jobs in the world, they deal with the worst of the worst. And within that population you have a worst of that worst,” he said. “You need a degree of maximum control.”
The issue hits home for the Colorado system. Mr. Raemisch’s predecessor, Tom Clements, was murdered in 2013 by an ex-inmate who, paroled after spending nearly eight years in solitary confinement, came to his house and shot him. Last year, Mr. Raemisch himself spent a night in an “ad-seg” cell to get a sense of the experience.
This week, California agreed to end solitary confinement for thousands of prisoners to settle an inmate lawsuit alleging that isolating gang members in “security housing units” violates the Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment.
At the U.S. Supreme Court, a pending petition alleges Virginia’s policy of placing death- row inmates in solitary confinement is unconstitutional. Justice Kennedy, for one, has indicated he is ready to review the constitutionality of isolation practices.
“Years on end of near-total isolation exacts a terrible price,” he wrote in a June concurring opinion. “In a case that presented the issue, the judiciary may be required, within its proper jurisdiction and authority, to determine whether workable alternative systems for long-term confinement exist, and, if so, whether a correctional system should be required to adopt them.”
Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com
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