President Obama Cites ASCA/Liman Report on Solitary Confinement

President Barack Obama cited a groundbreaking report published by Yale Law School’s Arthur Liman Public Interest Program and the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) Tuesday, January 26, 2016 in a Washington Post op-ed announcing the end of solitary confinement for juveniles in federal criminal custody.

Titled “Why we must rethink solitary confinement,” the President’s op-ed outlines a series of executive actions that will prohibit federal corrections officials from punishing prisoners who commit “low-level infractions” with solitary confinement, as well as ban solitary confinement for juveniles. 

“There are as many as 100,000 people held in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons — including juveniles and people with mental illnesses,” wrote President Obama, linking to the ASCA-Liman Report, Time-in-Cell. “As many as 25,000 inmates are serving months, even years of their sentences alone in a tiny cell, with almost no human contact.”

The President’s decision is one of several steps towards curtailing the use of profound isolation. On Friday, Jan. 22, the American Correctional Association (ACA) held hearings on new standards for what is termed “restrictive” housing, in which people are kept 22 hours or more in their cells – potentially for months or years on end. The ACA is also considering bans on placements for juveniles, pregnant women, and limits on the use of isolation for the seriously mentally ill. The Liman Program joined many other commentators in lauding the effort but raised concerns that the proposed standards do not go far enough in preventing people from being confined for too long with too little access to social contact, programs, education, and other services.

The President relied on data from the report, Time-in-Cell: The ASCA-Liman 2014 National Survey of Administrative Segregation in Prison. The report was the first in a decade to provide information on the total number of people in restricted housing nationwide. Time-in-Cell also provides cross-jurisdictional information on the rules and practices governing the use of restricted housing in the state and federal correctional systems. Read more about the report here.

The report, based on responses from 47 jurisdictions, provided windows into the numbers of people in isolation (“restrictive housing”) and the degrees of isolation imposed.

• 34 jurisdictions — housing about 73% of the more than 1.5 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons — provided data on all the people in restricted housing, whether termed “administrative segregation,” “disciplinary segregation,” or “protective custody.” 
• In that subset, more than 66,000 prisoners were in restricted housing. Given that those 34 jurisdictions housed 73 % of US prisoners, the best estimate is that 80,000 to 100,000 people were in isolation. That number does not include jails, most juvenile facilities, immigration or military facilities.
• Across the country, in many jurisdictions, prisoners are required to spend 23 hours in their cells on weekdays, and in many, 48 hours straight on weekends.
• The 30 jurisdictions reporting that they tracked release information estimated that, in 2013, 4,400 prisoners were directly released from administrative segregation to the community, the report states.

In January, the Yale Law Journal's online Forum published responses to this report, including an overview of the report, by Yale Law Professor Judith Resnik, Liman Fellow Sarah Baumgartel, and Director of the Liman Program Johanna Kalb ’06, that provides a brief snapshot of the data, the law, and the consensus about the harms of isolation. In addition, Only Once I Thought About Suicide, is authored by Dwayne Betts ’16, a third-year law student at Yale who spent several years, starting before he was 18 years old, in Virginia’s prisons — including in isolation. 

Also included in the online forum is an essay by Jules Lobel, a law professor in Pittsburg who also represents the plaintiffs in the Pelican Bay, California litigation. Lobel continues the discussion of the law in his essay The Liman Report and Alternatives to Prolonged Solitary Confinement. The Honorable Alex Kozinski, of the Ninth Circuit, wrote as well for this symposium; his title, Worse than Death, reflects his view of the current harms of isolation. Marie Gottschalk, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has written several books on the history of the U.S. criminal justice system, also wrote an essay titled Staying Alive: Reforming Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons and Jails. Finally, A.T. Wall ’80 offers A Practitioner’s Perspective on the challenges from the vantage point of those running prisons and reliant on staff. Wall is the Director of the Rhode Island Prison system; he is also a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. 

Yale Law School’s Liman Program has been working with the ASCA for several years. Together, the ASCA and Liman Program have issued reports on prisoners’ access to visitors and on the policies, as of 2013, governing the use of administrative segregation. That report documented how easy it was to be put into isolation and how little focus was placed in policies on getting people out of isolation.

The Liman program has also studied the ways in which prisoners’ locations affect their opportunities for programming and social visits. This work highlighted the disadvantages faced by women prisoners in the federal prison system, focusing particularly on the proposed closure of FCI Danbury on women from the northeastern United States.
 
The Arthur Liman Public Interest Program provides public interest fellowships to Yale law school graduates as well as summer fellowships for undergraduate students from Yale College, Barnard College, Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, and Spelman College, all of whom work to respond to problems of inequality and to improve access to justice. Since its inception, 108 Yale Law School graduates have held Liman Fellowships. Visit the Liman Program website for more information. 

Contact Judith Resnik, Johanna Kalb, and Sarah Baumgartel for additional information on the report.