A tale of two states: Wisconsin trails Colorado as both cut
solitary confinement
By Dee Hall center for Investigative Journalism; wwwwisconsinwatch.org
Former Wisconsin Department of Corrections chief Rick
Raemisch is leading the push in Colorado to reduce isolation, which many
believe is torture
Jen Friedberg/For the Wisconsin Center for Investigative
Journalism
Former Wisconsin Corrections Secretary Rick Raemisch stands
outside the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañ–on City
where he famously spent 20 hours in solitary confinement, formerly known as
administrative segregation, in 2014. Raemisch now heads the the Colorado
Department of Corrections. Says Raemisch: "I'll tell you right now,
segregation doesn't work — at all."
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CAÑON CITY, Colo. — Rick Raemisch sits on the concrete bed
in a cell, one of 948 empty rooms in the shuttered Centennial South
Correctional Facility. He is recalling the day — actually just 20 hours — that
he spent in solitary confinement at the state prison next door.
As he looks around the white-walled room, Raemisch declares
it fairly similar to the 7-foot by 13-foot cell where in 2014, as head of
Colorado’s corrections system, he had himself locked up.
In this cell, he notes the tiny window looking out toward a
gravel yard and a concrete wall. There is a stainless steel sink, toilet and a
mirror made of metal. The solid purple door has a narrow slot that looks out to
a common area.
“The problem with this cell, there’s nothing to count,”
Raemisch says, noting the smooth walls. “There’s no chips. There’s no scrapes.
There’s no dents. You got nothing to count in here.”
 |
| Add caption |
Adrienne Jacobson / Colorado Department of Corrections
Rick Raemisch, executive director of the Colorado Department
of Corrections, sits in a cell similar to the one where he spent nearly a day
in 2014. Raemisch found himself pacing, losing track of time and counting nicks
in the wall to occupy his mind. And he was there for just 20 hours — not the
20-plus years some Colorado inmates had endured before the state eliminaElijah
Beatty
ted
indefinite use of solitary confinement.
The reason this cell at Centennial South remains relatively
unmarked is that, except for about two years from 2010 to 2012, it has not been
used. Colorado’s rapid shift away from solitary confinement — from 1,500
prisoners in 2011 down to 185 as of May — has left the state with a $200
million empty all-solitary prison in City.
Colorado’s decision to curtail the use of solitary
confinement — which the state of Wisconsin has begun to do — offers lessons for
the Badger State that Raemisch is uniquely positioned to offer.
Raemisch was secretary of the Wisconsin Department of
Corrections from 2007 until Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2011. A Republican,
Raemisch was an assistant district attorney and sheriff in Dane County and a
federal prosecutor before taking Wisconsin’s top corrections post.
Before the changes, Colorado held some violent or
hard-to-manage inmates in isolation for more than 24 years. The state
eliminated the use of such long-term, indefinite solitary confinement in 2014;
inmates now serve no more than one year in that status, formerly known as
administrative segregation and now called restrictive housing-maximum security.
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In Colorado, prisoners confined for disciplinary infractions
within the institutions now serve a maximum of 30 days at a time, with just a
few exceptions. During those stints, inmates are allowed at least four hours a
day out of their cells along with other inmates.
Colorado also has banned the use of seclusion for any inmate
with a serious mental illness.
Earlier this year, Raemisch took a Wisconsin Center for
Investigative Journalism reporter on a tour of three Colorado prisons, allowing
access to staff and prisoners.
By contrast, requests by the Center for access to a
so-called restrictive housing unit in one of Wisconsin’s prisons, to interview
an inmate in solitary or to discuss the state’s solitary confinement policy
with an agency official were all rejected. A DOC spokesman cited security
concerns and a rule that bans media interviews with prisoners in solitary.
 |
| Waupun Cell |
Wisconsin Department of Corrections
Inmates can spend years, even decades, in a cell like this
one at Waupun Correctional Institution under so-called administrative
confinement. Colorado and California have eliminated the use of such indefinite
solitary confinement.
