44 Years in Solitary Confinement

 

Hell is a “restricted housing” cell within Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections. Photo via Flickr user jmiller291.

By Matt Stroud and Midge Carter, ACLU-PA

Daniel Delker is a Pennsylvania prisoner who has been in solitary confinement since 1973. That’s 44 years.

It’s likely that you’re aware, at least on some conceptual level, of what solitary confinement is — that it’s a punishment, often referred to as “the hole,” restricting a prisoner to a cell for nearly 24 hours per day, with rare opportunities to leave the cell for showering and exercise. In Pennsylvania, they call it the “Restricted Housing Unit.”

It’s also likely that you have some idea of what the effects of such an isolated punishment might entail. Maybe you read Atul Gawande’s 2009 New Yorker piece “Hellhole” about the reasons why solitary confinement should be considered psychological torture. Or maybe you read The Washington Post’s July 15 editorial calling out the federal Bureau of Prisons for continuing to use solitary confinement even though its leaders know solitary confinement equals torture.

But if you’re like us, the idea that someone might find themselves in such a circumstance for 44 years — for longer than Beyoncé and Leonardo DiCaprio have been alive — is mind-boggling. Particularly in Pennsylvania, where the commonwealth’s corrections secretary is lauded, sometimes in high-profile outlets, as a reformer.

What surprised us even further when we started looking into Delker’s case was that he’s one of dozens of people confined similarly — on something called the “RRL,” or the “Restricted Release List” — within Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections. Spelled out in the prison system’s DC-ADM 802 procedures manual, the RRL is a group of prisoners held in solitary confinement indefinitely. They don’t know when they’ll be released into general population — and neither does anyone working for DOC.

Recently, ACLU-PA — with the help of spring 2017 Criminal Justice Intern Morgan Everett — came out on the winning end of a months-long public records skirmish with DOC about access to this list. The list itself contains names of RRL prisoners, as well as reasons why those prisoners were placed onto the list in the first place. After DOC denied our initial request to provide the list, we appealed to the Office of Open Records, which eventually came to a compromise decision: that DOC could provide us with names of people on the RRL, but redact the reasons why they were on the list.

Fair enough. To its credit, DOC actually sent us the redacted list and didn’t force us to sue. We’ve since sent surveys to each and every one of the 100 people on that list — 100 people locked up indefinitely in solitary confinement — to get the information DOC withheld, and more: We wanted to find out how long they’ve been locked up, what procedures were individually set up for being released from the RRL, what kinds of conversations they’ve had with counselors during their stay in isolation, and whether they’ve had any interactions with mental health professionals, among other things.

We’ve learned a lot so far. Decades in solitary confinement is not unusual among people on the list, for one, and there’s already been an RRL death since we received the list. About three-quarters of the prisoners on the RRL have responded to us — and we’re learning more with each response we receive. But what we still don’t know is why such a list needs to exist at all.

Atul Gawande said it in “Hellhole.” The Washington Post said it in its editorial a couple weeks back. Countless organizations have spelled it out over, and over, and over again: Solitary confinement is torture. It’s unfair. It’s a drain on resources. And it doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t help those who serve sentences in solitary confinement and are then released onto the streets. And it certainly doesn’t help those who have been locked up for 44 years.

The idea that Pennsylvania continues to confine its prisoners in isolation is baffling enough. (More than 2,200 Pennsylvania prisoners — about four percent of the state’s prison population — are confined to solitary.)

The idea that it keeps some of these prisoners in a secluded limbo for decades on end is beyond comprehension.

It’s indefensible.

Let’s hope DOC leaders wake up to that reality soon.

On to the links.

EXCERPTS
(Criminal justice news deserving of an in-depth look.)

 

Debtor’s prisons still exist; Pennsylvania residents are still being jailed for the inability to pay fines. Photo from The Legal Intelligencer.

Andrew Christy, ACLU-PA Independence Foundation Fellow, writing in The Legal Intelligencer: “Thousands Jailed in Pa.’s Modern Debtors’ Prisons”

“My investigation of court collections ­practices suggests that many judges on both the courts of common pleas and the ­magisterial district courts fundamentally misunderstand what constitutes a defendant’s ability to pay, and thus what constitutes a willful act justifying a finding of contempt. If a defendant is unable to pay, then that defendant by definition lacks the ability to pay, the failure was not ­willful, and there can be no finding of contempt and incarceration…. Nevertheless, these practices continue to be widespread, as was recently documented by the Pennsylvania Interbranch Commission for Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness in its report ‘Ending Debtors’ Prisons in Pennsylvania,’ to which the ACLU contributed.”

CityLab: “Attorney General’s Civil Asset Forfeiture Orders Are ‘Irrelevant’ in Philadelphia”

“Civil asset forfeiture remains a problem, however. For one, it’s still legit for cops to take your property if they suspect it’s tied to a crime, and the victims of those takings still have no right to a lawyer to get it back. Moreover, the profit incentive for law enforcement officials to pursue seizing people’s assets remains.”

The New Yorker: “A Veteran ICE Agent, Disillusioned with the Trump Era, Speaks Out”

“The agent, who has worked in federal immigration enforcement since the Clinton Administration, has been unsettled by the new order at ice. During the campaign, many rank-and-file agents publicly cheered Trump’s pledge to deport more immigrants, and, since Inauguration Day, the Administration has explicitly encouraged them to pursue the undocumented as aggressively as possible. ‘We’re going to get sued,’ the agent told me at one point. ‘You have guys who are doing whatever they want in the field, going after whoever they want.’”

