Officials with the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services told lawmakers last year that the state’s prisons need to be able to employ solitary confinement as a management tool. File photo by Getty Images.
Solitary Confinement! Restrictive Housing! Segregation! Whatever the name, holding human beings in tiny spaces with no human contact, clothes, light or fresh air amounts to torture!
Advocates demand that Maryland’s correctional authorities limit the use of solitary confinement and respect the human rights and dignity of all justice-involved people. Most civilized nations and the United Nations have outlawed torture, but Maryland corrections officials repeatedly use solitary confinement for extensive periods of time and for the most vulnerable people in our prisons. Remember that people are sent to prison as punishment – they are not sent there for punishment.
Legislation will be introduced again this year seeking to significantly constrain the use of solitary confinement. It also incorporates the use of step-down procedures so that there is proper notification of the reason for such placement, access to counseling and other services and a process for gradual reintegration back into the prison population or return to society.
A 2011 report by the United Nations on torture identified the use of solitary confinement as cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment often rising to the level of torture. Four years later, the UN included strict limits on the use of solitary in its revised Minimum Standards for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules.
These rules demand that all nations restrict their use of solitary to no more than 15 days. Currently, people are kept in solitary for days, weeks, months and even years. The Mandela Rules also end solitary altogether for children, pregnant people and new mothers, individuals with mental illness and physical disabilities, and other vulnerable populations.
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Placing individuals with severe psychiatric symptoms into solitary confinement in prisons is “akin to pouring gasoline on a fire,” according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. It only worsens psychiatric symptoms such as paranoia, extreme anxiety and depression, increased suicides and suicide attempts, sleep disturbances, hallucinations and self-mutilation. It destroys human beings — mind, body and soul!
During the last legislative session, Maryland corrections officials testified that the use of solitary confinement is necessary as a management tool. They are under the false belief that they cannot operate institutions securely without the use of such practices.
Advocates do not dispute that the limited use may be necessary for short periods of time and in limited circumstances. Most would think that people are sent to solitary for breaking rules or for the protection of others. But people are sent to solitary for having mental health issues, because they are youth, or because of their sexual orientation — things that have nothing to do with violent acts that might justify such extreme response.
Solitary confinement is a reflection and a measure of the wider punitive culture in our criminal legal system that has fueled mass incarceration.
Despite the fact that evidence shows that solitary confinement causes extreme and sometimes permanent damage to the individuals who endure it. It is also costly and counterproductive, increasing recidivism and making communities less safe when individuals are released from confinement directly back to the community.
People of color are disproportionately subjected to solitary confinement, even beyond their disproportionate representation in the general prison population. A report by the Sentencing Project concluded that Black women are overrepresented in solitary confinement. They found that among the 40 jurisdictions providing data, Black women constituted 24% of the total female incarcerated population but comprised 41% of the female restricted housing population.
A report from the Maryland Disabilities Rights Center found that the conditions in the segregation, infirmary and mental health units at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women violated the Eighth Amendment, Article 25 of the Maryland Constitution, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
This report was done following the 2017 suicide of a woman, Emily Butler, at the facility. She was found dead in her cell after an apparent suicide on Nov. 12, 2017.
She was in segregation at the time of her death. She had a history of mental illness that included anxiety and depression. She was placed on medication but never received regular counseling. She was placed in isolation for throwing coffee. For two days she asked to speak with her father and asked for mental health help but no relief ever arrived for her. Her situation is not unusual.
The proposed legislation would limit use to no more than 15 days , require a mental health assessment within 24 hours and receive programmatic out-of-cell time.
Legislators have already promised to prioritize closing the state deficit this session. Well, limiting the use of torture in our prisons will serve as one opportunity to shrink the corrections department’s fiscal budget – which currently operates at a $1.6 billion dollar budget while simultaneously limiting the devastating impacts of torture on human beings.