That is not the only difference between the two states.
Colorado has several factors that helped it make major changes to its
20,000-inmate system that Wisconsin lacks, including:
A bipartisan commitment by top political leaders from
Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper on down to reduce solitary confinement;
A vigorous prisoner advocacy community that meets regularly
with Raemisch; and
Transparency about the treatment of inmates and safety
within the prisons, including annual reports to the Legislature and a constituent services office
that handles complaints.
In Wisconsin, the number of prisoners in solitary also has
dropped, a reduction of nearly 300 to 827 as of late March. Officials say it is
due to reduced terms implemented in 2015 for disciplinary infractions.
In addition, 116 inmates are in indefinite administrative
confinement for prison safety reasons. Prisoners at Waupun Correctional
Institution were set to begin a hunger strike June 10 in an effort to eliminate
such long-term solitary confinement.
 |
| LaRon McKInley |
Wisconsin Department of Corrections
LaRon McKinley Bey has sued the Wisconsin Department of
Corrections, alleging his 25 years in a form of solitary confinement
constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
The conditions in administrative confinement in Wisconsin —
which are similar to solitary and include 23 hours or more per day in a cell
with little human contact or access to natural light — can last for years. In
April, Waupun Correctional Institution inmate LaRon McKinley Bey sued the Wisconsin DOC over what he charges is mental torture
and physical deprivation during more than 25 years of administrative
confinement.
And in Colorado, there are now occasional inmate fights in
restrictive housing as prisoners are allowed to congregate in common areas
instead of being completely isolated from one another.
“There’s scuffles. There’s fights,” Raemisch said. “When you
put people together, that’s going to happen. But the majority have not been
serious.”
And agency figures show assaults on corrections staff are
down sharply.
Stir crazy in solitary
As he planned his own stint in solitary back in 2014,
Raemisch imagined it would be a good time to catch up on sleep.
Instead, Raemisch found himself counting nicks in the wall.
He paced. He lost track of time. He craned his neck to catch a glimpse of sky,
and he strained to hear a nearby inmate’s TV. The yelling and glare of lights
kept him awake for all but a few minutes at a time. At 11 a.m. the next day, he
broke his own rule and asked what time it was. Still four hours to go.
The experience, which he also recounted in a New York Times column, left Raemisch shaken — and more
determined than ever to finish the job his late predecessor, Tom Clements, had
started: to end solitary confinement in Colorado’s prisons.
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| This prison is now vacant was built exclusively to house solitary confinement prisoners |
Jen Friedberg / For the Wisconsin Center for Investigative
Journalism
This $200 million prison in Ca–ñon City,
Colorado was opened in 2010 exclusively to house prisoners in solitary confinement.
It is now vacant because of the Colorado Department of Corrections’ decision to
severely curtail use of isolation. Officials are considering turning the
948-bed facility into a reentry center to help inmates prepare for life after
prison.
Speaking perhaps as much for himself as for the estimated 100,000 U.S. prisoners a year who endure a form of
isolation that many believe is torture, Raemisch said, “If we put you in there
for 23 hours a day, you’re going to come out thinking differently than you did
when you came in.
“I’ll tell you right now,” he added, “segregation doesn’t
work — at all.”
Raemisch’s experiment reinforced his opinion that use of
solitary can exacerbate violence and mental illness among prisoners. Colorado’s
overuse of solitary confinement was “sending people out worse than when they
came in.”
“You can’t put someone with a mental illness in a 7-by-13
cell for 23 hours a day and let the demons chase them around,” he said. “So
those who were severely mentally ill in the past, that’s oftentimes where they
ended up — sometimes for years.”
In 2014, after hundreds of prisoners were returned to
less-restrictive settings, inmate-on-inmate violence rose, according to the
most recent eight years of data provided by the Colorado DOC. From fiscal year
2008 through fiscal year 2015, the average annual number of inmate-on-inmate
assaults was 432; in 2015 it was 520. And there were 723 fights in 2015 — the
highest in eight years.
