The Council for Court Excellence, a D.C.-based nonprofit organization aimed at “improving justice for the community,” just released a report on the Department of Corrections’ use of disciplinary or administrative segregation—more colloquially known as solitary confinement—within D.C. Jail. 

CCE was able to obtain limited data that paints a grim picture of the use of both disciplinary and administrative segregation in the local lockup. In fiscal year 2021, the average length of stay in restrictive housing units in D.C. Jail was 49 days. The United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rules—also known as the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners—states that “solitary confinement of more than 15 consecutive days is regarded as a form of torture.”

The DOC also reports that in fiscal year 2021, 35 percent of residents housed in either administrative restrictive housing, disciplinary restrictive housing, prehearing detention, or protective custody had an active diagnosis of a serious mental illness. This information is especially troubling because research suggests that more than 33 percent of people held in solitary confinement become psychotic and/or suicidal within the first 15 days.

Advocates and policymakers have been questioning the use of disciplinary and administrative segregation within DOC facilities, particularly because a majority of the people held in these facilities, according to CCE Executive Director Misty Thomas, are being held pre-trial, and therefore have not been convicted of any crimes.

Although the March 15 report contains some information about the use of solitary confinement in the D.C. Jail, its primary focus is on DOC’s denial of CCE’s request for basic information about the practice.

The report was originally intended as a primer to inform upcoming policy decisions on DOC’s use of solitary confinement. It was also meant to evaluate whether or not DOC’s not-yet-built new correctional facility “should include units designated for solitary confinement.” But CCE was limited in what it hoped to discover due to the DOC’s denial of several Freedom of Information Act requests.

The CCE requested a series of data points from fiscal years 2019, 2020, and 2021; DOC only provided data from 2021. 

The lack of transparency on basic data points, including “responses related to the use of restraints on people in the jails; the races and ages of people in solitary … the number of pregnant people in segregation; or the number of people in segregation who tried to or succeeded in hurting themselves or completing suicide,” raises concerns for CCE.

For Thomas, there are real questions to be answered about why DOC denied these requests. “A decent number of our inquiries into the 2021 FOIAs were written exactly the same as inquiries that prior other organizations, including the Washington Post, including University Legal Services had requested and received,” Thomas says. “So either they’re collecting less deliberately or refusing to disclose.”

Policy advocates across the District, such as Darby Hickey, policy counsel at the D.C. Justice Lab, which is a member of the Unlock the Box Coalition, are also grappling with the inaccessibility of this data. “This makes policymaking very difficult because how can you hold them accountable, how can you make the best policies if you don’t understand what’s happening?” says Hickey. 

“It leaves an incomplete picture and makes it very difficult to believe that they really are making progress and reducing the use of restrictive housing and solitary confinement as they say they have, which we want to believe,” Hickey says. “We want to say, ‘That is good,’ if they are making those steps, but … we need to see their claims backed up with actual data.”

The Justice Lab is a strong proponent of the Eliminating Restrictive and Segregated Enclosures (“ERASE”) Solitary Confinement Act of 2023, a bill introduced by Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau in October of last year. The bill would prohibit “nearly all forms of segregated confinement” in the D.C. Jail. It would also “require DOC to collect and publish data on the ongoing use of solitary confinement, and allow residents to file special grievances, and potentially sue the agency if they’ve been subject to prolonged confinement.”

Tracy Velázquez, policy director for the CCE, says that the information they have requested is especially relevant, given the fact that DOC has been allocated funding in order to build a new correctional facility. “We do want to think about how we build the most humane jail that does the least harm,” says Velázquez. “If you build a jail with very limited facilities for solitary, you will use solitary less.”

“I’m not trying to supplant our expertise for what it takes to run a safe and secure facility. That is indeed a complicated and hard job, and one that I don’t envy them to do,” Thomas says. “But when they have such a profound power to hold people’s bodies and control their access to care, sunlight, and human interaction, that needs to be done with the utmost transparency.”