By Daniela Altimari
The Hartford Courant
HARTFORD, Conn. — The solitary confinement unit at Northern Correctional Institution in Somers consists of a dense warren of cells along a narrow corridor with low ceilings and an absence of natural light. Former inmates say the eerie quiet is punctured only by the sounds of prisoners screaming, cursing and throwing themselves against steel doors.
It is, says one man who spent two-thirds of his three-year sentence there, the lowest dungeon in the castle.
But these days, the dungeon is increasingly likely to be empty because Connecticut has significantly curtailed its use of solitary confinement.
The practice of isolating problematic prisoners for extended periods of time peaked in 2003, when 244 inmates were held in solitary units.
As of mid-October, 52 inmates were being held in solitary confinement in Connecticut prisons, according to Department of Correction spokeswoman Karen Martucci.
Connecticut’s retreat from solitary confinement is in step with a larger movement, led by activists, legal scholars and even some correctional administrators who have come to view the practice as inhumane.
“There’s a trend nationally ... across the political spectrum, related to limiting isolation,” said Judith Resnik, a Yale Law School professor and co-author of a new study on solitary confinement in U.S. prisons.
California, which has the nation’s largest prison population, agreed in August to move thousands of prisoners out of solitary confinement as part of a legal settlement. More than a dozen states are considering legislation placing new limits on solitary confinement, especially for juveniles, the mentally ill and other vulnerable groups of inmates. And in July, President Barack Obama ordered the Justice Department to review solitary confinement in federal prisons.
In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has made criminal justice reform a cornerstone of his second term in office. His Second Chance initiative reduces the penalties for some drug crimes, establishes a speedier parole process for nonviolent offenders and provides money for job-training and housing for prisoners upon their release.
While Malloy’s plan does not address the issue of solitary confinement, the Department of Correction has quietly changed a number of policies relating to the practice through administrative directives over the past few years. It has instituted a two-tiered system that emphasizes rehabilitation and offers incentives to change behavior. (Martucci and other correction officials reject the term “solitary confinement,” calling it “misleading.” The department prefers the term “administrative segregation.”)
Those changes have won the department and Commissioner Scott Semple praise from prison reform advocates.
“It’s easy to dump people at Northern,” said David McGuire, legislative and policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. “The commissioner has changed the regulations significantly. He understands that it’s not productive to keep people in solitary for long periods of time. It’s an extremely traumatic experience.”
More changes may be coming: Semple plans to reconvene a departmental panel on administrative segregation to consider additional policy revisions, Martucci said.
McGuire and other advocates are pressing for those new policies to be enshrined in statute, just as New York and other states have done. He hopes lawmakers will consider legislation further restricting solitary confinement next year.
But some correction officers fear the pendulum has already swung too far.
“In Connecticut, we’ve had a substantial change in the administrative segregation program,” said Rudy Demiraj, who works at Cheshire Correctional Institution and is president of the union representing correction officers. “It’s more of a watered-down version of what administrative segregation used to be and that does pose some problems for frontline staff members.”
Prison systems that have loosened the rules regarding solitary confinement have seen a spike in violence directed at correction staff, Demiraj said.
“It’s easy to sit in the safety of an office and say these tools aren’t necessary, but I would offer anyone to come into the facilities and see the types of violent behavior that some of these inmates display,” he said. “Then they would certainly see what an important tool administrative segregation is.”
Supermax Building Boom
Solitary confinement has deep roots in the American penal system. One notorious example was the infamous D-block at Alcatraz, where prisoners were locked in their cells, sometimes in total darkness, for days on end.
But it wasn’t until the rise of supermax prisons in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the practice of keeping inmates isolated for long periods became widespread.
Under President Bill Clinton, who took a hard line on criminal justice matters, drug sentences grew harsher, police cracked down on gangs and the federal government subsidized a prison-building boom. Dozens of states, including Connecticut, built state-of-the-art prisons with free-standing isolation units.
“A perfect storm of plenty of money, war-on-crime politics and the myth of the super predator ... all collided to produce this new form of incarceration,” said Hope R. Metcalf, executive director of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. “It was supposed to make us safer.”
Instead, Metcalf and other reform advocates assert, the harshness of the solitary confinement unit has made prisons more dangerous. And it left inmates ill-equipped to handle the everyday strains and stresses of life on the outside after their release.
Then there’s the cost. “It is an enormously expensive form of incarceration,” Metcalf said. “The state budget crisis and the withdrawal of federal funds has created a crack in the correctional edifice and prompted people to take a hard look at where money was being spent.”
In 2012, Metcalf worked with the Yale Visual Law Project, which produced a 30-minute documentary on life inside Northern Correctional Institution.
“People were being placed in solitary for relatively minor infractions,” she said. “People who were in for shoplifting, or parole violations ... would have an incident and collect minor disciplinary tickets for mouthing off to correction officers. Then, when they would deteriorate due to pre-existing mental health issues ... they would get stuck there.”
Metcalf credited the Department of Correction for taking steps to address some of the problems documented in the film. “From a numbers perspective, Connecticut is doing much better than it was,” she said. “The current leadership [at the Department of Correction] understands that solitary should be a last resort and for the shortest period of time ... that is the biggest change.”
But, she added, “I hesitate to say much has changed inside Northern. It’s still a harsh environment and there’s still nothing of any value offered to the men who live there in solitary.”
In Connecticut, a top administrator — the director of population management for the entire system — must sign off before an inmate is placed in administrative segregation, Martucci said. The inmate also must undergo a mental health screening.
Connecticut’s tiered system is designed to create incentives for inmates. Those in the more restrictive phase one are housed at Northern. “You still get recreation, you still get showers, you still get phone calls, but not at the duration you normally would,” Martucci said.
Those privileges increase in phase two and phase three, which are both at Cheshire Correctional Institution. For instance, instead of one 15-minute phone call per week, as is permitted in phase one, inmates in phase two receive two 15-minute calls and those in the third phase receive three. Access to showers and recreation and visits from family members also increase.
Inmates in administrative segregation can participate in various programs that aim to reverse negative behaviors and encourage positive interactions in preparation for release back into the general population, Martucci said. There are sessions on anger management, relapse prevention and “how to do your bid,” among others. The department has also moved away from releasing prisoners directly into their communities from the most restrictive phase of solitary confinement.
But it has not done away with the practice. “Out of a population of 16,000 inmates, there are some inmates that are very difficult to manage,” Martucci said. “The numbers are low ... but they’re very disruptive. ... They are dangerous inmates and there has to be a place for those inmates, because we have to protect our staff and other inmates.”
“There’s no disagreement that there is a need for high level supervision,” she added. “It’s just a question of who belongs there and for how long.”
Copyright 2015 The Hartford Courant