The resource team: A case study of a solitary confinement reform in Oregon.

The continued use of solitary confinement has sparked international public health and human rights criticisms and concerns. This carceral practice has been linked repeatedly to a range of serious psychological harms among incarcerated persons. Vulnerabilities to harm are especially dire for persons with preexisting serious mental illness ("SMI"), a group that is overrepresented in solitary confinement units. Although there have been numerous calls for the practice to be significantly reformed, curtailed, and ended altogether, few strategies exist to minimize its use for people with SMI and histories of violence against themselves or others. This case study describes the "Oregon Resource Team" (ORT), a pilot project adapted from a Norwegian officer-led, interdisciplinary team-based approach to reduce isolation and improve outcomes for incarcerated persons with SMI and histories of trauma, self-injury, and violence against others. We describe the ORT's innovative approach, the characteristics and experiences of incarcerated people who participated in it, its reported impact on the behavior, health, and well-being of incarcerated persons and correctional staff, and ways to optimize its effectiveness and expand its use.

"We just needed to open the door": a case study of the quest to end solitary confinement in North Dakota.

Solitary confinement is a widespread practice in US correctional facilities. Long-standing concerns about the physical and mental health effects of solitary confinement have led to litigation, legislation, and community activism resulting in many prison systems introducing policies or implementing legal mandates to reduce or eliminate its use. Yet little is known about the nature and effectiveness of policies that states have adopted to reduce their use of solitary confinement and exactly how various reforms have actually impacted the lives of people living and working in the prisons where these reforms have taken place. METHODS: We conducted an embedded case study, analyzing changes in policies and procedures, administrative data, and focus groups and interviews with incarcerated persons and staff, to describe the circumstances that led to changes in solitary confinement policies and practices in the North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (ND DOCR) and the perceived impact of these changes on incarcerated persons and prison staff. . RESULTS: North Dakota's correctional officials and staff members attributed the impetus to change their solitary confinement policies to their participation in a program that directly exposed them to the Norwegian Correctional Service's philosophy, policies, and practices in 2015. The ensuing policy changes made by North Dakota officials were swift and resulted in a 74.28% reduction in the use of solitary confinement between 2016 and 2020. Additionally, placements in any form of restrictive housing decreased markedly for incarcerated persons with serious mental illness. In the two prisons that had solitary confinement units, rule infractions involving violence decreased at one prison overall and it decreased within the units at both prisons that were previously used for solitary confinement. Although fights and assaults between incarcerated people increased in one of the prison's general population units, during the initial months of reforms, these events continued to decline compared to years before reform. Moreover, incarcerated people and staff attributed the rise to a concomitant worsening of conditions in the general population due to overcrowding, idleness, and double bunking. Both incarcerated persons and staff members reported improvements in their health and well-being, enhanced interactions with one another, and less exposure to violence following the reforms. CONCLUSIONS: Immersing correctional leaders in the Norwegian Correctional Service' public health and human rights principles motivated and guided the ND DOCR to pursue policy changes to decrease the use of solitary confinement in their prisons. Ensuing reductions in solitary confinement were experienced as beneficial to the health and wellness of incarcerated persons and staff alike. This case-study describes these policy changes and the perspectives of staff and incarcerated persons about the reforms that were undertaken. Findings have implications for stakeholders seeking to reduce their use of solitary confinement and limit its harmful consequences and underscore the need for research to describe and assess the impact of solitary confinement reforms.

Continuing to acknowledge the power of dehumanizing environments: Comment on Haslam et al. (2019) and Le Texier (2019).

Decades after it was conducted, the Stanford Prison Experiment endures as a classic, dramatic demonstration of the potentially destructive psychological dynamics that can be created when one group of people is given nearly total power over a group of derogated others in a powerful, dehumanizing environment such as prison. The authors of the study value the intellectually engaged alternative perspectives that continue to be used to discuss its unsettling results but reject those that are ad hominem, misleading, inaccurate, and unscientific. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Balancing the Rights to Protection and Participation: A Call for Expanded Access to Ethically Conducted Correctional Health Research.

Incarcerated individuals, over 95% of whom are eventually released, experience high burdens of chronic disease and behavioral health and social risk factors. Understanding the health needs of this population is critical to ensuring that general medicine physicians in prisons and in the community are adequately prepared to meet those needs. However, people in prison are significantly underrepresented in health research. In response to historical exploitation of prisoners in medical experimentation, federal guidelines appropriately require additional oversight for, and limit the scope of, research in prisons. Yet, according to a 2006 Institute of Medicine report, these requirements have produced inconsistent local regulations that often limit opportunities for incarcerated individuals to participate in research, and can slow the development of innovative medical interventions to improve their health. In this article, we describe the historical context surrounding regulations on research involving individuals in prison, the harms that can arise from excessive limitations to research in such settings, and the benefits of greater access to ethically conducted research in prison. We conclude with recommended actions that can be taken by general medicine researchers, correctional leaders, and policymakers to achieve consistent access to health research for incarcerated populations.

