U.S. officials on Wednesday issued strict new guidelines on the use of solitary confinement for detainees being held on immigration charges, the first federal policy decision following a strengthened public debate on the country’s unprecedented dependence on “segregated housing”.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture says solitary confinement can have detrimental and irreversible effects on individuals’ mental health. Credit: Bigstock

In a stark turnaround, immigration detainees will only be allowed to be held in solitary confinement for two weeks, with extensions requiring the consent of upper-level officials. Detention facilities will also need to engage in regular reporting on instances in which detainees were held in isolation.

“Placement of detainees in segregated housing is a serious step that requires careful consideration of alternatives,” the policy directive, released Wednesday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), states.

“ICE shall take additional steps to ensure appropriate review and oversight of decisions to retain detainees in segregated housing for over 14 days, or placements in segregation for any length of time in the case of detainees for whom heightened concerns exists based on known special vulnerabilities and other factors related to the detainee’s health or the risk of victimization.”

The guidance is being widely applauded by rights groups and appears to offer a strong new – and federally mandated – model.

“This is huge news and sets a wonderful federal precedent,” Rich Killmer, the executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS.

“The fact that ICE is saying that immigration detainees can only be held in solitary confinement for 14 days – that underlines such a significant contrast with prisoners in some U.S. states being held in solitary for decades. We will certainly be using this in our advocacy work, as an example of what can be done.”

Still, some are expressing apprehension that ICE did not go far enough.

“We are concerned that the new directive does not eliminate the use of extended solitary confinement,” Mary Meg McCarthy, the executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Centre, said Thursday, “and that the reporting period exceeds the 15 days which the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has observed can have detrimental and irreversible effects on individuals’ mental health.”

300+ per day

With some 80,000 people in solitary confinement throughout the various U.S. penal systems (as of the last available estimate, in 2005), the United States is a clear global outlier in terms of its active integration of segregated housing into its prison system, particularly since the late 1980s.

Why these numbers have climbed so high is unclear, but many experts feel that isolation is in part being used to deal with the overcrowding that has stretched federal prisons beyond their margins of safety. In such a situation, prison wardens may be choosing to put some vulnerable prisoners – those with mental health problems or even those who are underage – in segregated housing on the view that they will be safer.

While the new guidance is applicable only to those detained on immigration charges, it specifically disallows such use of solitary for a prisoner’s “own good”.

“In particular, placement in administrative segregation due to a special vulnerability should be used only as a last resort and when no other viable housing options exist,” the directive states.

“A detainee’s age, physical disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, or religion may not provide the sole basis for a decision to place the detainee in involuntary segregation.”

ICE runs or oversees some 250 detention centres. As part of President Barack Obama’s unprecedented crackdown on immigration-related crimes, last year the agency detained nearly 430,000 people, the highest ever.

Earlier this year, a major U.S. newspaper studied the 50 largest of these centres and concluded that an average of 300 people per day were being kept in solitary confinement just in those prisons. According to official data, half of those detainees were being kept for longer than 15 days, while some were being segregated for longer than 75 days.

Analysts estimated that around two-thirds of these detainees were being segregated due to minor infractions, while the rest were seen as either a threat or vulnerable, including due to sexuality or mental illness.

The subsequent political and public response led Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to order a review of ICE policies on segregated housing, resulting in Wednesday’s revised policies.

An ICE spokesperson told IPS that the review “included collecting quantitative and qualitative data on the use of segregation throughout ICE’s detention facilities; consultation with field office management and detention site managers; extra inspections of segregation facilities; discussions with a variety of stakeholders; and collaboration among many ICE and DHS offices on process improvements.”

Strengthened monitoring

Yet the ICE decision deals with only one part of the United States’ penal system. It does not directly affect the much-larger federal Bureau of Prisons or U.S. Marshals Service (the judicial system’s enforcement arm), both of which run parallel prison systems.

In June, the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. Congress’s independent watchdog, released an excoriating report on the Bureau of Prison’s failure to conduct adequate monitoring of isolation in its jails or its impact on prisoners.

“At the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons really hasn’t done more than begin to look at its use of solitary confinement, while the U.S. Marshals Service has neither been externally reviewed nor conducted an internal assessment,” Carl Takei, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, told IPS.

“The most praiseworthy aspects of the new ICE directive are its monitoring requirements – previously, the agency had very little idea of who was in solitary on a daily basis, how long or why. This move represents a significant step forward, and we’re hoping that these guidelines will be used as an example of the monitoring that the Bureau of Prisons should be doing.”

Other models have also recently arisen within the state prison systems, several of which are already drastically cutting down their use of solitary confinement.

Part of the motivation is financial, with squeezed coffers forcing state governments to figure out how to save money. Building and operating a solitary confinement unit costs 200 to 300 percent more than otherwise, while a 2007 state estimate found that it costs twice as much per year to keep a confined prisoner.

Part of this calculation also has to do with the effect of solitary confinement on the rest of society. Researchers have found, for instance, that prisoners who have been in segregated housing have higher recidivism rates than do other prisoners.

In a sign that the issue is gaining traction, a mass hunger strike in California’s prison system to protest against what inmates describe as the inhumane use of long-term solitary confinement ended Thursday after nearly two months, when two state lawmakers promised to hold hearings on the solitary confinement policy.

