Solitary Confinement and Covering the criminal legal: A Conversation w/journalist Piper FrencH

This is Due Processing, I'm Avi Singh, here with Kate Chatfield, and today we are thrilled to be joined by journalist Piper French, who has written in various places, including Bolts Magazine. And we're going to be talking about solitary confinement in California, and some of Piper's other reporting, and also some big questions on prisons, California coverage, all that stuff.

So Piper, welcome to Due Processing.

Thanks so much, great to be here.

Hey, can I start us off, Piper? Can you talk about how you got involved in this journalism project of covering the criminal legal system in California, and maybe more broadly around the country? You just talk about your personal connection to this issue.

Yeah, I came to criminal legal system reporting through kind of a circuitous route. I initially, when I decided that I wanted to be a freelance writer, God knows why, I was trying to pitch articles about EU migration and border politics, because that was the world I was coming out of. But I quickly realized that editors in the US just really weren't interested in those stories.

And it was the summer of 2020 as it happens, and I got arrested by the LA Sheriff's Department for protesting the murder of George Floyd, along with a bunch of other people, and I ended up writing an article about LASD because I didn't really know much about them. I think people think about LAPD when they think about LA and policing. But LASD are probably even more violent and brutal.

And so I wrote this article and just sort of started researching more about the criminal legal system, trying to understand how it worked and how it affected people's lives. And I got more and more interested and kind of like kept going down those rabbit holes. I'm lucky that I am a staff writer at Bolts, which cares a lot about local politics and the criminal legal system.

And, you know, still cares about those things, even as it's maybe not on the national agenda or in the national conversation quite so much these days.

Piper, your recent article in Bolts is about the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, CDCR, and some proposed regulations. They impose some regulations limiting their use of solitary confinement following the governor's veto of a thing called the Mandela Act, which we'll talk about. And now they're seeking to roll back those regulations.

And that's one of the things we're going to chat about now. To get us started, can you tell us about the Mandela Act and what kind of community effort, advocacy effort went into passing it before it wound up getting vetoed?

Yeah, absolutely. So the efforts to limit solitary confinement in California are long standing. Most notably, there was a historic hunger strike in 2013 by prisoners across California that culminated in some real reforms, but it didn't end solitary confinement.

And in practice, the prison system is pretty slippery on this stuff and avoided implementing some of the reforms. And so in response to those gaps, advocates, family members of incarcerated people, and people who have experienced solitary confinement themselves, decided that they needed something stronger and they needed more oversight of the prison system. And all of that led to the Mandela Act, named after Nelson Mandela, who was held in solitary confinement for quite a long time.

The Mandela Act was meant to severely limit solitary confinement to periods of, I think, 15 days at a time. That's sort of in line with international standards governing the practice, and also outlaw entirely for vulnerable groups like pregnant people, elderly people, young people, and mentally ill people. I think it would have been a really significant reform, and it had a lot of buy-in from the legislature.

But Governor Newsom vetoed it back in, I believe, 2022. And since then, there have been more efforts to pass it, and it hasn't gotten anywhere because of Newsom's opposition, specifically.

I take for granted that solitary confinement is an inhumane thing, but can you speak a little bit to that about why do people care about solitary confinement in the community, the people who have suffered from it, their family members? What voices have you heard talk from the experience of solitary confinement itself?

Yeah, no, that's an important question. I've spoken to a lot of people who have experienced solitary confinement at this point, and I think it's just universally seen as one of the worst things you can do to a person. It certainly can make even very mentally resilient and healthy people go a bit crazy, and people will say this to you.

But unfortunately, it's often used as a tool to respond to people who already struggle with mental health issues. And I mean, for these people, it can be deadly. It's extremely psychologically destructive.

You're putting someone in a cell, cutting them off from the outside world. I mean, I spoke to one woman who was put in solitary when she was pregnant, and then after she gave birth, her baby was taken away from her, like just a few days after she gave birth, and they put her back in the hole. Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine just how awful something like that would be.

Oh, my God.

I think when you hear about this stuff, like you hear those stories, and then I'm looking at the prison regulations, and they're saying, you know, assaults on staff are up, overdoses or drug use are up in the prison, so we need this tool. And I mean, it kind of comes down for me as like, you know, one question is like, does one thing have anything to do with the other? Does solitary confinement reduce drug use in the prison, or outbursts or whatever?

