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Date: November 25, 2024 Mon
Time: 9:09 pm
Time: 9:09 pm
Results for protective custody
1 results foundAuthor: Baumgartel, Sarah Title: Time-In-Cell: The ASCA-Liman 2014 National Survey of Administrative Segregation in Prison Summary: Prolonged isolation of individuals in jails and prisons is a grave problem drawing national attention and concern. Commitments to lessen the numbers of people in isolated settings and to reduce the degrees of isolation have emerged from across the political spectrum. Legislators, judges, and directors of correctional systems at both state and federal levels, joined by a host of private sector voices, have called for change. In many jurisdictions, prison directors are revising their policies to limit the use of restricted housing and the deprivations it entails. Although a few in-depth reports and litigation have provided detailed accounts of specific systems, relatively little nationwide information exists about the number of people held in restrictive housing, the policies determining their placement, how isolated the settings are, and whether the rules governing social contact, activities, and length of stay vary from place to place. Therefore, in 2012, the Liman Program at Yale Law School joined with the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA), which is the national organization of the directors of all the U.S. prison systems, to gather information. We asked the directors of state and federal corrections systems to provide their policies governing administrative segregation, defined as removing a prisoner from general population to spend 22 to 23 hours a day in a cell for 30 days or more. The result, Administrative Segregation, Degrees of Isolation, and Incarceration: A National Overview of State and Federal Correctional Policies (2013), based on responses from 47 jurisdictions, analyzed the criteria for placement in and release from administrative segregation. What we learned is that the criteria for entry were broad, as was the discretion accorded correctional officials when making individual decisions about placement. Many jurisdictions provided very general reasons for moving a prisoner into segregation, such as that the prisoner posed "a threat" to institutional safety or a danger to "self, staff, or other inmates." Some but not all jurisdictions provided notice to the prisoner of the grounds for the placement and an opportunity for a hearing. The kind of notice and what constituted a "hearing" varied substantially. In short, at the formal level, getting into segregation was relatively easy, and few policies focused on how people got out. In 2014, to understand the impact of these policies, the Liman Program and ASCA developed a survey of more than 130 questions, again sent to the directors of all the prison systems. Responses came from 46 jurisdictions, although not all jurisdictions answered all the ASCA-Liman questions. The result is this report, providing a unique inter-jurisdictional analysis of the use of administrative segregation around the United States. A basic question is the number of prisoners in isolation. Commentators have relied on estimates dating back ten years or more; the figures cited range from 25,000 to 80,000 prisoners. This Report is the first to update those figures; thirty-four jurisdictions, housing about 73% of the 1.5 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons, provided numbers, totaling more than 66,000 prisoners in some form of restricted housing - whether termed "administrative segregation," "disciplinary segregation," or "protective custody." If that number is illustrative of the whole, some 80,000 to 100,000 people were, in 2014, in segregation. And none of the numbers include people in local jails, juvenile facilities, or in military and immigration detention. Having current information is one contribution of this Report. So is the documentation of the commitments of correctional officials, nationwide, to reduce these numbers dramatically. Thus, directors of prison systems believe that these numbers are "wrong" in the sense that they are or will soon be out-of-date, based on their plans to cut back on the use of isolation and to change the conditions in it. This Report focused on a subset of people in restricted housing - the 31,500 male prisoners held in administrative segregation. In terms of the demographics, 21 jurisdictions provided comparative information on general population and the administrative segregation population and, in those systems, Blacks and Hispanics were over-represented in administrative segregation. As for living conditions, the cells were small, ranging from 45 to 128 square feet, sometimes for two people. In many places, prisoners spent 23 hours in their cells on weekdays and 48 hours straight on weekends. Details: New Haven, CT: Liman Program, Yale Law School, 2015. 96p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed September 30, 2015 at: http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Liman/ASCA-Liman_Administrative_Segregation_Report_Sep__2_2015.pdf Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Liman/ASCA-Liman_Administrative_Segregation_Report_Sep__2_2015.pdf Shelf Number: 136890 Keywords: Administrative SegregationPrisonersProtective CustodyRestrictive HousingSolitary Confinement |