Va. prisons’ use of solitary confinement is scrutinized

Suicide attempts

Malcolm Springs, 24, who is serving time in Red Onion for rape and abduction, said his mental-health problems have grown worse since he was put in isolation for assaulting an officer five years ago.

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He has tried to kill himself multiple times and has been moved back and forth from Marion Correctional Center, a prison psychiatric hospital, where he was housed in segregation, according to prison officials and his attorney.

“In segregation, all I could do is think about my life, what I have been through, how people treat me here,’’ Springs said in a phone interview. “If I was in population, maybe I wouldn’t be as depressed.’’

Abigail Turner, litigation director at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Charlottesville, said eight of the organization’s 12 clients in isolation in Virginia prisons have serious mental illnesses for which they receive inadequate treatment.

Harold W. Clarke, director of the Virginia Department of Corrections, declined to comment. Agency spokesman Larry Traylor said inmates are kept in isolation for disciplinary problems — such as assaulting another inmate, starting a riot or having weapons or drugs — or for administrative reasons to protect them.

Traylor acknowledged that an inmate in certain types of solitary could “potentially be assigned there for years according to their risk assessment.’’ But he said Red Onion operates in accordance with national standards and is accredited by the American Correctional Association.

Although solitary confinement has long been a tool of prison discipline (and a staple of pop culture depictions of prison life), the use of solitary became increasingly common in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, many legal and medical experts have argued that inmates in isolation for long periods suffer from higher suicide rates, increased depression, decreased brain function and hallucinations.

“They should be trying to get them back in the general population,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project in Washington. “Sometimes, these are difficult situations, but it only compounds the problem if you never get out of there.”

In Virginia, many of those in isolation are at Red Onion, where two inmates were killed in the past two years by fellow prisoners.

Virginia opened Red Onion — deep in coal country and about 400 miles from Richmond — a dozen years ago as part of a major prison-building effort after the abolishment of parole and the lengthening of prison sentences. Like many other supermax prisons, Red Onion was designed to confine — but not necessarily rehabilitate — the most-dangerous criminals.

As of October, 505 of 745 inmates at Red Onion were in solitary, according to the state. When legislators toured Red Onion on Sept. 1, prison officials told them that 173 inmates in solitary there were considered mentally ill.

State officials said they do not keep statistics on the length of isolation stays, but they told Hope in a recent memo that Red Onion inmates have been isolated from two weeks to almost seven years, with an average stay of 2.7 years.