Lawsuit ends prison solitary for mentally ill Pa. inmates

The state Department of Corrections has promised, in a lawsuit settlement released Tuesday, to apply new rules to its use of solitary confinement, including phasing it out entirely for inmates with serious mental illnesses.

By mid-2016, prisons will stop punishing seriously mentally ill inmates with assignments to Restricted Housing Units, sometimes called “the hole,” under the state’s 34-page pact with the nonprofit Disability Rights Network.

Even inmates without mental health diagnoses are entitled, under the agreement, to psychological evaluations if they are kept in the hole for a year.

Robert Meek, an attorney with the Disability Rights Network, said solitary confinement is “ineffective, inefficient and just plain wrong for any inmate. Solitary confinement for people with serious mental illness is a dinosaur that’s dying.”

The network sued Corrections Secretary John Wetzel in 2013, claiming that mentally ill inmates were being punished, with solitary confinement, for behaviors rooted in their diseases. The punishments worsened their conditions, and made it hard for them to make parole.

The state maintained that it hadn’t violated anyone’s constitutional rights. Mr. Wetzel, in a news release, said the state was “stepping up to do the right thing” in an era in which prisons “have become the de facto system responsible for treating the mentally ill.”

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