But assaults on staff decreased significantly. Between 2008
and 2013, there were an average of 262 assaults on staff per year. But those
numbers dropped to 188 in 2014 and 160 in 2015.
Murder sparks leadership change
Raemisch became the executive director of the Colorado
prison system in 2013 after the well-liked Clements was gunned down on his
front doorstep by an inmate released directly to the streets after seven years in solitary
confinement. Colorado has officially ended this practice for public safety
reasons.
The murder was sadly ironic: It was Clements, at the
direction of Hickenlooper and following pressure from advocacy groups and the
Legislature, who spearheaded the push to severely curtail the use of isolation
in Colorado prisons.
Speaking in the corrections headquarters conference room
with a view of Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs, Raemisch recounted the rapid
reduction in the state’s solitary confinement population: 1,500 prisoners in
2011, about 700 in 2013 and around 170 as of January. That number was back up
to 185 as of May, Colorado DOC spokeswoman Laurie Kilpatrick said.
Jerilee Bennett / For the Wisconsin Center for Investigative
Journalism
When Rick Raemisch left Wisconsin to take over leadership of
the Colorado prison system, Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper gave him a
mandate: Reduce solitary confinement. Today, fewer than 200 prisoners are
confined in 22-hour-a-day isolation in Colorado state prisons compared to 1,500
in 2011.
During the interview, Raemisch addresses the allegation that
the Colorado prison system was overstating the success of his reforms, including whether such
prisoners were continuing to be released directly from solitary. In December,
without acknowledging any wrongdoing, the department agreed to pay its former
statistician Maureen O’Keefe $280,000 to settle her whistleblower complaint.
Raemisch disputes the claim that his department has “cooked
the books.”
“We’ve had people question our numbers. I stand by our
numbers 100 percent. There’s no question. I always have and I always will,”
Raemisch said, adding that his agency has been “transparent” about its
operations.
Courtesy of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado
 |
| Rebecca Wallace ACLU |
Rebecca Wallace, staff attorney for the American Civil
Liberties Union of Colorado, says Rick Raemisch has helped to make reducing
solitary confinement “palatable” for other corrections leaders.
Rebecca Wallace, staff attorney for the American Civil
Liberties Union in Colorado, said she cannot verify every statistic, but she
credits Raemisch and his predecessor for the agency’s “remarkable” data
collection and transparency.
“Compared to what’s happening around the country, you can
just go onto the DOC’s website and you’ll see a level of information that
you’re going to see very few other places,” Wallace said.
Wallace was part of an ACLU team that examined the
department’s data to determine whether the reported gains were real. While
identifying several shortcomings, the ACLU report told Raemisch that his reforms have improved
public safety and “the humanity of Colorado’s prisons.”
“We recognize that because of policy changes under your
administration, hundreds of men and women have been freed from long-term
isolation and no doubt hundreds more will never endure it,” the report
concluded. “Your work and public advocacy are not just affecting prisoners in
Colorado, but are having positive ripple effects across the country and
abroad.”
‘Cultural change’ in Colorado
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| Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition |
Dee J. Hall / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal
Justice Reform Coalition, has been fighting overincarceration and the use of
solitary confinement for more than 20 years. This 1995 photo is from a protest
of the state’s first “supermax” prison, the Colorado State Penitentiary.
Inmates at the formerly all-solitary-confinement prison are now allowed to
socialize with one another and interact with staff outside of their cells for
four to six hours a day.
Among them is Christie Donner, executive director of the
Denver-based Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. Beginning in the
mid-1990s, Donner led the opposition against solitary confinement, including
protests against the prison that now stands vacant in the high desert 115 miles
south of Denver.
Donner said solitary was a “popular” solution to make
prisons safer for staff and inmates.
“They always talk about gangs and murderers and sociopaths
and really didn’t have any acknowledgement at all — zero — that there could be
any mental health risk, either for somebody who didn’t have a mental health
issue prior to going in, let alone for somebody that did have a mental illness
when they went in,” she said.
