Tale of two solitary confinement
practices: WI and COLORADO
(Note 2019 update : this is a good comparison of practices but Rick Raemisch no longer heads the effort)
A
tale of two states: Wisconsin trails Colorado as both cut solitary confinement
By Dee Hall center for Investigative
Journalism; wwwwisconsinwatch.org
Former
Wisconsin Department of Corrections chief Rick Raemisch is leading the push in
Colorado to reduce isolation, which many believe is torture .
Former
Wisconsin Corrections Secretary Rick Raemisch sits outside the Colorado State
Penitentiary in Cañon City where he famously spent 20 hours in solitary
confinement, formerly known as administrative segregation, in 2014. Raemisch
now heads the the Colorado Department of Corrections. Says Raemisch: "I'll
tell you right now, segregation doesn't work — at all."
CAÑON
CITY, Colo. — Rick Raemisch sits on the concrete bed in a cell, one of 948
empty rooms in the shuttered Centennial South Correctional Facility. He is
recalling the day — actually just 20 hours — that he spent in solitary
confinement at the state prison next door.
As he looks around the white-walled
room, Raemisch declares it fairly similar to the 7-foot by 13-foot cell where
in 2014, as head of Colorado’s corrections system, he had himself locked up.
In this cell, he
notes the tiny window looking out toward a gravel yard and a concrete wall.
There is a stainless steel sink, toilet and a mirror made of metal. The solid
purple door has a narrow slot that looks out to a common area.
“The
problem with this cell, there’s nothing to count,” Raemisch says, noting the
smooth walls. “There’s no chips. There’s no scrapes. There’s no dents. You got
nothing to count in here.”
Rick
Raemisch, executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, sits in
a cell similar to the one where he spent nearly a day in 2014. Raemisch found
himself pacing, losing track of time and counting nicks in the wall to occupy
his mind. And he was there for just 20 hours — not the 20-plus years some
Colorado inmates had endured before the state eliminated indefinite use of
solitary confinement.
The reason this
cell at Centennial South remains relatively unmarked is that, except for about
two years from 2010 to 2012, it has not been used. Colorado’s rapid shift away
from solitary confinement — from 1,500 prisoners in 2011 down to 185 as of May
— has left the state with a $200 million empty all-solitary prison in City.
Colorado’s
decision to curtail the use of solitary confinement offers lessons for the Badger State that Raemisch is
uniquely positioned to offer.
Raemisch was secretary of the Wisconsin
Department of Corrections from 2007 until Gov. Scott Walker
took office in 2011. A Republican, Raemisch was an assistant district attorney
and sheriff in Dane County and a federal prosecutor before taking Wisconsin’s
top corrections post.
Before the changes, Colorado held some violent or
hard-to-manage inmates in isolation for more than 24 years. The state
eliminated the use of such long-term, indefinite solitary confinement in 2014;
inmates now serve no more than one year in that status, formerly known as
administrative segregation and now called restrictive housing-maximum security.
In Colorado, prisoners confined for disciplinary
infractions within the institutions now serve a maximum of 30 days at a time,
with just a few exceptions. During those stints, inmates are allowed at least
four hours a day out of their cells along with other inmates.
Colorado
also has banned the use of seclusion for any inmate with a serious mental
illness.
Earlier this year,
Raemisch took a Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reporter on a
tour of three Colorado prisons, allowing access to staff and prisoners.
By contrast, requests by the Center for access to
a so-called restrictive housing unit in one of Wisconsin’s prisons, to
interview an inmate in solitary or to discuss the state’s solitary confinement
policy with an agency official were all rejected. A DOC spokesman cited
security concerns and a rule that bans media interviews with prisoners in
solitary.
Waupun
Cell
|
Wisconsin
Department of Corrections
Inmates can spend years, even decades, in a cell
like this one at Waupun Correctional Institution under so-called administrative
confinement. Colorado and California have eliminated the use of such indefinite
solitary confinement.
That is not the
only difference between the two states. Colorado has several factors that
helped it make major changes to its 20,000-inmate system that Wisconsin lacks,
including:
A bipartisan commitment by top
political leaders from Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper on down to reduce
solitary confinement;
A vigorous prisoner
advocacy community that meets regularly with Raemisch; and
Transparency about the treatment of inmates and
safety within the prisons, including annual reports to the Legislature
and a constituent services office that handles complaints.
In Wisconsin, the number of prisoners in solitary
also has dropped, a reduction of nearly 300 to 827 as of late March. Officials
say it is due to reduced terms implemented in 2015 for disciplinary
infractions.
