Solitary confinement can eat away at someone's mind, making mental illness worse and leaving many people depressed, suicidal, hopeless or hallucinating. It's no place for individuals with mental illness.
In 1995, a federal court in California agreed. After a trial exposing the appalling conditions at Pelican Bay—the state's most notorious, all-isolation, supermax prison and the site of repeated hunger strikes—a federal judge ordered all mentally ill prisoners out of the prison's security housing unit (SHU) in a case called Madrid v. Gomez.
But, because of the sometimes frustratingly limited nature of legal decisions, this judge's order only impacted Pelican Bay. While Pelican Bay has for years been notorious for its conditions of extreme isolation—leading thousands of prisoners across California to participate in the largest prisoner hunger strike in history, some for as long as two months—it is the only California prison in which prisoners with mental illness may not be held in solitary confinement as a matter of law. This means that seriously mentally ill prisoners all over California continue to be held in long-term solitary confinement, even though the Madrid order prohibits those conditions for the mentally ill at Pelican Bay.
It's time to change that. Today in Sacramento, key witnesses, including experts in psychology and corrections practices, will take the stand in support of the first statewide case aimed at getting all mentally ill people in California out of solitary confinement. The case is called Coleman v. Brown, and beginning today these experts will help to expose the extreme and sometimes irreversible damage of holding people with mental illness in solitary confinement.
The Coleman plaintiffs have marshaled stunning evidence to support their claims that all California prisons must remove mentally ill prisoners from solitary confinement. Statewide, according to case filings, about 9 percent of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's (CDCR) approximately 123,600 total prisoners are held in some form of segregated housing—but that number includes 21 percent of mentally ill prisoners system-wide. This means that mentally ill prisoners in California are held in disproportionately high numbers in solitary confinement. Even more alarming is evidence uncovered by the Coleman plaintiffs showing the dramatically heightened suicide rate among prisoners in segregated housing: in 2011, more than one third of all suicides in CDCR facilities took place in segregation units; more than half of the individuals who committed suicide in the first half of 2012 were housed in segregation; and 58 percent of the 19 people who have taken their life to date in 2013 occurred in segregation units.
These disproportionately high instances of suicide are unfortunately not surprising to those familiar with the harms of solitary confinement. Psychological studies consistently show that solitary confinement can wreak distinctive harms on prisoners, including heightened symptoms of hopelessness, depression, hallucinations, self-mutilation, suicidal ideation, and suicidal acts. And a 2008 study of California prisons noted a striking correlation between segregated housing and prison incident reports of self-mutilation and suicide.
Although the harms of solitary confinement for mentally ill prisoners are well known, many states, including California, have been slow to catch up to the growing trend against prolonged solitary. Across the country, corrections departments, judges, activists, prisoners and their families alike will be watching to see if the Eastern District of California holds that the CDRC must forbid the housing of mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement. If the court holds that it must, then California—and the rest of the country—will be forced to rethink its statewide policies governing the use of solitary confinement.
Helen Vera is a fellow of the National Prison Project at the ACLU

From revelations of widespread NSA spying to high profile data breaches, transparency about how personal information is collected, used and disclosed is more important than ever.  California has long been at the forefront of transparency efforts. With updates to the California Online Privacy Protection Act and data breach notification law passed this year and a bill to modernize the 2003 Shine the Light law up for a vote in January, the state is continuing to lead the way.

In our new ACLU of California policy paper, Losing the Spotlight: A Study of California’s Shine the Light Law, we take a close look at the state’s landmark transparency law as it turns a decade old. We examine why it’s important and whether it’s continuing to provide transparency about the “who, what, where and when” of how a business handles personal information. We also highlight public support for transparency and draw specific lessons that can inform policymakers and businesses seeking to protect privacy and increase transparency about data collection, use and sharing in the modern digital era.
Here are a few of our major takeaways:

• Transparency really does work, and in three important ways. It incentivizes companies to take steps that are good for consumer privacy and good for business, facilitates public knowledge about issues that leads to policy change and empowers consumers to make more privacy-protective choices.
• Consumers are very concerned about how their personal information is being collected and shared, and rightfully so, because information landing in the hands of data brokers, third party advertisers and applications has led to a wide range of harms. Seniors have been scammed. Americans have been denied jobs and mortgages. Pregnancies, health concerns and sexual orientation have been revealed, too.
• Californians cannot effectively use the Shine the Light law to learn what is happening to their personal information due to obsolete provisions and large loopholes.