Donner said Colorado is leading the way in shifting
corrections away from solitary. “It is not just policy and practice change. …
It’s an actual attitudinal, cultural change within corrections as a
profession,” she said.
In Wisconsin, under a policy enacted in June 2015, the DOC
has sharply reduced the maximum time in segregation for prisoners who violate
prison rules, from 360 days to 90 days, with longer stints possible under some
circumstances. But in practice, the Center revealed earlier this year that some inmates were not aware of the changes and had agreed to
longer-than-maximum stints in isolation.
By comparison, Colorado currently has a maximum stay in
restrictive housing of 30 days for most in-prison offenses. The exceptions are
60 days for murder and 45 days for manslaughter or kidnapping.
<a href='#'><img alt='Dashboard 1 ' src='https://public.tableau.com/static/images/Co/Coloradocutssolitaryconfinement2/Dashboard1/1_rss.png'
style='border: none' /></a>
“When you start questioning everything, which is what we’ve
done, does 30 days make any more difference than 15 days? The fact of the
matter is, in our minds, it doesn’t,” Raemisch said. “So, 15 days is going to
be the maximum number. We’re moving toward that. We will get to that.”
In the past, Colorado also confined some prisoners
indefinitely for safety reasons; now the maximum for such administrative
confinement is one year, Raemisch said.
“We are the only state that, when someone goes into
restrictive housing, they know when they’re going to come out, and the absolute
maximum — absolute maximum — is a year,” Raemisch said.
Less time in isolation
In fiscal year 2015, there were an average of 158 inmates
serving up to one year in restrictive housing-maximum security in
Colorado, spending up to 22 hours a day in their cells. The average length of
confinement has dropped from 28 months in fiscal 2013 to eight months in fiscal
2015, according to agency figures.
For those with serious mental illness, isolation is banned.
Now, such inmates must be offered a minimum of 10 hours a week outside their
cells for therapy and 10 hours a week for other activities.
However, the ACLU was critical of a mass reclassification of
mental health status launched in 2013 before Raemisch came on board that cut
the percentage of prisoners listed as seriously mentally ill from 17 percent to
10 percent.
The report also found an “extremely high” number of
prisoners were refusing at least part of the 10 hours a week of out-of-cell
therapy, particularly group therapy. It recommended more mental health staff to
provide individual counseling.
Raemisch said some prisoners are uncomfortable interacting
with others after lengthy isolation. Clinicians coax them out using rewards
such as extra canteen items or therapy dogs, he said.
Congregating for the first time
At Colorado State Penitentiary, where Raemisch served his
solitary stint, Warden Travis Trani conducts a tour. Prisoners being confined
for violating prison rules talk and play board games at tables in glassed-in
common areas as the doors to their single cells stand open. These inmates are
outside of their cells for between four and six hours a day in groups of
between eight and 16, Trani said.
In the past, every prisoner was in his cell at least 23
hours a day.
“They would come out one hour a day — or I should say one
hour five times a week — and they would recreate in that area,” Trani said,
pointing to an empty cell. “They’d be there for an hour, they’d be allowed to shower,
then they would go back to their cell. One offender at a time … The offenders
never came out to congregate in these areas.”
In the gym, which had been closed to inmate use for 20 years
until 2014, prisoners play basketball. When they leave the gym, they pass
through a metal detector unrestrained.
 |
| per lawsuit mandate building outside rec area |
Jen Friedberg / For the Wisconsin Center for Investigative
Journalism
A lawsuit by a mentally ill inmate forced construction of an
outdoor recreation facility at the Colorado State Penitentiary seen here. Until
the facility is completed later in 2016, prisoners will continue to have
recreation time indoors. Plaintiff Troy Anderson had sued after spending 11
years confined at the prison with no outdoor recreation.
