Two leftist Pennsylvania state senators are reintroducing legislation that would ban the use of solitary confinement for gay and transgender prisoners but allow its limited use on others.
State Senators John Kane (D-Chester) and Katie Muth (D-Royersford) sent colleagues a memorandum describing their proposal and bemoaning the effects of isolation on prisoners’ mental health. Their bill would limit to 15 days a period of solitary confinement for any of Pennsylvania’s 37,000 state-facility inmates. LGBTQ individuals, as well as pregnant women, minors, and those 70 or older, would be shielded from any isolated imprisonment.
“There is no benefit to placing someone in isolation, and the excessive use of solitary confinement in our correctional facilities is cruel and unnecessary,” the senators wrote. “There is already a movement toward eliminating the use of solitary confinement in county jails. The time has come for us as a state to take a hard look at how we treat incarcerated people, and it is our duty as public servants to do everything in our power to protect all of our constituents.”
Kane and Muth’s measure also would disallow the use of shackles, chemical agents, and restraint chairs. Twelve co-sponsors, all Democrats, signed onto the bill last session though it failed to receive a vote in the GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. State Representative Tina Davis (D-Levittown) introduced a House version in 2021 and while it also received no vote, a resubmitted bill could gain more traction now that Democrats control that chamber.
While experts across the political spectrum have become increasingly critical of what they consider solitary confinement’s overuse, some parts of the Senate legislation appear to be nonstarters for right-leaning criminal justice reformers.
David Safavian, general counsel at the Conservative Political Action Coalition’s Nolan Center for Justice, told The Pennsylvania Daily Star that solitary is imposed too frequently and often for too long. He objected to simplistically capping the time any inmate can serve in isolation.
“Just the nature of corrections is that there are some people who are too dangerous to be even in general population, particularly if they have assaulted another inmate or really if they’ve assaulted a corrections officer,” he said. “So putting an arbitrary number of 15 days as a maximum on solitary makes no sense. All you’re doing is jeopardizing the safety of everybody inside the institution.”
Safavian, moreover, found fault with exempting LGBTQ persons from the possibility of isolated immurement.
“There’s nothing that is related to the sexuality of an inmate that merits a blanket carveout for any group — black, white, trans, gay, nothing,” he said. “If they’re a danger to other inmates or corrections officers, they can’t be allowed in the general population and they need to be segregated for as long as they’re a danger.”
Jillian E. Snider, criminal justice and civil liberties policy director at the R Street Institute, also posited that solitary confinement remains the only option in some situations and that shielding LGBTQ prisoners may not be practicable, at least not presently.
“Recent data has indicated that members of the LGBTQ community may have been disproportionately negatively impacted by the overuse of solitary confinement, but in certain environments, the use of solitary confinement is the only currently available option to ensure the safety of individuals within this vulnerable population,” she told The Daily Star via email. “As such, alternatives must be explored in order to protect incarcerated members of the LGBTQ community and others similarly vulnerable without having to rely on such a severe sanction.”
A better policy than the Kane-Muth bill, Safavian suggested, would address the use of restricted housing, especially over long durations, in instances when prisoners have not disturbed the peace in a correctional facility. A Nolan Center backgrounder mentioned that one-fifth of all state offenders eventually serve some time in forced isolation. In such settings, offenders cannot attend educational or religious programs nor can they keep personal possessions with them.
The backgrounder explained that some prison administrators have broadened eligibility for solitary to include inmates who are “incorrigible (i.e. difficult to manage)” so that legislators don’t discover many prison beds are going unused. Many of these inmates have mental infirmities that isolated housing will only exacerbate.
Solitary confinement, Safavian reasoned, should, therefore, only await offenders who endanger others’ safety in a way that cannot be effectively handled in a normal prison environment. He said prison officials managing these cases should produce a written report justifying initial placement in solitary and subsequent reports explaining why an individual remains there.
“If somebody is a danger and they’re put in,” he said, “let’s make sure that there’s transparency so everybody, including the defendant’s or the prisoner’s family, understands 1)… [how] to justify the action in the first place, 2) to reevaluate… and 3) …[to] provide the inmate with an understanding of the pathway out of solitary…. If he’s violent, he has to understand he can’t be violent anymore…. He or she should have the keys to going back to gen pop, the keys being their good behavior.”
Neither Kane nor Muth returned calls requesting comment.
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Hahaha I bet the gen pop wants them out , too.