THE USE OF PROLONGED SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN UNITED STATES
PRISONS, JAILS, AND DETENTION CENTERS
Submission to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review of
United States of America
Second Cycle
Twenty Second Session of the UPR
Human Rights Council
April-May 2015

Submitted by: Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Legal Services for Prisoners with
Children (LSPC), California Prison Focus (CPF)
Contact Name: Alexis Agathocleous
Contact Phone/Email: 212-614-6478, aagathocleous@ccrjustice.org
Organization website: www.ccrjustice.org; www.prisonerswithchildren.org; www.prisons.org
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights
guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a
non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive
force for social change.
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC) organizes communities impacted by the
criminal justice system and advocates to release incarcerated people, to restore human and civil
rights and to reunify families and communities. We build public awareness of structural racism
in policing, the courts and prison system and we advance racial and gender justice in all our
work. Our strategies include legal support, trainings, advocacy, public education, grassroots
mobilization and developing community partnerships.
California Prison Focus (CPF) works to abolish the California prison system in its present
condition. We investigate and expose human rights abuses with the goal of ending long term
isolation, medical neglect, and all forms of discrimination. We are community activists,
prisoners, and their families educating and inspiring the public to demand change.

I.

SUMMARY

The United States currently detains approximately 80,000 prisoners in solitary confinement in its
jails, prisons, and detention centers. Solitary confinement – which typically involves being held
in a cell in a state of near‐total solitude for between 22 and 24 hours a day – is well-known to
result in severe psychological and physical harm. The extensive use of solitary confinement in
US prisons, jails, and detention centers implicates concerns about torture or cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment, abuses in the criminal justice system, due process violations,
racial discrimination, and discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.
CCR, LSPC, and CPF are currently litigating Ashker et al. v. Governor of California et al., 09‐
cv‐5796 (N.D. Cal.) (Wilken, J.), a federal class action lawsuit that challenges the
constitutionality of prolonged solitary confinement at California’s Pelican Bay Security Housing
Unit (SHU).1 In Ashker, we represent hundreds of prisoners who have been held in solitary
confinement for a decade or more, and who have been placed into indefinite SHU confinement
as a result of their validation as so-called gang members or associates.
We recommend that prolonged solitary confinement (i.e. in excess of 15 days) in the US should
be banned, except under exceptional circumstances. Where solitary confinement is used, its
duration must be as short as possible and for a definite term that is properly announced and
communicated. The practice of solitary confinement in pre-trial detention should also end. The
US Government should ensure that those prisoners who are sent to solitary confinement are only
sent for the most serious disciplinary infractions, where no other less restrictive alternatives
exist, and receive meaningful process prior to such confinement. The US Government should
also develop standards to ensure that actual or perceived race, political affiliation, religion,
association, vulnerability to sexual abuse, and challenging violations of one’s rights as a prisoner
plays no role in the decision to confine a prisoner to solitary confinement. Federal, state, and
local governments should compile data on the use of solitary confinement in their jurisdictions,
including data on the effect of isolation on detainees.
II.

LEGAL FRAMEWORK

The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, while
the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution guarantee the right to due process.
No recommendations were made with respect to solitary confinement in the 2011 Report of the
Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review – United States of America.
III.

U.S. COMPLIANCE WITH ITS INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS
OBLIGATIONS WITH RESPECT TO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

The US currently detains approximately 80,000 prisoners in solitary confinement in its jails,
prisons, and detention centers. Prisoners in solitary confinement are typically warehoused in
cramped, concrete, windowless cells in a state of near‐total solitude for between 22 and 24 hours
1

More information about Ashker et al. v. Governor of California et al. is available at www.ccrjustice.org/pelicanbay.

