Imagine yourself 17. You’ve been convicted of armed robbery. In jail, you were caught with a shiv. In the eyes of the institution, no excuse for that. However, any viewer of the TV series “Law and Order” would know having protection might be the only way to stave off predators.
Now take this further. Imagine you are confined to an 8-by-10 foot cell, 23 hours a day without human contact. That’s what happened to Michael Kemp. “You just like, ‘Man, I feel like an animal in here. I don’t even feel real...where I’m not even a human being."
Warehousing kids in solitary confinement has come to the attention of the United Nations. It called solitary confinement of children tantamount to torture.
In April 2012, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry weighed in saying that juveniles in solitary confinement “could lead to depression, anxiety, and even psychosis and called for an end to the practice.” “Due to their developmental vulnerability, juvenile offenders are at particular risk of such adverse reactions. Furthermore, the majority of suicides in juvenile correctional facilities occur when the individual is isolated or in solitary confinement.”
In the same year, the National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence concluded “Nowhere is the damaging impact of incarceration on vulnerable children more obvious than when it involves solitary confinement.” The task force recommended the practice be forbidden.
More voices continue to weigh in. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Ian M. Kysel, a Georgetown University Law Center adjunct professor, advocated for the end of putting adolescents into solitary confinement. He stated that up to a quarter of teenagers incarcerated in many of these jails are in solitary. The United States Department of Justice found juvenile solitary confinement to be “excessive and inappropriate.”
A New York Times editorial first praised the 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which attempted to get kids out of adult lockups using federal dollars. While this worked to some extent with a precipitous 30-percent drop in the number of adolescents in the system, it was noted that “Some judges, however, still put far too many kids behind bars by relying on an exception to the status offense rule that allows them to lock up juveniles who have been warned not to re-offend.”
Alaska, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., have banned solitary confinement in juvenile facilities. Maybe the best remedy is making sure kids don’t enter the system in the first place.
Evidence-based practices such as Multisystemic Therapy work to keep offenders at home, in school, and in their communities—and out of solitary confinement.
