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solitary confinement
'Wrong Side of History': NYC Mayor Adams Vetoes Solitary Confinement Ban
"With this veto, the mayor has condemned New Yorkers to suffer in solitary confinement and isolation, and he did so after the cameras were turned off and backs were turned," the bill's sponsor said.
Jan 20, 2024
New York City Mayor Eric Adams vetoed a New York City Council bill on Friday that would have banned the practice of solitary confinement in city jails.
Also on Friday, Adams vetoed another bill that would have increased transparency and oversight of the New York Police Department (NYPD). However, both bills passed the council with more votes than is required to override a veto.
"To recap: Police transparency is good. Solitary confinement is bad. And Mayor Adams is committed to manufacturing controversy where there is none," Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso wrote on social media in response to the news. "The Mayor shouldn't be spending time sowing dissent on veto-proof bills that will pass regardless of his actions today."
"Solitary confinement is torture. It often results in lasting psychological damage, and undermines public safety both inside and outside New York City's jails."
Solitary confinement is an increasingly controversial practice that has been recognized as torture by the United Nations and human rights groups if it lasts for more than 15 days in a row, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Its use at New York's Rikers Island has been linked to at least two recent deaths: Layleen Polanco Xtravaganza, who died after having a seizure while in solitary in 2019 and Kalief Browder, who took his own life after being placed in solitary confinement for two years.
"Solitary confinement is inhumane, and its presence in our city is indefensible," Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who sponsored the legislation, said ahead of its passage last month. "Committing an infraction in jail can cause you to lose privileges, not basic human rights. People in solitary are isolated, denied human contact and connection, denied support, and come out of these deplorable conditions worse than when they went in—and some don't come out at all."
The bill, 549A, would have required that everyone in jail in New York City be allowed to gather with other inmates for at least 14 hours every day, except during emergency lock-ins or to deescalate conflict, ABC News reported. In those cases, inmates could only be confined for up to four hours.
Adams announced the veto by press release, and not during an earlier press conference when he announced his veto of the police transparency measure, as New York Magazine reported.
"Our administration does not support solitary confinement in our jails, and New York City has not used the practice for years. In fact, we have achieved significant reductions in key indicators of violence in our correction system without solitary confinement," Adams said in a statement. "But despite the misleading nickname, had [the bill] taken effect, the Department of Correction would no longer be able to protect people in custody, or the union workers charged with their safety, from violent individuals. I implore the City Council to work with our administration and follow the federal monitor's guidance to abandon this misguided bill."
Williams criticized the mayor's decision.
"With this veto, the mayor has condemned New Yorkers to suffer in solitary confinement and isolation, and he did so after the cameras were turned off and backs were turned. It's cowardly, weak, shameful, and entirely expected from this version of this mayor," Williams said in a statement.
"I don't think there's a single person in the city outside the mayor's office who thinks the status quo on Rikers right now is good and effective," Williams continued. "The ongoing use of solitary confinement and isolation in New York City—no matter what the administration calls it—is indefensible, and vetoing the ban is inexcusable."
Other city council members and rights groups spoke out against the mayor's action.
Speaker Adrienne Adams and Criminal Justice Chair Sandy Nurse promised to "take the steps to enact this law over the Mayor's veto." The measure passed 39-7, and an override requires 34 votes.
"The Council passed Intro. 549-A to ban solitary confinement with more than a veto-proof majority because it is imperative to make the city's jails safer for those who are detained and staff alike," Adams and Nurse said. "We cannot allow the human rights and safety crisis on Rikers to continue by maintaining the status quo of failed policies and practices."
The #HALTsolitary Campaign thanked Adams and Nurse for promising to override the mayor's veto.
"He's on the wrong side of history, human rights, and public safety," the group, which is led by impacted New Yorkers, posted on social media.
The NYCL also encouraged the city council to pass the legislation.
"Solitary confinement is torture," the group wrote on social media. "It often results in lasting psychological damage, and undermines public safety both inside and outside New York City's jails."
Council members and rights groups also criticized Adams' veto of the NYPD transparency measure—5862A or the "How Many Stops Act,"—which passed by a 35-9 margin.
"The Mayor's veto betrays his stated goal of public safety and harms the Black and Latino communities that bear the brunt of these stops."
This bill would have mandated that New York police officers report on civilian stops and searchers and give more detailed information about vehicle stops and searchers, ABC News explained.
