LAW REVIEWS— Decency Comes Full Circle: The Constitutional Demand to End Permanent Solitary Confinement on Death Row

A 2022 arti­cle in the Columbia Journal of Law & Social Problems presents both a his­tor­i­cal overview of the prac­tice of death-row con­fine­ment in the U.S. and the find­ings of a sur­vey of the con­di­tions on death rows in every juris­dic­tion with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in America. Regarding the use of high­ly restric­tive con­fine­ment, the author states that ​“the sys­tem of per­ma­nent soli­tary con­fine­ment on death row has nei­ther the weight of his­to­ry nor the sup­port of the major­i­ty in either con­tem­po­rary prac­tice or social values.” 

The sur­vey of con­di­tions in the var­i­ous states found: ​“Of the twen­ty-sev­en state juris­dic­tions cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing death rows, approx­i­mate­ly half (four­teen) impose either per­ma­nent or semi-soli­tary con­fine­ment (i.e., an aver­age of at least twen­ty hours of soli­tary con­fine­ment per day) on peo­ple sen­tenced to death. Of these states, eleven keep death row pop­u­la­tion in per­ma­nent soli­tary con­fine­ment.” The article’s Appendix con­tains per­ti­nent details on the con­di­tions on each death row in the country.

The author notes that the use of soli­tary con­fine­ment on death row emerged ​“with­out a judge, jury, or leg­is­la­ture order­ing it,” and that ​“many of the near­ly two and a half thou­sand peo­ple on America’s death rows will spend an aver­age of sev­en thou­sand days sealed for twen­ty-three hours behind a sol­id steel door, inside a win­dow­less cell the size of a parking space.”

The arti­cle dis­cuss­es a recent trend away from per­ma­nent soli­tary con­fine­ment in many states, with some juris­dic­tions view­ing it through the Eighth Amendment’s lens of the ​“evolv­ing stan­dards of decen­cy” in deter­min­ing what con­sti­tutes cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. Nine juris­dic­tions have tak­en steps to end per­ma­nent soli­tary con­fine­ment over the past six years (includ­ing Virginia, which sub­se­quent­ly abol­ished cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment), while no state has imposed harsh­er death row con­di­tions. The author notes that ​“senior cor­rec­tions offi­cials in juris­dic­tions that have reformed or semi-reformed death rows uni­ver­sal­ly praised the change.”