Time to rethink solitary confinement?

Being alone in your own head 23 hours a day in a 48-square-foot poured-concrete cell makes the mad madder and the bad even worse, inmates say.

"One guy told me he had, like, 15 faces on tissue paper, and he had names on them," said inmate Michael Richards, who spent about seven of the last 11 years in solitary confinement at Clallam Bay Corrections Centre.

"He'd say, ‘Hey Bob, good morning.' He'd talk to them through the day, just to keep that contact, because he couldn't talk to anyone else."

For centuries, solitary confinement has been the big stick of prisons, the harshest means to deter rule-breaking.

But the benefits are being reconsidered, and Washington state is at the forefront of a national re-examination. Instead of facing nothing but forced solitude, Washington inmates in solitary units - called Intensive Management Units, or IMUs - are increasingly being let out for hours to attend classes, see counsellors or hit the gym.

It is a clear move to the left in prison management, but one that Washington prison managers say is rooted in data.

More emphasis on rehabilitation appears to calm behaviour in the prison, and cuts violent recidivism on the streets, experts say. It is also a cost-saver: Solitary confinement costs about three times as much as keeping a prisoner in general custody.

At Walla Walla, hard-core gang members assigned to isolation units are chained to classroom desks for nine hours a week. At the Monroe Correctional Complex, a special unit for inmates with mental illness and traumatic brain injuries - who often end up in solitary confinement - is in the works.

At Clallam Bay, once the so-called gladiator ground of the state prison system, the new approach has slowed a revolving door of hardened inmates who returned, again and again, to isolation.

"Now that we've got it up and running, to look at it through the rear-view mirror, we wonder why didn't we do this 10 years ago," said Assistant Secretary Dan Pacholke, a 30-year Department of Corrections (DOC) veteran.

Solitary confinement's history is a pendulum swing between concepts of punishment and rehabilitation. It was pioneered in the early 1800s so inmates, alone with just a Bible, could repent. It fell out of favour when the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890 found inmates, unreformed, instead grew "violently insane" or suicidal.

It returned to wider use in the 1990s as states, drifting from rehabilitation, built "supermax" prisons; by 2005, 40 states had at least 25,000 prisoners on lockdown 23 hours a day.

A series of recent lawsuits, alleging the practice violates the Constitution's Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment, led to court orders curtailing its use.

Washington avoided such lawsuits but began reconsidering solitary after violent clashes in IMU units at Shelton in the mid-1990s. About 400 of the state's 17,500 inmates are in such units, which also house death-row prisoners and those in protective custody.

University of Washington professor David Lovell studied solitary confinement in the state under a DOC contract, and found the isolated inmates were most often gang members serving long sentences for violent crimes. Up to 45 percent were mentally ill or had traumatic brain injuries.

And once in solitary, they stayed in - for nearly a year, on average - because prison staff were reluctant to send likely violent inmates back into the general population.

Those who were released often returned, after committing new assaults on corrections officers or other inmates.

Most disturbing, Lovell found a quarter of inmates were released to the streets directly from solitary confinement. Unaccustomed to human contact, they were more prone to quickly commit new violence.

Roy Marchand, serving 10 years for manslaughter, did 27 months in isolation, but lasted just 30 days before getting into a fight and going right back.

"The minute you think it's disrespect time or what not, it's time to jump, because usually the one who jumps first gets on top," he said.

Path out of isolation

Life in solitary is spare: no personal effects except what can be posted within a 12- by 18-inch space on the wall; meals slid through a door; and one hour a day for showering or for exercise in a small, walled yard, with two officers in escort.

At Clallam Bay, the path out of isolation runs through the colour-coded tiers of the Intensive Transition Programme (ITP), housed since 2006 in a unit originally built for juveniles.

About 30 inmates, all volunteers, agree to a nine-month programme stocked with coursework such as "moral recognition therapy" and "self-repair," gradually earning more freedoms.

"Someone needs to say, ‘I want this,' " said IMU supervisor Steve Blakeman, bald and weathered, a corrections officer out of central casting. "The novelty of living in a box has worn off."

Isolation has a purpose, Blakeman said, comparing it to the "adult version of having to stand in the corner."

But Lovell's data - especially on the recidivism for those released directly to the street - was important, Blakeman said.

"These are the guys who are going to be in the grocery store line next to your daughter one day," he said. "This is an ethic and legal responsibility we have to the community."

The four-step programme starts in an unusual classroom: a row of steel cages, inmates chained to floor-mounted chain hooks beneath metal desks.

Earnest Collins, a 24-year-old serving a life sentence for murdering a SeaTac cabdriver, volunteered after two fights earned him trips to solitary.

The programme, he acknowledged, also would allow him more visits with his toddler-aged son. Family visits are highly restricted while an inmate is in isolation.

Collins insists he is "open" to change, reading, at Blakeman's suggestion, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People."

"I wish life were like ‘The Butterfly Effect,' " said Collins, recalling a 2004 movie about a man using supernatural power to alter past events. "I wish I could go back."

Before the program started, inmates released from isolation returned more than 50 percent of the time. Since then, 131 inmates have graduated; 107 have not returned.

"It works because it's rational for someone to choose to live in a way that doesn't have them locked in a hole," said Lovell. "If you give them the choice, it's a rational decision to make."

'A safe harbour'

In prison lingo, they are called "dings" - inmates suffering psychotic episodes, banging on sinks, smearing feces on themselves and their walls, shouting in their solo cells.

Inmates with mental illness have historically clustered in isolation units, sometimes because of their behavior, sometimes voluntarily checking into protective custody.

Clallam Bay's ITP has two staff psychologists, one of the biggest added costs.

Pacholke, the assistant DOC secretary, said the planned isolation unit at Monroe for inmates with mental illness or traumatic brain injuries will include group mental-health care, a result of work with disability advocates.

"You want to somewhat create a safe harbour," he said.

Angela Browne of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, said Washington is on the edge of a national wave that is causing prison systems to rethink solitary confinement.

Financial pressures from the recession have contributed, because such units are so expensive. "And there's a willingness to not just say, ‘Punish punish punish, they deserve it,' " she said.

It's a complicated shift for a prison.

Richards, the Clallam Bay inmate, had already graduated from ITP when he was interviewed by The Seattle Times last summer. He'd been a member of the Surenos gang. A tattoo across his neck reads, "Test Your Fate."

He said he'd also graduated from seven anger-management classes "but had little to show for it," and was set to be released this summer, after serving 15 years for residential burglaries. So he said he bought into the ITP's behavioural change ideas.

"I put my heart into it," he said. "No one expects me to gang bang. Everybody respects that I'm out of the crap, out of the politics."

In November, he went back into solitary confinement, pending an investigation into gang activity.