Stepping Down From Solitary Confinement

This piece was reported through The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal-justice system.

Before solitary confinement became a widely acknowledged national problem—before the hunger strikes and class-action lawsuits, before the Senate hearings, before a Supreme Court justice’s condemnation of the “human toll wrought by extended terms of isolation,” before corrections leaders described holding more than 80,000 prisoners alone in a cell for 23 hours a day as a “grave problem”—Catherine Bauman did something a bit less dramatic. She called a staff meeting.

Bauman, a small woman with long red hair, is the warden of Alger Correctional Facility in Michigan’s upper peninsula, a remote prison near Lake Superior, just across from Canada. She’s hard to miss; the staff is made up of mostly husky white men from nearby small towns, and the inmates are mostly black men from urban areas hundreds of miles away. In the summer of 2009, Bauman had been warden for less than a year when her bosses at the Michigan Department of Corrections—in the wake of a lawsuit over a prisoner’s death in an isolation cell—asked prisons throughout the state to come up with ways to reduce the number of prisoners held in what the department calls “administrative segregation,” or “seg.”

Bauman volunteered, and she did not have trouble getting her staff interested. Fully half of Alger’s 500 inmates were housed in three seg wings, and nobody liked working in them, even if they believed they were necessary for safety. The officers didn’t like the smell of urine, feces, body odors, smoke; or the sounds of banging and shouting; or how often they had to suit up in riot gear—the “goon squad”—to tackle men wielding shanks or setting fires in their cells.

For many policy makers and activists, curbing the use of solitary confinement is a