In justifying his veto, Adams said that while the legislation "has good intentions behind it, the bill is misguided and compromises our public safety."
"Our administration supports efforts to make law enforcement more transparent, more just, and more accountable, but this bill will handcuff our police by drowning officers in unnecessary paperwork that will saddle taxpayers with tens of millions of dollars in additional NYPD overtime each year, while simultaneously taking officers away from policing our streets and engaging with the community," he said.
In response, Council Speaker Adams said the council was "prepared to override this veto," issuing a joint statement with Public Safety Chair Yusef Salaam.
"The false narrative that we cannot have transparency is bad for our city, and belies the fact that accountability is vital to improving public safety by increasing trust," Adams and Salaam said. "The Mayor's veto betrays his stated goal of public safety and harms the Black and Latino communities that bear the brunt of these stops."
The NYCLU wrote on social media: "The mayor's veto leaves another stain on an administration that has been winding back checks on hyper-aggressive, biased, and unaccountable policing. We are confident the city council will heed the call of impacted New Yorkers and advocates and override the Mayor's veto."
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Why Biden Must Dump Trump’s Charges Against Julian Assange
It’s long overdue for the United States to cancel its request for extradition of Julian Assange and for Assange to be able to be free from the bogus charges of the past decade.
Dec 20, 2023
President Joe Biden, you defeated Trump, yet your administration has not rolled back all of the evil caused by his administration.
Take the case of journalist Julian Assange.
Under the Obama administration of which you, Biden, were vice president for eight years, journalist and publisher Julian Assange was not prosecuted for publishing the “Collateral Murder” video of the U.S. Army murder by hellfire missile of Reuters reporters nor the classified Afghanistan and the Iraq war files.
It wasn’t Biden’s administration had cooked up the novel legal theory under which Assange was charged—it was the Trump administration.
However, you and the Obama administration did prosecute and won conviction of U.S. Army PFC Chelsea Manning for disclosing those classified materials.
As you will know from being the head of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, journalists and publishers are protected by the First Amendment which allows them to publish classified materials given to them by whistleblowers. But, the First Amendment does not protect those who release classified information to journalists, like Manning, whom you prosecuted.
Fifty years ago, no U.S. publisher, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, or any other newspaper in the U.S. or abroad was prosecuted for publishing the classified history of the U.S. war on Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers.
Daniel Ellsberg, who released the 4,000-page sordid classified tale of U.S. military involvement, fully expected to be prosecuted as he was the one who gave classified information to the media. The Nixon administration’s theft of Ellsberg’s medical records torpedoed Nixon’s attempt at prosecuting Ellsberg. Nixon continued to rail against Ellsberg as “the most dangerous man in America” because he, Nixon, was unable to put Ellsberg in jail.
No publisher in the history of the United States has been prosecuted until the Trump administration came into power. After WikiLeaks and other media published in 2017 “Vault 7,” the most CIA materials about CIA hacking capabilities ever to come into the public domain, Trump’s Attorney General William Barr, at the command of CIA director Mike Pompeo, decided to try a new legal theory, one that had never been used in U.S. history.
CIA director Pompeo described WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” and the Department of Justice charged non-U.S. citizen, Julian Assange, with espionage against the U.S. and demanded his extradition from England.
A conviction of U.S. charges of espionage could result in Assange being sentenced to 175 years in prison.
At the time of the U.S. charges, Assange had requested asylum from the Ecuadorian government and had been protected by living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for five years.
With a change in Ecuadorian government and under intense pressure from the British and U.S. governments, in April 2019 the new Ecuadorian administration allowed British police to break the embassy’s sovereignty and enter the embassy. London police carried Assange out of the embassy, put him into a police van, and immediately locked him up in the highest security prison in the U.K., Belmarsh Prison.
Prior to the police breaching the Ecuadorian Embassy, Assange had been denied his razor for weeks. His haggard appearance as he was carried out of the embassy was part of an orchestrated negative publicity campaign orchestrated by the British government and, without a doubt, the U.S. government.
Assange Has Been in U.K. Prison in Solitary Confinement for Almost Five Years with No Conviction on Any Charges
For the past for four years and nine months, Assange has been in Belmarsh Prison, a high security prison for those convicted of violent crimes. He has been in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day, a violation of the right not to be tortured, according to former U.N. Special Rapporteur Nils Melzer.
