The End Of Solitary Confinement?

It is one of the most brutal treatments we inflict on prisoners.  And in big news, a court in California is going to look at solitary confinement and see if it violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

But in a ruling this week, a federal judge in Oakland, Calif., agreed to consider whether, as a lawsuit against the state’s corrections department maintains, holding prisoners in such prolonged isolation violates their rights under the Eighth Amendment.

Legal experts say that the ruling, which allows inmates at Pelican Bay who have been held in solitary confinement for more than a decade to sue as a class, paves the way for a court case that could shape national policy on the use of long-term solitary confinement.

“It seems that the judge is going to decide the broad policy questions involved here,” said Jules Lobel, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which originally brought the suit on behalf of 10 inmates in the security housing unit at Pelican Bay. Without class-action status, any decision in the lawsuit could have been restricted only to those plaintiffs and not the broader policy.

Just another step toward joining the civilized world.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.