SOLITARY DISGRACE

Prisons Should Abolish Long-Term Solitary Confinement.

MANY ARE KEPT in their cells for at least 23 hours a day with minimal
contact with other people, including guards. Food is delivered
through a slit in the door, and most are prohibited from attending
classes or counseling sessions with other inmates.

They are not, by and large, the "worst of the worst" -- mass
murderers or psychopaths in the mold of Hannibal Lecter. They are,
instead, men and women serving time for all manner of offenses, some
of them relatively minor. But they have been deemed disciplinary
problems -- or potential disciplinary problems -- by prison staffers.
And so they find themselves locked up in what is commonly known as
solitary confinement, sometimes for months, sometimes for years and
sometimes with devastating consequences.

At one time shunned in the United States, solitary confinement is
becoming a tool increasingly used by corrections officials trying
desperately to keep order in grossly overcrowded and sometimes
chaotic prisons. These decisions are made even though solitary
confinement costs roughly twice as much as keeping an inmate in the
general prison population. At any given time, experts estimate that
25,000 to 100,000 prisoners are kept in some sort of "special housing
unit" where they are isolated and kept apart from the general prison
population. The number changes frequently as new prisoners are sent
in and others sent out of solitary. The federal "supermax" prison in
Florence, Colo., home to al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui and
"shoe bomber" Richard Reid, houses some 480 inmates in the federal
version of solitary confinement.

A short stint in solitary for most does not result in serious or
permanent harm. But more prolonged stays of months or years -- a
practice not uncommon in many states -- can result in devastating
psychological damage, including psychosis and debilitating
depression. Studies have also shown that inmates kept in solitary
confinement for prolonged periods display higher levels of hostility
than those in the general prison population; they tend to carry this
hostility with them after they are returned to the general prison
population or released back into the community.

Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of
California at Santa Cruz, estimates that some 30 percent of prisoners
in solitary confinement suffer from serious mental illness -- at
least some of it entirely induced by the isolation. Sometimes the
only justification given for sending an inmate to solitary
confinement is the desire to separate him from fellow gang members.

Placing an out-of-control inmate in solitary confinement for a short
period may sometimes be necessary -- for his own good and for that of
other inmates. And special precautions must be taken to prevent
convicted terrorists imprisoned in the same facility from
orchestrating plots and communicating with cohorts on the outside.

But there is rarely any justification for holding what is essentially
an average prisoner in solitary confinement for months, let alone
years. Such a practice is cruel and counterproductive and should be abolished.