The Fight Against Solitary Confinement
By Alan Mills, Executive Director, Uptown People’s Law Center
Four and a half feet by ten feet. Five feet by nine feet. Six feet by 10 feet. This is the size of many cells where people are held, for 22 hours or more every day, for days, weeks, years, and even decades. These numbers are abstract, and hard for many people to grasp. Sometimes people compare a solitary cell to a typical parking spot, a space most people are familiar. But that is wrong. Solitary cells are much smaller than parking spaces. In Chicago, regulations require that parking spaces be at least 8 feet wide and 18 feet long–more than twice the size of a solitary confinement cell.
Gray walls. No windows. No pictures on the walls. A bed. A sink/toilet. That is your entire life in solitary. How about the cell door? It used to be made up of bars–like you see in the movies. But decades ago, prison officials welded steel plates over the bars–so now even the door is just another gray wall, the monotony broken by a small window covered by heavy mesh.
Mr. Dennis Wayne Hope had been held in solitary for 27 years and suffered severe damage to his mental health as a result. The trial court held that regardless of the truth of his allegations, his treatment would not be in violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition in the United States Constitution against cruel and unusual punishment. In effect, this meant there was no constitutional limit on how long someone could be held in extreme isolation, regardless of the damage they suffered. Mr. Hope asked the United States Supreme Court to review this extreme holding. After the lower court ruled, after the petition asking the Supreme Court to review the case had been filed, and after the Justices had held a conference to decide whether to hear the case, the state, without explanation, released Mr. Hope from solitary and returned him to the prison's general population. Last month, on April 17, after receiving word of this change in circumstances, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of Hope v Harris, Docket # 21-1065.
Mr. Michael Johnson was diagnosed with severe mental illnesses: bipolar disorder; severe depression; anxiety; and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which causes him to repeatedly pick at his own skin. He has spent many years in solitary where he was forced to spend virtually 24 hours a day, every day, in his cell. Some years he was allowed outside for a few hours. Other years, he was never allowed outside. Only very occasionally was he let out of his cell for any type of exercise. Mr. Johnson’s claim was dismissed by the trial court, and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeal affirmed by an evenly split vote. His petition for review in the Supreme Court remains pending. (Johnson v Prentice, Docket # 22-693).
Various members of the United States Supreme Court have expressed concern about the constitutionality of long-term confinement to solitary in several cases over the last few years. However, the Court has never squarely ruled on the issue.
While Mr. Hope and Mr. Johnson present extreme cases, their experiences are in no way unique. Every day, approximately 80,000 people in this country are held in solitary confinement: locked in their cells 20-plus hours a day, day after day, month after month, year after year.
Solitary confinement is used by the federal government in United States penitentiaries and immigration detention facilities nationwide, it is used by state governments in prisons in every state in the United States and virtually every county in the country operates a jail where people are held in solitary confinement.
Beginning in the 1800s, study after study has demonstrated the devastating effect solitary confinement has on people’s mental and physical health. Charles Dickens wrote about the severe mental deterioration he observed among prisoners held in solitary at Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania in 1842:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
In 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court described what happens to people held in solitary (Re: Medley, 134 U.S. 160):
A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.
During the 1950s, there were a series of studies of isolation, meant to determine what effect the rumored torture of soldiers captured by North Korea would have. During the 1960s, there were a series of experiments where individuals were dropped into deep caves with no light to measure the impact of isolation and sensory deprivation. From the 1980s to the present, as the use of solitary confinement in United States prisons skyrocketed, there have been a long series of articles in peer-reviewed journals documenting the serious harm solitary confinement does to people’s mental health. There is also research suggesting that solitary confinement is so harmful that it shortens people’s lives even after they are released from prison.
Numerous challenges to solitary confinement in state and federal courts continue. With the support of the Barbara McDowell Foundation, the Uptown People's Law Center alleges in our grant-funded case that the Illinois Department of Corrections holds people in solitary for too long, for minor offenses, and in terrible conditions, resulting in serious harm to people’s mental and physical health. One of the named plaintiffs in the case was held for 25 years in solitary. Others have been held in solitary even longer than that, and thousands of people have been in solitary for over a year.
The time is now ripe for the Supreme Court to rule under the Constitution that long -term solitary confinement violates the Eighth Amendment’s clause against cruel and unusual punishment and the Fourteenth Amendment's right to due process. So many thousands of incarcerated Americans in solitary confinement across this Country wait for that to occur.
About Uptown People’s Law Center
Uptown People’s Law Center (UPLC) is a 2023 grantee of the Barbara McDowell Foundation. In June 2016, UPLC brought Davis v. Jeffreys against the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) on behalf of six prisoners who were facing, or had faced, extreme isolation in Illinois prisons. These individuals had been held in extreme isolation for between 6 months to 17 years. The case is part of a strategic national effort to challenge the overuse of solitary confinement in US prisons. UPLC has used its experience litigating this case to advise lawyers in both Texas and Florida who are challenging their states’ use of solitary. In addition, UPLC was one of the founding members of, and is still an active participant in, the national Stop Solitary campaign coordinated by the ACLU’s National Prison Project.