Banning solitary stems violence

The New York City Council has taken a crucial step toward scientifically proven methods of violence prevention by banning solitary confinement beyond four hours for de-escalation or emergencies, and promoting more effective interventions that incorporate group programming into full days of out-of-cell time.

This approach promotes health, protects basic human rights, and stems violence. While this law, Int. No. 549A, is not a panacea for the myriad crises plaguing Rikers Island and other NYC jails, it presents an opportunity for a long overdue, transformative approach.

We both have decades of experience applying violence prevention scholarship to jail and prison programs. We were co-authors of a 2013 report to the NYC Board of Correction that initiated some successful initial reforms replacing solitary with more effective behavioral management.

Since that time, we have been dismayed to see NYC jails move further away from evidence-based therapeutic approaches and as a result devolve further into cycles of terrible violence amid a proliferation of various new forms of solitary.

Solitary confinement, in addition to being inhumane and deadly, is counterproductive. Rather than reducing violence or recidivism, it makes harmful conduct more likely because of the mental health consequences, including cognitive distortions, hallucinations, overwhelming rage, and destructive behaviors that result directly from social isolation and sensory deprivation.

This vicious cycle keeps incarcerated people and jail staff in a chronic state of war with each other, and increases violence after people return to the community.

Continuing with re-tried and renamed practices has not worked, with death and violence only rising. Now, there is a crucial opportunity for NYC jails to finally move away from these failed approaches and instead follow successful models.

For example, we helped design and learn from a program in San Francisco jails — the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP) — in which incarcerated persons who had been jailed for violent crimes spent six days a week, 12 hours a day with their peers in intensive educational, psychotherapeutic, and other violence-prevention programming, and none were placed in solitary.

As a result, in-house violence dropped to zero after the first month, and the rate of violent re-offenses after returning to the community was 83% lower in the first year than in an otherwise identical control group. Perhaps more astonishingly, these results were achieved by many men with lifetime histories of violent crime.

When this program was first proposed, jail staff petitioned to move to other jails because of their fear that eliminating solitary would lead to riots and mayhem. Once the program was underway, however, they requested being returned to that jail because it was the safest in the whole system. Although it had more expensive upfront costs, it saved taxpayers $4 for every $1 spent on it, because of decreased rates of injuries, hospitalizations, and reincarceration.

This program was so successful it won a major national prize for “innovations in American governance” from the Ash Institute and Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

NYC jails can, and should, successfully implement this type of intervention. The model of using intensive programming has been proven to significantly reduce violence. Dr. Gilligan and his Harvard colleagues achieved similar success in violence-prevention programs in the prisons of Massachusetts, the City of Boston (the “Boston Miracle”), Poland, New Zealand, and other countries. Dr. Lee has helped advise governments on implementing such approaches for prisons in France, Ireland, and multiple states in the U.S.

The fact is, as Aristotle noted 2,400 years ago, we are social animals, designed to live in groups. That is why depriving people of social interaction and sensory stimulation has been shown, experimentally and clinically, to increase suicidal and homicidal behavior.

Implementation of Int. No. 549A presents an opportunity to put an end to a practice that the UN and the European Court of Human Rights have described as torture. Both Nelson Mandela and John McCain said being placed in solitary was more painful and unendurable than any of the physical tortures their jailors imposed.

If NYC jails were truly to implement an RSVP-like evidence-based approach, they could even become a model for the rest of the United States, instead of being an object lesson in how to stimulate violent behavior and decrease the safety of the public.

Lee is a forensic psychiatrist and violence expert with more than two decades of experience evaluating, treating, and designing programs for incarcerated people who have engaged in violence. Gilligan is a psychiatrist who has spent 50 years studying the causes and prevention of individual and collective violence in this country and around the world for the World Health Organization, the World Court, the secretary-general of the United Nations, and others.