Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to introduce the Solitary Confinement Reform Act, a bill that would make significant reforms to the use of solitary confinement in federal prisons and encourage states to implement similar reforms. Before I discuss what this legislation would do, let me explain why I am introducing it.

Several years ago, I read an article in the New Yorker magazine entitled ``Hellhole.'' This article was written by Dr. Atul Gawande, a medical doctor who examined the human impact of long-term solitary confinement in American prisons. In this article, Dr. Gawande asked:

If prolonged isolation is--as research and experience have confirmed for decades--so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

At the time, I was serving as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, and I decided to hold a hearing on solitary confinement--the first-ever congressional hearing on the topic. It turned out to be a hearing that I will never forget.

One of our witnesses at the hearing was Anthony Graves. I will never forget Mr. Graves' testimony. He spent 18 years in prison, including 16 years in solitary confinement. In 2010, he became the 12th death row inmate to be exonerated in Texas. Think about that--Mr. Graves spent 16 years in solitary for a crime he didn't commit. At the hearing, Mr. Graves testified about his experience, and here is what he said:

I lived under some of the worst conditions imaginable with the filth, the food, the total disrespect of human dignity. I lived under the rules of a system that is literally driving men out of their minds.

He went on to say:

Solitary confinement does one thing, it breaks a man's will to live and he ends up deteriorating. He's never the same person again. . . . I have been free for almost two years and I still cry at night, because no one out here can relate to what I have gone through. I battle with feelings of loneliness. I've tried therapy but it didn't work. The therapist was crying more than me. She couldn't believe that our system was putting men through this sort of inhumane treatment.

I think that sentiment echoed through the minds of everyone in the hearing room as Mr. Graves gave his testimony. We couldn't believe that our system was putting inmates through this sort of inhumane treatment.
Mr. Graves' story shed light on the damaging impact of holding tens of thousands of men, women, and children in small windowless cells 23 hours a day--for weeks, months, years--with very little, if any, contact with the outside world. Clearly, such extreme isolation can have serious psychological effects on inmates.
At the hearing, we also examined the serious fiscal impact of solitary confinement. We learned that in a federal high security facility, the cost of housing an inmate in segregation is about 1.3 times the cost of housing an inmate in a general population unit. At the Federal supermax prison in Florence, CO, the cost of housing an inmate in segregation is more than 2.5 times the cost of housing an inmate in the general population. Is this a wise use of taxpayer dollars when the money we spend on our Federal prisons already consumes one quarter of the Department of Justice's budget every year? So every dollar that we spend holding a prisoner in solitary confinement is a dollar that we don't spend on community policing, crime prevention, and drug treatment.

We also discussed the significant public safety consequences of widespread solitary confinement. Some people might ask, ``What happens in our prisons doesn't affect me, so why should I care?'' But consider this--the vast majority of inmates held in segregation will be released into our communities someday. So if solitary confinement destabilizes prisoners and makes them more likely to engage in violence or other criminal conduct, then that affects all of us.

Two years after my first hearing, I held a follow-up hearing. At that hearing, we heard from Damon Thibodeaux, who spent 15 years in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary before he was exonerated in 2012. Mr. Thibodeaux testified:

I do not condone what those who have killed and committed other serious offenses have done. But I also don't condone what we do to them, when we put them in solitary for years on end and treat them as sub-human. We are better than that. As a civilized society, we should be better than that.

Mr. Thibodeaux was right. We should be better than that. Thankfully, our society is beginning to recognize that the widespread use of solitary confinement in our prison system must change.

In 2014, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy testified to Congress that, quote, ``solitary confinement literally drives men mad.'' Last year, Justice Kennedy again brought up the issue in a powerful concurring opinion. He wrote, quote, ``research still confirms what this Court suggested over a century ago: Years on end of near-total isolation exacts a terrible price.'' He went on to note that, quote, ``the judiciary may be required . . . to determine whether workable alternative systems for long-term confinement exist, and, if so, whether a correctional system should be required to adopt them.'' Pope Francis has also criticized solitary confinement. In a 2014 speech at the Vatican, he referred to the practice of extreme isolation as ``torture'' and ``a genuine surplus of pain added to the actual suffering of imprisonment.'' He went on to say:

The lack of sensory stimuli, the total impossibility of communication and the lack of contact with other human beings induce mental and physical suffering such as paranoia, anxiety, depression, weight loss, and significantly increase the suicidal tendency.

