Former inmate: Solitary a ‘constant attack’ on senses
Activists want more outofcell time for inmates, Northern prison to be closed
The term “solitary confinement” evokes the image of an inmate sitting alone for hours on end and for months at a time in a dank prison cell, with virtually no mental or physical stimulation.
The state Department of Correction doesn’t use the term, and its spokeswoman says the most severe isolation, 23 hours a day at maximumsecurity Northern
Correctional Institution in Somers, is used only on a limited basis for the most dangerous and unmanageable prisoners.
Those who oppose the practice, however, claim that longterm isolation still is used to punish inmates, not only at Northern but at prisons and jails across the
state, and while the population at what opponents call the state’s supermax prison has declined, from 267 in November 2018 to 80 last month, the work to reform the correctional system must continue.
“Isolation is being used in prisons and jails throughout the state,” said the Rev. Allie Perry of New Haven, a member of Stop Solitary CT, which is seeking legislation to close Northern and grant more outofcell time to inmates, among other reforms.
“It would be not enough to close Northern,” Perry said. “We need to address the mentality. It’s a prison culture to have that as a punishment.”
In chains
Leighton Johnson of New Haven, coordinator of Stop Solitary CT, was originally imprisoned for an armedrobbery conviction and said he was sent to Northern from MacDougallWalker Correctional Institution in 2008 after he got into a fight, the third or fourth “ticket” he had been given. He was categorized as “chronic discipline.”
“You don’t go directly to administrative segregation,” he said, using the term the Department of Correction uses for the most severe isolation.
“You’re still in Northern. You’re still in a cell all day. There’s nothing in your cell, no radio,” Johnson said. He got through the three phases of administrative segregation, each of which comes with fewer physical restraints and more privileges, and was sent back to the general population.
In Phase 1, inmates wear leg shackles, handcuffs and at times a tether between the two that forces them to stoop. Phases 2 and 3 remove restraints and grant more outofcell time.
But Johnson kept running afoul of the guards. One day, as prisoners were rapping in the yard and Johnson was tapping a beat on a window, he said a guard grabbed him “and poked me on the forehead.” He said he was in chains at the time.
“As soon as I flinched, I was swarmed by officers who slammed me on the ground, jumped on me. … What they did was pull my thumb all the way back and broke my thumb,” he said. In addition to disciplinary charges, state police charged him with assault on a corrections officer.
In 2010, Johnson got into a fight on the basketball court at Cheshire Correctional Institution. He was sprayed with Mace and lashed out. Johnson said, with his eyes burning, he lashed out. “I’m pushing whoever is grabbing me … I’m in survival mode. I was thrown to the floor, trampled on.” He was sent back to Northern and put in isolation.
Solitary confinement like torture
To Johnson and others in Stop Solitary CT, solitary confinement is torture, and they say it is used far too often to punish inmates rather than to keep dangerous prisoners away from the general population.
Life in solitary is “a constant, constant attack on every form, your mental, your selfesteem … your senses, because it’s sensory deprivation as well,” Johnson said. “I had to go to the shower chained up with shackles on. … I think it’s overkill. It serves no purpose to do these type of things.”
Johnson described other conditions, such as cold air blowing into the cell during the winter and having to visit with his 6yearold daughter through a glass wall.
Since he was released in 2017, Johnson has put his life back together. In an email,, he described working in a machine shop in Hamden running computerized manufacturing machines and manual lathes; at a tire store; at Clinton Nurseries and for the Urban Resources Initiative, planting trees and building bioswales in New Haven; for the city Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees; as head chef at the Anchor Spa.
“My mom is extremely proud of me for the Man I’ve turned out to be despite my torturous experience inside the Belly of the Beast. And so am I,” he wrote.
But serving time in solitary confinement can cause lasting damage as well. Germano Johnson of New Haven was released from prison in 1990, after serving time on drugrelated offenses and said “the time we spent isolated in administrative segregation or solitary, we didn’t have the luxury of paying attention to the abuse. Part of it was the rite of passage,” the need to “come out and still be a man.”
However, he said, “You basically never heal from that and there’s some damage there that keeps people from functioning at a high level, no matter how normal you may appear.
“Since that time I managed to secure employment … managed to go back to school, get an education and get a decent job, but it does not come easy. There were a lot of bumps along that road.”
Most of the prisoners at Northern, including those who were on death row before capital punishment was abolished in Connecticut, are in administrative segregation, say members of Stop Solitary CT.
Legal matters
The Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School sent a letter to Nils Melzer, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, in May, claiming that the Department of Correction “systematically engages in the psychological and physical torture” of prisoners at Northern and other prisons.
“The DOC routinely resorts to prolonged isolation to punish and to control incarcerated individuals,” the letter states. “Once subjected to the social and sensory deprivation of Northern, many individuals’ mental health and behavior deteriorate, and they may engage in desperate and selfdestructive acts. Rather than responding with clinically appropriate care, the DOC chains such persons for hours and even days in direct retribution for the very behavior that the DOC has itself precipitated. These practices constitute, at a minimum, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and, in many cases, torture.”
The letter was accompanied by 15 testimonies from prisoners, some handwritten.
“There’s no legitimate reason for Northern to exist,” said David McGuire, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. “Northern, by its very construction and design is a psychologically damaging place,” he said. “It was designed essentially to break down prisoners” and not to house them long term.
“It’s a facility that was designed for restricted movement. Just going into the place you feel like you’re underground even though you’re not,” McGuire said. “There’s no meaningful recreation, mental health care and a lot of it is due to the design of the facility.”
McGuire said the ACLU has worked on prison issues for the 12 years he has been there.