Reducing the use and impact of solitary confinement in corrections.

Purpose Although the reform of solitary confinement is underway in many jurisdictions around world, isolation remains in widespread use in many jails and prisons. The purpose of this paper is to discuss opportunities for reform in the USA that could also be applied globally. Design/methodology/approach A review of the evidence on solitary confinement policies and practices in the USA to develop recommendations for reform with global application. Findings Focusing on this evidence, the authors argue that solitary confinement is overused and recommend a multi-level approach available to correctional systems worldwide including: immediately limiting solitary confinement to only those cases in which a violent behavioral infraction has been committed for which safety cannot otherwise be achieved, ensuring the briefest terms of isolation needed to achieve legitimate and immediate correctional goals, prohibiting its use entirely for some populations, regularly reviewing all isolated prisoners for as-soon-as-possible return to general population, including the immediate return of those showing mental and physical health risk factors, assisting individuals who are transitioning out of isolation (either to the general population or to the community), and partnering with medical, public health, and criminal justice experts to develop evidence-based alternatives to solitary confinement for nearly all prisoners. Originality/value This paper provides an overview of the evidence supporting an overhaul of solitary confinement policy in the USA and globally where solitary confinement remains in wide use and offers recommendations for immediate steps that can be taken toward achieving evidence-based solitary confinement reform.

How health care reform can transform the health of criminal justice-involved individuals.

Provisions of the Affordable Care Act offer new opportunities to apply a public health and medical perspective to the complex relationship between involvement in the criminal justice system and the existence of fundamental health disparities. Incarceration can cause harm to individual and community health, but prisons and jails also hold enormous potential to play an active and beneficial role in the health care system and, ultimately, to improving health. Traditionally, incarcerated populations have been incorrectly viewed as isolated and self-contained communities with only peripheral importance to the public health at large. This misconception has resulted in missed opportunities to positively affect the health of both the individuals and the imprisoned community as a whole and potentially to mitigate risk behaviors that may contribute to incarceration. Both community and correctional health care professionals can capitalize on these opportunities by working together to advocate for the health of the criminal justice-involved population and their communities. We present a set of recommendations for the improvement of both correctional health care, such as improving systems of external oversight and quality management, and access to community-based care, including establishing strategies for postrelease care and medical record transfers.

Getting to the point: attempting to improve juror comprehension of capital penalty phase instructions.

This research examined the effects of several versions of capital penalty phase instructions on juror comprehension. Study One documented the impact of California's recently implemented "plain language" instruction. It showed that although the new instruction has clear advantages over the previous version, significant comprehension problems remain. Study Two evaluated several modified instructions designed to enhance comprehension. Participants heard either a standard patterned instruction or one of two alternatives-a psycholinguistically improved instruction, or a "pinpoint" instruction using case-related facts to illustrate key terms-in a simulated death penalty sentencing phase. Persons who heard modified instructions demonstrated higher levels of comprehension on virtually every measure as compared to those in the standard instruction condition.

Capital jury deliberation: effects on death sentencing, comprehension, and discrimination.

This study focused on whether and how deliberations affected the comprehension of capital penalty phase jury instructions and patterns of racially discriminatory death sentencing. Jury-eligible subjects were randomly assigned to view one of four versions of a simulated capital penalty trial in which the race of defendant (Black or White) and the race of victim (Black or White) were varied orthogonally. The participants provided their initial "straw" sentencing verdicts individually and then deliberated in simulated 4-7 person "juries." Results indicated that deliberation created a punitive rather than lenient shift in the jurors' death sentencing behavior, failed to improve characteristically poor instructional comprehension, did not reduce the tendency for jurors to misuse penalty phase evidence (especially, mitigation), and exacerbated the tendency among White mock jurors to sentence Black defendants to death more often than White defendants.

Persistent dispositionalism in interactionist clothing: fundamental attribution error in explaining prison abuse.

The Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated some important lessons about the power of social situations, settings, and structures to shape and transform behavior. At the time the study was done, the authors scrupulously addressed the issue of whether and how the dispositions or personality traits of the participants might have affected the results. Here the authors renew and reaffirm their original interpretation of the results and apply this perspective to some recent socially and politically significant events.