Long Islanders, like all New Yorkers, have many different views about our criminal justice system, but everybody believes in the importance of safety and fairness. There is also a growing bipartisan consensus that mass incarceration does not achieve those objectives, and research affirms that incarceration can actually worsen a person’s future behavior. Reforms are urgently needed, including in the use of solitary confinement.
Inmates in solitary are confined to cells that are roughly the size of a parking space for 23 to 24 hours a day, and denied access to any meaningful human engagement. International human rights standards say that solitary confinement beyond 15 days can constitute torture, but people in New York prisons are regularly held there for months, years and even decades.
This year, a proposal to reform solitary, and fundamentally change the way prisons and jails treat people — and make the facilities, and our communities, safer — has gained momentum in the State Legislature. The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act would end long-term solitary and replace it with more humane and effective alternatives. It would not end all solitary confinement, but rather limit it, in line with human rights standards, and instead give staff the tools to more meaningfully address problematic behavior by incarcerated people. I believe we have a real opportunity to get it done.
My eyes were opened to this issue, in part, by Johnny Perez, with whom I served on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Perez spent 60 days in solitary confinement when he was first locked up at age 16, and a total of three years while in prison following a later conviction for robbery. Most of his time in solitary was for cannabis consumption — a violation of both the law and prison rules, admittedly, but far less damaging than solitary confinement.
In solitary, he couldn’t interact with anybody except the officers who slid trays of meager portions of food through a slot in his door. He received no counseling, religious services or any programming whatsoever. He was just alone, left to count the bricks on his cell wall. He found himself in a deep depression, and though he pulled out of it, many others do not fare as well. Indeed, between 5 percent and 7 percent of the state prison population is held in solitary confinement, yet roughly 30 percent of suicides take place there.