In addition, 116 inmates are in indefinite
administrative confinement for prison safety reasons. Prisoners at Waupun
Correctional Institution were set to begin a hunger strike June 10 in an effort
to eliminate such long-term solitary confinement.
 |
LaRon
McKInley
|
LaRon
McKinley Bey has sued the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, alleging his 25
years in a form of solitary confinement constitutes cruel and unusual
punishment.
The conditions in administrative confinement in
Wisconsin — which are similar to solitary and include 23 hours or more per day
in a cell with little human contact or access to natural light — can last for
years. In April, Waupun Correctional Institution inmate LaRon McKinley Bey sued the Wisconsin DOC
over what he charges is mental torture and physical deprivation during more
than 25 years of administrative confinement.
Colorado is not
superior to Wisconsin on every measure. Between 2001 and 2013, 19
inmates were killed by other inmates in Colorado state prisons,
according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. By contrast, Wisconsin
prisons had no homicides during that time.
And in Colorado, there are now occasional
inmate fights in restrictive housing as prisoners are allowed to congregate in
common areas instead of being completely isolated from one another.
“There’s
scuffles. There’s fights,” Raemisch said. “When you put people together, that’s
going to happen. But the majority have not been serious.”And agency figures
show assaults on corrections staff are down sharply.
Stir crazy in
solitary
As
he planned his own stint in solitary back in 2014, Raemisch imagined it would
be a good time to catch up on sleep.
Instead, Raemisch found himself counting nicks in
the wall. He paced. He lost track of time. He craned his neck to catch a
glimpse of sky, and he strained to hear a nearby inmate’s TV. The yelling and
glare of lights kept him awake for all but a few minutes at a time. At 11 a.m.
the next day, he broke his own rule and asked what time it was. Still four
hours to go.
The
experience, which he also recounted in a New York Times column,
left Raemisch shaken — and more determined than ever to finish the job his late
predecessor, Tom Clements, had started: to end solitary confinement in
Colorado’s prisons.
This
$200 million prison in Ca–ñon City, Colorado was opened in 2010 exclusively to
house prisoners in solitary confinement. It is now vacant because of the
Colorado Department of Corrections’ decision to severely curtail use of
isolation. Officials are considering turning the 948-bed facility into a
reentry center to help inmates prepare for life after prison.
Speaking perhaps as much for himself
as for the estimated 100,000 U.S. prisoners a year who
endure a form of isolation that many believe is torture, Raemisch said, “If we
put you in there for 23 hours a day, you’re going to come out thinking
differently than you did when you came in.“I’ll tell you right now,” he added,
“segregation doesn’t work — at all.”
Raemisch’s
experiment reinforced his opinion that use of solitary can exacerbate violence
and mental illness among prisoners. Colorado’s overuse of solitary confinement
was “sending people out worse than when they came in.”“You can’t put someone
with a mental illness in a 7-by-13 cell for 23 hours a day and let the demons
chase them around,” he said. “So those who were severely mentally ill in the
past, that’s oftentimes where they ended up — sometimes for years.”
In 2014, after
hundreds of prisoners were returned to less-restrictive settings,
inmate-on-inmate violence rose, according to the most recent eight years of
data provided by the Colorado DOC. From fiscal year 2008 through fiscal year
2015, the average annual number of inmate-on-inmate assaults was 432; in 2015
it was 520. And there were 723 fights in 2015 — the highest in eight years.
But assaults on
staff decreased significantly. Between 2008 and 2013, there were an average of
262 assaults on staff per year. But those numbers dropped to 188 in 2014 and
160 in 2015.
Murder sparks leadership change
Raemisch became the
executive director of the Colorado prison system in 2013 after the
well-liked Clements was gunned down on his front doorstep by an inmate released directly to the streets
after seven years in solitary confinement. Colorado has officially ended this
practice for public safety reasons.
The
murder was sadly ironic: It was Clements, at the direction of Hickenlooper and
following pressure from advocacy groups and the Legislature, who spearheaded
the push to severely curtail the use of isolation in Colorado prisons.
Speaking in the
corrections headquarters conference room with a view of Pikes Peak in Colorado
Springs, Raemisch recounted the rapid reduction in the state’s solitary
confinement population: 1,500 prisoners in 2011, about 700 in 2013 and around
170 as of January. That number was back up to 185 as of May, Colorado DOC
spokeswoman Laurie Kilpatrick said.
Raemisch’s
goal is zero.
When
Rick Raemisch left Wisconsin to take over leadership of the Colorado prison
system, Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper gave him a mandate: Reduce solitary
confinement. Today, fewer than 200 prisoners are confined in 22-hour-a-day
isolation in Colorado state prisons compared to 1,500 in 2011.
During the
interview, Raemisch addresses the allegation that the Colorado prison system was
overstating the success of his reforms,
including whether such prisoners were continuing to be released directly from
solitary. In December, without acknowledging any wrongdoing, the department
agreed to pay its former statistician Maureen O’Keefe $280,000 to settle her
whistleblower complaint.
