AMERICA imprisons 2.2m people—more than any other country in both real and relative terms. About 4.4% of those prisoners, on any given day, are serving time while virtually bereft of human contact. The conditions in solitary confinement are grim: prisoners sit alone in 6-by-10 ft windowless cells for all but an hour or so a day, eating meals that are, themselves, punitive. In many prisons, inmates are served a post-apocalyptic meal called Nutraloaf but known more popularly as “the brick” or “the loaf”—a dry, flavourless, 1100-calorie product that makes people gag. But mealtime may be the highlight of one’s day in solitary. A chorus of critics say that time in a “special housing unit” (or “SHU”) brings severe mental and emotional harm to prisoners without making prisons any safer for inmates or staff. Last week, a major agreement to tamp down the use of solitary confinement in the Empire state was reached in response to a class-action lawsuit waged by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). For several decades New York prisons, such as Rikers Island (pictured), have shown a particular enthusiasm for tossing prisoners in the hole. New York's rate of solitary confinement, at 8%, is nearly double the national average, and prisoners often stay in SHU for months or years. Some of those inmates are especially violent, segregated from the general prison population to avert further crimes. But many end up in solitary confinement for breaking everyday prison rules. One prisoner profiled in an NYCLU report ended up in SHU for “tattooing his own hands (a broken star, with his initials at the center), smoking in the bathroom, failing to report for work duty and visiting another prisoner’s dormitory”.

The settlement, reached after three years of negotiations with Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration, will remove about a quarter of the 4,500 New York inmates from their SHU cells. It limits terms in solitary confinement to three months for most first-time violations and only 30 days for “almost all first-time non-violent violations”. It also removes the discretion of prison guards to send prisoners to SHU for “petty violations”. But the agreement is far from a radical reform: 64 rule violations continue to be grounds for solitary confinement, and thousands of prisoners will still be eligible for the punishment of being sent to a prison-within-a-prison.

For those inmates, the agreement suggests that life in SHU may become somewhat less intolerable. They will be able to make occasional phone calls, use shower curtains, check out more books from the prison library, use tablet computers (without an internet connection) and enrol in correspondence courses. They will have expanded access to mental-health care. And unless they are found “[t]hrowing food…[c]ommitting unhygienic acts...such as spitting at staff or other inmates or throwing feces or urine...or [r]efusing to obey a direct order at the time of meal distribution”, the menu for prisoners in SHU will not include Nutraloaf. Other states have recently implemented more expansive reforms to their solitary confinement regime. In Colorado, the use of the punishment has dropped 85%. In Washington state, the number of inmates in solitary has fallen almost 50%, accompanied by a fundamental rethinking of how to conceptualise “the worst of the worst”.

The agreement in New York to cut the inhumanity of solitary confinement is significant, but its success depends on a shift in culture among New York’s correction officers. The union representing prison guards came out with a swift warning about the reforms: “[O]ur state's disciplinary confinement policies have evolved over decades of experience, and it is simply wrong to unilaterally take the tools away from law enforcement officers who face dangerous situations on a daily basis”. Noting that “the number of inmate assaults on staff has almost doubled” in the past three years, the union insists that “any policy changes must prioritise the security of everyone who works and resides in these institutions”. The agreement, the correction offers suggest, does not do that. But studies belie the assumption that solitary confinement is necessary to keep prisons secure and orderly. A recent report from the Vera Institute, a criminal justice think-tank, notes there is “little evidence to support the claim that segregated housing increases facility safety or that its absence would increase in-prison violence”. Fears to the contrary are “unsubstantiated”, and in the wake of the dramatic decrease in solitary confinement in Colorado, “prisoner-on-staff assaults are the lowest they have been since 2006”.

In anticipation of recalcitrant corrections officers, the settlement wisely lays out "a robust monitoring regime to ensure compliance with [its] terms...including quarterly reporting to the public.”Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU's executive director, says this provision is key: "We need to be monitoring like a hawk, and we will be monitoring like a hawk to ensure that the reforms are actually carried out".