I still don't fully understand how our society reached a point at which the overuse of solitary confinement became acceptable, or normal.

But I know that we need to do something about it.

In light of the mounting evidence of the harmful, even dangerous, impacts of solitary confinement, states around the country have led the way in reassessing the practice. Take Colorado, for example, which has implemented a number of critical reforms. Colorado no longer releases offenders directly from solitary to the community and no longer places inmates with serious mental illness in solitary. Have these reforms made Colorado's prisons less safe? No, in fact since Colorado changed its solitary confinement practices, inmate-on-staff assaults are at their lowest levels since 2006, incidents of self-harm have decreased, and most inmates released from solitary are not returning.

Progress has been made at the Federal level as well. After my 2014 hearing I called for an end to solitary confinement for juveniles, pregnant women, and inmates with serious mental illness in our federal prisons. I also asked the Federal Bureau of Prisons to submit for the first time to an outside independent assessment of its solitary confinement practices. The assessment, released last year, noted that some improvements have been made since the hearing, most importantly in the declining number of inmates in solitary confinement. The assessment also made a number of recommendations for additional reforms, such as improving mental health care for inmates in segregation and establishing alternatives to segregation for inmates in protective custody. BOP began taking steps to address these issues following the release of the assessment.

Last year, building upon this independent assessment, the Department of Justice undertook a review of the Bureau of Prisons' use of solitary confinement. This January, President Obama announced that he had accepted a number of DOJ's recommendations to reform and reduce the practice of solitary confinement in the Federal prison system-- including implementing the ban on juvenile solitary confinement that I called for in 2014.

I welcome the reforms that the President announced, and I am glad to see that the Bureau of Prisons is making some progress in implementing these reforms. However, our Federal prison system is still housing more than 10,000 inmates in segregation as I speak. The number of inmates in solitary confinement since my first hearing has decreased from about 13,600 to about 10,400. But the number of total Federal prisoners has also dropped significantly since 2012. So the percentage of Federal prisoners in solitary has only gone down from 7.8 percent to 6.7 percent. Clearly, there is much more work to be done.

That is why Senator Coons and I are joining together to introduce the Solitary Confinement Reform Act. This legislation will build on the Justice Department's recommendations to further reform and reduce the use of solitary confinement in Federal prisons.

Our bill ensures that inmates are only placed in solitary confinement when absolutely necessary--such as to control a substantial and immediate threat to the safety of other inmates or corrections staff, or to punish an inmate for a significant and serious disciplinary violation.

Our bill also improves the conditions of confinement for prisoners in solitary and establishes firm time limits on segregation, in order to combat long-term isolation. However, we recognize that some extremely dangerous inmates require long-term separation from the general population. That's why our bill ensures that BOP can continue to separate those inmates who pose the greatest risk to other inmates, staff, and the general public.

Among the most important provisions in our bill are the strict limits on the use of solitary confinement for inmates nearing their release date, inmates in protective custody, LGBT inmates, and inmates who are minors, have a serious mental illness, have an intellectual or physical disability, or are pregnant or in the first eight weeks of postpartum recovery after birth.

For inmates who are placed in segregated housing, our bill improves access to mental health care and ensures that a robust review process is in place. Additionally, our bill increases transparency and accountability by requiring the Attorney General to establish a Civil Rights Ombudsman within the Bureau of Prisons to review inmate complaints, and directing BOP to submit an annual assessment to Congress detailing their solitary confinement policies, regulations, and data. Finally, our bill establishes a National Resource Center on Solitary Confinement Reform that would provide vital resources to state and local jurisdictions as corrections systems around the country pursue reductions in solitary confinement.
I want to thank Senator Coons for working with me on this legislation, and Senators Booker, Leahy, and Franken for joining as original cosponsors of the bill.

I also want to thank the ACLU, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Just Detention International, Campaign for Youth Justice, Center for Children's Law and Policy, Human Rights Campaign, National Alliance on Mental Illness, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Bend the Arc Jewish Action, Interfaith Action for Human Rights, T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, and Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs for endorsing the Solitary Confinement Reform Act.

This legislation is one of many steps we should take to reform our criminal justice system and make our country safer, more just, and more fiscally responsible. I urge my colleagues to support the Solitary Confinement Reform Act.

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