Each time Stephanie Peña was placed alone in a prison cell the size of a parking spot, she could feel herself losing it. Peña, 23 and living with post-traumatic stress and antisocial personality disorders, would recoil from the bloodstained mattress and the feeling of pests crawling over her as she slept. When New York banned the use of long-term solitary confinement in its prisons and barred the practice entirely for certain people, including mentally ill prisoners like Peña, it was hailed as a groundbreaking measure that would fundamentally change life behind bars. Since the law took effect two years ago, prison officials have refused to implement it and have continued to hold incarcerated people with disabilities in solitary and in cells in specialized disciplinary units for most of the day, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Brooklyn, the New York Times reports. Peña is one of hundreds of prisoners who have been held in isolation or in solitary-like conditions for more than 17 hours at a time in violation of the new state law, says the lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Society, Disability Rights Advocates and the law firm Winston & Strawn.
“Solitary confinement is extremely harmful for people generally and, of course, for people with disabilities specifically,” said Stefen Short, a lawyer working on behalf of the Prisoners’ Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society. “Really what the agencies are doing here is flouting the will of the Legislature and by extension flouting the will of the people.” Over the past two years, state legislators and oversight agencies have sounded the alarm in reports and letters to the New York Department of Correction and Community Supervision and the state’s Office of Mental Health, warning that the agencies were violating the law. On any given month from May 2022 to April of this year, more than a quarter of the inmates in solitary had a diagnosed mental illness in violation of state law, the lawsuit charged.