The U.S. federal prison system’s use of solitary confinement and other forms of “segregated housing” has increased substantially over the past five years, according to new data released by the U.S. Congress’s official independent watchdog.

Inmates are held in solitary confinement for around 23 hours a day, often for months or even years at a time. Credit: Bigstock

Inmates are held in solitary confinement for around 23 hours a day, often for months or even years at a time, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is warning in a major new report. More damningly, the country’s federal prisons authorities have failed to carry out studies on the effects of this practice.

“[The Bureau of Prisons] has not assessed the impact of segregated housing on institutional safety or the impacts of long-term segregation on inmates,” the report, released Friday, states.

“…[W]ithout an assessment of the impact of segregation on institutional safety or study of the long-term impact of segregated housing on inmates, [the bureau] cannot determine the extent to which segregated housing achieves its stated purpose to protect inmates, staff and the general public.”

From 2008 through February this year, the total number of U.S. inmates in segregated housing rose by around 17 percent, to nearly 12,500 people, the GAO states. During the same period, the number of inmates under the federal Bureau of Prisons increased by just six percent.

Critics say the lack of assessment is potentially dangerous for society at large. After all, a broad body of global research – stretching back centuries – has been resounding in its findings on the deleterious impact of social seclusion on the human psyche.

“For almost all people, sustained social isolation is very damaging, causing extreme suffering that can lead to permanent psychiatric damage,” David Fathi, director of the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a watchdog group, told IPS.

“Solitary confinement is clearly very damaging and counter-productive. But we also know that people who have been in solitary confinement have higher recidivism rates than comparable prisoners, particularly those that have been released directly after their solitary confinement.”

There’s an argument to be made, Fathi says, that solitary confinement has direct negative ramifications for the rest of society.

Historically unprecedented

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons operates with relatively little public oversight, with journalists typically not allowed into its most sensitive installations. It is answerable to Congress, however, and the new GAO report, compiled at the request of three members of Congress, thus offers unique insight into some of the functioning of this massive system.

The U.S. prison system is by far the world’s largest. In a January report by the official Congressional Research Service (CRS), the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. was found to have grown by almost 800 percent over the past three decades, to around 219,000.

That’s 716 out of every 100,000 people, indicative of a growth rate the CRS said was “historically unprecedented”.

According to the new GAO report, around seven percent of those inmates are kept in segregated housing, which Fathi says makes the United States an “egregious global outlier in this area – there is no other country of any description that has made long-term solitary confinement such an integral part of its prison system.”

Still, the question of why this practice has become so integrated – which the new report doesn’t delve into – is harder to discern.

“A lot of corrections people think that solitary confinement promotes prison safety, and overall I think it just reflects an unthinking response,” Fathi says.

“Solitary confinement is where prisoners who are problematic or difficult to manage or just plain different tend to end up. In addition, this tends to be a one-way ratchet – it’s relatively easy to get in but difficult to get out.”

Others point to how overstretched the crowded U.S. prison system has become, noting that solitary confinement has become an important if questionable method of dealing with inmates with special needs.

“Problems with overcrowded prisons force officials to be more strategic with how they deal with vulnerable populations, particularly those who are mentally ill – there are just not enough resources,” Nicole Porter, director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“We don’t accept that as good correctional policy, of course, but these are pressures that correctional officers have to deal with. Isolating prisoners becomes one way to address inmates with particular vulnerabilities.”

This approach came in for some high-profile criticism late last week. On Friday, a federal investigation found that a state prison in Pennsylvania was misusing solitary confinement, keeping prisoners with serious mental problems segregated for upwards of 23 hours a day, often for years.

According to Justice Department officials, the practice violated the inmates’ constitutional rights, and a probe has now been expanded to the entire state.

States leading

Each of the GAO’s four recommendations deals with strengthening the Bureau of Prisons’s monitoring and assessment on these issues, including specifically studying the impact of long-term segregation.

Porter says it is unsurprising that the Bureau of Prisons has failed to undertake any long-term studies on the effects of solitary confinement, as “Doing so would open them up to having to actually do something about it.”

According to the GAO, however, the bureau has “agreed with these recommendations and reported it would take actions to address them”. Further, in January prisons officials authorised a study on segregated housing and at the time was also considering “conducting mental health case reviews for inmates held in [segregated housing] for more than 12 continuous months”.

While observers are welcoming these steps, it remains to be seen how independent and rigorous those assessments are.

At the same time, however, significant changes are already taking place in the state-level prison systems, the recent Pennsylvania findings notwithstanding. Three states – Colorado, Maine and Mississippi – have recently cut down dramatically on their use of solitary confinement, and other states are reportedly taking keen notice.

“In the last few years, we’re seeing a sea change at the state level,” the ACLU’s Fathi says.

“This is partly a result of concern about the effects of solitary, but also partly about cost, as solitary confinement costs two to three times as much per prisoner even as an ordinary maximum security prison. So far, none of these three states have reported any adverse impact on prison safety.”

While the Bureau of Prisons was long seen as a leader and innovator, Fathi says it is now “very much on the wrong side of history” on this issue.