Yet, Assange has not been convicted of any crime. Despite no conviction, he has been incarcerated by the British government on behalf of the U.S. government until extradition proceedings to the U.S. are successful.
Almost three years ago in January 2021, lower court judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange should be released from Belmarsh Prison. She denied the U.S. request for extradition based on Assange’s mental health, his propensity to commit suicide, and conditions of U.S. prisons.
The U.S. appealed her decision, issuing “diplomatic assurances” that Assange would not be mistreated in a U.S. prison. The High Court, after a two-day hearing in March 2022, accepted those “assurances” and rejected Assange’s appeal. His application to the U.K. Supreme Court to hear the case was then denied. Assange then applied for a new appeal of Baraitser’s legal decisions and the home secretary’s extradition order. His 150-page argument was rejected in a three-page ruling. The appeal of that decision will now take place on February 20 to 21, 2024.
Don’t Trust the U.S. Government’s ‘Diplomatic Assurances’
As a former U.S. diplomat, I can guarantee Julian that U.S. “diplomatic assurances” mean absolutely nothing. The U.S. breaks its word to individuals and countries frequently, and the U.S. Department of State has no jurisdiction over the Federal Bureau of Prisons which makes decisions unilaterally about how prisoners are treated.
At the Belmarsh Tribunal held in Washington, D.C. on December 9, 2023, former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who spent nearly two years in federal prison for talking about the CIA’s waterboarding program, the existence of which had been in the public domain for years, said that the guarantees that the State Department had made in court documents were meaningless. He said that the Bureau of Prisons makes its own decisions on whether a person will be in solitary confinement, and the recommendations of the State Department and Department of Justice are disregarded.
The United States has more prisoners in solitary confinement that any other country. In May 2023, the watchdog group Solitary Watch and the advocacy coalition Unlock the Box released a groundbreaking joint report showing that at least 122,840 people are locked daily in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails for 22 or more hours a day.
Pressure on Biden From the Australian Government and Members of the U.S. Congress
In October 2023, a group of bipartisan members of the Australian Parliament traveled to the U.S. and lobbied the U.S. government to drop the charges against Assange.
At the end of October, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Washington where he raised the Assange issue in a meeting with Biden and repeated his call for President Biden to bring the matter to a close.
On November 8, 2023, 16 Congresspeople from across the political spectrum signed a letter to President Biden, calling on him to drop all charges and withdraw the extradition request.
In the letter, the members of the U.S. Congress said, “We believe the Department of Justice acted correctly in 2013, during your vice presidency, when it declined to pursue charges against Mr. Assange for publishing the classified documents because it recognized that the prosecution would set a dangerous precedent.”
The letter continued that they are “well aware that should the U.S. extradition and prosecution go forward, there is a significant risk that our bilateral relationship with Australia will be badly damaged.”
So Why Hasn’t the Biden Administration Dropped the Trump Charges Against Assange?
What is so ironic is that the Biden administration could immediately withdraw the request for extradition from the U.K. It wasn’t Biden’s administration had cooked up the novel legal theory under which Assange was charged—it was the Trump administration.
The Obama administration, of which Biden was the vice president for eight years, never charged Julian Assange with a crime.
Is it that Biden fears the right-wing Republican party members will call him soft on the Trump-era cooked up “non-state actor” legal theory of espionage?
Surely, the former chair of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee can see through that smear attempt.
It is long past time for U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to tell President Biden that the Trump charges against Assange that are the basis for the extradition request are without merit.
It’s long overdue for the United States to cancel its request for extradition of Julian Assange and for Assange to be free from the bogus charges of the past decade.
Call (Comments: 202-456-1111; Switchboard: 202-456-1414) or write the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice today and demand that charges be dropped.
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'This Is Madness': Supreme Court Denies Solitary Confinement Appeal
Rep. Cori Bush, who is leading the End Solitary Confinement Act, argues that "we are using taxpayer money to torture people."
Nov 15, 2023
The U.S. Supreme Court's three liberal justices issued a scathing dissent this week as the tribunal's right-wing supermajority rejected the appeal of an Illinois inmate with mental illness imprisoned in solitary confinement without access to fresh air for three straight years.
