WITNESS
Fred Cohen recently completed five years as a court-appointed monitor for mental health services in all of Ohio's prisons, where he provided oversight and programmatic input for mental health care. In addition, he has been a litigation consultant in prison mental health care litigation in Michigan, Utah, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and most recently Alabama. He is the author of The Mentally Disordered Inmate and the Law (and Supp., 2000-2001), the leading text in the area.
Mr. Cohen is the publisher and editor of the Juvenile Correctional Mental Health Report, the editor of Correctional Mental Health Report, and co-editor of Correctional Law Reporter. He is a frequent lecturer and trainer on sex offender law, custodial suicide, and correctional mental health law. He recently testified on prisons before the American Bar Association's "Kennedy Commission" and is a member of the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Standards Project, revising the corrections standards.
Mr. Cohen has been a full professor at a number of leading law schools. He is one of the founders of, and now Professor Emeritus at, the Graduate School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York in Albany, and he developed the law component of its Ph.D. program. He has a L.L.B. and L.L.M. from Yale Law School.
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STATEMENT
Isolation is not a fixed, invariable condition of penal confinement. It is variable in its extremes of deprivation and at its most extreme should be banned and in its less onerous forms sharply limited, very closely regulated, and closely monitored.
The most extreme form, at times referred to as "dark cells," consists of inmates held in solitary confinement and subject to near total sensory deprivation by lack of access to light, sound, or fresh air.… Another form of isolation (or segregation) has inmates housed in single cells with some access to light and air, able to hear movements outside their cell (even yell or "tap" (in code) as communication), but meals are taken alone in the cell, exercise is indoors and very restricted as is access to visits, radio, TV, etc. This is generally characteristic of most segregation units and the typical, so-called Supermax.
Isolation or solitary confinement conveys a set of circumstances beyond life in a single, quiet cell and includes all manner of deprivation of life's most basic components. As one ascends the ladder from "second degree" isolation to the still unreal world of prison, we pass an uncertain line that divides isolation from merely harsh conditions of confinement.… The greater the deprivation, then, the more suspect the practice and the greater the obligation on proponents to produce evidence of benefits outweighing liabilities.
…Curiously, today's binge with multi-million dollar supermaxes and the increasing reliance on extended isolation in special management units rests on no theory of criminal, or even rule-violation, behavior. It is a management decision that is purely reactive, rarely reformative, and rarely reviewed or rethought.
Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission
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