“Northern’s kind of become the focal point for it because it in our minds serves no legitimate public safety interest for the state of Connecticut,” he said.
He said the ACLU takes the stand that solitary confinement violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. “When you keep someone in a cell for 22plus hours for an extended period, it is cruel and, if not causes, it exacerbates mental health issues,” McGuire said. “It still happens and it shouldn’t and that’s why we’re grateful that this Stop Solitary [campaign] is pushing an aggressive campaign to stop solitary confinement in Connecticut.”
“We firmly believe Northern should be shuttered because it’s an inhuman facility.” He also pointed out that, of the 80 prisoners in Northern, just 11 are white — 13.75 percent — while 50 are black, 17 are Hispanic and one each is Native American and Asian. “That is an outrageous stat,” McGuire said.
Overall, about 30 percent of the state’s 12,530 inmates are white, 42.7 percent are black and 26.6 percent are Hispanic.
But he and others said that closing Northern will not achieve the ultimate goal of ending solitary confinement. “This has been done in other states and also internationally. Very few countries do what we do here in the U.S. and in Connecticut,” McGuire said.
“The argument from corrections officials is they need Northern … to keep order in the facilities and what I used to hear back in the day was, without the threat of Northern you can’t control prisoners.”
Those opposing solitary confinement say it exists throughout the state’s prison system, even in the New Haven Correctional Center, which mostly houses people awaiting trial. Kevnesha Boyd of Hamden, a licensed professional counselor, worked at the Whalley Avenue jail for four years, quitting in August because of “a lot of moral and ethical conflicts that started affecting me personally.”
Boyd said Whalley Avenue was “actually my dream job” but it became “the most toxic work environment I’ve ever been in in my life.” She said there are cells in the jail where detainees are kept for 23 hours a day and that “when I deemed somebody a suicide risk, they go into the infirmary,” which is even more restrictive. “You don’t come out of the cell; you don’t take a shower” unless the warden allows it, she said.
She said the March 21 death of Carl “Robby” Talbot in the jail, which was ruled a homicide, played a role in her decision to resign. Talbot, who struggled with mental illness, had been in chains and shackles when he died.
Level of force
Karen Martucci, spokeswoman for the Department of Correction, said the descriptions of solitary confinement “are inaccurate depictions of what’s happening in today’s prison system.
She said administrative segregation “is reserved for the most violent, unmanageable” offenders, such as one who recently embedded a fan blade in another inmate’s skull.
“That is an incident that rises to that threshold,” she said. “We are leading the country with using restrictive status the least amount of time.”
Martucci said only lieutenants and captains carry Mace and that “no one is using greater force than necessary. We would not tolerate that in our agency. Have there been circumstances of someone acting inappropriately? Yes.”
In a followup email, Martucci made the case that administrative segregation is necessary to ensure the prisons will be as safe and secure as possible.
“Something that those of us that work in corrections are acutely aware of is the fact that rehabilitation and reentry efforts will never work if you don’t have a safe and controlled atmosphere,” she wrote.
“The Department of Correction has placed a strong emphasis on building programs to assist the population, including family reunification efforts, expansion of higher education opportunities and furlough programs that allow offenders to leave the correctional facilities every day to work in the community. These programs are not possible without the ability to manage the very small percentage of the population whose violent behaviors pose a significant safety risk to our staff and other offenders,” she wrote.
Martucci said these programs increase the time that inmates are out of their cells, so that few are inside even 21 hours a day, which Stop Solitary CT claims is common at prisons such as Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown and Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire.
“We always operate utilizing the least amount of force necessary to manage an incident, but without the appropriate tools you have chaos,” she said. “The safety of the offender population and our dedicated correctional professionals will always remain our number one priority. Commissioner [Rollin] Cook has made it his mission to place human dignity at the core of all of our work.”
Gov. Ned Lamont named Cook to replace Scott Semple, who retired in 2018.
Barbara Fair of New Haven, who has been an activist against solitary confinement “for decades across the country,” has met with both men and with William Murphy, director of the Programs and Treatment Division.
Her son, Keishar Tucker, who suffers from mental health issues, was held at Northern and other maximumsecurity prisons despite pleas from Tucker’s psychotherapist not to send him to prison before trial because Tucker was under his care.
She said Cook has “made some incremental changes” and that Murphy “did tell me he’s starting to make changes,” including prisoners “actually being let out of their cell without being chained up … which is amazing because before they never took them out of their cell without being chained up.”
Fair said Murphy also told her he hopes to reduce the amount of time inmates are kept in their cells, “but I’m not sure how much time that’s going to be and how soon that’s going to happen.”
Rahisha Bivens said she has been fighting to get her brother Joshua Stanley, out of Garner because he has schizophrenia. He was arrested on a charge of firstdegree assault. She said he is in his cell 21 hours a day and she would like to have him transferred to the Sierra Center in New Haven, a halfway house for exoffenders, while he awaits trial.
“If he was to go there, because it’s considered pretrial detention … it would count as time served for him,” Bivens said. For someone with schizophrenia, “one of the things that could exacerbate their symptoms is being in an isolative setting.”
But Stanley was put in segregation for two weeks because he had a fight with his cellmate. There have been times when her brother was sent to the infirmary, which she said is even more isolating than segregated housing, because “they can’t have a television; they can’t have a radio.”
“It’s heartbreaking,” Bivens said. “I worry. There are times that I can’t sleep at night. … It’s like a waste of his time and a waste of his potential. He was in college; he was working full time; he had his own apartment. … I think there’s a better way to have justice in our system for people who are impacted by crime and help people be well.”