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;
• enhance programs to ease the transition of prisoners out of segregation;
• improve conditions of confinement for those who remain; and
• collect data to track the effects of moving prisoners from segregation to other levels of security.

SRP 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?

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 contribute to serious mental health problems and assaultive or antisocial behavior among incarcerated individuals. Empirical evidence suggests that long-term segregation has negative outcomes for institutional and public safety and increases the risk of recidivism.

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 segregation beds nationwide increased by at least 40 percent from 1995 to 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.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 or public 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 Angela Browne.