Settlement in Class Action Suit Calls for Prison Reforms

A settlement that calls for major reforms was reached Tuesday in a federal class action lawsuit that alleged California prison officials have engaged in cruel and unusual punishment by putting many inmates into solitary confinement for long periods of time.

The plaintiffs in the case, which was being litigated before U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland and was scheduled to go to trial in December, are inmates at the Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, near the Oregon border, which is considered the state’s toughest prison.

The suit alleges that many Pelican Bay prisoners are held at the facility’s security housing units for more than 10 years at a time and spend 23 hours a day in their cells with little or no access to family visits, outdoor time or any kind of programming. Jules Lobel, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the lead attorney for the plaintiffs and the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement, “This far-reaching settlement represents a major change in California’s cruel and unconstitutional solitary confinement system.”

The plaintiffs in the case said in a separate statement, “This settlement represents a monumental victory for prisoners and an important step toward our goal of ending solitary confinement in California, and across the country.”

The settlement applies to all state prisons in California. Pelican Bay inmates were so upset about the conditions they faced that they conducted hunger strikes in 2011 and 2013. The initial lawsuit was filed by inmates Todd Ashker and Danny Troxell on Dec. 9, 2009, an amended complaint was filed in 2010 and a second amended complaint, which sought and was granted class action status, was filed on Sept. 10, 2012, after the inmates retained lawyers.

At a rally and news conference outside the state building in downtown Oakland Tuesday, Carole Travis, one of the lawyers for the inmates, said, “California was a true outlier because it had the most inmates in solitary confinement and they’ve been placed there without due process.”

Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Terry Thornton said prison officials decided to settle the case at this time because the department has already been making improvements in inmates’ conditions in recent years. Thornton said prison officials “take issue” with the allegation that the state places some prisoners in solitary confinement, saying the phrase is “problematic.” Thornton said the state places many prisoners in security housing units or segregated housing units but most of those who are put in those units have cellmates and television. But she said California has made efforts to reduce the number of prisoners in security housing units and that number has dropped from 4,000 to 2,800 in recent years.

Thornton said the state placed many inmates in such units in response to gang violence which resulted in prison employees and inmates being murdered. She said the idea was to separate inmates identified as gang members away from other inmates. Under the terms of the settlement, prisoners will no longer be sent to a security housing unit based solely on gang affiliation and instead will only be sent to such a unit for specific and serious rule violations. Thornton said the state began making changes in 2007 and placement is now “behavior-based, not (gang) affiliation-based.”

Attorneys for the inmates estimate that between 1,500 and 2,000 of the 2,800 prisoners now in security housing units at Pelican Bay will be transferred to the general population within a year. Marie Levin, whose brother Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, also known as Ronnie Dewberry, is one of the plaintiffs in the suit, said at the rally in Oakland that she hopes the settlement is a step in “transforming the criminal justice system and ending the warehousing of people.

Levin said her brother, who was convicted of murder in Alameda County in 1981, has been in prison for 34 years and has been in solitary confinement for 31 of those years. Levin said her brother told her that he’ll be one of the first security housing unit inmates to be transferred to the general population and he expects that to happen later this month.

Related:

• Legal Settlement Will End Indeterminate Solitary Confinement in State

By Bay City News

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