Inside the Fight for Ridding Rhode Island Prisons of Solitary Confinement

Photo illustration by Emily RietzeL and Getty Images

The Rhode Island State Prison opened in 1838 where the Providence Place mall stands today. It was originally designed to hold each prisoner separate and alone, except from sunup to sundown, when he was to work in silence. A troublesome inmate could expect to go hungry and sleep on the floor of his cell. When withholding food and furniture did not prove corrective enough, prison officials asked the legislature to add corporal punishment to the penalties. 

Within a few years, the warden and prison physician found that the one deprivation least likely to produce a docile inmate, and most likely to create misbehavior, wasn’t a disciplinary tactic at all. It was the isolation at the core of incarceration. A prisoner was prohibited from communicating with anyone except the physician, prison staff or visiting clergy on a few limited topics. The scheme had its roots in a Quaker belief that enforced solitude allowed the wayward time to reflect on their misdeeds and become “penitent.” 

Instead, jailers found that depriving the inmates of meaningful social contact led to “mental derangement,” as the warden and prison physician wrote in their annual reports, and abolished the practice. In 1844, Warden Thomas Cleveland submitted a passionate defense of the policy change to the General Assembly, blending case studies with psychological analysis. Withholding the mental stimulation of human interaction was like cutting off an alcoholic from “ardent spirits,” he wrote. The “vagrant” may be restored after surviving the delirium tremens, he wrote, but the consequences of long-term solitary confinement could be “irreparable and he may be very much reduced in the scale of being; without energy or capacity for action and unfit to be restored to society.”   

Despite Cleveland’s firm rejection, the practice of confining offenders to their cells for long stretches with little to no interaction continued in Rhode Island and elsewhere, waxing and waning in popularity at the Adult Correctional Institutions ever since. Samantha Hill, a fifty-two-year-old trans woman, spent three months in protective custody in Rhode Island in 1998 awaiting trial on a federal bank robbery charge. Released from a Terre Haute, Indiana, prison seven years ago, she still remembers her time in the ACI. 

“I was new to this, so I was depressed, locked up in a cell twenty-three hours. It started to wear on one’s psyche. You feel dehumanized, and I became very paranoid,” she recalls.

Imprisoned for his role in a 2002 robbery and murder, Brandon Robinson spent eight months of his fifteen years in the ACI in the most restrictive conditions. He watched some of his neighbors develop paranoia, suicidal thoughts and auditory hallucinations.

“It was just too much for them. We are social beings, and if we have nobody to talk to, we will create somebody,” he recalls. “And I was starting to deteriorate from the sensory deprivation. You aren’t living; you are existing.”

Released in 2019, Robinson now works as a community organizer for OpenDoors, which advocates for ex-offenders and is lobbying hard for the passage of a comprehensive solitary confinement reform bill that would strictly limit the use of long-term “restrictive housing” in Rhode Island. 

The United Nations defines “solitary confinement” as twenty-two hours or more per day in a cell without meaningful human contact, and “prolonged solitary confinement” as lasting longer than fifteen consecutive days. In the United States, it remains widely used as a tool of detention, punishment or protection, and exists under a variety of names, including restrictive housing, administrative segregation and disciplinary confinement. According to a 2016 report by the National Institute of Justice, an estimated 90,000 inmates (70,000 prisoners and 20,000 jail inmates) reside in restrictive housing on an average day. In 2022, an average of sixty-four out of 2,233 inmates at the ACI were held in some form of restrictive housing. 

ACI officials insist there is no “solitary confinement” in Rhode Island, but define “restrictive housing” as “any type of detention that involves the removal of an inmate from the general population, voluntarily or involuntarily; placement in a locked room or cell, whether alone or with another inmate; and the inability to leave the room or cell for the vast majority of the day, typically twenty-two hours or more.” 

Inmates in Rhode Island’s high security facility are held in single cells roughly the size of a parking space. Inmates can be held on lockdown for as many as twenty-two hours a day with few privileges for prison programming or communication with family and friends, although they get out-of-cell time to meet with their lawyers, social workers and medical staff, according to Rhode Island Department of Corrections spokesman J.R. Ventura. In addition, general population inmates may be subject to disciplinary confinement as a penalty for infractions, escalating with the severity of the infraction, Ventura says. The most serious infractions — violent, injurious behavior — could earn an inmate up to a year in disciplinary confinement, with opportunities to work his or her way back into the general population.

Typically, says Richard Ferruccio, a corrections officer for thirty-nine years and president of the Rhode Island Brotherhood of Correctional Officers, “we consider it a well-run facility. I don’t think inmates are being physically or mentally abused. We spend a lot of time helping inmates with mental health problems.

“Disciplinary confinement is a prison within a prison,” he adds. “There has to be a deterrent for you to follow the rules, and if you don’t, there has to be a penalty.”  

