US prisoners with mental illness at greater risk of solitary confinement

A new study has found high rates of punitive isolation among incarcerated people with serious mental illness, with three times as high a rate of solitary confinement as for similar incarcerated people without mental health problems.

The study, by researchers at Boston University, Columbia University, and Harvard University, appears in Criminology, a publication of the American Society of Criminology.

‘With people in prison confined to their cells for up to 23 hours a day, often denied visitors and phone calls, solitary confinement is an important test case for studying harsh treatment in prisons,’ said Jessica T. Simes, assistant professor of sociology at Boston University, who led the study. ‘Routinely used as punishment for prison infractions, this type of confinement may be subject to the same forces that criminalize people with mental health problems in community settings.’

Researchers analysed a large administrative dataset that showed all prison admissions and discharges from 2007 to 2016 in Pennsylvania, whose prison population is demographically similar to the national prison population. The study analysed data for more than 90,000 individuals.

The study found that people with serious mental illness experienced frequent and lengthy periods of solitary confinement, controlling for crime and misconduct histories. The average person in prison with serious mental illness spent three times longer in solitary confinement than a similar person in prison with no history of mental illness.

In addition, disproportionate solitary confinement resulted mostly from the large number of misconduct tickets written by prison staff to mentally ill people in prison, with most tickets for nonviolent misconduct categories of threats and defiance. This highlights the importance of correctional officers at the first stage of the prison disciplinary process, and it suggests that disparities could be reduced by changing the use of discretion through officer training, policy change, or greater oversight.

The study also found that 64 percent of female prisoners had an ongoing mental health diagnosis, putting them at high risk of punitive isolation in prison.

‘Our results are consistent with a process of cumulative disadvantage operating in prisons in which the stigma of mental illness affects decisions at each stage of the prison discipline process,’ said Bruce Western, professor of sociology and director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University, who co-authored the study. ‘The mental health disparities we found, combined with evidence that isolation in incarceration exacerbates mental illness, underline the extreme potential for institutional harm associated with solitary confinement, and show how US prisons heap the harshest forms of punishment on the most vulnerable.’

The study was supported by Arnold Ventures, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Project on Race, Class, and Cumulative Adversity at Harvard University funded by the Ford Foundation and the Hutchins Family Foundation, the Justice and Poverty Project funded by the Ford Foundation, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University.