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CRIMINAL JUSTICE | WINTER 2024
Over the last decade, the surprisingly common
American prison practice of keeping individu-
als locked in solitary confinement, 23 or 24
hours per day, seven days a week, for months and years
at a time, has faced increasing scrutiny. In the early
2010s, people incarcerated in California’s Pelican Bay
State Prison Security Housing Unit, one of the nation’s
archetypal “supermax” units, staged a series of hunger
strikes to protest the extremely restrictive conditions of
solitary confinement and the indefinite (and seemingly
interminable) durations of their confinement. Ultimate-
ly, California prison officials agreed to integrate all 500
people who had been in solitary confinement for more
than 10 years continuously at Pelican Bay State Prison
into the less-restrictive, lower-security conditions of the
general prison population in the state. Ashker v. Gover-
nor of Cal., 2015 Settlement. Since the hunger strikes
and the Ashker litigation, 45 states have introduced bills
to regulate solitary confinement in some way, and 20
states have introduced bills explicitly to limit solitary
confinement to 15 days or less. Unlock the Box, Banning
Torture, Jan. 2023. These bills build on the Nelson Man-
Overview of the
International Guiding Statement on
ALTERNATIVES TO
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
dela Rules, adopted by the United Nations General As-
sembly in 2015, which prohibit prolonged (more than 15
days) and indefinite solitary confinement. While dozens
of states have enacted legislation limiting solitary use in
the last few years, as of January 2023, only three states
KERAMET REITER is co-chair of the ABA Corrections
Committee within the Criminal Justice Section and a
Professor of Criminology and Law at the University of
California, Irvine, author of 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and
the Rise of Long-term Solitary Connement (Yale University
Press, 2016), and a signatory on the International Guiding
Statement on Alternatives to Solitary Connement.
She can be reached at reiterk@uci.edu. DANA MOSS
is a contributing author of the International Guiding
Statement on Alternatives to Solitary Connement and
the accompanying Background Brief and Physicians
for Human Rights Israel’s international advocacy
coordinator. She can be reached at dana@phr.org.il.
ONEG BEN DROR is a contributing author of the
International Guiding Statement on Alternatives to Solitary
Connement and project coordinator at the Prisoners
and Detainees department at Physicians for Human
Rights Israel. She can be reached at onegbd@phr.org.il.
BY KERAMET REITER, DANA MOSS, AND ONEG BEN DROR
Published in Criminal Justice, Volume 38, Number 4, Winter 2023. © 2023 by
the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in
any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database orretrieval system
without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.
