As landmark settlement will end state’s ability to indefinitely lock up prisoners in solitary – former inmate and allies reflect on time that ‘literally drives men mad’

From solitary confinement to the streets: California prison reform too late for some

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Lonnie Rose spent 26 years in California’s high security state prisons. Now, walking into a crowded supermarket makes him feel overwhelmed and panicky.

“I start to look around and feel the need to get out of there. It is the result of being in solitary confinement for almost 10 years straight,” said 64-year-old Rose.

Rose, who had been in and out of prison since 1972, was given a life sentence under California’s three strikes law in 1994 for transporting heroin, a nonviolent offense.

Lonnie Rose 1972 - in prison Photograph: Courtesy of Lonnie Rose

He served time in solitary confinement units in High Desert, Corcoran and Pelican Bay State prisons.

Rose was released from Pelican Bay in April 2013 and lives in Stockton, in California’s central valley. He says that he still feels the effects of having been in the solitary units, officially called the Secure Housing Unit (SHU). Inmates in the SHU spend 22-23 hours in a windowless 8 by 10ft concrete room, and are denied all physical contact with visitors, phone calls, and educational and recreational programs.

“I was no angel. I was a seasoned convict but I didn’t do anything that merited long-term isolation,” said Rose, who was put in solitary because he was involved in a prison riot in 2003 and prison officials linked him to the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist gang.

Rose likely would have benefitted from changes in California’s solitary confinement system announced on Tuesday under a landmark legal settlement involving Pelican Bay prisoners and the state of California. The settlement will end thestate’s ability to indefinitely lock up prisoners in solitary because of their “status”– having been labeled as gang members or associates of gangs. The new system will only allow prisoners to be placed in solitary for set terms if they’ve committed a serious crime in prison or are proven to be physical threats to other prisoners.

‘I was no angel. I was a seasoned convict but I didn’t do anything that merited long-term isolation,’ says Lonnie Rose in 2015. Photograph: Courtesy of Lonnie Rose

The agreement is a result of a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of prisoners held in the SHU at Pelican Bay who have spent a decade or more in solitary confinement.

The case charged that prolonged solitary confinement violates theeighth amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and that the absence of meaningful review of prisoners in solitary confinement violates the prisoners’ rights to due process.



A core group of prisoners at Pelican Bay led two 21-day hunger strikes in protest over the practice in 2011. A 60-day strike in July 2013 that involved 30,000 inmates brought national attention to the state’s solitary confinement practices.

Under the new changes, Rose says he is certain that he would have been moved to the general prison facility and not suffered in solitary for so long. He attributes his current social phobias and obsessive compulsive disorder to being in solitary for almost 10 years.

“In the SHU I would sometimes make my bed multiple times and clean my floor six times in one day, I had control of every tiny detail inside my cell and now when I walk into to large environments I am overwhelmed by how much of it I can’t control,” said Rose, who says his obsessive compulsive behaviors worsened in the SHU.

He says even now he has moments where being alone in a small room is more comforting for him than being outside or with people.

“You are in there [solitary] for so long that it becomes what you know,” said Rose, who during his time in solitary saw his son a few times through the glass partition, but couldn’t hug or touch him or anyone else.

He says being deprived of touching another human being for so long affects a person’s ability to rehabilitate, especially because he wasn’t in prison for a violent offense.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A cell in the Secure Housing Unit of Pelican Bay State prison – such cells are typically used to house violent gang members. Photograph: Reuters

Currently there are about 1,800 prisoners in California state prisons serving indeterminate terms in solitary confinement, according to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) spokeswoman Terrry Thornton.

She says that the CDCR started reviewing the cases of inmates serving indeterminate solitary terms in October 2013 and has removed 1,100. Thornton says the remaining 1,800 inmates in indeterminate solitary confinement will be reviewed within the next year.

“I’m elated with the changes. The prison guards and the officers can’t just decide to lock you up and throw away the key anymore,” said Rose.

Before the recent reforms, the CDCR had very low standards for evidence to connect a prisoner to a gang and could use anything to put someone in the SHU.

“They found a book in my cell that they said linked me to the Aryan Brotherhood and that was it. I was validated as a gang member and put away indefinitely,” said Rose. According to Rose’s prison records, prison officials claimed Rose was writing letters to Aryan Brotherhood members, but Rose says they never showed him any of the letters as proof.

Thornton wouldn’t comment on specific cases.

“Before these changes, validating an inmate as a gang member or an associate was as easy as finding a book, Mayan images, or a list of gang members on a piece of paper in an inmate’s cell,” said Alexis Agathocleous, a deputy legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a lead attorney on the prisoner lawsuit.

High-profile inmates caught up in ‘prison politics’

Marie Levin is the sister of Sitawa Jamaa, a plaintiff in the lawsuit who was in the Pelican Bay SHU from 1989 to 2014. Jamaa is charged with being part of the Black Guerrilla Family, a prison and street gang, and was recently transferred to the SHU in the prison facility in Tehachapi.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former prisoners carry a sign during a rally at the Elihu Harris state building in Oakland, California, last week. Photograph: Robert Galbraith/Reuters

“My brother is a political prisoner. He hasn’t done anything in more than 10 years that should keep him in solitary indefinitely,” said Levin, who lives in Oakland.

She says that “prison politics” have kept many high-profile prisoners like her brother in the SHU and she hopes the settlement agreement will change that.

In an appearance in front of Congress in March, US supreme court Justice Anthony Kennedy said solitary confinement “literally drives men mad” as he highlighted the case of a California man isolated for 25 years. In July, President Obama ordered the Justice Department to review the overuse of solitary confinement in US prisons.

Agathocleous says the new restrictive units will allow for prisoners to have meaningful interactions with one another. “This group interaction will foster change and rehabilitation in the prisoners, which will prepare them for entering the general population of the prison or even be released someday,” he said.

Critics say that allowing group interaction for high-risk inmates could create more violence inside the prisons. In August, Hugo Pinell, a prominent figure in 1970s prison violence, was killed after he was moved from solitary confinement and into the general population at the California State Prison Sacramento. Pinell had spent four decades in solitary confinement, including the Pelican Bay SHU.

Thornton says for the number of inmates that they have moved out of the SHU, “we’ve had minimal problems.”

Rose recalls 2 April 2013, the day he was released from prison.

“I went from solitary right to the street… When prison officers dropped me off at the bus stop, I hadn’t had physical contact with another human being for 10 years, other than when the prison guards transported me to the yard or when I was seen by a doctor,” said Rose.

He says he is still getting used to being free.