Suing California’s Prisons Over State-Ordered Solitary

Last February I linked to an NPR report by Michael Montgomery about a man named Ernesto Lira, a low-level but chronic petty thief and drug user, who was arrested for 3 grams of meth, and put in solitary confinement in Pelican Bay for nearly eight years.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sent Lira to the high tech super max prison, and then confined him to isolation in the SHU (Security Housing Unit) because they believed Lira was a member of a powerful prison gang—although the evidence CDCR officials used to determine this classification was mighty thin.

Nevertheless, for the next 7 plus years, the consequences of the prison officials’ questionable assumption about Lira were stark:

Lira was locked in a windowless, 8-by-10-foot cell in the prison’s Security Housing Unit, or SHU, where there were no phone calls, no family visits, no programs of any kind.

According to Lira, being deprived of human contact or even sunlight, he slowly decompensated mentally and emotionally.

From isolation, Lira wrote hundreds of journal entries, which he says trace his slide into mental illness.

“This isolation is wearing me down,” he wrote. “I can’t believe I’ve been in the hole five years. I believe I’m losing my mind.”

After he was released from prison last year, Lira sued the CDCR for wrongly classifying him. Interestingly, he didn’t sue for damages, but rather to clear his name of the gang accusation and to get the State of California to admit that that it was wrong.

Last month, Montgomery reports, Lira won his case.

Lira’s situation brings to mind the recent highly regarded New Yorker article, by physician/writer Atul Gawande in which Gawande posed the question: Is solitary confinement torture?

By the article’s end it is clear that Gawande thinks it is indeed torture.

Ernesto Lira has lived that question, and contends that solitary broke him mentally.

It now seems that a Federal judge has agreed.

In a 49-page decision, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Ilston wrote that the evidence did not support Lira’s gang classification, and that he was denied due process when he tried to contest it. Most importantly, the judge found that solitary confinement can be the cause of mental illness, and that this mental illness can continue long after the prisoner is released.

Prison reformers hope that the Lira decision will be set a precedent that will eventually allow a challenge to the use of units like the SHU altogether.

How all of this helps Lira, however, is far from clear. When I exchanged emails with Montgomery over the weekend about the story, I asked him how he thought Lira was doing. Not well, he wrote:

I wish Ernesto’s story had a happy ending. Certainly, his family is helping him, as is his girl friend. And the judge’s ruling–affirming all of his central arguments–means a lot. Ernesto feels a weight has been lifted an he can finally move on with his life. But the question is: where can he go? What kind of life can he create for himself, especially as a felon suffering from mental illness living in one of the most economically depressed areas of California? It’s not surprising that so many men like Ernesto drift back to jail and prison. I truly hope he can break that cycle, but I’m not certain he will.

By the way, thank you to Michael Montgomery and to NPR’s California Report for following this important case.

Sadly, thus far I can find no other California media outlet that felt the story merited even the slightest mention.