Opening the Black Box of Solitary Confinement Through Researcher–Practitioner Collaboration: A Longitudinal Analysis of Prisoner and Solitary Populations in Washington state, 2002–2017

Abstract

This article presents a rare longitudinal analysis of solitary confinement use in one state prison system: spanning 2002–2017 in the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC). An ongoing partnership with DOC officials facilitated methodological and conceptual improvements, allowing us to construct a dataset that provides a rich description of who is in solitary confinement, for how long, and why. Operationalizing solitary confinement as the intersection of the most serious custody status with the most restrictive housing location, we describe significant changes in ethnic composition and behavioral profiles of people in solitary confinement and in frequency and duration of solitary confinement use. These results suggest how particular policy interventions have affected the composition, numbers, and lengths of stay in solitary confinement. Combining longitudinal analysis and iterative engagement with DOC officials, we provide a roadmap for better understanding solitary confinement use in the United States now and in the future.

Keywords:

• Restrictive housing
• solitary confinement
• prison
• gangs

Acknowledgments

The research presented here utilized a confidential data file from the Washington Department of Corrections. This study would not have been possible without the support of the research and correctional staff in the Washington DOC, especially Eldon Vail, Bernard Warner, Dan Pacholke, Dick Morgan, Jody Becker-Green, Steve Sinclair, Paige Harrison, Vasiliki Georgoulas-Sherry, Bruce Gage, Ryan Quirk, and Tim Thrasher. Formerly of the University of Washington, Lorna Rhodes served as a project mentor, and L. Clark Johnson provided critical advice at early stages of data compilation. At the University of California, Irvine, Keely Blissmer helped to compile the literature review; Dallas Augustine, Melissa Barragan, Pasha Dashtgard, Gabriela Gonzalez, and Justin Strong all participated in data collection and analysis at various stages of this project. Note: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Washington DOC or other data file contributors. Any errors are attributable to the authors.

Disclosure statement

None of the authors have conflicts of interest to declare.

Notes

1 In a timely example of how relevant the analysis in the instant study is, DOC research staff recently noted that they “had some concerns” with these numbers as originally reported and have revised them upwards, re-calculating that, in 2015, 3.4% of the state prison population was in “restrictive housing” according to the ASCA-Liman Definition, and, in 2017, 4.1% of the state prison population was in “restrictive housing” by this definition. E-mail communication with DOC Department of Research, dated Sept. 25 and Sept. 28, 2020, on file with authors. The ASCA-Liman report defines “restrictive housing” as “separating prisoners from the general population and holding them in cells for an average of 22 or more hours per day for 15 continuous days or more.”

2 Intra-facility housing changes and periods spent in recently decommissioned internal solitary confinement units are better captured in our related, intensive field study dataset of 106 solitary confinement prisoners (Reiter et al., 2020).

3 General crime types were derived from DOC codes in the administrative data. Violent, non-sex offenses include murder, manslaughter, robbery, and assault; sex offenses include rape, sexual assault, child molestation, and failure to register as a sex offender; property crimes include arson, burglary, theft, forgery, trafficking, and possession of stolen property; drug crimes include manufacturing, delivering or possession with intent to distribute, and possession of a controlled substance.

4 To avoid confusion, we follow DOC's terminology with the term “Hispanic,” which DOC codes separately from race as “Hispanic Origin” (Y/N); but we apply these data to define mutually exclusive categories: “White, non-Hispanic” includes any individual whose race is listed as White and who is not classified as Hispanic Origin; “Black, non-Hispanic” includes any individual whose race is listed as Black and not identified as Hispanic; “Hispanic” includes any individual whose ethnicity is listed as Hispanic or Latino, regardless of any other racial identification; “Other/Unknown” includes any individual whose race is listed as Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American/American Indian, Other, Unknown and whose ethnicity is not Hispanic.

5 Rates of gang affiliation by racial/ethnic group were generated by dividing the total number of members in each racial/ethnic group identified as an STG member by the total number of prisoners of each racial/ethnic group. Table 1 displays the STG membership by racial/ethnic affiliation of STGs, grouped from detailed STG data provided by DOC. STGs identified as “White” affiliated included Biker, Skinhead, White Supremacist and Security Threat Concern; “Black” affiliated included Black Gangster Disciples, Blood, Crip, and Vice Lord; “Hispanic” affiliated included Norteño, Sureño, Paisas, La Fuma, Cuban, and Hispanic-Other; “Other” affiliated included Asian and Other.