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a day – whether in Special Housing Units (SHUs), in Supermax facilities, or in lockdown. Cells
often contain a toilet and a shower, and a slot in the door only large enough for a guard to slip a
food tray through. “Recreation” involves being escorted, frequently in handcuffs and shackles, to
another solitary cell where prisoners can pace alone for an hour before being returned to their
cell. Prisoners in solitary confinement are frequently deprived of meaningful access to visits and
telephone calls home, furthering their isolation and despair and preventing them from
maintaining the family and community ties pivotal to their ability to successfully reintegrate into
society upon release. As such, prisoners often live for years alone, without any normal human
interaction, stimulation, or meaningful programming or vocational opportunities.
These conditions can be exacerbated by Special Administrative Measures (“SAMs”), an
additional set of contact and communication restrictions that can be imposed by the US
Department of Justice on federal prisoners already in solitary confinement, including in pre-trial
detention. These restrictions frequently bar a prisoner’s attorneys and family members from
sharing any information received from that prisoner with third parties, under threat of criminal
sanction. Separate from the implications for zealous advocacy and free speech, these gags,
together with DOJ’s refusal to provide meaningful information, mean that the public knows very
little about a critical aspect of the government’s treatment of prisoners in federal custody.2
Solitary confinement is disproportionately used against prisoners of color, and other vulnerable
incarcerated populations. At Pelican Bay in California, for example, 85% of the prisoners in
solitary confinement are Latino. So too are African American prisoners disproportionately
overrepresented in SHU populations across the country. Prisoners with mental illness are all too
frequently confined in solitary confinement, only exacerbating their symptoms; and gender
identity, sexual identity, and vulnerability to sexual assault are inappropriately used to confine
prisoners in solitary confinement, ostensibly for prisoners’ own protection.
Like prisoners placed in isolation units around the country, prisoners at the Pelican Bay SHU are
confined to windowless cells for between 22½ and 24 hours a day, without access to natural
light, telephone calls, contact visits, and vocational, recreational, or educational programming.
At Pelican Bay, hundreds of prisoners have been held in solitary confinement for over a decade;
and dozens of prisoners have languished under these conditions for over 20 years – in
contravention of human rights standards.3 They are retained in the SHU on the basis of flimsy
2

The DOJ has refused to make virtually any information publicly available about the use of SAMs, including who
and how many are subject to the measures, where these individuals are being held, and what the measures entail.
The only available official data is from 2009, when DOJ reported that there were 44 prisoners subject to SAMs in
Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”) facilities. See U.S. Dep’t Justice, Fact Sheet: Prosecuting and Detaining Terror Suspects
in the U.S. Criminal Justice System, June 9, 2009, available at http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/June/09-ag564.html.

3

The U.N. Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment has found that prolonged solitary confinement is prohibited by Article 7 of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Article 1 of the Convention against Torture and
Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). The Special Rapporteur concluded that use
of solitary confinement is appropriate only in exceptional circumstances, and where imposed, its duration must be as
short as possible and for a definite term that is properly announced and communicated. He called specifically for
States to end the practice of solitary confinement in pre-trial detention. The Special Rapporteur concluded that “any
imposition of solitary confinement beyond 15 days constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or

2

evidence of “gang affiliation.” Evidence used by the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation (CDCR) to purportedly demonstrate gang affiliation – and keep these prisoners in
brutalizing conditions for decades at a time – includes appearance on lists of alleged gang
members discovered in an undisclosed prisoners’ cell, or possession of allegedly gang-related
drawings.
The devastating psychological and physical effects of prolonged solitary confinement have been
well documented by psychological experts. Solitary confinement, these experts have found,
results in severe psychological and physical harm. Common psychological effects of prolonged
solitary confinement include a persistent and heightened state of anxiety, and paranoid and
persecutory fears, as well as hallucinations, headaches, ruminations and irrational anger, violent
fantasies, oversensitivity to stimuli, extreme lethargy, and insomnia. This mindset commonly
persists long after prisoners are released from solitary confinement.
Our clients at the Pelican Bay SHU report that they experience unrelenting and crushing mental
anguish as a result of the years they have spent under these conditions, and they fear that they
will never be released from the SHU. Echoing the findings of psychological experts on solitary
confinement, prisoners have described their confinement there as “a living nightmare that does
not end and will not end.” As our client Luis Esquivel puts it, “I feel dead. It’s been 13 years
since I have shaken someone’s hand and I fear I’ll forget the feel of human contact.” And as our
client Gabriel Reyes wrote in 2011:
You don’t really know what makes [the SHU psychological torture] unless you live it and
have lived it for 10, 15, 20 plus years 24/7. Only the long term SHU prisoner knows the
effect of being alone between four cold walls with no one to confide in and only a pillow
for comfort. How much more can any of us take? Only tomorrow knows. Today I hold it
all in hoping I don’t explode.

Similarly, our client Todd Ashker experiences great feelings of anger at his situation, which he
tries to control and suppress, but this just deadens his feelings. He feels that he is “silently
screaming” 24 hours a day.
Professor Craig Haney, Professor of Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz and a
leading expert on the impact of solitary confinement, interviewed a number of prisoners in the
Pelican Bay SHU as part of our litigation. In a Declaration to the Court, he reported:
The magnitude of the suffering that they have endured, and the full measure of what they
have lost over the course of the last two decades of their lives, is difficult to fathom. They
are all men in their 50s who have matured into middle age without having had any of the
adult experiences that lend meaning to that stage of someone’s life. Because they could
not remain connected in a meaningful way to the social world and social contexts in
which they were raised and from which they came—the network of people and places
punishment, depending on the circumstances” and called on the international community “to agree to such a
standard and to impose an absolute prohibition on solitary confinement exceeding 15 consecutive days.”
See Interim Report of the Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or
Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Aug. 2011).