The current era of mass incarceration began in the 1970s; about a decade later, United States prisons took a hard turn away from rehabilitation as prison violence exploded in overcrowded facilities. In 1983, two inmates murdered two correctional officers at the federal penitentiary near Marion, Illinois, in separate incidents on the same day. The warden declared the facility on permanent lockdown twenty-three hours a day. Rhode Island was the first to build a so-called super-max prison — a facility with the most restrictive lockdown policies intended for dangerous offenders — in 1981, but the Marion incident sparked a building boom. Extreme confinement became a template for prison policy across the country. Today, forty states have super-max facilities.  

Psychiatrist Dr. Terry Kupers, who has studied and testified in class-action lawsuits to the psychological effects of overcrowding and isolation for the past fifty years, says “solitary confinement doesn’t reduce violence and probably increases it by incapacitating people. The massive psychiatric damage is such that inmates are more likely to get into trouble, do drugs or get involved with gangs or violence. I call it the decimation of life skills — they come out without the skills to be social, to be intimate, to work and be productive. It destroys people.” 

For about forty years, Rhode Island’s use of solitary confinement was governed by the “Morris Rules,” so named for inmate Joseph Morris, who, in 1969, sought a temporary restraining order against the state for holding him in what was then called a Special Control Unit. His lawsuit alleged that the isolation, along with unsanitary conditions, constituted a health hazard and a violation of the United States constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In 1970, the parties reached a settlement to reform the classification and disciplinary procedures. A decade later, the DOC petitioned the court to vacate the settlement, without success. Nonetheless, in 1998, officials unilaterally changed key aspects of the agreement, including eliminating the thirty-day limit on disciplinary segregation. 

In the meantime, a national backlash against solitary confinement — as an ineffective and inhumane practice — was slowly building, says Jean Casella, director of the nonprofit Solitary Watch. 

“The amount of press coverage is incredibly different from twelve years ago; the amount of scholarly study on solitary confinement has increased. It’s discussed at corrections conferences,” she says. “There’s a strong activist movement and a growing consensus not to use it so extensively and arbitrarily, if at all.”

In 2017, inmate Richard Paiva took the DOC back to court, arguing that the state had violated the settlement. Two years later, a second group of prisoners suffering from mental illness sued the DOC, alleging they were punished for disability-related behaviors with placement in restrictive housing and denied equal access to prison services and programs, therefore violating their due process rights and the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Charlene Liberty, an ex-offender who died of a drug overdose shortly after her release from the ACI in February 2022, had been the lead defendant. Liberty entered prison addicted to cocaine, and over her confinement developed a serious and persistent mental illness. She made multiple suicide attempts, including swallowing razor blades and throwing herself off a sink. 

“She just wanted to die,” says her sister, Elisha Liberty. “I think when they see someone breaking down like that that should be a signal that a different type of care is needed. To get to that point, something was seriously wrong.” 

At any given time, about 5 to 10 percent of the general population is designated as severely and persistently mentally ill. As of 2023, 44 percent of all inmates in the state were receiving psychiatric services, and 31 percent were receiving mental health counseling. The ACI also has a twelve-bed Residential Treatment Unit for male inmates, which the lawsuit alleges is insufficient to the need.

In April, after nearly two-and-a-half years of negotiation, the DOC and attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Justice representing the inmates appeared to be nearing a settlement that would “lead to a significant overhaul of current policies,” says Sonja Deyoe, one of three lawyers representing the Paiva case. “But there are a lot of balls in the air. And even if the parties can agree on the language of a consent decree, it would have to be approved by the plaintiffs and the court.” 

In the meantime, the Stop Torture Coalition, which includes OpenDoors and other ex-offender groups, such as Black and Pink, says it will continue to press for a legislative solution, even as the correctional officers’ union and prison officials continue to oppose it. 

“A settlement will not replace the need for legislation,” says Nick Horton, co-director of OpenDoors. “There have been consent agreements in the past that have been ignored or vacated.”

According to Unlock the Box, a national campaign to end solitary confinement, 500 bills in forty-four states have been introduced over the last five years to regulate, limit or ban solitary confinement, but only a handful of states — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, North Dakota and Colorado — have actually abandoned the practice. 

In 2013, Rick Raemisch, executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, which is considered a national model, radically transformed the system’s confinement policies. He was continuing the work of his predecessor, who was murdered at home by an inmate who had recently been released from administrative segregation. For much of his career, Raemisch has faced and won over skeptics who believed it impossible to run a safe prison without using solitary confinement. Over his 5½-year tenure, Raemisch instituted a wide range of reforms, including increased prison programming and the addition of step-down programs to shift inmates out of solitary confinement. His experience was not so different from Thomas Cleveland’s.  

“The excuse you hear about the overuse of segregation is to run a more efficient institution, but our mission is public safety, and we did everything we could to have a safer facility, which ultimately means a safer community,” he says. “A lot of people believe that restrictive housing is a really needed tool in the toolbox. I believe it’s time to take it out. We know it hasn’t worked for a hundred years. Let’s try something different.”

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Ellen Liberman is an award-winning journalist who has commented on politics and reported on government affairs for more than two decades.