cA new D.C. Council bill could prohibit solitary confinement in D.C.’s jails and youth detention facilities. The bill, introduced by Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh, would also impose stricter limits on the D.C. Jail’s use of so-called “safe cells,” a form of solitary confinement that jail officials say is designed to prevent self-harm but which advocates, experts, and people in the jail have called out for being unnecessarily punitive.

Washington City Paper was first to report on the bill’s introduction.

Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman, and At-Large Councilmember Robert White all co-introduced the bill.

“Studies have shown that solitary confinement has many negative effects, including increased risk of addiction, recidivism, and suicide,” Cheh said in a press release announcing the bill. “I am proud to continue my previous work on this issue by moving the District forward and severely limiting the instances in which solitary confinement can be used.”

Cheh’s proposal would prohibit D.C.’s corrections facilities from using solitary confinement for “any purpose, including discipline, safety, security, and administrative convenience,” according to the bill text. It carves out an exception for cases where a person detained in a D.C. facility is suspected of having an infectious disease that’s transmissible through droplets or the air — like COVID-19 or tuberculosis.

In fiscal year 2018, people in custody at D.C.’s jail complex spent approximately 8% of their days in restrictive housing units, and approximately 17% of people at the jails were placed in restrictive housing at some point during their period of detention. Advocates have pointed out that this means that in that year, D.C. was using solitary confinement at a rate about three times the national average for U.S. jails.

The bill would also curtail the jail’s use of safe cells, which are housing cells that are designed for people at risk of suicide or self harm. D.C. corrections officials say the restrictions on people in these cells are for their own safety, and they have also said they are working to reduce the need for safe cells. But in recent years, advocates have raised the alarm about the conditions people have experienced in them. They have alleged that people in safe cells are denied access to water and legal phone calls. They have also said that people in safe cells live in filthy conditions and their lights are left on 24 hours a day.

If Cheh’s bill was signed into law, the Department of Corrections would only be allowed to place someone in a safe cell if “it is immediately necessary to prevent death or serious bodily injury.” In addition, the jail would only be allowed to make use of safe cells if it was able to provide residents with adequate medical and mental health care. If the jail can’t provide people in safe cells with that care, the bill says, they need to transfer them to a local hospital or mental health facility that can provide it.

“The deplorable conditions at the District’s jails and restrictive housing units— including flooding, lack of grievance procedures, lack of mattresses, and more— only exacerbate the harmful effects of solitary confinement. The conditions of safe cells in the District’s jails are likewise troubling and, thus, similarly exacerbate the harms of solitary confinement for those on suicide watch,” wrote Cheh in a letter announcing the bill.  “Abolishing most forms of solitary confinement in the District’s jails and amending safe cell procedures would produce a fairer and more humane criminal justice system in the District.”

The bill would also require D.C.’s Department of Corrections to report to the D.C Council on its progress in removing people from solitary confinement and other forms of restrictive housing, like safe cells.

Keena Blackmon, a spokesperson for D.C.’s Department of Corrections, did not comment specifically on the bill, but defended the jail’s policies in an emailed statement to WAMU/DCist. Blackmon said DOC “does not operate solitary confinement within its facilities,” and instead uses “restrictive housing” for safety reasons. Jail residents in restrictive housing receive a minimum of two hours out of their cell five days per week, Blackmon said.

By that definition, the jail’s use of restrictive housing qualifies for the WHO’s definition of solitary confinement —”the physical and social isolation of an individual in a single cell for 22.5 to 24 hours a day”—about two days out of the week. Moreover, it stands to be banned under Cheh’s bill, which bars any form of prolonged isolation from the general population of the jail, including restrictive housing.

Blackmon said people in restrictive housing maintain access to certain services at the jail, including educational programming, health care, hair care, showers, and food. And she added that “DOC leadership continues to explore ways to implement measures to further reduce the use of restrictive housing within our facilities.”

Cheh has tried to limit solitary confinement at the D.C. Jail twice before, in 2015 and 2017, but neither bill came to a vote before the D.C. Council before they expired.

D.C. Justice Lab, a local advocacy organization that has pushed for the end of solitary confinement in the District, said on Twitter that when the group reached out to Cheh about renewing her effort to end solitary confinement this year, “she responded within minutes, firmly committing to doing her part to ban the practice and find alternatives to isolation in our jails.”

It will be Cheh’s last chance to push this reform on the Council, since she decided earlier this year to drop her re-election bid, citing a desire to focus on her personal life and spend time with her grandchild.

The council also has limited time to consider and pass the bill: the legislative body will reconvene in September, and will have to pass the bill before it expires at the start of next year. During that time, the Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety has a host of other bills to act on — including a sweeping revision of the city’s criminal code, a bill restructuring the city’s troubled crime lab, and a series of other reforms to policing and incarceration, including making temporary police reforms permanent and expanding criminal record sealing and expungement.

Erik Salmi, a spokesperson for Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the committee, said in an email to DCist/WAMU that the councilmember is out of office so has not had a chance to review Cheh’s solitary confinement bill. Salmi said that the use of solitary confinement “has been a consistent theme in the Committee’s oversight hearings, and the need to explore limiting the practice and also account for emergency and safety situations is clear.”

But Salmi also said that regardless of the topic, introducing a bill on the last day of session before summer recess, as Cheh did, “is competing against the most active legislative weeks of the Council period.”

A hearing might be possible later in the year, but all council committees will be using most of their meetings through the end of the year to vote on bills that have already been through the legislative process, so they don’t lapse.

The bill on solitary confinement at the jail comes after a series of highly publicized allegations of human rights violations at the facility. For more than a year during the pandemic, people detained at the D.C. Jail were confined to their cells for 23 hours a day. Experts said that policy amounted to a human rights violation and was basically the equivalent of putting the entire jail population in solitary confinement. Last year, the U.S. Marshals Service also released a scathing memo on conditions in the D.C. Jail and said conditions at the facility were so unacceptable that they would be transferring hundreds of people in their custody out of the facility and into federal prisons instead.

This story was updated with comments from a D.C. Department of Corrections spokesperson.