Our study highlights a few suggestions meant to ensure that transparency measures work effectively for both consumers and companies in the modern digital world:

• Consumers should be able to learn what personal information companies collect and disclose about them.
• Transparency rights should encompass a wide array of personal information, including location and sexual orientation information, and should reach businesses that consumers may not directly interact with, such as online advertisers and data brokers.
• The process for learning how personal information has been collected and shared should be straightforward and quick for consumers.
• Transparency requirements should be flexible for companies to implement and balance legitimate business and security concerns with fair enforcement.

We are encouraged that policymakers at the state, federal, and international levels are focusing on transparency’s important role in protecting privacy, and we applaud initial efforts by businesses to increase transparency about government demands for information.
Almost 100 years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said that sunlight is the “best of disinfectants.” Echoing Justice Brandeis’ classic observation, Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez recently emphasized the “need to move commercial data practices into the sunlight” in order to “empower consumers to make sure they are being treated fairly.” More needs to be done, and our study of California’s Shine the Light law seeks to help chart a path forward.
Download the full report.
Nicole A. Ozer is Technology & Civil Liberties Project policy director at the ACLU of Northern California

"Veterans don't deserve special care, benefits or assistance." How many Americans hold this view? How many would vote for a politician who supported it? And yet this is the message that veterans like Greg Valentini hear every day.
Valentini served in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. As a private in the Army's 101st Airborne Division, he participated in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the assault on Tora Bora that sought Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders, as well as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the attack on Karbala to destroy Saddam Hussein's elite Fedayeen forces. He took part in intense ground fighting, under nearly constant sniper fire and mortar bombardment, and saw numerous comrades and civilians gruesomely maimed and killed. For his service, he received six decorations.
After risking his life abroad, he suffers from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, lacks a safe, stable place to call home and struggles to survive on the streets.
Like Valentini, approximately 62,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, with about twice that number experiencing homelessness at some point over the course of a year. Researchers have found that veterans make up a much larger percentage of the homeless population than the general population, meaning that veterans are more likely to be homeless than non-veterans. What makes this shameful is that there is a solution.
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) committed itself to the goal of ending homelessness among veterans by 2015, operating on the principle that the solution to homelessness is permanent housing coupled with supportive services to address mental illness, substance addiction, and other challenges resulting from their service. The strategy is working, albeit slowly: the number of homeless veterans who have used VA programs to obtain permanent housing has risen dramatically -- from 18,446 in 2009 to 35,905 in 2012 -- and the number of homeless veterans has steadily decreased -- from 76,000 in 2009 to 62,000 in 2012.
Research has demonstrated that permanent supportive housing works even for those who have been homeless for years. Indeed, it not only ends homelessness for them, but it also costs less than having them live on the streets or in shelters and cycle through emergency rooms and jails because their mental and physical disabilities have not been addressed.
Some might think that the recession or the slow recovery from it explains why so many veterans are homeless, but the truth is that we are not close to making the most effective use of available resources, much less doing everything possible to make permanent supportive housing available to them all.

Look no further than Los Angeles, the homeless veteran capital of the nation, with approximately 6,000 veterans living on our streets. The VA owns nearly 400 acres of property in West Los Angeles. The property was deeded to it by private individuals in 1888 to establish a permanent home for disabled soldiers, yet it has not provided any long-term housing for veterans there for decades. Some buildings previously used for housing inexplicably have been allowed to fall into disuse and disrepair. Nearly one-third of the property has been leased for uses unrelated to housing veterans, like a rental car parking lot, a hotel laundry, and a dog park, and no one can account for where the revenue from the leases has gone, much less tie it to expanding access to supportive housing.
The ACLU of Southern California and its partners filed a federal lawsuit against the VA on behalf of Valentini and other homeless veterans, challenging the legality of the leases and the failure to provide housing on the property. Federal Judge S. James Otero recently ruled the leases unlawful, and the VA has decided to appeal that decision. Instead of devoting limited resources to fight this ruling, it could have used them to ensure that the property operates as intended to house disabled veterans. The VA's decision to appeal speaks volumes about whether it intends to end homelessness among veterans or defend the status quo.
The VA's failure to meet Valentini and other veterans' most basic need for housing should cause us to question how much our government values the sacrifices they make. As we commemorate Veterans Day, we should refuse to be satisfied with platitudes and demand that our elected leaders make permanent supportive housing available to all our wounded warriors -- starting with those who live under freeways or in dumpsters when they could be living at the VA's West L.A. campus -- or be honest with ourselves and admit we as a nation honor only those veterans who don't need our help to keep from living and dying on our streets.
Hector Villagra is executive director of ACLU SoCal; Cross-posted from the Huffington Post. Follow Hector on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HectorSoCalACLU