ACLU sues state over use of solitary confinement for inmates with mental illness

PROVIDENCE — The longstanding state-prison practice of placing many people with severe mental illness in solitary confinement for “22 to 24 hours a day for weeks, months and even years at a time” is a violation of federal disability law and violates an individual’s constitutional right to protection from cruel and inhumane punishment, a federal suit filed Friday morning asserts.

The class-action suit, which names six inmates at the Adult Correctional Institutions, was filed in U.S. District Court by Disability Rights Rhode Island and attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project and the Rhode Island ACLU affiliate. During a news conference after the filing, local ACLU head Steven Brown and others described conditions that, according to the suit, exacerbate underlying illness, causing paranoia, depression and thoughts of suicide.

Brown described “the profound and disturbing deprivation of civil rights that many inmates with mental illness face while they are incarcerated at the ACI. If it’s true that you can judge the civilization of a society by its prisons, we are doing an unconscionable job when it comes to individuals with severe mental illness.”

With limited in-patient beds for people living with mental illness at state hospitals, Brown said the state Department of Corrections, named as a defendant along with three Corrections Department officials, “serves as the largest mental health hospital in the state. Admittedly, it does that by default, not voluntarily. But it does so without the resources to operate safely, effectively and humanely on behalf of that population, and it places that population at serious risk of harm.”

Read more: https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20191025/aclu-sues-state-over-use-of-solitary-confinement-for-inmates-with-mental-illness