Advocates: Prisons failing inmates freed from solitary

California prisons no longer hold large numbers of prisoners for a decade or more in solitary confinement, but advocates said Monday that prison officials have failed to provide promised mental health services and other programs for traumatized inmates released into the general prison population.

“The torture of solitary confinement doesn’t end when the cell doors open,” said Jules Lobel, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which negotiated a settlement with the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in 2015 to restrict the prisons’ use of isolation cells.

The agreement — which followed a series of statewide prison hunger strikes — prohibited sentences that kept inmates in solitary confinement for 10 or 20 years, or longer, if they were found to be affiliated with gangs. Those who commit violent crimes behind bars can still be sent to solitary confinement for up to 10 years, or longer if they pose a threat to other inmates or guards.

Those inmates are confined in concrete cells in Security Housing Units, or SHUs, for more than 22 hours a day, are fed through a slot and are excluded from job training and other prison programs.

Nearly 1,600 inmates have been released from solitary cells under the settlement, Lobel said. But he said some of them have been transferred to other high-security prisons that undergo frequent lockdowns, again isolating them in their cells, and most of the others are suffering mental and emotional problems that the state is largely ignoring.

Researchers’ interviews with nearly 30 former SHU inmates found that they were “very anxious, depressed, even psychotic, hearing voices,” said Daryl Reicherter, a Stanford psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor and director of a mental health laboratory at the university.

“They cannot handle the noise, the colors, the overwhelming sensations they’re experiencing” in the general prison population, Reicherter said. Many had lost all connections to friends and family, and even “the capacity to have friendships,” and were afraid to get phone calls, he said — because the only calls they were allowed in solitary were to notify them of the death of a loved one. And, he said, they still lack access to work programs and mental health services.

“Occupational, educational and social programs are needed to address the lasting consequence of the long-term SHU experience,” said a study by Stanford’s Human Rights in Trauma Mental Health Laboratory. Because the inmates distrust the prison system, the study said, mental health care should be provided from outside sources.

Reporters also heard from a former prisoner, Dolores Canales, whose 20-year sentence included time in solitary confinement — “an environment that was meant to crush my very soul,” she said. Her son, also a prisoner, was freed from solitary confinement by the 2015 settlement, and Canales has founded a group called California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement.

Federal court monitoring of the settlement was scheduled to end this fall, but Lobel and his colleagues asked Monday for a one-year extension, saying the state has failed to live up to its promises.

Corrections Department spokesman Jeffrey Callison said department officials “have received the motion and are reviewing it.”