The nation's high court declined to hear the appeal of Michael Johnson, an inmate at Pontiac Correctional Center northeast of Peoria, whose attorneys argued he was being subjected to unconstitutional "cruel and unusual punishment" as he was deprived of fresh air and outdoor exercise while enduring horrific conditions in a tiny, filthy cell.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan that during three continuous years in solitary, "Johnson spent nearly every hour of his existence in a windowless, perpetually lit cell about the size of a parking space."
"His cell was poorly ventilated, resulting in unbearable heat and noxious odors. The space was also unsanitary, often caked with human waste," the dissent continued. "And because Pontiac officials would not provide cleaning supplies to Johnson unless he purchased them from the commissary, he was frequently forced to clean that filth with his bare hands. Johnson was allowed out of his cell to shower only once per week, for 10 brief minutes."
According toThe New York Times:
Mr. Johnson suffered from what the corrections system acknowledged was profound mental illness. He violated countless prison rules, disobeying guards' orders, spitting at them, and damaging property.
As a punishment for those violations, prison authorities took away the hour of exercise that prisoners in solitary were generally afforded five days a week, typically in a small, secured cage outdoors.
"Each yard restriction was imposed for a period of between 30 and 90 days, but the restrictions were stacked such that, in total, Johnson received over three years' worth of yard restrictions," Jackson's dissent noted. "The cramped confines of Johnson's cell prevented him from exercising there. Thus, for three years, Johnson had no opportunity at all to stretch his limbs or breathe fresh air."
"The consequences of such a prolonged period of exercise deprivation were predictably severe," Jackson added. "Most notably, Johnson's mental state deteriorated rapidly. He suffered from hallucinations, excoriated his own flesh, urinated and defecated on himself, and smeared feces all over his body and cell. Johnson became suicidal and sometimes engaged in misconduct with the hope that prison guards would beat him to death."
Responding to the ruling, U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.)
wrote on social media Tuesday that "excessive use of solitary confinement is cruel, violates the Constitution, and doesn't rehabilitate individuals. Disappointing that SCOTUS ducked this case."
While praising the three liberal justices' dissent, Daniel Greenfield, an attorney at the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center said in a
statement that "three years of 24/7 solitary confinement unrelieved by any opportunity for exercise would have appalled the Founders. It should be no less shocking to us today."
On Tuesday, just a day after the ruling, the Federal Anti-Solitary Task Force—a coalition of the Center for Constitutional Rights, ACLU, #HALTSolitary, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Unlock the Box Campaign, and Zealous—held a National Day of Action Against Solitary Confinement.
The day's main event was an afternoon virtual rally during which U.S. Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) asserted that "we are using taxpayer money to torture people."
"As we convene today, there are still over 122,000 people being held in solitary confinement across our country," said Bush, who in July led the introduction of the End Solitary Confinement Act, which according to the congresswoman now has 20 co-sponsors.
"And the problem, we know, is getting worse," she added. "As of last year, solitary confinement has increased nearly 12% in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, despite President [Joe] Biden's campaign pledge to end this horrific practice once and for all."
"Let's be clear," she stressed. "This is shameful, and another example of how our government talks a big game about human rights, but does little to affirm and protect them in actual practice."
"The catastrophic harms of solitary confinement are indisputable," Bush continued, listing suicide and other forms of self-harm, heart disease, depression, and other serious physical and mental ailments. "Placement in solitary for any length of time... can cause severe long-term harm."
"This punitive and violent tactic does not improve safety. It is long past time to prohibit its use," the congresswoman added. "The people of this country agree; that's why recent polling shows that a majority of voters across the political spectrum support federal legislation ending solitary confinement entirely, beyond a limit of four hours."
In addition to ending solitary confinement in federal facilities for over four hours, Bush's bill would protect vulnerable prisoners from being placed in solitary confinement, establish alternatives for longer-term inmate separation from the general prison population, impose strict due process protections, create oversight and enforcement mechanisms, and incentivize states and municipalities to enact similar legislation.
Solitary confinement has long been recognized as torture. Research including a 1990s study of dozens of former Yugoslavian prisoners of war held for an average of six months in isolation found that people locked up in solitary confinement registered brain abnormalities comparable to those who suffered physical head trauma.
"In moments like these, we are called upon to recognize the common humanity in one another," Bush said during Tuesday's online rally. "Ending solitary confinement is one of these ways."
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