Thomas Hawk / flickr

A momentous court settlement has given new shape to California’s multi-year struggle with the courts over its criminal justice system, rolling back the state’s reliance on solitary confinement as a way of dealing with gangs and violence in prison. “Many such prisoners are left in solitary confinement indefinitely, with severe psychological effects,” The New York Times observed; “over the years, hundreds have spent more than a decade in isolation.”

A sudden shift

The practice had come under special scrutiny as Gov. Jerry Brown ameliorated overcrowding through his controversial strategy of “realigning” inmates with lesser sentences to county jails. “Under the terms of the settlement, state authorities will only send inmates to solitary if they commit new and serious crimes in prison, like murders or violent assaults,” NPR reported. “California prison officials have a year to review files of inmates in isolation now. The process is designed to send many of those prisoners back into the general prison population.”

California’s secretary of corrections and rehabilitation Jeffrey Beard said that over 1,000 inmates had been released from solitary, telling the Los Angeles Times that “the prison system was largely unable to make the case for change, and show solitary confinement could work, until dealing with overcrowding problems that had inmates sleeping in bunks set up in prison gyms and day rooms.”

Filed three years ago, the now-settled lawsuit took shape as a class action “brought on behalf of thousands of inmates who had filled the Pelican Bay State Prison isolation wing for alleged gang affiliation,” the Huffington Post noted. According to one of the plaintiffs, the Center for Constitutional Rights, over 500 inmates “had spent more than a decade locked in solitary at the time the lawsuit was filed,” reported the Huffington Post, with 78 prisoners locked in the so-called Security Housing Unit for over two decades.

Legal shifts

Solitary confinement has earned the ire of California’s criminal justice activists for years on end, and with the state’s legal woes surrounding its prison system, some in Sacramento took up the cause. In collaboration with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, authored Senate Bill 124, focusing on the extension of solitary to state and county juvenile detention centers. The bill “would ban the use of solitary confinement for longer than four hours at a time,” East Bay Express reported, barring facilities from doling out stints in solitary to punish young offenders and authorizing the practice only “when juveniles pose an immediate, substantial risk to themselves or others.” Inmates whose mental illness factored into their behavior would also be safe from solitary confinement.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, which had angrily mandated a reduction in California’s crowded state prison population, also seemed to be circling around the state’s use of solitary. Considering an appeal this summer from one of the state’s prisoners on death row, Justice Anthony Kennedy “had his law clerks dig up an 1890 case in which the Supreme Court had decided that even for those prisoners sentenced to death, solitary confinement contained a ‘particular terror and a peculiar mark of infamy,'” Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted in New York magazine.

A spate of prisoner protests in California fueled a growing sense that solitary confinement had become too routine and too ineffective around the country. As the New York Times observed, “a number of corrections officials across the country have increasingly come to see locking up inmates for years at a time as ineffective. Some human rights groups have assailed it as torture, and tens of thousands of inmates across California have participated in hunger strikes since 2011 to protest the state’s use of solitary.”

Although the state’s agreement will remove gang affiliation from its list of offenses punishable by isolation, few have speculated what was likely to happen once thousands of formerly solitary inmates were returned to prisons’ general populations.

Thomas Hawk / flickr

After years spent under the glare of judicial scrutiny, California’s effort to clean up its prison system has run up against a fresh wave of challenges and controversy. Lawsuits, violence and Draconian measures have all increased costs while chipping away at support from the public and policymakers.

‘Potty watches’

Critics have no shortage of policies to go after. One stratagem under fire is the so-called “potty watch,” wherein prisoners are restrained, as ABC News reported, “for at least 72 hours or until they complete at least three closely watched bowel movements” — with guards investigating the feces for contraband. “Something is recovered from about four out of 10 inmates.”

The techniques used for restraining prisoners have become a particular focus of criticism. “Suspected smugglers are strip-searched, then placed in an isolation cell in which the toilet has been covered and the water turned off,” as ABC News noted. “Their clothing is taped shut at the waist and legs to prevent them from physically reaching body cavities, their hands are cuffed to a chain around their waist and their legs may be shackled. If they fight back, they can be strapped down by the arms and legs.”

A drug epidemic

But the drug problem in California’s prisons has become so severe that reform would have to strike at that challenge. Overdose rates have now tripled the national average for state prisons, according to the San Jose Mercury News. “The rate of drug overdose deaths in California prisons climbed between 2006 and 2013, the most recent year available, according to an annual death review for the federal court-appointed receiver who controls prison medical care.”

As the Associated Press reported earlier this summer, analysts have not been convinced that millions in spending and “the tough steps state officials took this year to stop illicit drugs from getting into prisons are having any effect, though they are prompting criticism from civil rights advocates.” Anecdotal evidence has cast a pall on screenings. Riverside resident Tania Gamboa, visiting her brother at Kern Valley state prison, faced a harrowing procedure, the AP observed:

She initially laughed when the ion machine tested positive for exposure to heroin, saying she doesn’t even drink alcohol. But she was crying after she was required to strip naked in front of two female correctional officers and squat to demonstrate that she was not concealing drugs.

Rising tensions

Drugs have become emblematic of California’s prison woes, which extend to the broader matter of simply maintaining order and safety for the incarcerated. A recent prison riot in Solano left guards making a grisly discovery of a murdered and disemboweled inmate’s body five hours after the victim first went missing.

And in an effort to save water, officials have turned off the taps on prisoners’ typical outdoor showers. A spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told the Los Angeles Times “all showers outside of those in the housing units have been shut down as part of the statewide mandate to reduce water use by 25% due to the drought.”

Without delay, inmates’ attorneys bundled the action into a complaint brought against the state. “The aqua austerity in prison yards is included in a lawsuit alleging inhumane conditions on California’s death row, alongside complaints about the prolonged use of solitary confinement, inadequate food and a lack of due process,” the Times confirmed.

Some progress

Despite the battery of difficulties, the Golden State has managed to move forward with some key prison reforms. This month, California regained control of its own prison health care system, following ten long years of federal receivership in the wake of shocking failures. Last decade, as the AP reported, “a federal judge found that conditions in the state’s prisons were so poor that an average of an inmate each week was dying of medical malpractice or neglect. A receiver was appointed to run the system in 2006. Since then, the state has spent $2 billion for new prison medical facilities, doubled its annual prison health care budget to nearly $1.7 billion and reduced its prison population by more than 40,000 inmates.”

Meanwhile, facing another lawsuit over its usage of solitary confinement, the state has dialed back its reliance on the practice. “Inmates may no longer be put in isolation for refusing a cell assignment, for example, one of several prison infractions for which solitary confinement punishment has been reduced or dropped. And those being disciplined with segregation can cut that punishment in half with good behavior,” according to the Times.