What is Solitary Confinement?

• Solitary confinement is incarceration in a cell for approximately 22 hours or more each day, alone or with another prisoner. People in solitary confinement have very little or no meaningful contact with other human beings.
  
  

What’s Wrong with Solitary Confinement?

• Prolonged solitary confinement often leads to mental illness in people who previously were healthy and exacerbates pre-existing symptoms of mental illness.
• Scientific studies have shown that isolating people in small cells for more than 15 consecutive days inflicts serious and sometimes permanent neurological damage. Consequently, the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners call for limiting isolated confinement to 15 days and banning isolation of mentally ill and other vulnerable prisoners altogether.
• Solitary confinement is not part of anyone’s sentence. It is not ordered by a court, and prisoners have no meaningful opportunity to challenge their placement in solitary confinement. Often periods in solitary confinement follow disciplinary charges for non-violent offenses. Sometimes people are placed in isolation against their will, ostensibly for their own protection. Nothing prohibits placement of people with mental illness, disabilities, or other specific vulnerabilities in prolonged isolation.
• Solitary confinement is much more expensive than detention in the general prisoner population. Other states have realized significant savings from reducing their use of solitary confinement.

What Would this Bill Do?

• The bill would require the Department of Corrections (DOC) to report annually on its use of solitary confinement (sometimes known by other labels such as “restrictive housing” or “segregation”). The DOC would submit the data to the Governor and the General Assembly and would publish the data on its website.
• Eleven categories of data would be reported both in the aggregate and by institution:
  o The average daily prison population reported on a biweekly basis;

  o The number of people placed in solitary confinement;

  o Identification of those in solitary confinement by categories such as age, sex, gender identity, national origin, race, ethnicity, and English proficiency status;

  o The number of those in solitary confinement who are members of vulnerable populations as defined by the bill, including those under age 22 or over age 54; those with a mental illness or developmental disability; those who have recently harmed themselves; those with a serious medical condition that cannot be adequately treated in solitary confinement; those who are pregnant, or recently experienced termination of a pregnancy, or are in a postpartum period; those with a significant visual or auditory impairment; and those who are perceived to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex;

  o The reasons for these individuals’ placement in solitary confinement;

  o The dates each person was placed in and released from solitary confinement and the total number of hours spent in such confinement;

  o The number of “sick calls” made by each individual while in solitary confinement;

  o The number of instances of self-harm by inmate in solitary confinement;

  o The number of individuals released directly to the community from solitary confinement;

  o The total number of mental health staff assigned to each state prison; and

  o Any changes made during the reporting period to policies or procedures of the prison or the DOC relating to solitary confinement.

Why is this Bill Needed?

• The bill would ensure that the public and legislators have information about how solitary confinement is used, including who is in solitary confinement, for what reasons, and for how long. Without this bill, corrections officials have no obligation to divulge this kind of information.
• The DOC itself has acknowledged that it doesn’t know certain things about those in solitary confinement that are of direct interest to the public, such as how many people have been released directly to the community from solitary confinement.
• As noted on page 31 of the ACLU of Virginia’s May 2018 report Silent Injustice: Solitary Confinement in Virginia, the DOC has issued conflicting information about certain outcomes of its Step-Down Program, which aims to reduce the number of people held in prolonged isolation. This makes it hard to objectively assess the impact of the program. The bill would help remedy this by requiring consistent and comprehensive reporting of data that would enable a fuller understanding of what the program has and has not accomplished.
• The DOC says it doesn’t use “restrictive housing” as punishment and that prisoners placed in it are given due process hearings, but we know of numerous instances of people being placed in isolation immediately following a disciplinary charge without any documentation of a decision about their placement. These cases should be properly documented so that the public will be able to evaluate the DOC’s claims. We need to know how many such cases there are and how long prisoners’ isolation lasts.
• The DOC says it has no one in prolonged “restrictive housing” that has serious mental illness. We need better data on this. The Virginia Coalition on Solitary Confinement knows of cases of individuals in prolonged isolation who have serious mental health symptoms that have not been treated effectively.