What Is Solitary Confinement?
Solitary confinement is a term that’s taken many meanings over the years, especially since civil rights advocates have passed reforms limiting and, in some cases, banning it.
In 2024, the New York City Council enacted Local Law 42, which bans the use of solitary confinement in city jails beyond four hours and requires that alternate standards be established for the use of restrictive housing and emergency lock-ins. The law also sought to infuse due process for incarcerated people prior to being placed in “restricted housing.”
Then-Mayor Eric Adams bucked the implementation of Local Law 42, citing concerns over the safety of Department of Corrections (DOC) workers, especially at Rikers Island jail. During his administration, a federal judge ruled that the law banning solitary confinement could increase violence in jails, upholding the block.
But in early January, the current mayor, Zohran Mamdani, signed an emergency executive order requiring the DOC and city’s Law Department—the city’s legal arm, representing N.Y.C., its agencies and officials in all legal matters and advising the mayor and city government—to furnish a plan to comply with the solitary confinement restrictions as well as other Board of Corrections rules about staffing and rights for people who are incarcerated.
Bernadette Rabuy, senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), says that the NYCLU believes that solitary confinement is torture because it results in harm to people, especially those who are already suffering from mental health disorders. Even for those without pre-existing conditions, she said research shows that incarcerated people subject to solitary confinement are more likely to engage in self harm or die by suicide.
A 2014 American Journal of Public Health study on solitary confinement found that incarcerated people in solitary were nearly seven times more likely to try to harm themselves or attempt to die by suicide than those who did not experience solitary confinement. The effects are also long term: In one analysis, even after their release, formerly incarcerated people who spent time in restricted housing were 78% more likely to die by suicide within two weeks of their release.
“Confining people to a very small area where their well-being and health are being damaged is only going to do further harm to those individuals and make it less likely that they will both survive that experience and also be able to reenter society and succeed,” Rabuy said, “which purportedly is the goal of any correction system.”
Arguments to uphold isolation tend to focus on the safety of corrections officers, Rabuy said. Corrections officers and affiliated unions say that violence has been on the rise ever since the solitary law was enacted, but Rabuy said this allegation is easily refuted since the solitary confinement law hasn’t actually been implemented. In fact, recent data shows that violence by corrections officers against incarcerated people has been on the rise, not the other way around.
When asked about its plans to reform solitary confinement in light of Mamdani’s executive order, DOC Press Officer Latima Johnson told A+E Crime and Investigation the department “does not practice solitary confinement and has not for quite some time.”
However, criminal justice policy experts interviewed for this story say that corrections officials have rebranded solitary confinement with other terms, like restrictive housing, while the practice of isolating incarcerated people remains in place.
Advocates Define Isolation as Torture
Anisah Sabur, a civil rights advocate and organizer on a variety of initiatives to end solitary confinement, tells A+E Crime and Investigation that Mamdani’s push to implement Local Law 42—especially over a concrete timeline of 45 days—is welcomed among those who have spent years fighting for the end of solitary confinement.
Sabur emphasizes that the conditions in solitary confinement do not promote rehabilitation. She spent 61 days in isolation on Rikers Island, where she says corrections officers took away all her property, leaving her with a pair of sneakers, a paper gown, bedding and no pillow, adding that “for 61 days, I truly felt like I was tortured.”
She details that one day, another person in solitary lit their mattress on fire and that corrections officers left those in nearby cells to inhale fumes of plastic and cotton as the unit filled with smoke.
The unit Sabur was held in contained about eight cells, and she says sounds routinely permeated the space: “You could hear all of the people deteriorating, banging, screaming, crying. The sounds of solitary are real.”
Sabur adds that not only were incarcerated people isolated, but they also received inadequate support. If you asked for medical care, a doctor may have come to your door, but as long as you were “moving and breathing,” they didn’t provide additional care.
People have died from medical conditions in solitary because they didn’t receive proper medical care, Sabur notes.
In 2014, 36-year-old Rolando Perez died after two days of solitary confinement at Rikers Island after neighboring incarcerated people reported he was yelling for the medication he had taken since he was a teenager to manage a seizure disorder. Perez’s autopsy revealed he died of a seizure disorder and heart problems.
“This is the Department of Corrections, right? If I commit an offense and I’m incarcerated, you should be helping me address that offense so that I [won’t commit another offense]. But instead, you isolate people, you torture them,” Sabur says.
Sabur adds that isolating incarcerated people without due process is like resentencing them, whereas if you're charged with a violent crime, you have a day in court to call witnesses and garner support. She argued that due process should exist in the same way for isolating people, so it’s not a correction officers’ word against an incarcerated person’s.
“It tears me up to see that they’re still, after decades, using these same horrific practices on human beings,” Sabur says.
Sixteen-year-old Bronx resident Kalief Browder was sent to Rikers Island in 2010 after being accused of stealing a backpack. He awaited trial for three years, about 800 days of which he spent in solitary confinement, before his release in 2013 after charges were dropped.
In 2015, at the age of 22, he died by suicide at his parents’ home in the Bronx. Since his release, he had undergone additional education and enrolled in community college. Jennifer Gonnerman, a journalist for The New Yorker, wrote an article on his treatment that drew widespread attention including from then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, and reported that Browder repeated much of his behavior in solitary confinement even after he’d been released. Gonnerman told The New York Times after Browder’s death that he struggled to reacquaint himself with day-to-day life after spending 23 hours a day in a cell. He would lock himself in his bedroom and grow uncomfortable around large groups of people, she reported.
De Blasio ended solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year-olds in late 2014 due to the damage such isolation can cause for young people who are incarcerated.
In late February, at the end of the 45-day deadline Mamdani gave the Law Department to work with the federal monitor and parties in the Nunez v. City of New York case—a long-running federal civil rights case that placed New York City jails under court oversight for the excessive and unconstitutional use of force by correction officers—City Hall proposed a plan that Mamdani called "a decisive step to improve conditions and move our jail system toward long-term stability and safety for those in custody and correction staff."
Under the proposal, the city would move toward complying with Local Law 42, which effectively bans solitary confinement in New York City jails. The plan would limit the DOC to brief “de-escalation” confinement after an incident, generally capped at two hours during the day or four hours within a 24-hour period. Staff would be required to regularly engage with the person rather than leaving them in prolonged isolation.
City officials say the next step is implementing operational changes and staffing adjustments required under the law, and working with federal monitors overseeing the jail system to bring facilities like Rikers into compliance.
