California's Secret Solitary Courts

by Sarah Shourd

Despite a new settlement that bans indefinite solitary confinement in California, prisons are finding new secondary excuses to lengthen time in the SHU.

A change in policy in California just last month could result in an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 prisoners being released from solitary confinement into the general prison population.

Seventy-eight of these prisoners have been isolated for more than 20 years. Like being confined to a small fish bowl in the dark corner of an attic—these prisoners will suddenly be thrust into a much larger aquarium, teeming with life.

“This is a pretty shocking admission that these people—who have been held in solitary confinement ad infinitum—perhaps never needed to be there in the first place,” says Charles Carbone, a part of a team of lawyers who worked on the class-action suit Ashker v. Governor of California, which recently ended in a settlement resulting in a pending seismic shift in California’s prisons policies.

Ashker v. Governor of California will, in fact, lessen the widespread use of solitary confinement—a punishment the United Nations deems “cruel and unusual”—but internal resistance, retaliation, and a widening definition of what constitutes a gang may keep prisoners ...