Read and Vote: Does solitary confinement have a place in our prisons?

Kim Pate : “Please help me, I need to get out” is the plea I usually hear from those who survive segregation. And, even more troubling, from those who don’t.

There’s something about trying to cope in a cell the size of a small bathroom that makes even people not suffering from mental health issues hallucinate that the walls are closing in on them. Many become paranoid about ghosts or staff trying to harm them. They experience dissociation and flashbacks. They injure themselves in unimaginable ways and numbers.

Twenty years ago, I was often called and asked to assist, even permitted into segregation cells, to provide human contact and intervene when women were self-injuring or threatening suicide. Now, in only the most desperate cases, I may be permitted to plead through meal slots with women as they smash their heads against walls, try to gouge out their own eyes, or smear blood and feces on their bodies and surroundings.

Solitary confinement – known in the Canadian prison system as segregation -- is both a status and a place, and its harmful physiological and psychological effects are profound and well documented by research.

The Canadian Medical Association has called solitary “cruel and usual punishment,” noting that social isolation and lack of stimulation too often result in feelings of anxiety, depression and anger, increasing the risk of self-injurious and suicidal responses in prisoners.

In 2011, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment called for an absolute ban on its imposition on youth and those with mental health issues. He declared solitary confinement contrary to the successful rehabilitation and reintegration needs of prisoners – something in which we all have an investment.

Recently, Canada’s own Correctional Investigator reported that 14 of 30 prisoner suicides in the past three years occurred in segregation, which elevates suicide risk. Most prisoners who died in segregation had a documented history of mental health issues, but counselling intervention is rarely offered to those who’ve been isolated.

Given this context, Canadians are questioning why the practice continues.

The rationale offered is that solitary-confinement cells provide the easiest means for prison staff to “manage” those whose behaviour is perceived as challenging. In practice, what this means is that most prisoners with disabling intellectual or mental health issues are isolated. This happens in a range of institutions and circumstances. Prisoners can be segregated individually, as well as within groups of up to five prisoners -- 10, if they are double bunked. When, how and why this can defensibly occur is outlined in the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.

But the Correctional Service of Canada, by defining certain units as “special needs,” “mental health observation” or “intensive psychiatric care,” often avoids the current review requirements stipulated by the Act. The resulting, often punitive, disciplinary responses exacerbate pre-existing mental health issues.

The preventable deaths of such prisoners as Ashley Smith, Kinew James, and Edward Snowshoe have galvanized opposition to the use of segregation, especially for indigenous prisoners and those with mental health issues. Eliminating or severely curtailing the use of isolation is a laudable objective. And in Canada, entire prisons for youth, men and women have been managed for months, and sometimes years, without segregation units.

But what’s really needed is a broader conversation about the use of imprisonment more generally.

The rush to limit state support for social, health and education systems and thereby to abandon the most marginalized and victimized to an ever-expanding criminal justice system is being propelled by the expansion of mandatory minimum sentences and other legislative and regulatory mechanisms. This is the wrong direction and we have ample evidence to prove it.

In the late 1980s, the Justice Committee studied the criminal justice and correctional systems extensively. Its report, Taking Responsibility, called for an end to mandatory minimum sentences, a reduction in the maximum length of sentences and increased use of alternatives to prison. Perhaps more convincingly, in the mid-1990s all of the federal, provincial and territorial heads of corrections agreed that as many as 75 per cent of the people in prison did not pose a significant risk to public safety.

The bottom line is this: too many prisoners spend their entire sentences (and die) in segregation. Just as segregation seriously impedes the ability of individuals to adjust to life in the general prison population, imprisonment itself as we practice it needs to be reconsidered. Women, Aboriginal peoples and those with mental health issues are not those who we fear when we walk alone at night, nor do they pose the greatest risks to public safety.

Jails are not shelters or treatment centres. They are the least effective and most expensive non-responses to social justice issues. Around the globe, nation states are revisiting the rush to incarcerate. We need to join those ranks.

