Emphasize the need for transformational change in conditions of confinement.

We should create prisons that offer safety to incarcerated people, corrections staff, and administrators. We also should create conditions that keep people from returning to prison after they are released. This will entail radical change that values the dignity of everyone inside a prison’s walls and affords incarcerated people the chance to realize their potential. Among changes that should be made immediately are: ending solitary confinement, rolling back the Prison Litigation Reform Act, and achieving widespread adoption of rehabilitative jail and prison models to replace existing punitive ones.

Explore our conditions of confinement related resources below.

Publication

Rethinking Restrictive Housing

Lessons from Five U.S. Jail and Prison Systems

Explore

Publication

Step-down Programs and Transitional Units

A Strategy to End Long-term Restrictive Housing

Explore

In 2017,

1 in 25

people (or 61,000 of 1.5 million) in U.S. prisons were held in solitary confinement, where they were restricted to a tiny cell for at least 22 hours a day with no access to programming or treatment and minimal human interaction.^[]The Association of State Correctional Administrators and The Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School. Reforming Restrictive Housing: The 2018 ASCA-Liman Nationwide Survey of Time-in-Cell. New Haven: The Liman Center at Yale, 2018.
Low-level nonviolent offenses, such as 'disobeying an order' and 'profanity,' are among the most common infractions to result in disciplinary segregation sanctions.^[]Léon Digard, Elena Vanko, and Sara Sullivan. Rethinking Restrictive Housing: Lessons from Five U.S. Jail and Prison Systems. New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2018, Table 1.

From The Blog

Federal Leadership Needed to Transform Conditions of Confinement

Conditions inside jails and prisons do more harm than healing. For those behind the walls, trauma and victimization are widespread, with rates of assault 10 times greater than that found in the community. Myriad issues with policy and practice foster this system of violence. First, many prisons are severely overcrowded, with the number of people in ...

News

Logan Schmidt

January 09, 2020

News

Looking to Norway for Inspiration on Reducing the Use of Solitary Confinement

Recognized as a leader in progressive incarceration, Norway’s system is based on the idea that courts are for punishment and correctional facilities are for creating better neighbors. Correctional policies and practices center around respect for the human dignity of incarcerated people and staff. They focus primarily on rehabilitation, resocializat ...

News

Janelle Guthrie

March 11, 2020

News

Corrections at a Crossroads

Ironically, prisons began as 19th century reforms—a movement away from the barbarism of public humiliation, corporal punishment, and executions. Practices like solitary confinement—pioneered at Eastern State Penitentiary and in Auburn Prison’s regime of silent, forced labor—were meant to rehabilitate incarcerated people. They reflected moralistic a ...

News