San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Trust me, solitary confinement is torture
Solitary confinement is torture. I know this because I spent more than a decade of my life held in isolation. My first experience in solitary confinement took place in the California Youth Authority when I was 16 years old. I was sent there because I had been caught with drugs. I needed treatment for addiction and counseling.
Instead, I was placed in isolation. Once a week, I was given a novel, five pieces of paper and a pencil. Talking to my neighbors while we were in our cells was prohibited. My only human contact came during one hour of exercise in the yard.
The loneliness was crushing and unbearable. Our cells were designed to deprive us of any sensory experience, with the windows covered by a painted dense metal grate. But the worst thing was the lack of human contact. I would often become so desperate to break that silence that I would ask myself questions and answer them out loud as if I was interviewing myself. I would also recite every memory that I could think of since birth just as a way to keep my mind active. Sometimes I would just sit there and cry.
Later, when I was moved to solitary at the notorious Pelican Bay prison, I would forget what human touch felt like. I was so desperate for contact—a handshake, a hug — that I would caress myself. When human touch finally did come it was in the form of handcuffs slapped on my wrists and guards' hands squeezing the back of my neck.
I often tell people that I would have preferred a physical beating to being held in isolation. Bruises and cuts heal,
but the wounds in my mind and soul are so deep that I do not believe I will ever fully recover.
Research has shown that exposure to solitary confinement can cause serious and often permanent harm to individuals. It also has greater repercussions for our society. Numerous studies have shown the practice leads to higher rates of recidivism, lowers parole grants and perpetuates cycles of violence in carceral settings. Recent studies have also shown that solitary confinement increases the risk of premature death, even after release, as well as health care costs. Some medical experts estimate that reducing the practice in supermax facilities across the nation could save taxpayers $155 million dollars in total future health care costs.
Since my release from prison, I have started a new life. I am now attending the University of California at Berkeley and am a member of the Underground Scholars Program, which is building a prison-to-school pipeline for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. I'm also working with other solitary survivors in California to limit how this practice is used in our prisons and jails.
I am among the lucky few able to land on my feet after surviving solitary. Most of us end up drowned in addiction or so crippled by mental health challenges that we are incapable of living a healthy life.
For many solitary survivors, our best opportunity at healing has come through working together to create change. In 2011 and 2013, I joined thousands of other prisoners in a hunger strike to protest the use of solitary confinement in California's prisons, a practice that was widespread at the time and kept some people in isolation for more than a decade. This organizing, coupled with brilliant legal work in a class-action lawsuit by thousands of individuals who were held in prolonged solitary confinement in California, led to the Ashker settlement, which helped reshape solitary in California.
The settlement challenged the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's indefinite use of solitary confinement. Despite the success of the litigation, however, judges have found the department has continued to deny individuals due process and violate the terms of the agreement. Other states, including New York, have recently passed legislation to limit the use of solitary. The United Nations has declared the use of prolonged solitary confinement as torture under the Nelson Mandela Rules.
Solitary survivors, including myself, are now advocating for California to join this movement. AB2632, “The California Mandela Act on Solitary Confinement” by Assembly Member Chris Holden, would help us do just that. The bill ends the use of prolonged solitary confinement, setting a strict limit of 15 days. It also bans solitary for special populations, including pregnant women, people with disabilities and people under 25 and over 65. The goal of the bill is to show that alternatives to solitary confinement exist and are rooted in providing programming and human interaction as a means to ensure everyone's safety.
The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has claimed that the bill will cost the state billions and will require new construction at every facility. This claim is untrue and put forward in bad faith. In 2017, the Legislative Analyst's Office noted that Gov. Jerry Brown's 2016-17 and 2017-18 budgets accounted for more than $50 million in savings by converting 469 “high security beds” — i.e. solitary — to 533 “sensitive needs beds.” This transition took place because of the Ashker settlement, and it demonstrates how costly solitary is. The Legislative Analyst further noted: “Because security housing units require more custody staff than most other units, these conversions would result in net savings.”
I recently co-authored a report that demonstrates how reducing the use of solitary confinement can save California more than $60 million, with tens of millions of savings into the future.
