Closing 'the hole': Fight to end solitary confinement gains momentum

A FORMER member of the radical Revolutionary Action Movement convicted of bank robbery in the early 1970s, Philadelphia's Hakim Ali spent about three decades in state and federal lockups, but nothing haunts him more than his roughly two years in "the hole" - solitary confinement.

Ali, the spiritual leader of Muslim prisoners at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa., in the early 1980s, said an inmate work stoppage led to disputes with prison officials, who ultimately retaliated by throwing him into solitary. That meant he would stay behind bars, isolated, for at least 23 hours a day. Ultimately, he said, the feds moved him to their high-security "SuperMax" lockup in Marion, Ill.

At Marion, Ali recalled, his human contact was almost nonexistent; even his food was delivered into his tiny cell - called "a boxcar" - on a conveyor belt. When he did interact with a corrections officer outside his door once, Ali recalled, the guard told him, "Your days are numbered."

The experience rattled Ali to his core. "I almost went crazy," he recalled of his complete isolation. "I was physically and emotionally drained." He said he grew so paranoid in the hole at Marion that he stopped writing letters and even stopped eating because he became convinced the guards wanted to poison him, losing a great deal of weight. He said he forgot how to have a basic conversation.

Ali was released into the general population, he said, only after an ABC News reporter working on a feature about the prison asked to interview him. Free since 2003, Ali has become one of Philadelphia's leading prison-reform activists, and no cause animates that movement more than pushing to end the use of solitary confinement, a practice that its critics insist is a form of torture.

For years, their crusade received almost no attention from politicians or in the mainstream media, even as researchers found that as many as 100,000 American inmates are now in some level of solitary. But just recently, the once-obscure push to end isolation as a form of punishment in the United States and in Pennsylvania has gained surprising momentum from friends in high places.

President Obama, speaking in July to the NAACP annual convention in Philadelphia, called for an immediate review of solitary-confinement practices in federal prisons, which he labeled as "not smart." The president asked, "Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time?" Just weeks earlier, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy - a Ronald Reagan appointee - wrote in an opinion that "years on end of near-total isolation exacts a terrible price."

Last week, in a landmark agreement, California state officials agreed to new limits that could move nearly two-thirds of its inmates now in solitary into the general prison population, while an organization of state prison officials including Pennsylvania's secretary of corrections, John Wetzel, issued a policy statement that said "prolonged isolation of individuals in jails and prisons is a grave problem in the United States."

But that same statement also offered no specific proposals for reducing the numbers of prisoners in isolation - more proof that curbing the use of solitary confinement is easier said than done. In Pennsylvania, Wetzel acknowledged in a phone interview with the Daily News, despite his commitment to cutting back on solitary, the rate of prisoners in segregated lockups has dipped only slightly during his 4 1/2-year tenure, from 4.3 percent of state prisoners to 3.9 percent.

That means roughly 2,000 of Pennsylvania's 51,000 prisoners are in the hole at any given time. For prison-reform activists, change is not happening quickly enough.

"The war on crime devolved into a war on prisoners," said Bret Grote of the Pittsburgh-based Abolitionist Law Center, a public-interest firm that fights for prisoners' rights in Pennsylvania. He said the deprivation of keeping inmates in solitary is seen as "the first, last and most appropriate technique for exerting control."

Ironically, the notion of solitary confinement was born in Philadelphia - first at the Walnut Street Jail in 1790, later at Eastern State Penitentiary in Fairmount, with its long rows of single cells - out of a belief by the city's Quaker founding fathers that long periods of silence and isolation would lead inmates to contemplate their misdeeds and repent.

The idea fell rapidly out of favor by the end of the 19th century, as experts saw a sharp rise in mental illness among inmates. In the 1980s, however, the practice came roaring back.

The biggest factor was quite simply mass incarceration - a staggering rise in the number of prisoners, including a six-fold spike in Pennsylvania from 1980 until today. Crowded conditions led to more conflict between inmates and with guards, and more punishments were doled out. At the same time, the number of inmates with mental illness also rose, creating new headaches for keeping order. Correctional officials said they had to do something about "the worst of the worst" to keep order behind the prison walls.

Angus Love, who heads the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project in Philadelphia, said that one problem in the rush to solitary confinement was the escalating conflict between detainees and officers, so that inmates placed in the hole for what was supposed to be a few months of punishment stayed for years, sometimes a decade or more. He said that some in solitary were written off as problem inmates, when in reality "it was the place that made them into a maniac."

In Pennsylvania, several prisoners became notorious for spending endless stints in the hole - especially former Black Panther activist Russell Maroon Shoatz, who is serving a life sentence for the 1970 slaying of Fairmount Park police Sgt. Frank Von Colln and who escaped from prison twice, in 1977 and 1980.

Theresa Shoatz, a lifelong local activist against the use of solitary confinement, fought for nearly three decades to get her dad released back into the general inmate population, which didn't happen until last year, a few months after his 70th birthday. She said the impact of years of solitary has been devastating.

"You start losing your health, and start losing your mind," Shoatz said. She said her father told her that inmates would write questions on a torn bedsheet and try to pass it to the prisoner next door with a pencil, a process they called "fishing" that could take an hour or two to pass a few words. "It gave them something to do."

"Being in solitary exacerbates every type of mental-illness problem," said Dr. Terry Kupers, a professor at the Wright Institute in San Francisco and one of the nation's foremost experts on the psychology of confinement. "Schizophrenics become more suspicious, people prone to depression become more depressed and suicidal." Kupers was one of the leaders of the push to curb the practice at California's Pelican Bay.

In Pennsylvania, however, it took a lawsuit - and an agreement announced at the beginning of this year - to force state officials to agree not to place inmates with serious mental illness in solitary. The full plan won't be phased in until the middle of next year.

State corrections chief Wetzel said the state late last year began to work with its wardens to start carrying out a number of smaller recommendations from the Vera Institute, a criminal-justice think tank, that could reduce the population in its segregated units.

He said the recommendations - not using solitary when an inmate is transferred between facilities, a common practice, or sending the small number of inmates who test positive for drugs into treatment - should further reduce the numbers in solitary, but he conceded that now-entrenched practices are hard to break.

And, Wetzel added, officials still worry about the prisoner who might be released into the general population and hurt another inmate or a guard. "You use an abundance of caution," he said.

But for prisoner-rights advocates like Ali, Pennsylvania's problem with solitary confinement is that it needs to be less cautious in ending the practice. He said he still draws a mental blank in some situations and wonders if zoning out is a lingering impact of his time in the hole. He said he suspects that other inmates suffer even more traumatic fallout from solitary.

"Nobody," said Ali, "comes home and says, 'I'm home now - that's the end of this.' "

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