Paul Gendreau : The debate over the effects of prison solitary confinement on offenders can best be summarized by the position taken by two schools of thought on the matter. The first school claims relatively brief periods of solitary confinement (typically 30 to 60 days) produces lasting emotional damage, psychosis, and functional disability. The second perspective contends that solitary produces much less severe effects unless extreme conditions of lockup are present.

The initial research on solitary confinement occurred in the 1950s at McGill University, with funding allegedly from the CIA. Volunteers spent just a few hours in a solitary confinement (SC) room at a university laboratory where dramatic effects were reported (hallucinations, delusions). These results attracted much attention which led to concern from medical authorities at the Canadian Penitentiary Service and a call to assess the possible negative consequences of inmates in SC versus those living in regular prison cells. Their research failed to replicate the McGill findings. In addition, researchers who evaluated SC in experiments involving about 3,000 individuals in non-prison settings reached the same conclusion.

Thus, by the late 1960s experts in the field concluded that the McGill results were confounded by response bias - that is, their research protocols unintentionally encouraged subjects to give responses that promoted the reporting of adverse effects.

In the early 1980s the claim that solitary confinement was psychologically destructive was renewed. The studies in this regard unfortunately did not use comparison groups of offenders and the results were confounded once again by response bias. In some cases, the inmates questioned were engaged in legal actions against prison authorities that likely further prejudiced results.

Fast forward to 2011, when the most comprehensive and experimentally sound evaluation of solitary confinement was conducted in Colorado. Their study found that only 7 per cent of non- mentally disordered inmates placed in SC for several months showed negative psychological effects, 20 per cent improved, the rest remained stable.

These results supported the credibility of the second school of thought. Scholars in this group followed up on this landmark study by generating two separate independent meta-analyses of the evaluations of SC dating back 40 years. The average length of time in solitary for the studies was around 60 days, the period of time when very disturbed behavior should, according to those earlier analyses, occur. In actual fact, very mild increases of negative effects (5 per cent or less) were found for behavioural, medical and psychological outcomes.

The important conclusion from the above, and one confirmed from the many studies of the effects of prison life in general, is that oftentimes the poor coping behavior displayed by inmates existed well before they arrived in prison. The physical structure of the prison, unless substandard living conditions apply, is a secondary contributor.

So why do problem behaviours occur in solitary-confinement as well as in non-SC prison environments? While part of it is who the inmate is, the real culprit turns out to be that of the quality of human relations in prison. In other words, if a culture of harm is established in a prison where inmates are treated mendaciously by staff, are fearful of violence against them by predator inmates and are not provided with rehabilitation programs where they can acquire the skills to cope with prison life in general, serious problems are sure to arise. This conclusion has been re-affirmed by prison investigations conducted by independent sources dating back to 1975.

What then is the role of solitary confinement? There is the stark reality that particularly in prisons of higher security there are a few dangerous inmates who will seek any opportunity to disrupt the good order of the prison. The use of brief periods of SC is a viable option for protecting staff and inmates. But, aside from this circumstance, the extensive use of SC reveals an organization that is taking the easy way out in managing offenders.

Indeed, there are actions that can be undertaken that will mitigate the use of SC considerably.

First, research is urgently required to predict what inmate characteristics (age, gender, personality) predict poor adjustment to SC for the purposes of diverting inmates to other prison units. Surveys should be periodically conducted measuring the social climate in regular prison environments as well in solitary to determine the degree to which a culture of harm exists.

Mentally disordered inmates should be diverted from SC to a specialized mental health unit for ongoing treatment of their mental disorder. Inmates who are “trouble makers” make up a meaningful percentage in SC should be identified and placed in programs to reduce their chances of going to solitary.

There are programs that use powerful positive incentives that can be employed to motivate inmates to leave SC.

Staff assigned to SC should receive special training, their shift rotations set such that there is a continuity of service, and their interactions with inmates videotaped to ensure constructive relations take place. And limits should be put on the number of SC cells in prisons to force authorities to seek alternative solutions.

We are at a point where we know that a major contributor to behavioural problems in solitary confinement rests primarily on the human side of the equation, and that there are management policies which, if pursued, will lead to a more humane prison system that will reinforce a rehabilitative agenda that benefits the public in the long run.