Florida Becomes Latest State to End Permanent Death-Row Solitary Confinement After Settlement of Conditions Lawsuit

Florida has joined the grow­ing num­ber of states that have end­ed auto­mat­ic per­ma­nent soli­tary con­fine­ment for pris­on­ers sen­tenced to death.

The Florida Department of Corrections agreed to the action as part of a set­tle­ment of a fed­er­al civ­il rights law­suit brought by eight pris­on­ers who alleged that the state’s death-row con­di­tions were ​“extreme, debil­i­tat­ing, and inhu­mane, violate[d] con­tem­po­rary stan­dards of decen­cy, and pose[d] an unrea­son­able risk of seri­ous harm to the health and safe­ty.” U.S. District Court Judge Marcia Morales Howard approved the set­tle­ment in late April 2022 to elim­i­nate per­ma­nent soli­tary con­fine­ment for death-row pris­on­ers and to improve death-row con­di­tions in the state.

Florida death-row pris­on­ers had for more than forty years spent almost every day in 24-hour-a-day soli­tary con­fine­ment in con­crete rooms the size of a park­ing space with no win­dows. They had severe­ly lim­it­ed access to exer­cise, phone calls, and oth­er human inter­ac­tion, includ­ing with oth­er pris­on­ers and staff. 

The set­tle­ment allows the pris­on­ers to spend up to 20 hours a week in a day room, where they can meet with oth­ers, watch tele­vi­sion, and have access to Department of Corrections mul­ti­me­dia kiosks. They will also have more access to phones to call loved ones, increased show­er access, and will be grant­ed six hours a week of out­side activ­i­ty — up from three hours — with a new sun­shade. Prisoners who meet eli­gi­bil­i­ty require­ments deter­mined by the Department of Corrections will also have access to institutional jobs.

Evan Shea, whose law firm helped coor­di­nate the law­suit, praised the set­tle­ment. ​“This is going to lead to a smoother oper­a­tion of the prison,” he said. ​“It’s not a good way to run a prison to have inmates that are sub­ject to severe psy­cho­log­i­cal strain. That leads to unhap­py pris­on­ers, inmates that are not sta­ble and react in ways that place bur­dens on cor­rec­tion­al offi­cers and on the prison administration.”

“It’s been a tenet of our legal sys­tem, real­ly since its incep­tion, that no mat­ter what any­one has done or what they’ve been con­vict­ed of, they deserve humane, respon­si­ble con­fine­ment,” Shea said. ​“As we under­stand more about the effects of iso­la­tion on men­tal health, it’s very clear from the sci­ence that pro­longed iso­la­tion is not a humane, just con­di­tion to place someone in.”

Florida is just the lat­est in a series of states who have sig­nif­i­cant­ly changed or altered their death-row con­di­tions in recent years in response to pris­on­er law­suits. Since 2017, five oth­er states have end­ed auto­mat­ic pro­longed soli­tary con­fine­ment for their death rows: Arizona, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. Another state, Oklahoma, has not end­ed its prac­tice of keep­ing death-row pris­on­ers in soli­tary con­fine­ment for 23 hours a day, but has imple­ment­ed some oth­er changes, includ­ing elim­i­nat­ing incar­cer­a­tion in win­dow­less cells, per­mit­ting con­tact vis­i­ta­tion, and pro­vid­ing some oppor­tu­ni­ty for outside recreation.

A brief filed in February 2022 by a group of for­mer prison direc­tors in Hope v. Harris, a pend­ing Supreme Court chal­lenge to the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of long-term soli­tary con­fine­ment, argues that the prac­tice ​“can cause severe psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal harm, and is a cost­ly, inef­fec­tive form of pun­ish­ment that does not advance peno­log­i­cal goals or improve prison secu­ri­ty.” They write that “[t]he severe iso­la­tion increas­es prison vio­lence and dis­or­der, serves no inter­est in pre­vent­ing incar­cer­at­ed peo­ple from escap­ing, and inhibits rehabilitation.” 

The Texas death-row pris­on­er behind that chal­lenge, Dennis Hope, wrote to his lawyers that “[c]hallenging the use of soli­tary con­fine­ment has giv­en me a pur­pose and goal and helped me main­tain a degree of my san­i­ty in an oth­er­wise insane envi­ron­ment.” ​“Having sat back here and watched men com­mit sui­cide, muti­late them­selves, try to over­dose on pills and slow­ly lose their minds,” he told his lawyers, ​“I said to myself that I was going to try to make a pos­i­tive change in the way we are housed and treat­ed if it was the last thing I did.”

A DPIC analy­sis of data from a fall 2021 law review by Merel Pontier found that the twelve states that man­dat­ed pro­longed soli­tary con­fine­ment — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming — col­lec­tive­ly account­ed for 953 death-row pris­on­ers, or 38.6% of those on death rows nation­wide at the end of 2020. Half of U.S. death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers have been on death row for more than twen­ty years.

While reha­bil­i­ta­tion has nev­er been the goal of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, a Death Penalty Information Center review of more than 9,700 death sen­tences imposed in the United States between 1972 and the end of 2020 has found that the most like­ly out­come of a cap­i­tal case once a death sen­tence has been imposed is that the defendant’s con­vic­tion or death sen­tence will be over­turned and the pris­on­er will not be resen­tenced to death. Death-row exonerees face sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges to reen­try into soci­ety that are exac­er­bat­ed by the psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age caused by as a result of the con­di­tions in which they had been con­fined on death row . The con­di­tions of con­fine­ment also adverse­ly affect the abil­i­ty of for­mer death-row pris­on­ers to inte­grate into the gen­er­al prison population.