The Virginia Department of Corrections has won kudos from the Obama administration Department of Justice and the Southern Legislative Conference for limiting the use of long-term “restrictive housing,” the administrative euphemism for solitary confinement. In 2011 the maximum security Red Onion prison in Southwest Virginia held 511 prisoners in long-term restrictive housing. Today, the number is fewer than 100.
But that’s not good enough for the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union which, in a letter to Governor Ralph Northam, asked the state to curtail the practice even more. Reports Frank Green with the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
“Isolating someone not just from their family and community but placing them in a cell the size of a parking space for 22-24 hours a day and depriving them of human contact, natural light, exercise and other out-of-cell time, and other stimuli, causes extreme suffering and mental illness,” wrote [Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia].
“No one, regardless of their crime, should be tortured and dehumanized in this way,” she added.
Let’s parse this. Roughly 100 of the most dangerous of the 30,000 prisoners in Virginia’s penitentiary system — one in 300 — are held in solitary confinement at any given time. Almost all of them, I’ll wager, have been convicted of violent crimes. Almost all of them, I’ll bet, have what we might call anger management issues. In all likelihood, every single one has gotten into altercations inside prison. These guys are either (a) considered a danger to other inmates, or (b) live in fear of other inmates. Still, they are let out of the cells up to two hours a day for exercise, recreation and showers. This is dehumanizing? This is torture?
I’m sorry, but this is the kind of rhetoric that gives liberals a bad name.
The ACLU study quotes the inmates themselves as evidence that disciplinary charges are sometimes inflated or false, and that solitary confinement is not limited to situations in which it is essential for reasons of safety. Right. Like violent criminals never lie.
OK, OK, sometimes they may be telling the truth. Perhaps I’ve watched too many prison movies, but I’ll grant that prison guards may not always be the finest specimens of humanity themselves and may sometimes abuse their power. The appropriate response is to correct injustices when they occur rather than impose blanket policies, as the ACLU advocates, such as using solitary only in “rare and exceptional cases,” limiting the length to 15 days, and banning the practice entirely for prisoners with mental illness.
In a free and open society, it’s a good thing to know that someone like the ACLU is looking out for the rights of prison inmates. Abuses sometimes do occur, and they sometimes do get covered up. That’s the nature of things. Prisoners need an outside channel like the ACLU to report wrong-doing. But this time, it sounds to me that, the ACLU has gone way overboard.
As a frivolous aside, I’ve occasionally thought what it would be like to be imprisoned in a maximum security facility with scary inmates and I”ve wondered how I would survive. My first thought: Do whatever it takes to be put into solitary. I’d far rather live in confinement than become some big hairy dude’s prison bitch.
Give me a stack of books and an hour a day in the exercise yard, and I’d do just fine.
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