More important than saving money is the simple fact that the bill will save lives. We need to protect future generations from the cruel and permanent harm that is solitary confinement.
With the Oak Fire now blazing across over 19,000 acres of Northern California, it is clear: Fire season is here — and with it, comes the very real potential for life and property loss.
Although technological advances are improving firefighting capabilities, most innovations focus on identifying and responding to fires after they start. But given wildfires will only get worse in the hotter, drier future, solely being reactive to them isn’t a winning strategy. California needs to fight fire smarter. Currently, 11.2 million people and 4.5 million homes in California are on land adjacent to wilderness lands, a region firefighters refer to as the wildland urban interface, or WUI. As recent years have shown, the risk to those who live in WUI and their property is potentially catastrophic.
So what can be done? Communities, government agencies and the insurance industry must work together to establish consistent standards and align economic incentives to encourage people to meet them.
Fire mitigation standards have never been consistently established or enforced across California’s WUI. Even though we’ve long known, for example, that creating defensible space — a buffer between a building and any wildland surrounding it — and home hardening measures — which prevent sparks and embers from infiltrating a home’s walls — are effective fire prevention tactics, WUI residents do not implement them uniformly. Why? Look no further than the divide between local and state government. Depending on which government agency or department is responsible, fire mitigation requirements are different. Two homes that share a property line, for example, can be inspected to different standards if one home is in a “local responsibility area” and the other in a “state responsibility area.” If a home in a state responsibility area is also included in a specific fire district, it can be inspected by both the local fire department and Cal Fire — again, with each using a different standard. On top of that, an insurance inspector then shows up using yet another standard unique to that a specific carrier. The result is confusing directives, which only discourages residents from implementing any measures at all.
Another contributing factor is that even with these numerous standards, government enforcement has only so much reach. With limited resources, any government agency’s capacity to enforce standards is restricted to only a few thousand of the at-risk properties — nowhere near the scale required to make an impact on its own. And while there are valiant fire mitigation education efforts from Cal Fire, local government, California Fire Safe Councils, Firewise USA groups and others, these efforts cannot compel enough people to improve their fire safety practice at the scope or pace that is needed.
All of this confusion around standards and their implementation makes it nearly impossible then for the insurance industry to accurately price fire risk. According to a 2019 white paper from the management consulting firm Milliman, California homeowners insurers lost 26 years of profit just in 2017 and 2018 due to wildfires, resulting in a net loss of $10 billion. Losses this big create market instability: Insurers are beginning to leave the California market and for those that remain, they are either increasing their nonrenewals or increasing the premiums on those they still insure.
As for those who can’t find an insurer, they’re left with the California FAIR Plan, the “insurer of last resort,” which has high premiums and limits on coverage. In 2020, the number of consumers forced to obtain a policy through FAIR increased by 49,049 policies.
But neither shifting consumers to FAIR nor increasing premiums on current insurance policies makes progress toward the ultimate goal of limiting losses or lowering fire risk.
A far more effective approach to decreasing fire risk would be to financially incentivize homeowners to implement effective measures like fuel mitigation and home hardening. The annual need to find or renew property insurance creates an opportunity for the rapid adoption of these and other techniques.
Currently, insurance companies determine risk based upon the general characteristics of a landscape, the area’s firefighting capacity and conditions on the individual parcel being assessed. But since carriers use their own standards and lack a mandate to understand parcel-level conditions throughout a given landscape, they cannot accurately characterize the fire-safety conditions around any given parcel — particularly ones located in high- to moderate-density neighborhoods where fire has the potential to spread quickly.
A consistent and accessible common standard of parcel-level wildfire risk reduction measures addressing both defensible space and home hardening retrofits can reduce wildfire losses and make insurance policies more accessible. If government agencies can adhere to a standard implementation of science-backed mitigation techniques and create a common verification process, insurers will be able to accurately assess fire risk in California’s WUI and integrate that information into their underwriting decisions. Homeowners who meet those standards at community scale will then be rewarded with average annual loss calculations which accurately price the residual risk encouraging further community-wide adoption of best practices.
