Advocates fight to eliminate long-term solitary confinement
1st July 2019 · 0 Comments
By Meghan Holmes
Contributing Writer
A new report released last week details conditions for prisoners jailed in solitary confinement across Louisiana. Data in the report, called “Louisiana on Lockdown,” comes from more than 700 twelve-page surveys that the ACLU sent to every solitary confinement inmate across the state.
“This report details deeply harmful conditions and reform could not be more urgent,” said Katie Schwartzmann, legal director for the ACLU. “As we speak, people are being permanently harmed and the communities to which they will return are also being imperiled.”
Schwartzmann and others, including representatives from Loyola University and their Social Justice Research Institute, advocates from the groups Solitary Watch and the Louisiana Stop Solitary Campaign, religious leaders, and formerly incarcerated persons, spoke at Loyola on June 25 to announce the report’s release. Albert Woodfox, who was jailed in Angola Penitentiary for 44 years as part of the Angola 3, also spoke at the event.
“I lived in solitary confinement for 44 years and ten months and I had to fight for my sanity 24 hours a day,” Woodfox said. “I watched other men I considered very strong go insane, their sense of self-worth, dignity, pride and respect, completely stripped away from them.”
Currently, Louisiana houses more than 2,700 inmates in solitary confinement. That’s nearly twenty percent of the state’s prison population – a rate four times the national average. More than 77 percent of survey respondents said they had been in solitary for more than a year. Thirty percent said they had been there for more than five years. The United Nations has called on countries to ban the use of solitary beyond fifteen days.
“We are calling on the state to limit confinement to fifteen days, because that’s the international standard,” Schwartzmann said. “The problem is so significant in Louisiana, and there are so many people in solitary confinement, that we know that can’t happen overnight. We want any youth under eighteen or anyone with a mental health diagnosis to be immediately removed and a six-month limit on stays to be implemented.”
Formerly incarcerated advocates read excerpts from surveys at the release event, detailing disturbing conditions and treatment from guards in Louisiana’s prisons, with allegations of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, as well as raw sewage, flooding and unbearable heat in some cells.
They also told their own stories. “I was falsely accused and convicted of two counts of murder in Jefferson Parish in 1994,” said Kiana Calloway, who now works with Voice of the Experienced and Roots of Renewal. “In 1998, I spent sixteen months in solitary. It was transformative. Even today I wake up in cold sweats, after nightmares of screams next to me, or hearing a guy being beaten down the hall after asking for medical treatment.”
Inmates in solitary confinement spend 23 hours a day in a six by nine cell. In some instances, they never leave, trading their hour of freedom for perks like a phone call, food or shower. “One guy told me that for fifteen years he traded his hour so that he could get an extra piece of chicken,” Calloway said.
In a prepared response to The Advocate, the Louisiana Depart-ment of Corrections disputed the report’s findings. Spokesman Ken Pastorick called some claims “vague and blatant lies,” and said that “it appears that information was gathered improperly.”
Woodfox criticized the department’s response. “I challenge the Department of Corrections to call me a liar,” he said. “I am living proof, and lived in a cell that was meant to be a death chamber. I’ve seen men die from illnesses because of a lack of medical treatment, and I’ve seen men cut and even kill themselves because they couldn’t handle the pressure of being in this space. Solitary confinement is brutal non-physical torture.”
Researchers also defended the report’s data collection and statistical analysis following the department’s criticism. “This report was compiled and processed carefully over two years and is the result of 709 surveys,” Schwartzmann said. “We hope that once the department reads and processes the report, they’ll be thoughtful and want to work with us.”
Recently, the state has been working to reduce its prison population as well as the number of inmates held in solitary confinement.
“People at the department are starting to listen, and we have to keep having conversations,” said David Cloud, a researcher at the VERA Institute of Justice who studies solitary confinement in the state. “We know there’s been a net reduction in the number of beds and we have seen signs of progress and reform. One of the tasks ahead is getting them to say what they’re doing and looking for empirical results.”
VERA has been working with the state’s department of corrections as part of a legal settlement with Albert Woodfox.
Solitary survivors emphasize that reform needs to happen immediately. “Right now someone is in a cell trying to figure out what to do with their hour,” Woodfox said. “Prisoners don’t come from another planet; they come from your family, and every individual has value.”
This article originally published in the July 1, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
