Faith leaders call for end to solitary confinement

Story by Beth Donze, Clarion Herald; file photo by Kyle Encar, Loyola University

During Consuela Gaines’ 22 years in prison, the two years she spent in solitary confinement in a Louisiana prison agonized her more than the other 20 years of her incarceration put together.

“Spiritually, it can destroy a person,” said Gaines, recounting how the isolation led to suicidal thoughts. Prison guards even denied her requests for reading materials on her Islamic faith.

“To be deprived of being able to be around other human beings – that’s not normal. That’s cruel. That is not what God created us (for),” Gaines said. “He created us to interact with other human beings.”

Now a Lafayette-based community organizer for the prison reform nonprofit Voice of the Experienced, Gaines was part of a Sept. 23 virtual panel of solitary confinement survivors and faith leaders who addressed the moral imperative to end the practice.

The discussion was hosted by the Louisiana Stop Solitary Coalition, an effort of the Justice and Accountability Center of Louisiana that in June helped push through Louisiana’s Act 140, which bans the use of solitary confinement for pregnant women, for mothers who are less than eight weeks postpartum, and for mothers who are caring for a child in one of the state’s penal or correctional institutions.

According to a 2019 study, 77% of those imprisoned in isolation in Louisiana have been there for more than a year –  four times the national rate. Use of the practice has exploded some 500% since the COVID-19 epidemic.

“In Louisiana, nearly 60% of DOC (Department of Corrections) prisoners are placed in solitary for the vague reason of parole violations,” said Shemetria Gonzales, community organizer for Louisiana Stop Solitary. She said keeping people alone in cells inflicts permanent neurological damage, with even the United Nations declaring that people left in forced isolation for as little as two weeks is commensurate with torture.

The inhumane practice does nothing to make prisons safer and only makes inmates’ reentry into society more difficult, Gaines said.

“There are other ways (to discipline someone) in prison,” Gaines said. “There are different things that can be taken away from a person. But caging a person isn’t the answer.”

Responsibility of all faithful

Katie Bauman, senior rabbi at Touro Synagogue in New Orleans, and Houma-Thibodaux Bishop Shelton Fabre explored the faith underpinnings that cast solitary confinement as a sin against humanity.

Rabbi Bauman said the practice flies in the face of an “overarching principle” of Judaism: All are created in the image of God.

“That really should inform the way we behave, the way we interact with every single person,” she said. “When I look at our biblical texts more broadly, I see and hear the call of the prophets that emphasize God’s insistence that society’s treatment of its most vulnerable citizens – vulnerable for any number of reasons – is the barometer by which its overall character is measured.”

Rabbi Bauman noted how in Psalms, David calls out from “a narrow place” – and God hears him and wants him to come out, back into communion. In the Book of Jonah, “Jonah cries out from the belly of the whale and God does not leave him in that place, no matter what his mistakes may have been,” Rabbi Bauman said.

Bishop Fabre told the panel that solitary confinement goes against two tenets of Catholic social teaching: The life and dignity of the human person and solidarity. He shared St. John Paul II’s definition of solidarity as not a feeling of “vague compassion” or “shallow distress at the misfortunes of others,” but the “fine and persevering determination to commit oneself to the good of all and of each individual.”

“Now that we know that, we cannot simply sit around and do nothing,” Bishop Fabre said. “Solidarity calls us to do something about it.”

Rev. Ron Stief, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and a leader of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), said the NRCAT exposed the torture of solitary confinement in a 40-minute documentary called “Breaking Down the Box,” available on YouTube. The 2015 film inspired 15 state campaigns against the practice of placing people in tiny cells by themselves for 23 hours a day, he said.

“Not enough people knew that this was happening inside our prisons and still don’t,” Rev. Stief said. “People are starting to realize that this is a practice that needs to end.”

One Easter season, United Church of Christ members built a 15-foot solitary confinement cell and invited people to spend time there. They took the cell on the road to other churches to share their social experiment.

“People would go in thinking, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be quiet in there; I’ll get a lot of reading done,’ but I have yet to see one person walk away from that (mock solitary confinement cell) without saying, ‘My God, I had no idea this is what we were doing to people inside our prisons. I can see why they call it torture, and we need to stop it.’”

Domino effect

The hopeful news is that the campaign to end solitary confinement seems to be reaching a “national tipping point,” Rev. Stief said. In 2019, legislation to ban or limit solitary confinement was introduced in 28 states, including New Jersey, which completely banned the practice in all of its state facilities, jails and detention centers. Today there are 63 active pieces of legislation whose aim is to limit solitary confinement in states including Arkansas, Georgia, Montana, New Mexico and Texas.

In Louisiana’s upcoming 2021 state legislative session, advocates will lobby for a ban on solitary confinement for inmates who have a serious mental illness. The recently passed ban in Louisiana against using solitary confinement for pregnant women was the first change to the state’s solitary confinement laws in some 150 years, the panel reported. 

“(All this legislative action) wasn’t happening a decade ago,” Rev. Stief said. “Don’t let anybody typecast this as an issue that belongs to any one political party or any one political group. It really does belong to us all.”

The Louisiana Stop Solitary Coalition invites state residents to sign the coalition’s petition to Gov. John Bel Edwards and other state officials at https://bit.ly/2GwyyZw.

bdonze@clarionherald.org