Times-Union: “Albany County inmate’s death ‘shocks the conscience'”

“The criticism wasn’t an anomaly for Correctional Medical Care, a Pennsylvania-based private company. A month after Cannon’s death in August 2014 — but long before his case was investigated — the office of New York’s attorney general reached an agreement with the company that allowed it to remain in business in New York with monitoring through May 2018. The company paid a $200,000 penalty and agreed to improve staffing levels and training practices.”

HEADLINES

(Criminal justice news to be aware of.)

Philadelphia’s civil asset forfeiture program continues to embroil its District Attorneys’ office. Photo via Newsworks

Pennsylvania

• Newsworks: “Philadelphia offers to reform use of forfeiture funds, but critics say that’s not enough”
• Salem News: “New county [privately-run] jail warden — the fifth since 2015 — introduced, hopes to buck recent trend”
• Pittsburgh Courier: “Silent But Deadly: Hepatitis C and Prison”
• Philly: ”Supporters of juvenile lifer gather for a ‘community resentencing’”
• And a follow-up from Philly.com: “After ‘powerful’ hearing 3 decades later, juvenile lifer Songster eligible for parole”
• Keystone Crossroads: “Don’t Call it the Badlands: The Story of Savannah Zayas”
• BBC: “As an open-air heroin camp is closed, options narrow”
• Pittsburgh Post Gazette: “Pa. Supreme Court finds sex offender registration is punitive”
• Billy Penn: “Preliminary murder rates in Philadelphia ‘will put the murder rate at the highest of this decade in the city.’”
• Beaver Times: “Industry man files excessive force suit against Beaver, three police officers”
• The Morning Call: “Contractor’s criminal record didn’t discourage business with Allentown or Reading”
• Penn Live: “Officers, turn on your bodycams: Editorial”
• Penn Live: “Man shot while fleeing from police gets up to 15 years behind bars”
• Penn Live: “DUI conviction blocks man from owning a gun, Pa. court rules”
• Philly: “Parkside man gets 35 to 70 years for shooting, wounding Philly officer”
• Reading Eagle: “Those who didn’t win medical marijuana permits weigh options”
• The Legal Intelligencer: “Fate of Common-Law Forfeiture in Pa. Now Rests With Justices”
• BillyPenn: “6 takeaways for Philly from a national conference about women behind bars”
• NextCity: “How Prison Gardens Help Inmates and Save Money”
• Associated Press: “Cops: Pennsylvania Man Gave Unwitting Co-Worker Pot Brownie, Now Facing Charges”
• Injustice Today: “Court holds that retroactive extension of sex offender registration is punitive”

National

• Marshall Project: “How Fake Cops Got $1.2 Million in Real Weapons”
• New York Times: “A Broader Sweep: A day in the field with immigration enforcers in California, a state hostile to President Trump’s efforts to step up deportations”
• Miami Herald: “Miami was once a murder capital. The gunfire deaths this year tell a new story”
• New York Daily News: “KING: Pedro Hernandez is Rikers Island’s new Kalief Browder”
• The New Yorker: “A Prisoner’s Only Writing Machine”
• The Week: “Is marijuana a secret weapon against the opioid epidemic?”
• Philly: “Ex-Philly official pleads guilty to child porn charges”
• The Marshall Project: “Condemned to Death — And Solitary Confinement”
• Penn Live: “This explains the rise in hate crimes against Muslims: Opinion”
• St. Louis Public Radio: “US appeals court: Lawsuit against Ferguson, Darren Wilson can go forward”
• Slate: “’The Most Innocent Victim’: What the response to a police shooting sounds like when a black cop kills a white woman”
• Earth Island: “America’s Toxic Prisons”
• AL: “Another day, another preventable crime lab scandal”
• Washington Post: “10th Circuit grants narrow victory to family raided by a SWAT team over loose leaf tea”
• US News: “Underfunded, Overcrowded State Prisons Struggle With Reform”
• ProPublica: “On Rikers Island, a Move Toward Reform Causes Trouble”
• StarTribune: “Chief: Minneapolis police officers must turn on body cameras for any call”

Trump Criminal Justice Watch

• National Review: “Trump Has Himself, Not Sessions, to Blame for the Limitless Mueller Investigation”
• The Guardian: “‘I won’t stop’: Jailed activist blasts US crackdown on anti-Trump protesters”
• New York Times: “Sessions Once Again Threatens Sanctuary Cities”
• Philly.com: “Embattled Sessions announces new restrictions on funding sanctuary cities”
• Washington Times: “ICE chief wants to slap smuggling charges on leaders of sanctuary cities”
• The News Tribune: “What actually happened to violent crime after Washington legalized marijuana” (It decreased.)

The Appeal is a weekly newsletter keeping you informed about criminal justice news in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania and beyond. It is written and compiled by Matt Stroud, ACLU-PA’s criminal justice researcher, and ACLU-PA’s summer criminal justice interns, Emilia Beuger, Midge Carter, and Andrew Arslanpay.

If you have suggestions for links or criminal justice-related work that you’d like to highlight in The Appeal, or if you have suggestions for ways that we might improve, please email Matt at mstroud@aclupa.org. And if someone forwarded this email to you, and you’d like to receive it every Friday, you can subscribe here.

This newsletter is governed by ACLU-PA’s privacy policy, which you can read here.