As Doug Berman notes at Sentencing Law and Policy, NYU Wagner School of Criminal Justice is planning a panel discussion titled "Segregation and Solitary Confinement: Cruel and Unusual Punishment?" The conference description includes this statement:
More than 25,000 people are confined in solitary confinement in the United States. An additional 50,000 to 80,000 are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation.But where do those numbers come from? And how accurately do they portray the issue? A cursory search reveals many sources cite to an article by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker. But that article really doesn't offer much in terms of hard numbers. As a former prison psychologist, I've thought quite a bit about the use of solitary confinement, the prevalence of its use, and the various policy arguments for and against its practice. What has always struck me about the debate is how little empirical data we truly have about this issue.
Perhaps the best assessment of the use of supermax comes from a paper published in 2008 in The Prison Journal: Naday, Freilich, and Mellow, The Elusive Data on Supermax Confinement. Naday and colleagues cogently point out the inherent difficulties in gathering empirical data on the use of supermax facilities. These include differing nomenclatures, inaccurately maintained records, and counting the number of beds occupied versus beds available. They state:
It is unclear how many inmates are in supermax confinement in the United States. Although published figures range from 5,000 to 100,000, the most frequently cited figure in the past 6 years is 20,000. This count actually originated from two reports conducted in the late 1990s. A close examination of these two reports, however, indicates that they relied on outdated figures and are undermined by definitional issues [internal citations omitted].Indeed, as the authors demonstrate, the data is hardly clear but do seem to show that in some states the number of inmates in supermax facilities has declined (albeit in some states it has risen significantly). But what I find lacking in all of these studies is any discussion about the length of time an average inmate serves in supermax. My experience was that stays in administrative segregation (a type of supermax) were quite limited - often just a few days. Inmates who were involved in assaults or were entirely uncooperative with staff were moved to administrative segregation as punishment and as a means to cool off their inflamed passions. Once there, they promptly received a medical and psychiatric evaluation. This was not the scene of the Shawsank Redemption that congers-up images of years of complete solitude.
Of course, this doesn't mean this is the typical or even a common experience. But it raises the question of what can we make of statements about supermax. Given the paucity of empirical data it seems very little. And that's too bad because it suggests the dialogue at conferences like the one at NYU will likely will outpace what can be accurately said.
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