Currently, Vera is partnering with the Illinois Department of Corrections and the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services to help them:

• develop criteria to determine who should be held in segregation and who could be moved safely to the general prison population;
• assess disciplinary sentences and lengths of stay in segregation;
• enhance programs to ease the transition of prisoners out of segregation;
• improve conditions of confinement for those who remain; and
• track the effects of moving prisoners from segregation to other levels of security.

The project is also collaborating with the Washington State Department of Corrections to assess its segregation policies and practices, analyze the effects of its use of segregation, and make recommendations for handling its protective custody, disciplinary, and intensive management populations.

Why work to reduce correctional segregation?

Since the 1980s, prisons in the United States have increasingly relied on the use of isolation to manage difficult populations in their overcrowded systems. According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of people in restricted housing units nationwide increased from 57,591 in 1995 to 80,870 in 2000. At the same time, conditions of isolation have become increasingly severe, not only in “supermax” units and facilities, but also in segregation units throughout the country. Evidence now suggests that holding people in isolation with minimal human contact for days, years, or even decades is exceptionally expensive and in many cases counterproductive. Long-term isolation can create or exacerbate serious mental health problems and assaultive or antisocial behavior among incarcerated people, have negative outcomes for institutional safety, and increase the risk of recidivism after release.

The tide is now shifting, and this project is designed to demonstrate a new, effective path forward, away from overreliance on this costly form of incarceration. Through this project, Vera hopes to demonstrate that it is possible for states to save money and achieve better outcomes by significantly reducing the numbers of prisoners held in segregation without jeopardizing institutional safety, and to create a model that can be adapted for use in many other U.S. jurisdictions.

For more information about this project, contact Suzi Agha.

(See: "Prisons Within Prisons: The Use of Segregation in the United States," Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 46–49. Browne, Angela, Cambier, Alissa, and Agha, Suzanne. University of California Press, October 2011.)