As long as wildfire continues to create large losses for insurers, we will continue to face a volatile insurance market where many Californians will experience increased premiums, policy nonrenewals, and decreased options, regardless of whether they experience direct wildfire loss. Stabilizing this situation must start with a better understanding of wildfire risk on a property by property and neighborhood basis, combined with greater reliance on mitigating that risk to protect lives.
Life and property loss have become hallmarks of our state’s fire season. To stave off catastrophic loss, we need a holistic approach with established standards and that incentivizes Californians to meet them. That is our best shot.
Efforts to address the dueling mental health and substance abuse crises on California’s streets have ramped up in recent years. The latest and showiest of these efforts is the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Court, put forth by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Pitched as an “upstream diversion” to prevent people with severe mental illness from ending up incarcerated or conserved, CARE Courts would work like this: First, any family member, case worker, or first-responder, including police, who believes a person needs intervention for mental health or substance use issues, could make a referral to a civil court. The person in need of care would then receive a clinical evaluation by their county behavioral health system. A public defender and case manager would then be assigned, and a CARE Plan would be drafted, which could include a 12month plan for medication, housing, and behavioral health treatment.
The plan is flashy. It’s well-branded. But dig just a little under the surface, and things don’t look so shiny. For a bill centered around care, it’s remarkably careless. And if San Francisco officials were hoping CARE Courts will sweep in to solve our issues for us, consider that idea dead in the water.
San Francisco has long battled with the ethical quandary of whether it is more humane to force someone who is very ill into involuntary treatment or grant them the freedom to make their own decisions about their life and care. Much of the discussion around CARE Courts centers on this debate. And these are valuable conversations to have.
But it’s doubtful CARE Courts will even get that far.
The most glaring flaw is a lack of funding and key infrastructure. The bill creates an entirely new system that can be used to compel treatment but includes only $65 million to support court expansion. It relies on already oversubscribed county programs to somehow accommodate an influx of new patients in need of court-mandated drug abuse treatment, mental health care and housing.
That a lack of resources is available to accommodate these mandates is
Gov. Newsom’s plan to address mental health and substance use will stretch an already under-resourced system of care.
obvious. Our existing systems to address the intersection of mental health and substance use issues can hardly operate. People accepted to mental health diversion programs are languishing in the county jail for months waiting for a bed to open. The lead judge of San Francisco’s Adult Drug Court said at a March Board of Supervisors hearing that due to this shortage, his staff has abandoned hope of getting anyone with both diagnoses into a treatment program. And a damning Board of Supervisors hearing last week discussed five people who have taken more than 1,700 ambulance rides in the past five years, costing the city upward of $4 million. When mental health professionals tried to conserve one person, there was nowhere to put them.
California — and in particular, San Francisco — is already suffering from a
severe shortage of behavioral health workers. In interviews with employees from both nonprofit and city health programs, we were told repeatedly that there simply isn’t anyone to hire for a growing number of vacant positions.
Across the bay, it’s not much better. A civil grand jury report on Alameda County’s behavioral health found understaffing on crisis phone lines, and incarceration used in place of psychiatric treatment.
When asked about the lack of funding attached to this bill, Newsom’s senior counselor Jason Elliott agreed that, “The whole thing only succeeds if we massively expand the behavioral health clinical network.” He noted that since Newsom took office in 2020, hundreds of millions have been allocated for this purpose across the state.
But the results have been slow to appear: In the past two years, San
Francisco has added only 180 new psychiatric treatment beds. It currently has none to spare. And CARE Courts would be implemented next year.
With this lack of attention to resources, it’s almost certain that CARE Court will fall flat. If San Francisco, a city with a $14 billion annual budget, can’t find a single bed for someone racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in ambulance rides, how will smaller, less wealthy, counties fare with these new requirements?
This, of course, begs the question: If people could already access health resources, why would they even need a court order?
Until we provide more housing and treatment beds, train, hire and fund behavioral health workers, and improve access to care for people at every step of their journey to recovery, we may never find out.