Critics of solitary confinement buoyed as Obama embraces cause

An estimated 75,000 state and federal prisoners are held in solitary confinement in the United States, and for the first time in generations U.S. leaders are rethinking the practice.

Washington — Before he was exonerated of murder and released in 2010, Anthony Graves spent 18 years locked up in a Texas prison, 16 of them all alone in a tiny cell.

Actually, he does not count it that way. He counts his time in solitary confinement as “60 square feet, 24 hours a day, 6,640 days.” The purpose, Graves came to conclude, was simple. “It is designed to break a man’s will to live,” he said in an interview.

An estimated 75,000 state and federal prisoners are held in solitary confinement in the United States, and for the first time in generations U.S. leaders are rethinking the practice. President Barack Obama last week ordered a Justice Department review of solitary confinement while Congress and more than a dozen states consider limits on it. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in a Supreme Court ruling last month, all but invited a constitutional challenge.

“Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time?” Obama asked in a speech at a convention of the NAACP in Philadelphia, where he called for an overhaul of the criminal justice system. “That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger. And if those individuals are ultimately released, how are they ever going to adapt? It’s not smart.”

Studies have found that solitary confinement exacerbates mental illness and that even stable people held in isolation report experiencing psychiatric symptoms.

Obama can exert little control over state prison systems, but he hopes that any changes he makes in the federal system will prod states to follow suit.

Graves, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of six people in 1992 only to be declared innocent and released nearly two decades later, said he was glad that Obama had taken on the issue.

“It’s a good thing that he’s actually talking about it and going to look at it because it puts it on the map,” Graves said. But by his own account, Graves is impatient. “I’m just tired of speeches,” he said. “I just want somebody to do something about it.”