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State prison chief Rollin Cook: Ending solitary confinement should be “incremental,” not immediate.
The state’s top prison official isn’t ready to give up on solitary confinement quite yet — though he is open to working towards an “incremental” phasing out of such a practice by allowing more out-of-cell time for and more supportive services brought to the most isolated prisoners.
Connecticut Department of Correction (DOC) Commissioner Rollin Cook expressed that hesitation about ending solitary confinement, also known as “restrictive housing” or “administrative segregation,” during an interview on WNHH’s “Love Babz Love Talk” radio program with host Babz Rawls-Ivy.
“My hope is that some day we will be able to have a system that we’re able to rely on … [in which solitary confinement] wouldn’t be required,” he said in response to a question about whether he supports ending the practice entirely in the state’s prison system.
“It’s got to be something that’s incremental.”
Critics like the advocacy group Stop Solitary CT and state legislators like New Haven’s Robyn Porter have labeled confining prisoners for up to 23 hours a day as a form of torture.
“Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, Supermax, the hole, Secure Housing Unit… whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by States as a punishment or extortion technique,” former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Rorture Juan E. Méndez is quoted as saying on the Stop Solitary CT website.
Critics say that the practice only exacerbates the mental health of isolated inmates, and that it is not a successful way to reduce prison violence or reform the most dangerous of inmates.Porter and Hamden State Rep. Josh Elliot co-sponsored a proposed state bill that did not make it to the floor for a final vote last year that sought to end solitary confinement for all state inmates, adult and child.
During his “LoveBabz” radio appearance, Cook argued that “restrictive housing” is an effective and necessary way to ensure the safety of prison staff and fellow incarcerated individuals.
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Cook with WNHH host Babz Rawls-Ivy
He pointed to a recent prison riot in Massachusetts where three officers were seriously injured.
“That immediately gets blamed on the reform,” he said. “It’s important that you need to know, that people in Connecticut know, that we’re continuing to constantly look at what we’re doing with restrictive housing.”
He said he is in support of providing more educational and social service programming for isolated individuals, as well as more out-of-cell time and more opportunities to progress out of confinement.
“I actually have incarcerated folks that don’t want to progress out of the restrictive housing piece” because they would prefer to remain isolated from the rest of the prison population, Cook said. He said the prison system needs to work harder to communicate with those individuals about all of the programs available to incarcerated individuals that will help prepare them to reintegrate into society upon release.
In written testimony that Cook provided to the state Judiciary Committee last year in opposition to the proposed ban on solitary confinement, he similarly defended the state’s use of “restrictive housing” for inmates who attempt to escape from custory, who assault a staff member, or who use a dangerous weapon.
“Currently, out of a population of approximately 13,000 offenders there are 29 offenders on Restrictive Housing Status,” he wrote in March 2019. “That means that only .2 percent of our total population has been administratively placed on Administrative Segregation.”
Connecticut is one of the top five states in how rarely it uses solitary confinement, he said, pointing to a 2015 study by the Arthur Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School and the Association of State Correctional Administrators.
Cook was asked if any child inmates at the Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire are still held in solitary.
“Very, very few of our children end up in any sort of restrictive housing for any length of time,” he responded. On a recent visit to the youth prison, he said, there were no inmates held in the solitary confinement cells.
“What a lot of people don’t understand is that the things that go on in these kids’ lives that leads them to very violent tendencies in how they react to things, which makes it difficult for us to manage.”
Cook took over the DOC in January 2019 after the retirement of Scott Semple.
Like his predecessor, Cook, who hails from Utah, worked his way up the prison system from his first job as a correctional officer, ending up as one of the most heralded prison reform commissioners in the country. Semple and former Gov. Dannel Malloy also earned national accolades for closing prisons, reducing prisons sizes, reducing arrests for low-level non-violent crimes, and promoting “Second Chance Society” legislation.
“i see a lot of people thinking you can just change the system just like this, by a snap of the finger,” Cook said on radio, “and just opening all the doors, and everything will be ok. The reality is, it’s important for us to remain deliberate in what we do and methodical and making sure that we’re taking the time to move through all these things.”
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full interview.