American Civil Liberties Union

The overuse of solitary confinement concerns some members of the Virginia legislature. According to Senator Adam Ebbin and Delegates Charniele Herring and Patrick Hope, there are simply too many prisoners in solitary for too long.

The three visited Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison over the summer and were moved to write an opinion piece in the Washington Post calling for reform of the system. They describe witnessing prisoners “confined in an 80-square-foot cell 23 hours a day, seven days a week.” As the legislators go on to explain, many of the 1800 prisoners kept in such conditions “have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses.” Often they are isolated for years on end, including one prisoner the legislators spoke with who had been in solitary for more than 12 years.

The Washington Post had this important editorial on the overuse of solitary confinement in Virginia prison. The Post calls on Virginia to follow in the footsteps of other states that have moved in the right direction and begun to reduce their reliance on solitary confinement.

As we wrote last week, Department of Corrections (DOC) officials laud 23-hour-a-day lockdown as a necessary measure for handling the “worst of the worst.” Unfortunately, this supposed “worst of the worst” includes the mentally ill — the Virginia DOC admits that almost 30% of those in solitary in Red Onion State Prison have been diagnosed as mentally ill. Even worse, prisoners are sometimes kept in solitary for years, regardless of their mental health status.

This week we got the welcome news that the state of Alabama will not appeal a ruling ordering a new trial for ACLU client Montez Spradley, who was sentenced to death despite inadequate and very weak evidence, after his trial judge rejected the jury’s 10-2 vote for a life sentence .

As we’ve written before, Spradley, a young African-American man, has always vigorously maintained his innocence in the 2004 murder of a 58-year-old white grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama. The prosecution's case against Spradley was alarmingly thin and riddled with inconsistencies, and in ordering a new trial the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals found that much of it was "improperly admitted."

That is the title of this excellent editorial in the Washington Post, which takes on the issue of solitary confinement recently brought into the national spotlight by the hunger striking prisoners in California's Pelican Bay State Prison and other facilities across the state.