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| Durbin urges revamping prison solitary confinement |
| By miamiherald.com - ANNIKA MCGINNIS |
| Published: 06/20/2012 |
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WASHINGTON -- Keeping prisoners locked alone in tiny cells 23 hours a day is inhumane, costly and ineffective, a key U.S. senator said Tuesday in a hearing about ways to revamp the practice of solitary confinement in American prisons. The hearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee came after a lawsuit last month against solitary-confinement policies at a California prison and a widespread hunger strike against that state's use of the practice. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said he was drafting legislation designed to overhaul the nation's solitary confinement rules, even as the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons defended the system. During solitary confinement, the most disruptive prisoners are locked up from 22 to 24 hours a day, typically in windowless cells about the size of a king-sized bed, testified Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Former prisoner Anthony Graves, who spent more than 18 years in solitary confinement before he was exonerated of a murder conviction, said his treatment was "torture," "madness" and the "total disrespect of human dignity." Graves said he lived in an 8-foot by 12-foot "cage" where he slept, ate and defecated. He ate dehydrated food that sometimes included rat feces, lived without any physical contact and watched fellow inmates deliberately mutilate themselves, go insane or commit suicide. "I would watch guys come to prison totally sane and in three years they don't live in the real world anymore," Graves testified. "I know a guy who would sit in the middle of the floor, rip his sheet up, wrap it around himself and light it on fire." Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., repeatedly asked the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Charles Samuels, whether he thought there were any negative effects to such treatment. Samuels said it wasn't the "preferred option," and cited a 2010 Colorado Department of Corrections study that he said had found no negative effects from solitary confinement. Read More. |
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