Solitary Confinement

About 4-5% of people in prison at any one time in the U.S. are in solitary confinement, about half of a percent of people in prison have been in solitary confinement for more than a year, and about one in a thousand people in prison have been in solitary confinement for a decade or more.

Colorado uses this form of punishment only very rarely.

In a new report spearheaded by Yale Law School, the number of prisoners subjected to “restrictive housing”, as solitary is officially known, stood at between 41,000 and 48,000 in the summer of 2021. They were being held alone in cells the size of parking spaces, for 22 hours a day on average and for at least 15 days.

Within that number, more than 6,000 prisoners have been held in isolation for over a year. They include almost a thousand people who have been held on their own in potentially damaging confined spaces for a decade or longer....

The new solitary study, Time-In-Cell: A 2021 Snapshot of Restrictive Housing, extrapolates its findings from the reported figures of 34 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Though it finds that levels of solitary remain shockingly high, it also stresses that the figures are moving in the right direction.

When the researchers began the series of annual snapshots in 2014 the number of prisoners trapped in isolation was almost twice today’s level, at between 80,000 to 100,000. Since then the graph has steadily declined, with a growing number of states introducing new laws to restrict or even ban the practice.

From here. 

Periods of more than ten years of solitary confinement were predominantly in Texas, Alabama, the federal Bureau of Prisons, and Nevada, with Idaho, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Washington, New Hampshire, and Connecticut having one to seven inmates in solitary confinement for that duration each. 

Colorado had no one who has been in solitary confinement for more than 29 days.