California prisons to vastly reduce solitary confinement (xpost from GD)

[KamaAina]

Source: Reuters

California will no longer hold inmates in solitary confinement for more than five years at its notorious Pelican Bay prison and will reform its incarceration practices for similar units in other prisons under a sweeping settlement announced on Tuesday.

The settlement ends a lawsuit originally brought by prisoners at the maximum-security facility, where some of them lived for decades in units where they were housed alone in their cells for up to 23 hours a day, plaintiffs' lawyers said.

As outlined in the agreement, most inmates held in so-called Security Housing Units for more than 10 years will be released immediately into general prison populations, and inmates will no longer be confined to such units for unknown periods of time, according to the lawyers.

As many as 1,500 inmates, or about half the total population in solitary or near-solitary confinement, will soon be moved either into general prison populations or special units where they will have higher security but will be able to interact with each other and receive visitors, said Jules Lobel, an attorney with the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/01/us-usa-prisons-california-idUSKCN0R149M20150901

h/t IDemo

[petronius]

1. That's good, but even 5 years sounds like a long time

I wonder how long it takes under this sort of treatment for psychological harm to set in (I'd bet less than 5 years).

Still, this is positive, and it also sounds as though they've agreed to be a lot more specific/careful about who gets sent into the SHUs in the first place...

[daredtowork]

2. NPR this morning cited European studies

that argued 12 days do harm.

They also referred to UN condemnation that will make it pretty difficult for the US to maintain any Human Rights authority.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. We did a story this morning linking to some of the prisoner's testimony

not that this really matters.

I find most coverage to be dry as hell. And we should never, ever try to humanize these people.