Brian Williams of NBC’s Rock Center featured a disturbing “expose’ ” on Friday, Mar. 22, 2013, regarding teenagers being isolated from adult inmates while in custody by placing them in solitary confinement. This occurs when a juvenile is certified to stand trial as an adult. If the juvenile is unable to post bond, (s)he remains in custody. As such, (s)he must be kept from adult inmates. Consequently, solitary confinement.
The problem juveniles pose in pretrial detention is not new. It is endemic when you mix juvenile and adult inmates. This “problem” is becoming more prevalent due to the proliferation of certifying juveniles to stand trial as adults. But isolating juveniles, even in juvenile institutions, has been commonplace for those who work in these facilities or had the misfortune of doing time as an inmate.
This is not simply my opinion; it is my experience as a juvenile who bounced from institution to institution and as a criminal defense attorney for the past thirty-five years.
From 13 years old until 20, I was in and out of lock-up facilities. Beginning in Woodview Detention Home, I was confined a week or more during each stay. Each confinement was in a small room with a bed and toilet. The rooms were not cells; rather, they had metal doors. Interaction with others was severely limited. If I was not having a meal, I was confined to my room. The lack of interaction with others was stressful; it was meant to be.
I progressed to Boys Totem Town, confined a minimum of seven months each of the three times I was there. Although BTT did not have isolation rooms during my first two stays, if a juvenile was out of control he was returned to Woodview Detention Home and placed in a secure room, isolated from all inmates. During my last trip to BTT the institution had created an isolation room segregated from the main part of the facility, two floors above where most inmates congregated. After BTT I was next confined at Lino Lakes Diagnostic and Reception Center for two months. If you could not function in the main population, you were placed in isolation in B Building. Once I was “diagnosed” at Lino, I was transferred to Red Wing State Training School for Boys where I spent the next eight months, the first forty-five days in Brown lock-up cottage. My room only had a bed. No sink or toilet; no magazines or books. No conversation, no television. It became a daily struggle to cope with the isolation. I was deteriorating emotionally, psychologically. Two years later I was sentenced to St. Cloud Reformatory for Men for five years. Upon admission I was placed in B Hall, a segregated unit where I could see inmates at the far end of the cell block as I peered out through the bars. There was no contact with inmates for the first six weeks. Out of segregation for approximately thirty days, I got drugs, a needle and a fight with a couple of guards. I was confined in segregation for thirty days. The well-used isolation unit was on the top floor of the segregation unit in D Hall.
My experiences as a juvenile and adult inmate occurred over forty years ago. Everybody in the juvenile and adult systems knew of the isolation units. There were inmates at Woodview and Red Wing that I spent time with in isolation who could not cope with the debilitating, psychological effects of confinement. They came out of isolation worse off, more unstable than they were before isolation.
Segregation, particularly for high-strung inmates, is bad. It is one step removed from inmate contact. Isolation is two steps removed from inmate contact. That is, the inmate is segregated from other inmates in isolation. No conversations. You can’t even see other inmates. The atmosphere is subdued; eerily quiet. You feel buried alive.
As an attorney for the past thirty-five years, I have been aware of isolation units in different facilities. Minnesota’s Oak Park Heights Prison comes to mind. Before I became an attorney I was a paralegal representing inmates at disciplinary hearings at Stillwater Prison. This program, the Legal Advocacy Project, grew out of a consent decree entered into by the Minnesota Department of Corrections after United States District Court Judge Edward Devitt issued an order condemning the isolation unit in the back-end of C Hall as cruel and inhumane.
Isolation is draconian when applied to inmates; it is devastatingly cruel when applied to juveniles, regardless of the reason. There is no justification for it. And it is the height of ignorance to respond to arguments against isolation with the pithy cliche’ “Can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”
These “corrections” institutions correct virtually nothing. Isolation corrects nothing. It is the inmate- not the institution- that corrects the problem, be it chemical dependency, lack of job skills or education. Teenagers in the criminal justice system’s solitary confinement is a deliberate, calculated policy decision based on efficiency and indifference. It’s that simple.
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