Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I rise to speak about an urgent and long overdue reform to address how the United States houses and treats prison inmates in our Federal criminal justice system.

We are losing millions of Americans--disproportionately African- American men--to a criminal justice system that robs them of any meaningful opportunity to find gainful employment or participate in our democracy after they served their time.

Fortunately, Americans across the country have come to recognize that our so-called criminal justice system is broken. Here in the Senate, I am encouraged that many of my colleagues, including Senator Durbin, Senator Booker, and many others have joined together in support of a broad bipartisan bill entitled the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. Our criminal justice system should be about justice and rehabilitation, not just punishment. Passing this Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act would be a significant step in that direction. Today I have come to talk about a specific and targeted bill that Senators Durbin, Booker, Leahy, Franken, and I are introducing.

Far too often Federal inmates find themselves placed in 6-by-8-foot cells for 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, colloquially called restrictive housing units. These units are intended to segregate dangerous prisoners from the rest of the prison population or to punish individuals for crimes or misdeeds committed behind bars, but when one looks at the actual evidence surrounding the use of solitary confinement, they find it doesn't actually stop or reduce crime or bad behavior and it doesn't keep us safer. What it does cause is lasting, often irreparable, harm to those inmates subjected to it, and oftentimes it makes it harder for them to later successfully reenter society after they served their time.

Senator Durbin, who was to join me and Senator Booker on the floor this afternoon but for a change of schedule, first held hearings on this topic when he was Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.

He held a hearing on solitary confinement--the first-ever congressional hearing on the topic--back in 2012. In fact, he held two hearings. He left a note for me that says at one of his first hearings on solitary confinement, one of the witnesses was a man named Anthony Graves, whose testimony forever affected the Senator from Illinois. Anthony spent 18 years in prison, including 16 years in solitary confinement. In 2010, he became the 12th death row inmate to be exonerated in the State of Texas. Think about that. Mr. Graves spent 16 years in solitary confinement for a crime he was later proved never to have committed.

At that hearing, Mr. Graves testified about his experience, and here is what he said:

I lived under some of the worst conditions imaginable, with the filth, the food, the total disrespect of dignity. I lived under the rules of a system that literally drives men out of their minds.

He later said:

Solitary confinement does one thing--it breaks a man's will and he ends up deteriorating. He is never the same person again.

In those hearings, Senator Durbin asked: How big is the impact of solitary confinement in our prison system? It is difficult to determine exactly how many inmates are housed in these so-called restrictive settings. One recent study estimated as many as 80,000 State and Federal inmates in total. In my home State of Delaware, 453 inmates, about 8 percent of our State prison population, were held in restrictive housing units in 2015. Nearly one-third of them were receiving mental health treatment.

To fully understand the extent to which our prisons utilize solitary confinement, we need to look at not just the total number of inmates being placed in restrictive housing but the duration of time they spend there. One recent report by the nonpartisan Vera Institute of Justice found that inmates, even those not overly disruptive or violent, stay for long periods of time--months or years.

In Washington State, in 2011, the average length of stay in solitary confinement was 11 months. In the State of Texas, in 2013, the average stay was 4 years.

The overwhelming majority of individuals sentenced to prison will return to our communities. Rehabilitating those who have paid their debt to society is a key goal of our criminal justice system, and that is why we shouldn't subject inmates to practices like solitary confinement which lessens their ability to successfully reenter society. Mounting evidence shows that solitary confinement physically and mentally harms and destabilizes inmates in ways that then threatens the very communities--our communities--to which they will later return.

Over a year ago, President Obama asked Attorney General Loretta Lynch to review the overuse of solitary confinement in our Federal prisons.

Earlier this year, the Department of Justice released a report recommending reforms, which the Bureau of Prisons is now implementing.

Today Senator Durbin, Senator Booker, Senator Leahy, Senator Franken, and I are introducing a bill, the Solitary Confinement and Reform Act, to codify into law many of the recommendations the Bureau of Prisons is working to put in place and to lay the groundwork for broader reform.

This bill is grounded in two key observations: First, that our prison system has grown in population beyond any reasonable scope. Second, restrictive housing or solitary confinement is employed far too frequently for minor behavioral infractions, not as a sanction of last resort.

This act will establish limits on the use of solitary and require that it be limited to the briefest amount of time and under the least restrictive conditions that make sense in the setting.

The bill requires the Bureau of Prisons to limit the use of solitary confinement for inmates nearing their release date and to establish a transitional process for inmates who must remain housed in solitary confinement up to their release.

Most importantly, the bill mandates that the Federal Bureau of Prisons may not place an inmate in solitary confinement if the inmate is a minor, has a serious mental illness, has intellectual or physical disabilities, is pregnant or in the first eight weeks after delivery, except--in all of those cases, except--under limited and temporary circumstances.

Finally, the bill requires an annual report to Congress from the Bureau of Prisons about their assessment of their progress in improving solitary confinement practices and regulations.

The time to reform our criminal justice system is now, and this bill would mark an important step forward.
Some might ask why this is a passion of mine. When I was a young man, my father volunteered through our church and prison ministry, and I was a young man exposed to the impact that prison conditions can have on those who are serving time. But, more importantly, few individuals have captured the urgency of this issue as powerfully as a fellow Delawarean and friend, Bryan Stevenson. Bryan Stevenson is the author of a book entitled ``Just Mercy'' that chronicles his efforts founding and leading the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, AL. Since long before sensible reforms to our criminal justice system seemed possible, Bryan has been fighting to improve this badly broken system. In his book he tells the powerful and painful story of a 13-year-old child, Ian, incarcerated as an adult in an adult prison and who spent 18 years in solitary. As Bryan Stevenson recounts, ``Ian's mental health unraveled, and he attempted suicide several times. Each time he hurt himself, his time in solitary was extended.''

I remember being brought to tears by a number of passages in Bryan's book, and I profoundly agree with his concluding assessment that ``the true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.'' When it comes to fairly distributing justice in America, Congress has long failed this central test of character. With this bill, this Senate has a rare opportunity to right some of the wrongs that have too long plagued every step of our criminal justice system.

We also need to step up and take up and move forward the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act as well, an important and broad bill which would reduce mandatory minimums and give judges more discretion in sentencing. In this effort, we have a broad coalition of Democrats and Republicans and a diverse group of faith and reform and advocacy groups, and in President Obama we have a leader who has acted to end solitary confinement for juveniles in Federal prison and who is ready and willing to sign a broader package of criminal justice reforms into law. Now it is up to Congress.

I would like to transition, if I might, to a man who, from his very first days here in the Senate of the United States, has been a powerful, passionate, and engaged advocate for criminal justice reform broadly and for a change to our solitary confinement practices in particular. Far too many Americans have grown up in a society where they are defined by the worst thing they have ever done. When an inmate leaves prison with his sentence complete and time served, with his mind and spirit broken because of solitary, we are all less safe and our world is less just.

I wish to thank Senator Durbin for his efforts on this bill, but in particular I want to thank Senator Booker for his passion, for his engagement, for his effectiveness. He is my colleague who has been most engaged in the changes of solitary confinement from his first days here, and he is the deserving partner of Senator Durbin's long record going back to the hearings he first held in 2012.

With that, I yield the floor to my colleague from the great State of New Jersey.

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