New Jersey Senate, Assembly On Verge of Passing Historic Legislation to Limit Solitary Confinement in New Jersey

When: Today, Thursday, June 20

Assembly Floor Votes and Senate Floor Votes begin at 12:00pm.

Location: NJ State House, 125 West State Street, Trenton, NJ

Media Contact:

Allison Peltzman, ACLU-NJ, apeltzman@aclu-nj.org, 973-854-1711 (office), 201-253-9403 (cell)

Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, NJ-CAIC, elizabethwg@gmail.com, 917-273-7088

Today, June 20, the Isolated Confinement Restriction Act (A314/S3261) will be voted on by the full Senate and Assembly. The bill would dramatically limit the use of solitary confinement in New Jersey.

“Ending torture is non-negotiable,” said Justice Rountree, an organizer with the New Jersey Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement. “Solitary confinement is torture. In that cell, I was driven to consider suicide.”

The bill would also prohibit any member of vulnerable populations, as classified by clinical staff, from being placed in isolation. Vulnerable populations include people aged 21 and younger, people aged 65 and older, people with developmental disability, people with a disability based on mental illness, people with serious medical conditions, and people who are pregnant.

“This is one step toward humanity being the standard in New Jersey,” said Ron Pierce, the Democracy and Justice Fellow at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. During his more than 30 years of incarceration in New Jersey prisons, he spent a total of about four years in solitary confinement.

A wide coalition of advocates who aim to end the torture of solitary confinement have come together to form the New Jersey Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement, a coalition that includes the ACLU of New Jersey, several faith-based organizations, and Health Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE), the labor union that represents nurses in New Jersey prisons.

“New Jersey needs to lead the way in the treatment of humans in state care,” said Lydia Thornton, an advocate and survivor of solitary confinement. Thornton spent nine and a half months in solitary confinement in New Jersey.

Former Governor Chris Christie vetoed the Isolated Confinement Restriction Act in 2016 after it passed the state Senate and Assembly. A memorandum attached to the veto falsely claimed, “This Administration does not utilize isolated confinement,” a statement that has been repeatedly debunked. In fact, New Jersey subjects incarcerated people to longer durations in isolated confinement than most states, according to reports published by the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) and the Arthur Liman Center at Yale Law School. New Jersey ranks fourth in the country in the number of people in its prisons who are held in isolation for more than six years.

A full passage on Thursday will send A314/S3261 to the desk of Governor Phil Murphy, who affirmed his support for the bill during his gubernatorial campaign in 2017.

“We believe our legislators will make the right choice this week, as they did in 2016,” says Rev. Charles Boyer of Salvation and Social Justice. “And we trust that our governor will take the bold step necessary to ensure that New Jersey corrections system is more humane and, ultimately, safer for all involved.”