Man who spent 37 years in solitary confinement settles lawsuit with Pa.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A 65-year-old man who has spent more than half of his life in solitary confinement in prisons across Pennsylvania has been awarded $325,000 in a settlement.
Arthur Johnson of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit last year claiming that his 37 years spent alone in a small cell amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and violated his right to due process.
The settlement with the state was announced last week.
In a punchy decision in September 2016, a U.S. district court judge ordered that Johnson, who is serving a life sentence for a gang-related murder, be reintegrated into the general prison. He is currently at the State Correctional Institution Greene.
It’s been a year since Johnson rejoined other inmates, said one of his attorneys, Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center in Pittsburgh.
“It has been a big adjustment,” Mr. Grote said. “Being surrounded by so many people in the yard, in the cafeteria.”
A relief, to be sure, Mr. Grote said, but the scars of an entire adult life spent with little human contact persist.
“Issues like wanting to self-isolate, dealing with anxiety and despair, they remain with everybody I’ve known who’ve been in 20 or 30 years,” he said. Mr. Grote is currently working on three other cases where prisoners have been isolated for 19, 23 and 31 years, respectively.
The difference between dealing with that trauma in society rather than entirely removed from it is “the difference between what’s tolerable and what’s intolerable,” he said.
For 37 years, Johnson spent at least 23 hours a day alone in a small cell. When weather permitted, he was allowed to be outside for an hour each weekday in a metal cage. He was not allowed any contact visits and had had no meaningful physical contact with another person since 1979.
He originally was placed into solitary confinement after a series of attempts to escape from prison