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Litigation to End Indeterminate Solitary Confinement in California

In 2012, a group of prisoners brought a class action lawsuit challenging the incarceration of hundreds of prisoners in prolonged solitary confinement of over ten years in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison as cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. That lawsuit was eventually settled in 2015 and resulted in virtually all of those prisoners being released from solitary. This chapter describes the use of interdisciplinary and comparative experts in that litigation to present a multidimensional challenge to prolonged solitary confinement as cruel and inhumane. Those experts demonstrated that the prolonged solitary confinement of prisoners at Pelican Bay caused those prisoner serious psychological harm and physical harm, deprived them of basic human social interaction, was unnecessary and counterproductive penologically, and was contrary to international norms and practices.