On June 23, the U.S. Department of Justice sealed a deal with the Hinds County Detention Center and sheriff’s office in Mississippi to making sweeping changes to the county’s jail system. The new reforms focus on how to identify and treat mentally ill inmates and on reducing the time people can be detained at the jail. While this is happening in a small county in the Deep South, what makes these reforms monumental is that they seem to be signaling the dawn of a post-solitary-confinement era.
The stipulations in the Hinds County agreement are plentiful, but the new rules around segregated housing—often called solitary confinement—are worth noting. It’s in these rules that it appears that law enforcement officials are finally owning up to the harmful mental effects that solitary confinement has on prisoners. The agreement, in fact, states directly that “Segregation must be presumed contraindicated for prisoners with serious mental illness.”
“Contraindicated”—that’s the word doctors use when prohibiting a certain medication when they know that it will only worsen a patient’s health. We know from the story of Kalief Browder at Rikers Island, and many others like him, that solitary has worsened the mental health of people who didn’t have mental problems to begin with.
[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to http://www.citylab.com/crime/2...-confinement/488729/]
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