End solitary confinement of young adults on Rikers Island now

We were heartened to learn of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s advancement of one of the recommendations of the #CLOSErikers Campaign when he recently proposed to relocate 16- and 17-year-olds from Rikers Island to the Horizon Juvenile Center in the Bronx. Rikers Island is no place for adolescents, but the projected reduction in the population and the acknowledgment of the need for a more humane space for these children makes us hopeful.

But the news is not all good.

On July 11, criminal justice reform in New York City suffered a serious, if temporary, setback. On that day the city’s Board of Correction acceded to Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte’s request to delay the release of all 19- to 21-year-olds from solitary confinement at the Rikers Island jail. It granted an additional three months to comply with the Board’s January 2015 vote to end the practice for all youth under the age of 21.

This is the fourth time the commissioner, with the tacit backing of de Blasio, has requested an extension for implementing a rule passed more than 18 months ago. In a letter to the Board, Ponte said the delay was necessary because of a “pronounced spike” in the number of “serious and violent incidents” among young adults in the jail. Keeping a relative handful of 19- to 21-year-olds – somewhere between five and 20 on any given day – in cages for 23 hours a day cannot be the only way to maintain a safe environment for everyone else. And the damage that every hour in solitary does to the mental and physical condition of these young New Yorkers is incalculable.

“What can you offer to mitigate the horror that we know accrues to the young adults locked in 23 hours a day?” That question was posed by Board member and retired Judge Bryanne Hamill at the hearing to consider the commissioner’s request. There was no satisfactory response. If we are ever going live up to our ideal of being a just society, it behooves us to find alternatives to “punitive segregation” (the Rikers euphemism for solitary confinement). Anything less reflects a failure of courage and political will by our elected leaders.

Prolonged solitary confinement for anyone, but especially for young people and people with mental health issues, is a form of torture. This is the unequivocal conclusion of Juan E. Mendez, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, who has called on all countries to ban the practice except in very exceptional circumstances, as a last resort, and for as short a time as possible. In 2015, the United Nations adopted revised rules for the treatment of prisoners – the Mandela Rules – to which the United States is a party. These standards expressly prohibit solitary confinement exceeding 15 days, and ban solitary confinement for juveniles and people with mental disabilities. Our city’s failure to conform to fundamental human rights standards belies the mayor’s claim to progressive leadership.

These international standards are based on years of research into the extraordinary damage solitary confinement does to those in its grip. As one prison psychiatrist told Human Rights Watch some years ago, “It’s a standard psychiatric concept. If you put people in isolation, they will go insane . . . Most people in isolation will fall apart.” Among other documented psychological reactions, they exhibit revenge fantasies, rage, irrational anger, fears of persecution and lack of impulse control. One teenager who spent four months in the “box” at Rikers said, “You just get angry with hearing people constantly hollering all day. There’s so many people that have been in that cell and screamed on that same gate, it smells like a bunch of breath and drool.” The increased violence observed by Commissioner Ponte may well have been caused by the very conditions of confinement these young adults have experienced. If so, returning them to isolation is not only cruel, it is irrational.

Contrary to the claims of some prison and jail officials and the head of the New York City correction officers union, there is no convincing evidence that solitary confinement improves safety. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, “empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that segregated housing may have little influence on improving the behavior of incarcerated people.” Nor does it make a facility safer. The Vera Institute points out that prisons that have decreased their use of solitary confinement have seen marked reductions in violence. In 2013 the New York City Board of Correction commissioned a report from psychologists whose study revealed that in city jails, solitary confinement had no deterrent effect and actually contributed to a cycle of violence and aggression. What punitive segregation does do is make the communities to which people return less safe. Recidivism rates are higher for people who have been kept in punitive segregation than they are for other returning citizens.

The damage solitary confinement causes is understood by a growing number of political leaders. More than two years ago, New York Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry and state Sen. Bill Perkins introduced the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act, which would restrict the use of segregated confinement and create alternative therapeutic and rehabilitative confinement options. At a press conference marking the bill’s introduction Sen. Perkins explained, “Solitary confinement makes people suffer without making our prisons safer. It is counter-productive as well as cruel. Solitary harms not only those who endure it, but families, communities, and corrections staff as well.” The HALT Act now has 78 legislative sponsors and is supported by a growing list of civic and religious organizations, including the New York City Bar Association, the New York State Catholic Conference, and the New York State chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.         

Commissioner Ponte’s claim that continued solitary confinement for these young adults “represents the most reasonable and prudent approach in light of the current facts and circumstances” is simply not credible. Restrictive housing reform is going on at prisons and jails throughout the country, and there are a number of alternative models in place that have been shown to reduce reliance on solitary confinement without jeopardizing safety. In a city that is as progressive and resource-rich as New York, a lack of political will is the only explanation for the continued use of a practice that has been defined as torture to control a small group of 19 to 21-year-olds.

In his victory speech in November 2013 Mayor de Blasio said, “New York is no stranger to big challenges and each and every time, New Yorkers have faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles with grit and determination.” It’s time for the mayor to take his own advice and show the grit and determination to end solitary confinement on Rikers Island for all young adults now.

Glenn Martin is the founder and president of JustLeadershipUSA, an organization dedicated to cutting the US correctional population in half by 2030 and leading alocal campaign to close Rikers Island. Riley Doyle Evans is a member of theNew York City Jails Action Coalition.