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President Obama announced a set of sweeping prison reforms on Monday night, ending solitary confinement for juveniles and prohibiting the practice for punishment of those who’ve commited low-level infractions. The reforms, adopted from recommendations by the Justice Department, will also expand treatment for mentally ill prisoners. About about 10,000 people in the federal prison system will be affected.

While the announcement is a significant step in Obama’s criminal-justice reform agenda, the new policies won’t affect the overwhelming majority of US inmates, who are imprisoned for state-level crimes.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Obama outlined the argument against solitary confinement

How can we subject prisoners to unnecessary solitary confinement, knowing its effects, and then expect them to return to our communities as whole people? It doesn’t make us safer. It’s an affront to our common humanity. (…) The Justice Department has completed its review, and I am adopting its recommendations to reform the federal prison system. These include banning solitary confinement for juveniles and as a response to low-level infractions, expanding treatment for the mentally ill and increasing the amount of time inmates in solitary can spend outside of their cells. These steps will affect some 10,000 federal prisoners held in solitary confinement — and hopefully serve as a model for state and local corrections systems. And I will direct all relevant federal agencies to review these principles and report back to me with a plan to address their use of solitary confinement.

While solitary confinement is a “necessary tool” under some circumstances, according to the op-ed—though terribly inhumane, according to people who have actually experienced it—the practice has been subject to “overuse.”