Reiter on Solitary Confinement

Keramet Reiter of UC Irvine has recently done a Q&A with the Berkeley Human Rights Center on solitary confinement, her topic of expertise and focus of her forthcoming book.

Will the recent court settlement in California lead to any significant change in regard to solitary confinement practices?
Two big challenges with isolation in particular are that it’s been a very secretive process and there has been significant discretion over what circumstances and for how long people are sent to isolation….Now, under the recent settlement, you have to do something wrong instead of just being labeled a gang member and isolation terms are capped at five years. So that’s an improvement. But you still don’t have a right to a lawyer at the administrative hearing in which people decide whether you’ve done something wrong or not. The prison staff have a lot of control over what counts as a rule violation and who they charge with violations. Five years is a long time, and you’re under really intense scrutiny when you’re in isolation, and it’s easy to break more rules because of that.

Read the whole thing here.