Key Findings from Validation Surveys in NY Battleground Districts
Civil Liberties Union
This report, Boxed In: The True Cost of Extreme Isolation in New York’s Prisons, is the product of an intensive, year-long investigation that involved communication with more than 100 people who have spent significant amounts of time – in one case, more than 20 years – in extreme isolation. The authors interviewed prisoners’ family members and corrections staff, and analyzed thousands of pages of Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) records obtained through the state’s open records laws. The report is accompanied by a website – www.nyclu.org/boxedin – featuring excerpts of prisoners’ letters about life in extreme isolation, a library of DOCCS data and records, statistical analyses and a video featuring the voices of family members whose loved ones have been held in extreme isolation. Over the past 20 years, New York has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate an extensive network of extreme isolation cells, which DOCCS calls “Special Housing Units” or “SHUs” – and prisoners call “the Box.” New York has nearly 5,000 SHU beds located in 39 prisons across the state, including two dedicated extreme isolation prisons – Upstate and Southport Correctional Facilities – that combined cost about $76 million a year to operate. New York practices a unique brand of “solitary confinement.” About half of the 4,500 prisoners in solitary confinement spend 23 hours a day in an isolation cell completely alone. The other half are confined in an isolation cell the size of a parking spot with another prisoner, a practice that forces two strangers into intimate, constant proximity for weeks, months and even years on end. The NYCLU uses the term “extreme isolation” to capture the practice of subjecting one or two people in a cell to the conditions most commonly understood as solitary confinement. Based on a year of study and analysis, the NYCLU found that:
Extreme isolation is different than prisoner separation, which has long been an accepted corrections practice. Corrections officials can separate and remove violent or vulnerable prisoners from the general prison population without subjecting them to the punishing physical and psychological deprivation of extreme isolation – a point of consensus among corrections officials in other states, legal scholars and international human rights bodies. The NYCLU recommends that New York end its dependence on extreme isolation by: