From The Nevada Independent:
Nevada prison officials made headlines in 2017 when they told lawmakers that some inmates with serious mental illness had been in solitary confinement for years — potentially violating the Constitution — and promised the agency was moving away from the practice.
But a new report from the Vera Institute of Justice indicates the problem has not been fully resolved: The group found that more than 12 percent of Nevada prison inmates are in “segregation” — a number that researchers say is on the high end relative to other states — and some in isolation have serious mental illness. They also found that while the number of people explicitly sent to segregation as punishment went down, there was an increase in the number of people sent to segregation for murky and ill-documented “administrative” reasons.
“I think that the Vera report just solidifies and validates everything we say has been occurring with solitary confinement practices in the Nevada Department of Corrections,” said Holly Welborn, policy director at the ACLU of Nevada, which has pushed bills to limit the practice and published a report in 2017 with firsthand accounts> of people who spent time in segregation. “It’s a process that’s overused.” Continue reading >>>
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