By Steve Schmadeke
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — During years in solitary confinement, Brian Nelson says he spent the days pacing in his 5-by-12-foot cell to the point that each week brought new blood blisters to his feet.
“I called it the gray box,” said Nelson, explaining how the experience broke him physically and psychologically.
Nelson, who was convicted of the 1982 slaying of a Chicago jeweler, said even physical torture would have been easier to take than the unremitting isolation.
“Years alone in a room, that’s just wrong, especially in America,” said Nelson, who was paroled five years ago and now works for a law firm.
As part of a growing national effort to reduce the use of segregation in prison, a federal lawsuit was filed against the Illinois Department of Corrections, saying its alleged overuse of solitary confinement is unconstitutionally “cruel, inhumane, offensive to basic human decency.”
The suit alleges that the state prison system routinely uses solitary confinement as punishment for even minor infractions. As of mid-2013, about 2,500 inmates were being held in solitary confinement, 680 for more than a year, the suit said. Fully 15 percent of the inmates in maximum-security prisons — some 1,400 — were being held in solitary confinement.
According to the suit, extensive research has shown the grave psychological and emotional harm suffered by those who go through extended periods of solitary confinement. United Nations commissions on torture have said solitary confinement should be avoided unless an inmate poses a serious threat to himself or others.
And just last week, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in an unusual separate opinion that it was time to limit the use of long-term solitary confinement and essentially invited a legal challenge to the practice.
“Years on end of near-total isolation exacts a terrible price,” Kennedy wrote.
In a report released last month, the Vera Institute of Justice, a national policy nonprofit that works on criminal justice issues, said that 85 percent of Illinois inmates sent to segregation during a recent one-year period had incurred minor infractions such as using abusive language.
“Ninety-eight percent of the people in prison are getting out, and it’d be really good for them not to be severely damaged,” said Alan Mills, executive director of the Uptown People’s Law Center, which specializes in prisoner rights and filed the lawsuit with attorneys from the law firm of Winston & Strawn.
The corrections department had no immediate comment on the lawsuit, but last month it agreed to sharply reduce the amount of time juvenile detainees spend in solitary confinement as part of a settlement with the ACLU of Illinois following a separate federal lawsuit. The department agreed to ban the use of solitary confinement for discipline and required that juvenile inmates be allowed out of their cells at least eight hours a day.
The suit was filed in federal court in Chicago on behalf of three inmates but seeks class-action status for thousands of prisoners. The suit said one of the inmates has spent the last 15 years in either “segregation, administrative detention or investigative status” — all forms it said of solitary confinement.
According to the suit, Illinois inmates are held in isolation in “tiny, filthy, cold and barren cages” for 23 hours or more every day, denied “meaningful social interaction” or educational programs and “stripped of their dignity.”
Contrary to national and international standards, the IDOC uses solitary confinement “as a disciplinary tool of the first resort with astonishing frequency and length,” the suit said. Inmates can be put in solitary for violating any of some 50 internal regulations, most relatively minor, according to the suit.
The lawsuit also criticized the limited hearings afforded inmates accused of even major infractions. Prisoners are frequently convicted “of offenses based only on the disputed word of a single corrections officer following a ‘hearing’ in the hallway outside the prisoner’s cell,” the suit said.
In other cases, inmates can be ordered into segregation without a hearing or even a notice, according to the suit.
During 2008, only 15 percent of the inmates sentenced to “extreme isolation” had been implicated in violent offenses or the possession of dangerous contraband, the suit said.
According to the suit, IDOC policies provide only vague criteria for when those disciplined should be given segregation. The punishment imposed is often arbitrary and inconsistent. An inmate found with a package of cigarettes could be given up to three months of extreme isolation, the suit said.
Once segregation begins, the confinements can go for lengthy periods without any subsequent reviews, and officials aren’t required to periodically evaluate if the segregation may be causing harm, the suit alleged.
Solitary confinement was a Quaker innovation that dates to the 1770s and whose goal was to foster reflection and self-improvement, said Jessa Wilcox, a senior program associate for the Vera Institute of Justice.
The practice fell out of favor for nearly a century but was revived in the 1980s in part after two prison guards were murdered at a federal penitentiary in downstate Marion and inmates were kept locked up 23 hours a day, a change that became permanent.
The use of segregation “exploded,” Wilcox said. “I think it became a routine management strategy.”
Studies have found that inmates released from solitary confinement were more likely to commit violent crimes than those kept in the general population, she said.
After being released from solitary confinement — where he’d once spent a year, nine months and two days copying the Bible word-for-word — Nelson struggled to return to normal life, he said. Years spent alone had made it extremely difficult to be around people.
“It’s easier to throw people in segregation than solve the underlying problems,” said Mills, of the Uptown People’s Law Center, where Nelson works.
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