HARRISBURG (TNS) — Reform advocates are making another push to limit the use of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania prisons and jails, a long-running effort that has seen fits and starts of legislation and court cases over several years.

Advocates rallied in the Capitol last week in support of a bill that would, among other reforms, limit solitary confinement to no more than 15 days at a stretch.

That standard is consistent with United Nations treaties often called “Mandela Rules” in reference to the late South African civil rights leader, Nelson Mandela — standards to which the United States is nominally subject to under international law, but not in this country.

“Solitary confinement is torture on an international level. Confining prisoners of war in solitary confinement is a violation of international treaties, and yet we do this here in Pennsylvania every single day,” said Rep. Emily Kinkead, D-Allegheny County, who has circulated a bill memo seeking support for the legislation.

In addition to the 15-day standard, Kinkead anticipates her bill would limit what offenses could be used to justify solitary confinement, require a certain amount of outside contact even when in solitary, and other reforms.

At a press conference last Wednesday, Pennsylvanians who had served time in prison related the well-known negative effects of solitary confinement, being kept alone in small cells with virtually no amenities and allowed out only an hour a day – or sometimes not at all.

“You don’t realize how important human contact is until it’s taken from you,” said Remy Kayal, who said he was held in solitary at Northampton County Prison for a matter of weeks after getting into a confrontation with police at a traffic stop.

Kayal had undiagnosed bipolar disorder at the time, he said, but was denied substantive medical care – or even the opportunity to use the bathroom. He eventually began to hallucinate and believe he had super powers.

Solitary confinement is widely viewed as counter-productive, causing more public safety problems down the road than it fixes. A recently-released study of Pennsylvania inmates found that those who had spent 90 days or more in solitary confinement were 15% to 25% more likely to re-offend, even after controlling for variables such as the severity of the original offense and parole conditions.

A 2019 study of North Carolina inmates found that those who had spent time in solitary were far more likely to die within a year after release, with solitary inmates a whopping 127% more likely to die of opioid overdoses when they return to the community.

“They’re coming home mentally ill, not diagnosed, and we wonder why they’re going back to prison?” asks Shawn Bridges, a Berks County activist who spent 20 years in death-row solitary confinement before his murder conviction was overturned.

The prevalence of solitary confinement can be difficult to quantify, given that inmates in Pennsylvania are spread between county jails – used to hold people during adjudication and for sentences under two years – and the state prison system run by the state Department of Corrections (DOC), where inmates serve longer sentences.

The DOC refers to solitary confinement conditions as “restricted housing,” which can be imposed either by “administrative custody” or “disciplinary custody.” The former refers to inmates who have been deemed an inherent risk, whereas the latter is for inmates who have committed some sort of infraction.

Of the roughly 33,000 inmates the DOC is holding at any given time, approximately 5% are being held in restricted housing, according to the department’s most recent population reports.

The median length-of-stay in restricted housing was 27 days as of the first quarter of 2025, the department told PennLive. Statistics submitted to the House Judiciary Committee last year indicated that 75% of DOC inmates in solitary confinement had been there for 14 days or more, and 8% had been there for a year or longer.

Democratic state lawmakers have filed numerous bills over the years seeking similar goals to the bill that Kinkead plans to run, adding various checks and balances to the use of solitary confinement. None of these have made it very far in the legislative process.

Court cases have resulted in some change. In 2018, the Abolitionist Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union led a lawsuit that resulted in the DOC agreeing to stop automatically placing death row prisoners on administrative solitary confinement. Legal challenges also resulted in an overhaul of how the prison system provides out-of-cell treatment to those with mental health issues.

The DOC has also recently reformed its procedures for administrative and disciplinary custody, including guaranteed hearings for inmates who are placed in restricted housing.

But many former inmates said this works better on paper than in practice. Long periods of disciplinary solitary can be imposed for offenses such as having unauthorized ketchup packets; vague assertions that an inmate is difficult can justify years of administrative solitary, former incarcerated people said.

“The minute they let me out, I asked them ‘what did I do?’ They still did not tell me what I did. This issue has pervaded for decades,” said Caine Pelzer, who said nearly all of his 15 years in state prisons were spent in solitary confinement.

DOC procedures still only mandate an hour of out-of-cell time five days per week for those in restricted housing. Only after 30 days straight in solitary confinement does out-of-cell time increase; only after 90 days are inmates allowed to use the phone for call that aren’t deemed emergency or legal in nature, according to published protocols.

“The mentality is to break you,” Pelzer said, and in many cases “put you in a situation where you’re going to kill yourself.”

The Abolitionist Law Center is pursuing a case seeking broad relief from the conditions of solitary confinement. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of several disabled inmates who have been in solitary for months or years, argues the DOC’s use of solitary confinement remains indiscriminate enough to constitute violation of disability laws as well as cruel and unusual punishment under the Eight Amendment and violation of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Such efforts have seen some pushback, mostly from corrections officers’ groups who say solitary confinement is necessary for their safety when dealing with unpredictably violent inmates.

In an op-ed last year, John Eckenrode, the head of Pennsylvania’s corrections officers’ union, said the use of restricted housing was a crucial deterrent and that further limiting it “will be sending a clear signal to inmates that it’s open season on officers, prison employees and other inmates.”

Eckenrode pointed to the experience of New York, which passed a law in 2022 that limited the use of solitary confinement, after which reported assaults on officers increased. Skeptics note, however, that assault reports in New York prisons were on the rise for years before the law was passed, and the new limitations on solitary didn’t change the trajectory.

Further, Kinkead said, Pennsylvania already has a proven case where less-restrictive conditions for inmates has drastically reduced violence. The state’s Little Scandinavia unit at SCI Chester — modeled after corrections programs in Norway and Sweden — has seen only one fight in its six-year existence.

“When you treat people with dignity in prison, you don’t get the incidents, you don’t get the fights, you don’t get the kind of behavior that people are so afraid of if we limit solitary confinement,” Kinkead said.