New York City officials approved a series of sweeping changes Tuesday to the way its prisons use solitary confinement, headlined by the decision to stop putting nearly all inmates 21 and younger in isolation. The city will also limit how long any inmate can be sentenced to solitary and prohibit putting any inmates with serious mental illnesses or physical disabilities in isolation.
The change impacting younger inmates follows a recent wave of reforms across the country targeting how state prison systems use solitary confinement. Pennsylvania, one of the largest prison systems in the country, said last week that it would stop putting inmates with serious mental illnesses in solitary confinement.
Several states, including New York, have moved in the past year to limit the amount of time juveniles spend in solitary and the overall number of inmates held in solitary. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Joe Ponte, commissioner of the city’s Department of Correction, announced last month that the city would no longer put 16- and 17-year-old inmates in solitary.
[For more of this story, written by Mark Berman, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/...olitary-confinement/]
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