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that in essence, created them—they have lost a connection to the basic sense of who they
“were.” Yet, because of the bizarre asocial world in which they have lived, it is not at all
clear to most of them who they now “are.” There is a certain flatness or numbness to the
way most of them talk about their emotions—they “feel” things, but at a distanced or
disembodied way. The form of “social death” to which they were subjected has left them
disconnected from other people, whom they regard more or less as “abstractions” rather
than as real. Very few of them have had consistent social visits over the many years
during which they have been in isolated confinement, so they have lost contact with the
outside world, with the social world of even a mainline prison, and with themselves.4

Professor Haney’s observations comport with what is now clearly established about the impact
of solitary confinement. The incidence of suicides, attempted suicides and the development of
mental illness are much higher amongst prisoners in solitary confinement than those held in the
general population. A recent peer-reviewed study published in the American Journal of Public
Health has found that the risk of self-harm among prisoners (such as “ingestion of a potentially
poisonous substance or object leading to a metabolic disturbance, hanging with evidence of
trauma from ligature, wound requiring sutures after laceration near critical vasculature, or
death”) is significantly higher for prisoners in isolation units.5 Moreover, as Professor Huda Akil,
a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, recently explained at the American Association
for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, there is an increased understanding that the lack
of physical interaction with the natural world, the lack of social interaction, and the lack of touch
and visual stimulation associated by solitary confinement are each sufficient to dramatically
change the brain.6
In 2011, as a result of the severe psychological distress, desperation, and hopelessness that they
experience from languishing in the SHU for decades, hundreds of Pelican Bay prisoners engaged
in two sustained hunger strikes. Those hunger strikes ended after CDCR promised to engage
with prisoners and issue meaningful reforms to conditions and procedures. But CDCR has failed
to so. Hundreds of men are still languishing at the Pelican Bay SHU, and other isolation units in
California. CDCR still uses the same affiliation-based evidence to retain prisoners at the SHU
indefinitely. And so, on July 8, 2013, some 30,000 prisoners went on a third hunger strike in the
largest prisoner protest in history. Many refused food for 60 days. Our clients, and many other
prisoners, reported that the possibility of death by starvation was a worthwhile risk to draw
attention to their plight, illustrating the gravity of their situation and the need for swift action on
this issue. The prisoners have made five core demands.7 Central among these demands are that
solitary confinement must be used as a last resort, for a determinate period of time, and in
response to specific acts of misconduct; and that it cannot involve torturous and punitive
4

Declaration of Craig Haney, Ph.D., J.D., In Support of Plaintiffs’ Motion for Class Certification, Ashker, Dkt. No.
195-4.
5

Fatos Kaba, MA, Andrea Lewis, PhD, Sarah Glowa-Kollisch, MPH, et. al, Solitary Confinement and Risk of SelfHarm Among Jail Inmates, 104 AM. J. PUB. HEALTH 442, 443 (Mar. 2014).

6

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/02/18/3303721/solitary-confinement-dramatically-alter-brain-shape-justdays-neuroscientist-says/#

7

For a detailed explanation of these demands, please visit http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/theprisoners-demands-2/

4

conditions such as deprivation of natural light, phone calls, physical contact with family, group
recreation, educational programming, significant out-of-cell time that allows for normal human
conversations with others, lack of adequate medical care, and lack of adequate and nutritious
food.
The United States must take steps to address the human rights violations inherent in holding tens
of thousands of prisoners in solitary confinement. As such, we make the following
recommendations:
1. Prolonged solitary confinement (i.e. in excess of 15 days) in US prisons, jails, and
detention centers should be banned, except under exceptional circumstances. Where
solitary confinement is used, its duration must be as short as possible and for a definite
term that is properly announced and communicated. The practice of solitary confinement
in pre-trial detention should also end.
2. The US Government must ensure that those prisoners who are sent to solitary
confinement are only sent for the most serious disciplinary infractions, where no other
less restrictive alternatives exist, and receive meaningful process prior to such
confinement.
3. The US Government must develop standards to ensure that actual or perceived race,
political affiliation, religion, association, vulnerability to sexual abuse, and challenging
violations of one’s rights as a prisoner plays no role in the decision to confine a prisoner
to solitary confinement.
4. Federal, state, and local governments should compile data on the use of solitary
confinement in their jurisdictions, including data on the effect of isolation on detainees.
III.

CONCLUSION

The US warehouses tens of thousands of prisoners in prolonged solitary confinement, a practice
that is well-known to devastating psychological and physical effects. These harms are
disproportionately visited upon people of color, politically-active prisoners, and those whose
gender or sexual identity is perceived to make them vulnerable to sexual assault. The US
Government must take concrete steps to end the use of prolonged solitary confinement; to ensure
meaningful process prior to such confinement; to develop standards that prevent the
discriminatory use of solitary confinement; and to compile data on the use of solitary
confinement across the country.

5