As a forensic psychiatrist with five decades of experience, I know a mental health problem when I see it. The Mandela California Mandela Act, Assembly Bill 280, would greatly limit solitary confinement and enhance rehabilitation opportunities in California prisons, jails and immigration detention facilities.
AB 280 has been passed by both the state Assembly and Senate twice, but after its first passage Gov. Gavin Newson vetoed it citing security concerns. AB 280 was recently passed again by both houses and is on pause while negotiations with the governor proceed.
While it is very clear that solitary confinement causes massive psychological and physical damage to prisoners, there is no evidence that limiting solitary confinement would create a security problem in correctional facilities, nor would it lead to negative safety outcomes for the community at large.
The issue of solitary confinement has an important history in our state. This includes Ashker v. Brown, a class action lawsuit that greatly limited the time the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) could consign prisoners to solitary confinement. From 2011 to 2013, many thousands of prisoners participated in hunger strikes, supported by large gatherings of family members and advocates in the community. The hunger strikers’ demands included a fair process for consigning prisoners to solitary confinement, meaningful programs, and steps to being released from solitary. CDCR actually agreed to these very reasonable demands when the Ashker case was settled in 2015.
I testified as a psychiatric expert witness in Ashker v. Brown. I examined 24 prisoners who had been in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison for over ten years (20 or 30 years in some cases), and found alarming symptoms and disabilities. While relatively stable prisoners (from a mental health perspective) who are placed in solitary confinement almost immediately experience severe anxiety or panic, great difficulty thinking and concentrating, memory loss, paranoia, despair, exacerbation of serious mental illness and many other symptoms; those who spend many years in solitary develop additional problems that will likely plague them for a lifetime and severely impair their capacity to function in the community after they are released.
There is a veritable “decimation of life skills.” They begin to seek even more isolation than solitary confinement imposes, for example they stop greeting their neighbors and refuse to come out of their cell even for the short time permitted. They lose touch with their feelings, describing themselves as “numb,” “a zombie,” or “dead.”
In solitary confinement, prisoners, disproportionately prisoners of color, are denied effective mental health treatment as well as rehabilitation programs. And then, many of those who are eventually released from solitary suffer from the “SHU Post-Release Syndrome,” (SHU is one of many euphemistic terms for solitary confinement) where they seek to maintain their isolation, staying in a cell, or once released from prison refusing to leave their room or their home, and feeling incapacitated by continuing anxiety, difficulty concentrating, a strong startle reaction and dread of being in a crowd, even going to the supermarket.
Governor Newsom acknowledges that solitary confinement causes immense psychological damage, but argues that its use is necessary to maintain order in the prisons. He is very wrong about that. A substantial amount of research evidences no decrease in prison violence when a significant proportion of prisoners are consigned to solitary confinement, and an impressive decrease in prison violence when the population in solitary confinement is substantially reduced.
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This makes a lot of sense, since mounting anger is another symptom of solitary confinement. Absent adequate mental health and rehabilitation programs, anger plus difficulty concentrating on tasks lead to increased disciplinary problems and violence. Research also shows that downsizing solitary confinement while at the same time ramping up prison mental health programs and rehabilitation programs is an effective cost-saving measure
A good example of this research involves the North Dakota Department of Corrections. Utilizing an approach to Corrections modeled on the Norwegian system, North Dakota ramped up mental health treatment and very targeted rehabilitation programs while significantly downsizing solitary confinement, the outcome being a lower violence rate throughout the prison system and reduced harms in terms of mental health and preparation for post-release success. The ramifications for prisoner rehabilitation and greater safety in the community subsequent to their release from prison are clear.
The Mandela Act, AB 280, is modeled on the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, a.k.a. The Mandela Rules. Our state legislature is right to pass the bill, it is time for the governor to sign it.
Terry A. Kupers is a psychiatrist, Professor at The Wright Institute, and author of “Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It” (Univ. of California Press, 2017).