"End Solitary Confinement for Teenagers"

The title of this post is the headline of this New York Times op-ed authored by Ian Kysel. Here are excerpts:

Solitary confinement can be psychologically damaging for any inmate, but it is especially perverse when it is used to discipline children and teenagers.  At juvenile detention centers and adult prisons and jails across the country, minors are locked in isolated cells for 22 hours or more a day.  Solitary confinement is used to punish misbehavior, to protect vulnerable detainees or to isolate someone who may be violent or suicidal.  But this practice does more harm than good.  It should end.

A major study by the Department of Justice in 2003 showed that more than 15 percent of young people in juvenile facilities, some as young as 10, had been held in solitary.  My own research, for Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, suggested that the practice of putting teenagers in solitary was more widespread in adult jails and prisons.  A recent Justice Department investigation found that at any given time in 2013 as many as a quarter of adolescents held at New York City’s Rikers Island were in solitary confinement.  Dozens had been sentenced to more than three months in solitary.  Still others were held longer, for more than six months.

Only six states have laws on the books that prohibit certain forms of isolation in juvenile facilities.  No state — nor the federal government — has banned the solitary confinement of teens in adult jails and prisons....

A recent Justice Department review of suicides in juvenile facilities found that more than half of the minors who had killed themselves had done so in isolation.  And in adult jails, department data released this fall identified more than 40 teenagers who had committed suicide since 2000; the suicide rate for minors in adult prisons was twice as high as that for older inmates.  A recent study at Rikers Island found that adolescents there were significantly more likely to harm themselves....

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. should immediately direct the Bureau of Prisons to outlaw the solitary confinement of juveniles.  The federal government already prohibits the detention of juveniles with adults in federal prisons (a rule that states should emulate).  Mr. Holder could also direct the bureau to develop new policies to strictly regulate any use of even short periods of isolation.

Mr. Holder could then direct the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to promote these policies as model practices, much like the national guidelines on education in juvenile facilities that Mr. Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced last week....

That the practice [of solitary confinement] is widespread remains a disturbing indicator of how poorly we treat the hundreds of thousands of minors arrested each year in the United States. They are still maturing into adulthood. Solitary confinement can sabotage both their rehabilitation and their growth. It should be banned.