Raemisch disputes
the claim that his department has “cooked the books.”
“We’ve
had people question our numbers. I stand by our numbers 100 percent. There’s no
question. I always have and I always will,” Raemisch said, adding that his
agency has been “transparent” about its operations.
 |
| Rebecca Wallace, ACLU |
Rebecca
Wallace, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado,
says Rick Raemisch has helped to make reducing solitary confinement “palatable”
for other corrections leaders. Rebecca Wallace, staff attorney for the American
Civil Liberties Union in Colorado, said she cannot verify every statistic, but
she credits Raemisch and his predecessor for the agency’s “remarkable” data
collection and transparency.
“Compared
to what’s happening around the country, you can just go onto the DOC’s website
and you’ll see a level of information that you’re going to see very few other
places,” Wallace said.
Wallace was part of
an ACLU team that examined the department’s data to determine whether the
reported gains were real. While identifying several shortcomings, the ACLU report told Raemisch that
his reforms have improved public safety and “the humanity of Colorado’s
prisons.”
“We recognize that
because of policy changes under your administration, hundreds of men and women
have been freed from long-term isolation and no doubt hundreds more will never
endure it,” the report concluded. “Your work and public advocacy are not just
affecting prisoners in Colorado, but are having positive ripple effects across
the country and abroad.”
‘Cultural
change’ in Colorado
 |
| Christie Donner |
Christie
Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition,
has been fighting overincarceration and the use of solitary confinement for
more than 20 years. This 1995 photo is from a protest of the state’s first
“supermax” prison, the Colorado State Penitentiary. Inmates at the formerly
all-solitary-confinement prison are now allowed to socialize with one another
and interact with staff outside of their cells for four to six hours a day.
Among them is Christie Donner, executive director
of the Denver-based Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. Beginning in
the mid-1990s, Donner led the opposition against solitary confinement,
including protests against the prison that now stands vacant in the high desert
115 miles south of Denver.
Donner said solitary was a “popular” solution to
make prisons safer for staff and inmates.“They always talk about gangs and
murderers and sociopaths and really didn’t have any acknowledgement at all — zero
— that there could be any mental health risk, either for somebody who didn’t
have a mental health issue prior to going in, let alone for somebody that did
have a mental illness when they went in,” she said.
Donner said Colorado is leading the way in
shifting corrections away from solitary. “It is not just policy and practice
change. … It’s an actual attitudinal, cultural change within corrections as a
profession,” she said.
In Wisconsin, under a policy enacted in June
2015, the DOC has sharply reduced the maximum time in segregation for prisoners
who violate prison rules, from 360 days to 90 days, with longer stints possible
under some circumstances. But in practice, the Center revealed earlier this
year that some inmates were not aware of the changes
and had agreed to longer-than-maximum stints in isolation.
By comparison, Colorado currently has a maximum
stay in restrictive housing of 30 days for most in-prison offenses. The
exceptions are 60 days for murder and 45 days for manslaughter or kidnapping.
“When you start questioning everything, which is
what we’ve done, does 30 days make any more difference than 15 days? The fact
of the matter is, in our minds, it doesn’t,” Raemisch said. “So, 15 days is
going to be the maximum number. We’re moving toward that. We will get to that.”
In the past, Colorado also confined some
prisoners indefinitely for safety reasons; now the maximum for such
administrative confinement is one year, Raemisch said.
“We are the only state that, when someone goes
into restrictive housing, they know when they’re going to come out, and the
absolute maximum — absolute maximum — is a year,” Raemisch said.
Less
time in isolation
In
fiscal year 2015, there were an average of 158 inmates serving up to one year in restrictive housing-maximum
security in Colorado, spending up to 22 hours a day in
their cells. The average length of confinement has dropped from 28 months in
fiscal 2013 to eight months in fiscal 2015, according to agency figures.
For those with serious mental illness, isolation
is banned. Now, such inmates must be offered a minimum of 10 hours a week
outside their cells for therapy and 10 hours a week for other activities.
However, the ACLU was critical of a mass
reclassification of mental health status launched in 2013 before Raemisch came
on board that cut the percentage of prisoners listed as seriously mentally ill
from 17 percent to 10 percent.
The report also found an “extremely high” number
of prisoners were refusing at least part of the 10 hours a week of out-of-cell
therapy, particularly group therapy. It recommended more mental health staff to
provide individual counseling.
Raemisch said some prisoners are uncomfortable
interacting with others after lengthy isolation. Clinicians coax them out using
rewards such as extra canteen items or therapy dogs, he said.
Congregating
for the first time
At Colorado State Penitentiary, where
Raemisch served his solitary stint, Warden Travis Trani conducts a tour.
