In Pennsylvania, Coronavirus Means More Indefinite Solitary Confinement

Just after Pennsylvania agreed to relax their probably-unconstitutional death row practices as part of an ACLU settlement, coronavirus struck the US, which has left entire prison populations in a form of solitary confinement.

“The use of long-term solitary confinement on anyone is torture,” said Amy Fettig, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “The conditions Pennsylvania’s DOC was subjecting people on death row to — spending their entire lives in a tiny, filthy cell without any normal human contact, congregate religious services, sufficient access to exercise, sunshine, the outdoors, or environmental and intellectual stimulation — weren’t just deeply unconstitutional; they were horribly inhumane.”

As coronavirus lockdowns continue indefinitely, it seems like we're back to square one, but with the entire prison population - not just death row inmates.

“We don’t fully know what the impacts are of having tens of thousands of people effectively in an extended form of solitary confinement, and we just don’t know how manageable it is,” said Sean Damon, organizing director at Amistad Law Project, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that advocates for incarcerated people.

“Our fear is that this is going to have huge mental health impacts on the people that are on the extended lockdown,” he said, noting the possibility of an increase in suicides or general unrest.

Kris Henderson, executive director of the Amistad Law Project, said the organization has heard from incarcerated people “really suffering” the effects of the lockdown, from anxieties over contracting the virus to those struggling to get access to a single-person-capacity cell.

“It’s not great for anyone to be in a small room with another person for 23 hours a day,” Henderson said. “I think even those of us out in the community who are either alone or with one or a couple of loved ones are seeing how difficult it can be to be living with this new way of life.”

Henderson’s organization is also calling for greater use of reprieves to reduce prison populations as a means of mental and physical “harm reduction.”

After legislative efforts to reduce prison populations stalled in April, Gov. Tom Wolf announced plans to grant temporary coronavirus-related reprieves to nonviolent state inmates. The administration said up to 1,800 incarcerated people could qualify, although the number would likely be much smaller because of “reentry challenges.”

As of Thursday, 133 prisoners had received reprieves, according to department data.