By Andrew Seidman
The Philadelphia Inquirer
TRENTON — A New Jersey lawmaker wants to restrict the use of solitary confinement in the state’s jails, warning the practice has “grave consequences” for the safety of inmates and officers.
There’s just one problem: The Department of Corrections and the unions representing officers say they don’t use solitary confinement.
A disagreement over semantics dominated an hours-long hearing Thursday held by the Senate Law and Public Safety Committee, which took testimony on the bill but did not vote on it.
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Raymond J. Lesniak (D., Union), defines “isolated confinement” as confinement of an inmate to “a cell or similarly confined holding or living space, alone or with other inmates, for approximately 20 hours or more per day, with severely restricted activity, movement, and social interaction.”
The bill would ban such confinement for certain “vulnerable populations,” such as inmates younger than 21, the mentally ill, and the elderly.
It says inmates may not be confined in isolation for more than 15 consecutive days or more than 20 in a 60-day period. The bill was supported by civil-liberties groups, clergy, advocates for the mentally ill, and others who warned of the psychological toll solitary confinement can have on inmates.
States like Mississippi and Colorado have taken steps to ease their confinement laws, advocates said.
But corrections officers and department officials took issue with the bill’s definition of isolated confinement.
“We have inmates in the general population who would be categorized as an isolated inmate” under the bill, said Lance Lopez Sr., president of PBA Local 105. “That’s just not the case.”
Lopez offered a different definition: an inmate “in a complete box that is closed off to everyone,” with no communication “other than receiving meals and a little bit of light when someone is checking to see if the person is still alive.”
Lopez, an officer at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, said he hadn’t seen any inmates living in such conditions.
Such assurances didn’t console Terrell A. Blount, 30, who said he spent 90 days in solitary confinement at East Jersey State Prison in Rahway when he was 21 and serving time for robbery.
“I was going crazy in there,” he said, adding that he was assaulted by a cellmate twice his age.
“I had very little human interaction outside of my cellmate,” said Blount, who is now studying for his master’s degree in public administration at Rutgers-Newark and helping inmates prepare for life after prison.
Lopez, the union officer, objected to the relaxing of confinement standards at a time when officers don’t receive their full salary if they are injured by an inmate and forced to take leave.
Sen. Linda Greenstein (D., Middlesex), the panel’s chair, agreed that the bill needed a clearer and perhaps narrower definition of isolated confinement.
“It does seem like so many of the inmates would fall into this,” she said. Greenstein said lawmakers needed data “of who’s in there, what gets them into solitary, what is the treatment they’re getting?”
“We need a lot more information from the prisons,” she said.
Mark Farsi, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Corrections, said data would be available “upon request.”
Of the 21,000 inmates housed in New Jersey correctional institutions, 47 are currently confined to the state prison’s management control unit, a maximum-security area reserved for those who pose a “substantial threat to the safety of others or interrupt the orderly operations of the facility,” Farsi said.
Inmates also are removed from the general population for committing disciplinary infractions, he said. Inmates receive a hearing, which they can appeal. Their placements are “routinely reviewed,” Farsi said.
Alexander Shalom, an attorney with the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the department had not been responsive to his request for data on the number of inmates housed in isolation.
“They can’t have it both ways,” Shalom said in an interview. “If they want to claim the situation is hunky-dory, they should open their books.”
A Corrections Department spokeswoman didn’t respond to an e-mail request for the data.
Officials with the New Jersey County Jail Wardens Association told lawmakers that long-term isolation wasn’t a problem in the state’s local jails because an inmate’s average stay there is 30 to 50 days, and 95 percent of them are awaiting trial.