Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.


Monday, November 30, 2009

Solitary Disgrace

The Washington Post

MANY ARE KEPT in their cells for at least 23 hours a day with minimal contact with other people, including guards. Food is delivered through a slit in the door, and most are prohibited from attending classes or counseling sessions with other inmates.

They are not, by and large, the "worst of the worst" -- mass murderers or psychopaths in the mold of Hannibal Lecter. They are, instead, men and women serving time for all manner of offenses, some of them relatively minor. But they have been deemed disciplinary problems -- or potential disciplinary problems -- by prison staffers. And so they find themselves locked up in what is commonly known as solitary confinement, sometimes for months, sometimes for years and sometimes with devastating consequences.

At one time shunned in the United States, solitary confinement is becoming a tool increasingly used by corrections officials trying desperately to keep order in grossly overcrowded and sometimes chaotic prisons. These decisions are made even though solitary confinement costs roughly twice as much as keeping an inmate in the general prison population. At any given time, experts estimate that 25,000 to 100,000 prisoners are kept in some sort of "special housing unit" where they are isolated and kept apart from the general prison population. The number changes frequently as new prisoners are sent in and others sent out of solitary.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh Jesus come back soon.

Anonymous said...

Sometimes it seems that the most criminal thing in the country is the criminal justice system

Anonymous said...

So, we have more cells for solitary confinement, per population, than virtually any state. We have two CSP prisons. We are the leader of how not to handle the prison system. 60% of those in CSP get state prescribed mental altering drugs. Who is the drug dealer here? When patients/prisoners happen to get out of CSP their drugs are cut off by the state drug dealers. mpc

MichalClark said...

Solitary disgrace. Prisons should abolish long-term solitary ... up in what is commonly known as solitary confinement, sometimes for months

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