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KERAMET REITER is co-chair of the ABA Corrections Committee within the Criminal Justice Section and a Professor of Criminology and Law at the University of California, Irvine, author of 2317: Pelkan Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-term Solitary Confinement (Yale University Press, 2016), and a signatory on the International Guiding Statement on Alternatives to Solitary Confinement. She can be reached at [email protected]. DANA MOSS is a contributing author of the International Guiding Statement on Alternatives to Solitary Confinement and the accompanying Background Brief and Physicians for Human Rights IsraePs international advocacy coördinator. She can be reached at [email protected]. ONEG BEN DROR is a contributing author of the International Guiding Statement on Alternatives to Solitary Confinement and project coördinator at the Prisoners and Detainees department at Physicians for Human Rights Israël. She can be reached at [email protected].
Over the last decade, the surprisingly common American prison practice of keeping individu-als locked in solitary confinement, 23 or 24 hours per day, seven days a week, for months and years at a time, has faced increasing scrutiny. In the early 2010s, people incarcerated in California's Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit, one of the nation's archetypal "supermax" units, staged a series of hunger strikes to protest the extremely restrictive conditions of solitary confinement and the indefinite (and seemingly interminable) durations of their confinement. Ultimate-ly, California prison officials agreed to integrate all 500 people who had been in solitary confinement for more than ÏO years continuously at Pelican Bay State Prison into the less-restrictive, lower-security conditions of the general prison population in the state. Ashker v. Governor of Cal., 2015 Settlement. Since the hunger strikes and the Ashker litigation, 45 states have introduced bills to regulate solitary confinement in some way, and 20 states have introduced bills explicitly to limit solitary confinement to 15 days or less. Unlock the Box, Banning Torture, Jan. 2023. These bills build on the Nelson Mandela Rules, adopted by the United Nations General As-sembly in 2015, which prohibit prolonged (more than 15 days) and indefinite solitary confinement. While dozens of states have enacted legislation limiting solitary use in the last few years, as of January 2023, only three states had passed Mandela Rule-type legislation limiting soli-tary confinement to 15 days, and solitary...