A glimpse of life in isolation
Visiting the toughest secure housing unit in the state reveals what inmates endure in solitary confinement.
The way California inmates tell it, there’s prison — and then there’s prison.
Being in solitary confinement means being locked in a windowless cell for up to 23 hours a day, with little or no human interaction. Access to mail and medical care is limited, and phone calls can be nonexistent.
A legal settlement announced Tuesday will greatly reduce the practice throughout California’s prison system. In recent years, reporters and photographers with the Los Angeles Times have visited some of the state’s most prominent solitary confinement units. Here’s a glimpse of life in isolation:
The solitary units at Pelican Bay State Prison are designed to minimize contact. Doors are opened and closed remotely by an officer in a central control unit, out of sight of the inmates. The cells face a concrete wall so there is little natural light. Food is delivered through a slot in the door, and prisoners exercise in a walled concrete pen the size of a large dog run.
Built in the 1980s, the facility’s solitary wing is considered the toughest “secure housing unit” in California. The unit houses members of powerful prison gangs, murderers and inmates convicted of violence while incarcerated.
The Times wrote in 2013 that inmates housed there, some of them indefinitely, “take on a ghostly pallor, as if dusted with flour.”
Todd Ashker has been in Pelican Bay’s secure housing unit for more than two decades. Placed there after fatally stabbing an inmate, he helped spark a 2013 hunger strike that involved nearly 30,000 inmates and brought national attention to California’s solitary confinement practices.
Prison officials and corrections unions have argued that use of segregated housing is necessary to tamp down inmate-on-inmate violence. Former prisoners and those still incarcerated have said long-term solitary causes severe depression.
Before he was placed in solitary confinement for spitting on a guard at Pelican Bay, inmate Steven Czifra said he considered himself a “whole human being.”
“When I left, I was … deeply fractured,” he told a panel of state lawmakers in 2013.
This year Daivion Davis, 21, told The Times that using solitary confinement to discipline him as a teenage inmate created something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: The detentions agitated him, leading to future violent confrontations.
Davis was held at the Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar after he was convicted of manslaughter in a 2009 gang-related shooting.
Use of solitary confinement to punish juvenile inmates has been outlawed in 20 states. California is not one of them.