Prisoners being confined for violating prison rules talk and play board games
at tables in glassed-in common areas as the doors to their single cells stand
open. These inmates are outside of their cells for between four and six hours a
day in groups of between eight and 16, Trani said.
In the past, every prisoner was in his cell at
least 23 hours a day.“They would come out one hour a day — or I should say one
hour five times a week — and they would recreate in that area,” Trani said, pointing
to an empty cell. “They’d be there for an hour, they’d be allowed to shower,
then they would go back to their cell. One offender at a time … The offenders
never came out to congregate in these areas.”
In
the gym, which had been closed to inmate use for 20 years until 2014, prisoners
play basketball. When they leave the gym, they pass through a metal detector
unrestrained.
A
lawsuit by a mentally ill inmate forced construction of an outdoor recreation
facility at the Colorado State Penitentiary seen here. Until the facility is
completed later in 2016, prisoners will continue to have recreation time
indoors. Plaintiff Troy Anderson had sued after spending 11 years confined at
the prison with no outdoor recreation.
A fenced-in outdoor recreation area also is being
added to the prison, which will offer inmates access to sunshine for the first
time. The project is the result of a lawsuit filed by Troy
Anderson, a mentally ill inmate who had spent 11 years in solitary confinement
there. Ruling in 2012, a federal judge described the prison’s conditions as “a
paradigm of inhumane treatment.”
|
||
Laura Rovner, a University of Denver associate
law professor who teaches in the school’s Civil Rights Clinic, says the
Colorado Department of Corrections has shown “enormous progress” in reducing
solitary confinement in recent years.
|
“We
won on the issue of the need for people to be able to go outside, and that it
was a violation of the Constitution that they couldn’t,” said Laura Rovner, a
University of Denver associate law professor who teaches in the school’s Civil
Rights Clinic, which handled the case.
Rovner recalled one prisoner who had spent 20
years in isolation at the prison; she said his skin was “translucent” from lack
of exposure to the sun. Rovner confirmed that the Colorado corrections system
has shown “enormous progress” in reducing solitary confinement in recent
years.“Certainly this is a very different universe than the one we were in four
or five years ago,” she said.
Trani said the changes have been positive, but
they have created some new security problems.
“Right
now we’ve averaged around 10 fights, assaults a month,” he said. “They’ve
increased, obviously, because offenders are now coming out together — for the
first time.”
In Wisconsin,
inmates in solitary are allowed some out-of-cell time, but it is much shorter
and, usually, it is alone. Corrections spokeswoman Joy Staab said in an email
that each inmate in restrictive housing is offered at least four hours a week
of out-of-cell recreation plus time for showers and medical appointments —
nearly identical to the program Colorado has abandoned. Some inmates also
receive out-of-cell time for meals, programming or additional recreation, she
said.
Conditions improve
for inmates
 |
| Elijah Beatty |
Colorado
State Penitentiary inmate Elijah Beatty says there is more freedom but more
potential for friction between rival gangs under changes to solitary
confinement enacted in Colorado. Elijah Beatty is serving a 76-year sentence at
Colorado State Penitentiary for a 1999 case in which he shot at a car in
Colorado Springs with a father, mother and child inside. Beatty and the father
had had a run-in earlier at a grocery store.
Beatty, whose heavily muscled arms are covered with tattoos, agreed to
an impromptu interview during a tour of the prison. Asked to compare his former
stints in solitary confinement with his current status, Beatty said he now
attends class with a teacher rather than having a book slid to him through a
slot in the door. “We’re actually interacting with people,” Beatty said. “And
we’re able to speak or we’re able to reflect, when before we were just stuck in
a cell back then and we had nothing to reflect on. … We just had our moods and
got pissed off.”In the past, “We didn’t have nothin.” Now, he said, “We’re able
to run around and play some basketball. So I can be fair and say
recreation-wise, we’re able to do more now than we were able to do back then.”
But there are downsides. Beatty,
35, who is a member of the Crips, said the new approach can lead to clashes
between rival gangs making “the penitentiary very unpredictable and a tad more
dangerous.”
The reduction in
solitary confinement also means Colorado now has a vacant prison in Cañon City
costing taxpayers about $20 million a year. Several ideas — including
converting it to a pre-release center for inmates — have been floated.
Raemisch acknowledged that dismantling
solitary confinement in Colorado has not been entirely smooth. But, he added,
“There’s no question, at least in my mind and from our data, that the less you
use segregation, the safer your facilities are.”
Reporting
for this story was supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, the Center on
Media, Crime and Justice and the Vital Projects Fund. The nonprofit Wisconsin
Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org)
collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, other
news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and
Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the
Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of
its affiliates.
