Yesterday morning in Albany’s Legislative Office Building, Alecia Barraza’s voice cracked as she described her 21-year-old son’s mental decline and eventual suicide during his isolation in solitary confinement at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Dutchess County.
“We live with this tragedy every day,” Barraza said of the death of her son, Benjamin Van Zandt. “Reform is needed now! Not one more family should have to endure this pain.”
A bill that would radically alter solitary confinement in New York, called the Humane Alternatives to Long Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act, is gaining traction in Albany. It would create substantive alternatives to solitary confinement, place strict limitations on the use and permitted durations of confinement, and improve due process protections for prisoners who face solitary.
Yesterday, The New York Campaign for Alternatives to Solitary Confinement (CAIC) brought over 200 people from all over the state to Albany to rally and lobby the legislature to pass the HALT act, which now has 59 co-sponsors in the state legislature. Advocates also built a model solitary confinement cell in the legislative chambers that was covered with poetry written by inmates currently serving time in solitary confinement.
The push for solitary reform is part of a growing public discomfort — especially in New York — with the way our criminal justice system currently operates, especially its over-reliance on solitary confinement.
Despite the approval of a New York State settlement that requires incremental changes, the New York State prison system’s use of solitary confinement is one of the most egregious in the nation. Its prisons generally hold 3,700 people in isolation, more than 7% of the entire prison population. The average rate of solitary confinement nationally is 4.4%, and as low as 2% in states such as Colorado and Washington.
These people are held a tiny cell in extreme isolation and sensory deprivation for 22 to 24 hours a day, often for months or years, sometimes decades. The conditions of isolation often lead to serious psychological harm; over 40% of suicides in New York prisons in 2014 and 2015 took place in solitary, despite the fact that they only represent 7% of the inmate population.
"I did two years in the solitary confinement. It really affected me. Gave me flashbacks," said Tony Simon, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, who served over 30 years in prison.
"One time I was visiting my niece's house, and I got on the elevator, and had a terrible panic attack. I felt like I was back in solitary. It's like being in a coffin."
In New York, people with mental illness are disproportionately overrepresented in solitary: 20% of those in solitary confinement in New York prisons have diagnosed mental illness, the highest percentage in history, yet mental health treatment is barely existent. Racial disparities abound in NY solitary as well, with black prisoners overrepresented in regard to the general prison population by 20%.
“We need more than rhetoric to address an issue that has plagued our communities for decades," Queens Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubrey, HALT's main sponsor in the Assembly, told the crowd. "Our taxes are perpetuating it. Our votes, or lack thereof, are perpetuating it. The enemy is us, until this is over.”
Terrance Slater, who served 6 years of solitary confinement over the course of a 10 year sentence, also spoke.
"Back in the cell, I would hear all types of noises and things that you shouldn't hear. When you're facing all that solitude, you have no choice but to think about all the things you can't control."
The HALT act would place hard restrictions on keeping an individual in solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days or more than 20 total days in any 60 day period. If someone needs to be separated from the general prison population for more than 15 consecutive days, they must be placed a rehabilitative residential unit (RRU) providing rehabilitation programs and therapy to address the causes for the behavior that led to the separation.
Additionally, HALT would limit the violations that would allow for solitary confinement for more than 3 days to only most serious offenses. The act would also create a more robust system of due process for prisoners, and create a release mechanism from RRUs, with independent oversight.
Though the HALT bill has growing support, it still faces stiff opposition from some legislators, especially upstate, where the correction officers unions hold significant political sway.
“It is simply wrong to unilaterally take the tools away from law enforcement officers who face dangerous situations on daily basis,” a representative from the New York State Correctional Officers and Policeman’s Beneficiary Association said. “Limiting the ability to have real measures to discipline violent inmates will only increase those numbers in the coming years.”
“[The union's] concerns are unfounded,” Jack Beck, director of the Prison Visiting Project, told Gothamist. “They think that solitary confinement makes them safer, when it actually doesn’t because it makes prisoners incapable of interacting safely with others.”
Jack Denton is a freelance writer, radio producer, and probably riding a bike right now. Follow Jack on Twitter @jackwdenton.
