NASW-CA Social Action/Social Justice Council Report

California Prisoners and Sleep Deprivation

We need to make the Senate and Assembly Public Safety Committees and Governor Brown stop this now! 

Here is what was put together for letter on behalf of Council. Check out:

https://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/sleep-deprivation-for-almost-three-months-help-stop-it/#more-8033 to take action.

Our National Association of Social Workers, Social Action/Social Justice Council of California is writing to demand that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) immediately stop the so-called security/welfare checks for inmates in solitary confinement.

These checks are only being done in the isolation units, causing ongoing sleep deprivation for those prisoners.  The checks are particularly distressing for prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit (PB SHU) and women’s death row.  We further urge the abolition of prolonged solitary confinement.

As social workers we have an ethical obligation to support the right not to be subjected to dehumanizing treatment and punishment and to advocate for the elimination of the practice of torture, which we believe sleep deprivation and prolonged solitary confinement both are.

The purported intent of the “security/welfare” checks every 30 minutes is to improve mental health care and prevent suicides. Instead, these checks are causing serious psychological and physical harm. Sleep deprivation and relentless exposure to loud noise are known methods of torture that can quickly cause mental and physical impairment.

“Research over the past 20 years has finally begun to provide at least a partial explanation for why we must sleep.  The clearest finding is that sleep does not serve just a single purpose.  Instead it appears to be needed for the optimal functioning of a multitude of biological processes—from the inner workings of the immune system to proper hormonal balance, to emotional and psychiatric health, to learning and memory, to the clearance of toxins to the brain.  ….[A]nyone who lives for months without sleep will die.” (1)

In PB SHU, the men have been sleep deprived since August 3, 2015.  Every 20 to 30 minutes, prisoners are subjected to the reverberating noise of the steel doors to units opening and slamming closed, the stomping of guards through the pods and up and down the stairs,  the jingling of keys, the beeping of the Guard One System metal pipes on metal buttons, and the banging of metal pipes on the cells. Making matters worse, guards sometimes shine their flashlights into the prisoners’ eyes. The people who are suffering these so-called security/welfare checks spend 23 to 24 hours a day in solitary cells, so the noise and intrusion is unavoidable and endless torture.

Sleep deprivation is torture. Furthermore, prolonged solitary confinement is an inhumane, unethical, unconstitutional, necessarily physically and mentally damaging and torturous practice.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez; the United Nations Committee Against Torture; Amnesty International; the National Religious Campaign Against Torture; the Center for Constitutional Rights; and an expanding list of others are also calling for an end to prolonged solitary confinement.

A taskforce of social workers recently completed a more thorough review of this problem and found that more than 80,000 prisoners are detained in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons at any one time, some for months, years and even decades. It is a torturous, cruel, and inhumane practice that violates United Nations conventions.  Its prolonged use (over 15 days, according to Juan Mendez, the U.N. Rapporteur on Torture) is damaging to all prisoners, and its use AT ALL is especially damaging to juveniles, transgender women, the elderly, people with disabilities, and those with mental illness.

Rienzi (2015), recounting Rubenstein’s testimony before a Maryland Senate Committee, highlighted: Some states say that if an inmate has a serious mental illness, that inmate should be excluded from solitary…although this policy keeps some inmates out of segregation, the involvement of mental health professionals…in this “gatekeeping” process raises serious ethical concerns. “The practice amounts to a tacit medical endorsement of the use of solitary confinement for the nonexcluded prisoner, thus involving health professionals in punishment,” [Rubenstein] says. “It also forces the health professional to ignore evidence that many mentally healthy prisoners placed in solitary confinement suffer serious psychological harm from the experience.”

(Source—Greg Rienzi, 2015: http://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2015/spring/is-solitary-confinement-ethical)

It is not ethically defensible for our government to acquiesce silently to conditions of confinement that inflict mental harm and violate human rights and therefore we urge the end to “security/welfare” checks amounting to sleep deprivation and an end to solitary confinement.

Please take immediate action.

SOURCE:

Robert Stickgold: Sleep On It!, neuroscience article in the October 2015 issue of Scientific American.