By Michael Hill
Correspondent
“It was like hell on Earth.”
A former immigrant detainee’s description of two days in solitary confinement in one of the three New Jersey county jails that house immigrants awaiting hearings.
This man said the guards put him in the small room and took away his privileges because he was helping other inmates file grievances.
“Certain guards were trying to get back at me,” he said.
A new report, “Isolated in Essex: Punishing Immigrants Through Solitary Confinement”, finds “The imposition of solitary confinement in Essex is excessive and disproportionate … arbitrary … and lacks transparency and due process.”
“If, for example, you talk back to a guard you could be sent to solitary confinement,” said American Friends Service Committee Project Coordinator Serges Demefack.
The NYU Law Clinic on Immigrant Rights co-authored the report. One professor says it’s a system that perpetuates punishment. The example, she said, is that even inmates who complain about solitary confinement are punished with solitary confinement.
The American Friends Service Committee and New Jersey Advocates for Immigrant Detainees partnered with NYU and found the Essex County Correctional Facility used solitary confinement 446 times over three years and nearly a quarter of those cases were later dismissed.
“So you see the arbitrary nature of the punishment. It’s inhumane. It has to change if you want to live in a land where the makes sense to all of us,” Demefack said.
Today, New Jersey moved one step closer to that goal when the state Senate voted 23 to 16 to restrict the use of isolated confinement in state and county jails. Bill sponsor Sen. Ray Lesniak says solitary confinement leads to mental health issues and costs $15,000 more a year than regular incarceration.
“It breeds resentment and you don’t want to breed resentment in prison. The culture of corrections has to be to help a prisoner rehabilitate himself so that they come out of prison better than when they went in,” Lesniak said.
Some Republicans who opposed the bill declined to comment but U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement issued a statement saying consistent with national detention standards, every disciplinary action is examined separately by a trained correctional professional, based on the incident’s specific circumstances.
For now, this former immigrant detainee welcomes lawmakers’ efforts to restrict the use of solitary confinement.
“If you are not strong enough, you will want to die in there,” he said.