The Pelican Bay hunger strike has ended, but the conversation about solitary confinement must continue. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) must change its policies on solitary confinement for many persuasive reasons.  Some may point to the vast number of studies that have found long-term solitary confinement to be psychologically harmful. A 2003 UC Santa Cruz study, for example, found that months or years of isolation causes inmates to suffer from chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, despair, and irrational anger.
Some may rely on Aristotle’s argument that, by depriving a person of personal interaction, we rob him of the chance to rehabilitate himself into a virtuous citizen. Some will recall Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1826 finding that “absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man; it destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity; it does not reform, it kills.”
Others may cite the 1890 Supreme Court opinion stating that prisoners subjected to solitary confinement became violently insane and committed suicide. Still others may be persuaded by the myriad accounts of former prisoners of war and hostages who describe losing their minds when subjected to solitary confinement. And others may quote the California prison psychiatrist who concluded, “It’s a standard psychiatric concept, if you put people in isolation, they will go insane.”   In 2006, SHU units constituted 5 percent of California’s prison population but accounted for about half of inmate suicides. In 2005, SHU units accounted for almost 70 percent of suicides.
And some will no doubt be moved by the notion that solitary confinement violates basic notions of human decency, the constitution, and international human rights.
But we should all be concerned with California’s use of the SHU because the SHU undermines public safety. Inmates who spend lengths of time in solitary confinement are more likely to commit crimes in the future. People who have been cut off from human contact are ill- equipped to be productive members of our society, and the vast majority of inmates in solitary confinement will be released someday. In 2006, fully 95% of the inmates in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay were scheduled for release. So, if psychological, philosophical, legal, and humanitarian concerns provide insufficient rationale, we should call on the CDCR to make changes if only in the interest of self-preservation.

• To use solitary confinement only in exceptional cases, for as short a time as possible.
• To prohibit the use of solitary confinement for prisoners suffering from mental illness and developmental disabilities.
• To require regular mental health evaluations for prisoners in the SHU, and to require prompt removal of those who develop signs of mental illness.
• To mitigate extreme isolation by allowing some human interaction with staff or others, and by allowing some access to the outside world in the form of books, magazines, television, radio, and other media.
• And to fully prepare inmates who spent time in the SHU to reintegrate into the community.

 Hector Villagra is the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

In response to the July 5th beating death by Fullerton Police of 37-year-old Kelly Thomas, a homeless man with schizophrenia, ACLU of Southern California Executive Director Hector Villagra released the following statement:

“While much of what led to Kelly Thomas’ death is still hazy, several things are already crystal clear now.

We are pleased that the FBI will investigate Thomas’ death.  Although Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas reportedly has some two dozen investigators working on the case, interviewing up to 100 witnesses, the district attorney has an abysmal track record when it comes to investigating and prosecuting officer-involved deaths.

In 2004, an investigation by the O.C. Weekly found that of 50 officer-involved shootings in the previous five years, not a single one was pursued for prosecution by the D.A.’s office.  In 2007, the D.A. cleared two Huntington Beach officers in the shooting death of Ashley McDonald, who was shot 15 times after brandishing a knife.

The bottom line is that the district attorney’s office is simply not the body to conduct an independent investigation. These are prosecutors accustomed to working with police officers and building their cases with the assistance of police officers.  A thorough, impartial inquiry requires investigators who are not in daily contact with police; indeed, whose daily work doesn’t require police cooperation.

We call on Fullerton Police and the district attorney’s office to release a full accounting of what took place, including the release of additional videos from the bus depot showing the beating.  The district attorney’s office has said those videos may present a different picture of the incident; we won’t know until they’re shared with the public.

The incident also spotlights the complete lack in Orange County of government services for the mentally ill and chronically homeless populations. Without such services, tragic incidents like this will continue to occur, as police officers, improperly trained in identifying people with mental illness or de-escalating encounters with them, are called upon to respond to homeless individuals with untreated illnesses." 

A previous version of this page mistakenly referred to an investigation conducted by the LA Weekly.  The investigation was in fact conducted by the O.C. Weekly.  We regret the error.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department took a swing at the rights of all Americans this week.

In February, the ACLU and other groups filed a lawsuit on behalf of Southern California Muslims who were subjected to unlawful FBI surveillance on the basis of their religion. Between 2006 and 2007, the FBI paid an Irvine man to misrepresent his identity and infiltrate several mainstream mosques in order to collect the personal information of hundreds of Muslim Americans living in the area.
On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder asserted that the lawsuit should be dismissed based on the “state secrets” privilege. According to the government, whether or not the FBI violated the First Amendment right of American citizens to freely practice their religion is a state secret.
Students of the Bush administration should remember the state secrets privilege from its frequent application in covering up human rights abuses. Lawsuits filed against the system of CIA black sites where suspects of terrorism-- some of whom were innocent-- were detained and tortured, as well as against the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, were both dismissed using the state secrets doctrine.
During his campaign, President Obama attacked these abuses and actually promised to reform the state secrets program. But talk is cheap. Since taking office Obama has defended several of the prior administration’s legal positions on state secrets.
This week, however, brought a new low in the invidious history of the state secrets privilege: the administration asserted the privilege in an attempt to dismiss a lawsuit brought by United States citizens, challenging the constitutionality of an operation, conducted by a domestic law enforcement agency on American soil. In fact, the government says, it’s not only a state secret to disclose who FBI agents surveilled. It’s also a secret whom they weren’t surveilling.
This view of the state secrets doctrine represents an assault on our constitutional system. If the government’s assertion of the state secrets privilege in this case were accepted, then an FBI program to arrest American citizens on the basis of their race (or a government-backed campaign to detain its political opponents) would be immunized from constitutional challenge in the courts -- as long as the government says that doing so would protect national security. Closing the courthouse door, as the government sought to do on Monday, would effectively place the FBI’s conduct beyond judicial review.
The framers of the Constitution created three co-equal branches of government to protect against precisely this kind of abuse of power. If the Obama administration’s view is upheld, the courts will be closed to citizens who seek to stop the government from violating their constitutional rights right here in the United States.
Let’s hope that the federal courts put a stop to these abuses-- starting with this case.
 
Ahilan T. Arulanantham is the Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU of Southern California.