PD Editorial: State picks justice over vengeance

California’s penal system is taking another step away from its brutal past.

Under a legal settlement announced this week, the state will stop isolating prisoners in solitary confinement for years, even decades at a time.

An inmate who spent 17 years in solitary - locked in a cell 22½ hours a day and denied virtually any contact with other humans - described it as “a living tomb.” Thousands of inmates participated in hunger strikes protesting long-term solitary confinement and/or joined a class-action lawsuit seeking to end the practice.

But it wasn’t just prisoners who objected.

A special U.N. envoy who assessed California’s prisons said prolonged solitary confinement “amounted to torture” and “was contrary to the practices of civilized nations.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court, speaking to a House committee this spring, said extended isolation “literally drives men mad” and asked, “If those individuals are ultimately released, how will they ever adapt?”

One day after the California settlement, a national prison administrators association declared that its members are committed to “ongoing efforts to limit or end extended isolation.”

California built up its prison system in the 1980s, filled it well beyond capacity in the 1990s and spent much of the time since under federal court supervision because of crowding and inadequate health care in the state’s penitentiaries.

The state already has eased crowding, improved medical services and stopped using pepper spray to control mentally ill prisoners. With this week’s settlement, California is addressing another long-running prison problem.

To be clear, the state isn’t abandoning solitary confinement or turning its prisons into country clubs with razor-wire-topped fences.

However, prisoners will no longer be held in isolation indefinitely, and placements will be based on behavior rather than simply for gang membership or, in some cases, suspected gang membership.

Until recently, according to news accounts, the only way out of solitary was to become an informant and risk becoming a victim of prison yard reprisal.

As many as 2,000 inmates could be returned to the general prison population as the new policy is implemented. Some of these inmates have been held for as long as three decades in the ultra-high-security unit at Pelican Bay State Prison near Crescent City.

The state also agreed to create new units, with less isolation and more privileges, for inmates deemed too dangerous for the general population.

Prisons are filled with dangerous felons with little respect for their fellow citizens. But the state that incarcerates them must meet a higher standard, and it needs to consider Justice Kennedy’s question. By choosing justice over vengeance, California improves the chances that inmates can adapt should they return to civil society.