A fenced-in outdoor recreation area also is being added to
the prison, which will offer inmates access to sunshine for the first time. The
project is the result of a lawsuit filed by Troy Anderson, a mentally ill inmate who had
spent 11 years in solitary confinement there. Ruling in 2012, a federal judge
described the prison’s conditions as “a paradigm of inhumane treatment.”
 |
| Laura Rovner, a University of Denver associate law professor who teaches in the school’s Civil Rights Clinic, says the Colorado Department of Corrections has shown “enormous progress” in reducing solitary confinement in recent years. |
Courtesy of the University of Denver
Laura Rovner, a University of Denver associate law professor
who teaches in the school’s Civil Rights Clinic, says the Colorado Department
of Corrections has shown “enormous progress” in reducing solitary confinement
in recent years.
“We won on the issue of the need for people to be able to go
outside, and that it was a violation of the Constitution that they couldn’t,”
said Laura Rovner, a University of Denver associate law professor who teaches
in the school’s Civil Rights Clinic, which handled the case.
Rovner recalled one prisoner who had spent 20 years in
isolation at the prison; she said his skin was “translucent” from lack of
exposure to the sun. Rovner confirmed that the Colorado corrections system has
shown “enormous progress” in reducing solitary confinement in recent years.
“Certainly this is a very different universe than the one we
were in four or five years ago,” she said.
Trani said the changes have been positive, but they have
created some new security problems.
“Right now we’ve averaged around 10 fights, assaults a
month,” he said. “They’ve increased, obviously, because offenders are now
coming out together — for the first time.”
In Wisconsin, inmates in solitary are allowed some
out-of-cell time, but it is much shorter and, usually, it is alone. Corrections
spokeswoman Joy Staab said in an email that each inmate in restrictive housing
is offered at least four hours a week of out-of-cell recreation plus time for
showers and medical appointments — nearly identical to the program Colorado has
abandoned. Some inmates also receive out-of-cell time for meals, programming or
additional recreation, she said.
Conditions improve for inmates
 |
| Inmate Elijah Beatty |
Colorado Department of Corrections
Colorado State Penitentiary inmate Elijah Beatty says there
is more freedom but more potential for friction between rival gangs under
changes to solitary confinement enacted in Colorado.
Elijah Beatty is serving a 76-year sentence at Colorado
State Penitentiary for a 1999 case in which he shot at a car in Colorado
Springs with a father, mother and child inside. Beatty and the father had had a
run-in earlier at a grocery store.
Beatty, whose heavily muscled arms are covered with tattoos,
agreed to an impromptu interview during a tour of the prison. Asked to compare
his former stints in solitary confinement with his current status, Beatty said
he now attends class with a teacher rather than having a book slid to him
through a slot in the door.
“We’re actually interacting with people,” Beatty said. “And
we’re able to speak or we’re able to reflect, when before we were just stuck in
a cell back then and we had nothing to reflect on. … We just had our moods and
got pissed off.”
In the past, “We didn’t have nothin.” Now, he said, “We’re
able to run around and play some basketball. So I can be fair and say
recreation-wise, we’re able to do more now than we were able to do back then.”
But there are downsides. Beatty, 35, who is a member of the
Crips, said the new approach can lead to clashes between rival gangs making
“the penitentiary very unpredictable and a tad more dangerous.”
The reduction in solitary confinement also means Colorado
now has a vacant prison in Cañon City costing taxpayers about $20 million a
year. Several ideas — including converting it to a pre-release center for
inmates — have been floated.
Raemisch acknowledged that dismantling solitary confinement
in Colorado has not been entirely smooth. But, he added, “There’s no question,
at least in my mind and from our data, that the less you use segregation, the
safer your facilities are.”
Reporting for this story was supported by the Solutions
Journalism Network, the Center on Media, Crime and Justice and the Vital
Projects Fund. The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org)
collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, other
news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and
Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the
Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of
its affiliates.
Support WisconsinWatch.org
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Hall, a co-founder of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative
Journalism, joined the staff as managing editor in June 2015. She worked at the
Wisconsin State Journal for 24 years as an editor and reporter focusing on projects
and investigations.
