“Where you’re the only one in the cell,” said Shola Oloyede, who was released from a Maryland prison Thursday after spending nearly a third of his nine-year sentence in isolation, “that right there drives you crazy.”
Advocates have pressed for years to reduce the practice of isolating prisoners, citing enormous psychological and fiscal costs. Their call increasingly is being heard by both Democratic and Republican politicians.
States such as Virginia have begun to examine their use of solitary confinement, and President Obama last week visited a federal penitentiary and announced a set of prison-reform efforts that includes a review of isolation policies and practices.
Locking people away “in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time . . . is not going to make us safer,” Obama said. “Our prisons should be a place where we can train people for skills that can help them find a job, not train them to become more-hardened criminals.”
But in Maryland, where Oloyede served time for armed robbery, advocates are stumbling in the dark. They don’t have solid information on how often prisoners are isolated, and bills that would require the prison system to report such data have gone nowhere in the General Assembly.
A report commissioned in 2012 by a nonprofit organization suggests that Maryland isolates more prisoners than other states — 8.5 percent compared with 5 percent in Virginia. Advocates are pushing for more information and say they will try again next year to pass a reporting law, despite opposition from prison administrators and legislators.
“It’s hard to measure any progress or measure the status of something without the data,” said Susan Kerin of Interfaith Action for Human Rights, which has lobbied the state’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services for more information. “Especially in this society, data is everything.”
Advocates say at least 44 states and the federal prison system use some form of solitary confinement or segregation, a figure based on the number of states that have special “supermax” prisons, where the entire population can be held in isolation cells.
Colorado, Maine and Texas have passed transparency bills to release numbers about segregation. But most states are not required to report such information.
The most recent national estimate — which suggests about 80,000 prisoners in solitary confinement — comes from a 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics census report.
