Obama bans solitary confinement for juveniles in fed prisons

He also cited the case of Kalief Browder, who in 2010, aged 16, was accused of stealing a backpack and was put into the notorious Rikers Island prison in NY to await trial. He was kept in solitary confinement and, according to his lawyer, beaten by inmates and guards. “It doesn’t make us safer”. Obama said in a speech at the NAACP convention in July.

Last summer, in a speech in Philadelphia, Obama called for a bipartisan effort to fix what he called “a broken system” of criminal justice. Worse of it is that prisoners in solitary are easily driven to commit suicide, especially juveniles and people with mental illnesses. Solitary confinement should be a “measure of last resort”.

In New York, prison officials agreed in December to reform the use of solitary confinement. The extreme isolation of solitary, where prisoners may be held alone for up to 23 hours a day, often causes difficulty readjusting to the outside world, making it even more hard for freed inmates to find jobs and reunite with family.

Obama wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that ran in the Tuesday edition of the newspaper that solitary confinement is overused and can lead to risky psychological consequences. The Justice Department says it’s reduced the number of USA prisoners in solitary confinement by 25 percent since 2012. And while most of those who stand to benefit from the federal reforms are adults charged with nonviolent crimes or dealing with mental health issues, the announcement signifies an important change in attitudes around youth confinement, and could have a major impact in state and local prisons where the majority of young people are detained. As a result of an “extensive study”, the DOJ concluded that “this practice should be used rarely, applied fairly, and subjected to reasonable constraints”. “Every year, we spend billion to keep 2.2million people incarcerated”, he wrote.

The court, in a 6-3 ruling, sided with Louisiana inmate Henry Montgomery, who was convicted in the 1963 fatal shooting of a sheriff’s deputy at age 17 and has spent more than a half century behind bars with an automatic sentence of life without possibility of parole. “It’s an affront to our common humanity”. They are part of more than 50 “guiding principles” recommended for all correctional facilities by the Department of Justice in a review of restrictive housing.

With these “sweeping changes”, Mr Obama “has added the full weight” of the USA government “to the movement to end our jails and prisons’ addiction to solitary and its cruelty”, wrote Mr David Fathi, an official with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the leading United States civil rights group. He further emphasized that people make mistakes on a daily basis and instead of castigating them it’s better to give them a chance to remake their lives.