SAN FRANCISCO — After decades of holding thousands of inmates in concrete, sometimes windowless isolation cells, where some stayed for 20 years or more, California prison officials are about to drastically reduce their use of solitary confinement.
In a settlement Tuesday with inmates who filed a class-action suit in 2012 — and backed up their legal action with a series of hunger strikes — the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced changes that will return as many as 1,800 inmates to the general prison population. They will regain access to prison vocational and educational programs, phone calls, mail deliveries, and family visits.
Another 1,200 prisoners, found to have committed violent offenses while behind bars, can be kept in solitary confinement under the agreement for up to 10 years. Those who are found to pose a continuing threat to other inmates or guards can be held longer than 10 years. The settlement also expands the use of transition programs in which inmates are held in separate housing for two years while their access to the outside world is gradually restored.
“This far-reaching settlement represents a major change in California’s cruel and unconstitutional solitary confinement system,” said attorney Jules Lobel of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the inmates. “There is a mounting awareness across the nation of the devastating consequences of solitary.”
The lawsuit challenged a system that allowed placement in solitary confinement for gang “affiliation,” which prison officials sometimes determined merely by an inmate’s tattoos, or by letters or books they possessed. Under the new rules, isolation cells will be reserved for those guilty of assaults, weapons possession, drug dealing and other serious crimes while in prison.
Inmates in Security Housing Units, or SHUs, are kept in concrete cells for more than 22 hours a day, are fed through a slot, cannot take part in job training or other prison programs, and say they are punished for trying to talk to other inmates.
The cells are windowless at Pelican Bay State Prison in Del Norte County, which has the largest SHU population. The other three prisons with SHU quarters have windows in their cells.
California expanded its use of solitary confinement 40 years ago after a wave of prison violence that resulted in the killings of nine staff members in three years. Officials have defended the system as a needed brake on gang activity, but inmates’ lawyers say studies increasingly show that large-scale isolation damages prisoners without making prisons any safer.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy indicated in a court opinion in June that he would be receptive to a legal challenge to prolonged solitary confinement.
Lobel said much of the credit for Tuesday’s settlement belongs to inmates who staged three hunger strikes in three years, the last of which drew as many as 30,000 participants.
Jeffrey Beard, director of the state prison system, acknowledged that California has been “the only state locking up so many people based on (gang membership or affiliation), not on behavior.”
Beard said the prison system had begun scaling back the program on its own several years ago, when it started case-by-case review of SHU inmates. Since then, he said, about 1,100 have been moved into the general prison population with “minimal problems.”
“The agreement allows us to retain dangerous inmates in a segregated status if necessary to protect staff, other inmates or institutional security,” Beard said. He said their numbers should be “relatively small” and the prison system will not keep anyone in isolation indefinitely.
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which represents prison guards, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday that it feared the impending settlement would renew the violent prison environment of past decades. Union spokeswoman Nichol Gomez-Pryde declined to reiterate that statement Tuesday, saying only that her organization, which had attempted unsuccessfully to intervene in the lawsuit, was disappointed that “the people who are actually having to do the work” were kept out of the settlement process.
W. David Ball, an associate law professor at Santa Clara University, said the settlement was a move toward a more balanced approach after what appears to have been an overemphasis on security.
“I think it is still important to have some tools for combatting gang violence in prison, but indiscriminate and essentially permanent confinement in solitary confinement cells doesn’t seem to be the way to do that,” he said. “People who are in solitary confinement tend to go crazy.
”It’s very difficult for them to adjust to life outside prison in general, but even more so after solitary.“
The prison system started transferring some inmates from solitary cells to ”step-down“ transition programs two years ago, allowing increased access to visitors and other inmates over three to four years before a return to the general prison population. The settlement reduces that period to two years and also calls for a new maximum-security prison unit for inmates who fail to complete the step-down program. They will be allowed to take part in some job-training and educational programs and can have visitors approved by the prison system.
The settlement also places a five-year limit on solitary confinement at Pelican Bay. Prisoners sentenced to longer than five years in isolation will be transferred to other institutions.
Marie Levin, whose brother was one of the inmates who filed the suit and joined the hunger strikes, released a statement from prisoners saying the case had brought them together to stop violence among gangs and other groups divided along racial and ethnic lines.
The issue is ”awakening the conscience of the nation to recognize that we are fellow human beings,“ the inmates said.
U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken, who allowed the suit to proceed in a 2012 ruling, is scheduled to consider approval of the settlement Oct. 6. A federal magistrate will monitor the state’s compliance for at least the first two years.