T’ruah’s statement on historic reform of solitary confinement announced by the Obama Administration
T’ruah congratulates the Obama Administration on the announcement of significant reforms of solitary confinement in the federal prison system. We applaud yesterday’s release of the Department of Justice’s Report and Recommendations Concerning the Use of Restrictive Housing, which offers comprehensive guidelines on the use of solitary confinement in federal prisons.
Prolonged solitary confinement constitutes torture, both according to human rights experts and according to Torah. “It is not good for a person to be alone,” (Genesis 2:18) A Talmudic story is told about Honi HaMa’agel, who wakes from a 70-year sleep to learn that he has outlived everyone he knew and declares, “Either companionship or death.” (Ta’anit 23a) Indeed, the ancient rabbis understood that solitary confinement was a means of exacting the death penalty. (Sanhedrin 81b)
The fifty recommendations, which were immediately adopted by the Obama Administration, include a ban on juveniles in federal custody being placed in solitary confinement. While this recommendation is largely symbolic, given the small number of juveniles currently held in the federal prison system, we call for this ban to provide moral guidance state-based reform efforts to end the isolation of the more than 1000 juveniles currently held in solitary confinement in state prisons, as well as countless others in local jails and in immigration detention. Other recommendations issued by the Department of Justice, and adopted by the President, include banning the use of solitary confinement for low-level infractions, expanding treatment for the mentally ill, and increased out of cell time for prisoners in isolation. These changes, which may affect up to 10,000 adults, represent an important development towards respecting the tzelem elohim (divine image) in these prisoners. In a historic move towards transparency, the Bureau of Prisons will be required for the first time to post data every month regarding its use of restricted housing across the federal system.
As rabbis, many of us have visited congregants in prison, or served as prison chaplains. These pastoral experiences have taught us the degradation prisoners feel, the loneliness of being in prison, and the desperation of those unable to maintain normal human relationships while living in isolation. The pain of extreme isolation causes us to recall Psalm 118, “From the narrow place, I called to God.” As President Obama said in his OpEd in the Washington Post, “How can we subject prisoners to unnecessary solitary confinement, knowing its effects, and then expect them to return to our communities as whole people? It doesn’t make us safer. It’s an affront to our common humanity.”
We call on state and local corrections systems, which hold more than 80,000 prisoners in isolation on any given day, to follow the moral leadership of the White House on solitary confinement. T’ruah, as the leading Jewish member of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, is proud that its more than 1800 rabbis and cantors across North America, along with their communities, have made ending solitary confinement one of our priority moral and human rights concerns, as part of an overall commitment to racial justice and ending mass incarceration in the United States.