Solitary confinement in Pa. is at the center of a new federal lawsuit aiming to end the practice in certain cases

A federal class-action suit filed Monday aims to end solitary confinement for hundreds of incarcerated people in Pennsylvania, saying the practice is “cruel and unusual punishment” and can exacerbate or create mental health conditions for those in prison.

Lawyers from the Abolitionist Law Center, the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, and the law firm Dechert LLP sued the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to put an end to solitary confinement in certain cases. The lawsuit, filed in federal court on behalf of six people incarcerated in Pennsylvania prisons, aims to end prolonged and indefinite solitary confinement and solitary confinement for incarcerated people with a mental health diagnosis or who are receiving mental health care.

Solitary confinement is unconstitutional, the suit contends, violating incarcerated people’s Eighth Amendment rights not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The practice, the suit says, is harmful to the well-being of incarcerated people, aggravating mental health conditions and often creating a need for mental health treatment in people who previously had no diagnosed conditions.

The suit seeks an undetermined amount in compensatory damages and to reduce solitary confinement for those groups of incarcerated people, said Bret Grote, legal director for the Abolitionist Law Center.

“Solitary confinement greatly exacerbates mental health conditions that are pre-existing prior to somebody being put into solitary confinement,” said Grote in an interview. “And it also has the potential to generate adverse mental health symptoms where somebody had never experienced them before.”

Other defendants include Secretary of Corrections Laurel Harry, former Secretary of Corrections George Little, Executive Deputy Secretary for Institutional Operations Michael Wenerowicz, and the department’s director of psychology, Lucas Malishchak.

A spokesperson for the department of corrections declined to comment Monday morning, saying the department does not comment on pending litigation. Efforts to reach Little were unsuccessful.

“It is by now a scientific fact that solitary confinement creates and worsens a predictable constellation of adverse psychological symptoms including but not limited to uncontrollable anxiety, impaired impulse control, depression and suicidality, cognitive impairments, memory loss, and auditory and visual hallucinations,” the suit reads.

Before he was released from prison in 2021, Arthur “Cetewayo” Johnson spent 37 years in solitary confinement, living in a windowless, 9-by-12-foot cell, pacing back and forth to get exercise and to stay sane.

Convicted for his role in the shooting and stabbing death of a North Philadelphia man in 1970, Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without parole. After a thwarted escape from prison in 1979, he was put in solitary confinement.

Sometimes for days on end, Johnson said in a recent interview, he seldom saw sunlight and would not see or speak to anyone, confined to his cramped cell, eating food pushed underneath the door on a paper plate, relieving himself in a hole in the ground where the toilet used to be.

The practice, Johnson said is cruel and inhumane and does nothing to rehabilitate incarcerated people, instead often causing people to develop mental health conditions and become more violent than they were when they entered prison. Johnson said he saw many fellow incarcerated people grow more aggressive, suicidal, and not fit to leave prison.

“The holes destroy you to the point that you become monsters,” said Johnson.

In 2017, with help from lawyers from the Abolitionist Law Center, Johnson won the right to rejoin general population after nearly 40 years in solitary confinement. Four years later, Johnson was released from prison after a judge vacated his sentence after agreeing with prosecutors that the initial case against him in the murder case included false and “highly fraught” statements.

Research cited in the suit, Grote said, shows that solitary confinement makes the reentry process even more difficult, with incarcerated people bereft of basic abilities to navigate prison life, let alone life outside bars.

“Keeping people deprived, isolated, lacking things that we need just to be oriented in reality as social beings, has really harmful effects on behavior and on people’s ability to cope with and adapt to the rigors of prison life, as well as to the stresses that come with reentry,” said Grote.

The suit, filed in federal court in Philadelphia, comes just a day ahead of a state House Judiciary Committee hearing on solitary confinement scheduled for Tuesday in Harrisburg.

“Isolation causes painful, severe, and oftentimes irreversible harm,” the suit says. “There is a substantial body of literature from over the last 200 years documenting the harms of isolation, even for short periods of time.”