6 Our original analysis identified an even larger proportion of prisoners in this “Other-Max” group; our practitioner collaborators thought more than 10% was an unlikely proportion of prisoners to be assigned max custody status but still awaiting placement in an IMU or similar facility. We then further evaluated whether some of those “Other-Max” prisoners were housed out-of-state. Indeed, when we examined individual cases in the original movement files, we found this was true, leading us to better specify and exclude those prisoners in our sample, of any custody status, who were housed out of state.

7 Here, the 45-day cut point reflects institutionally-mandated administrative hearings required to extend or release an individual from administrative segregation. Likewise, for those classified as Max, (re-)classification reviews only happen every 6–12 months, as reflected in the overall longer mean lengths of stay for IMU-Max, as opposed to IMU-Ad/DSeg groups. Both represent examples of policies driving patterns in lengths of stay.

8 This analysis uses the person (in custody as of the snapshot date) as the unit of analysis. Even if a single person has multiple stays in an IMU during the current admission up to the snapshot date, they would be counted only once as “having spent at least one day in an IMU.” We further examined the average percentage of days spent in an IMU out of the total number of days in prison up to the snapshot date for each cohort, finding an increasing proportion of prison time spent in IMUs across the cohorts. While not presented here in detail, this finding reinforces the trends in the cumulative time spent in IMU and average LOS analyses.

9 Unlike the cumulative days in IMU calculations, the average length of stay by classification and confinement levels presented here do not cumulate days in IMU facilities. Here, each placement in a distinct IMU facility is analyzed as a separate placement term. Thus, if one prisoner is placed in IMU facility A, and subsequently moved to IMU facility B, the length of stay in each placement will be counted separately. (To the extent individuals have consecutive stays across multiple IMUs, then, these numbers might undercount average lengths of total stay.) Length of stay is calculated from admission date in the current incarceration up until the snapshot date.

10 The general population (GP) excludes: prisoners housed in IMUs, prisoners with a max custody classification held in other locations (i.e. those in SOU, ITP, or “Other Locations”), prisoners held out of state, and prisoners whose locations or custody statuses were unknown.

11 Violent infractions include seven infraction types: aggravated assault on another offender, fighting, possession of a weapon, aggravated assault on a staff member, sexual assault of a staff member, assault on another offender, sexual assault of another offender, and assault on a staff member.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Langeloth Foundation and approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of California, Irvine (HS 2016-2816).

Notes on contributors

David Lovell

David Lovell, PhD (philosophy, University of Wisconsin); MSW (social work, University of Washington), Research Associate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington, Child, Family, and Community Health Nursing. In 1982–1983, he was philosopher-in-residence with the Connecticut Department of Correction. His writing on prisons, mental illness, solitary confinement, and ethics centers on processes and outcomes in prison and the community, and has appeared in Psychiatric Services, Crime and Delinquency, Law and Human Behavior, and Criminal Justice and Behavior as well as Correctional Mental Health Report and Correctional Law Reporter. He is the author of the entry on solitary confinement in J. Bumgarner, C. Lewandowski (Eds.), Criminal Justice in America: The Encyclopedia of Crime, Law Enforcement, Courts, and Corrections.

R. Tublitz

Rebecca Tublitz, MPP is a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, Department of Criminology, 2340 Social Ecology II, Irvine, CA 92697. Email: [email protected]. She studies the impact of criminal justice and corrections reforms and is particularly interested in how actors across the criminal justice system respond to policy interventions.

K. Reiter

Keramet Reiter, JD, PhD is an Associate Professor, at the University of California, Irvine, Department of Criminology, Law & Society, 3373 Social Ecology II, Irvine, CA 92697. E-mail: [email protected]. She is the project PI, studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems, especially the history and uses of long-term solitary confinement in the United States and internationally. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Public Health, Law & Society Review, and Punishment & Society, and she is the author of two books: 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement (Yale University Press, 2016), and Mass Incarceration (Oxford University Press, 2017).

K. Chesnut

Kelsie Chesnut, MA, ABD, is a Research Associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, Center on Sentencing and Corrections, 634 S Spring Street, #300A, Los Angeles CA 90014. Email: [email protected]. She studies criminal justice reform, the impact and translation of policy into practice, and is especially interested in correctional staff’s role in policy reform. Her work has appeared in American Journal of Public Health, Injury Prevention, and The Annual Review of Law and Social Science.

N. Pifer

Natalie Pifer, JD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Rhode Island, 510 Chafee Hall, Kingston, RI 02881. Email: [email protected]. She studies criminal justice reforms and is especially interested in how changes to policing and punishment practices are developed and implemented. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Public Health, Law & Social Inquiry, and the Cambridge Handbook on Policing in the United States.