And even if it did, right, why would you do it? You know, it seems like some tools, if they're torture, should be off the table in terms of like discipline, or like behavioral regulation. Like, so, you know, do you have any, do either of you have any, you know, takes on that question?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's kind of two things here. One is that the justification that the prison system is using for these rollbacks of the modest reforms, the justification is that the reforms themselves led to increases in violence and overdose. CDCR put out a notice of these changes that basically unbares the 18-month period before November 2023, when the reforms were enacted and after November 2023.

And they say, look, the numbers from the bucket, 18-month bucket before 2023, are lower than the numbers after. And so this proves that this event in the reforms in November 2023 caused the increases. I think that you don't exactly have to be like a data scientist or a statistician to know that this is not how correlation and causation work.

And we looked at the numbers for this article, like Bolts did an analysis of CDCR's own data. They didn't disaggregate this data by the month in their justification, but on their website, they post month by month incident reports. And so what we found when looking at those numbers is that violence and drug use were increasing even before the policy changes in November 2023.

In the past year, violence and drug use have plateaued. So no one's trying to say there's not a violence problem in CDCR. There definitely is.

It's prison. And that should be addressed. But the idea that implementing some modest solitary reforms is what caused the violence to spike is, I think, just not supported by the numbers that we have.

The second thing is the idea, as you pointed out, that solitary confinement can reduce violence. I think that that also is not supported by the evidence.

One thing I want to just ask, follow up on is in your assessment, Newsom has done this or has touted as part of his administration this California model of humane treatment of people who are incarcerated and looking to the Nordic countries for a way to incarcerate people, and that this is touted as a way to reduce violence and increase staff job satisfaction, et cetera, et cetera. But this seems to, allowing this indiscriminate use of solitary confinement flies in the face of all that the California model would seem to stand for. Like, is there any sort of...

Have you seen this administration or can you speak to how someone would justify both like a commitment to the California model or commitment to greater, you know, humane treatment in prisons and yet hold on to something that's universally condemned, which is solitary confinement?

I think it's very trendy to say that you want your prison system to be like kinder and more humane and more Swedish. And I don't think people really like follow that to its logical conclusion. The whole idea about Nordic-style prisons is about conditions of confinement.

But it seems to me that one of the biggest difference between, you know, the system in the Scandinavian countries and the American system is just like sentencing length.

Right.

I don't think it's very common for people to be sentenced to life without parole in Nordic countries, if that even happens in all but like the most rare cases. So, yeah, I think that when people talk about Nordic-style incarceration, it's often a bit selective. Another thing I'll say is that Newsom's office and CDCR now disputes that these are rollbacks of the 2023 reforms.

They responded quite dramatically to our request for comment, saying it's totally false that these are rollbacks. But CDCR's own notification of these policy changes explicitly said that they needed to dial back the reforms of November 2023 because of the violence. So it seems to me that now that there's been some public outcry about this, they're sort of trying to edit their framing.

But I think in some ways, this is a continuation of the language games that are often played around solitary confinement. In general, prison systems don't even want to admit that they're using solitary confinement, and they refer to it by a number of euphemisms. So it kind of feels like a continuation of that to me.

Yeah, they literally say, the department must scale back the provisions provided in the previous RHU regulations reinstating stricter disciplinary penalties for those offenses warranting RHU placements. Piper, can you talk about language a little bit? Like, we're talking about solitary confinement.

The governor's office talks about, I think they use a different term, like segregated confinement, or it used to be segregated housing units, now it's restricted housing units. How much of the language, if any, are you kind of noticing in terms of terminology? Like, are the CDCR talking about solitary confinement, or is the governor's office talking about solitary confinement at all?

I mean, the people you talked to are saying I was in a hole, you know, it's a different terminology.

Yeah, I'm trying to communicate with, like, the governor's office and the prison system about solitary confinement can feel very postmodern because you'll be emailing them, and they'll be like, oh, it's not solitary confinement. And like, the language is just very slippery and it keeps moving. There's like 15 different names.

There's secure housing unit, there's restricted housing unit, there's administrative segregation. And I think, you know, one thing the advocates have tried to do is just like cut through some of that noise and be like, you know, if you're holding someone in a cell for 23 hours a day, like that solitary confinement, and you know, if you're holding them in a cell for 21 hours a day, that's still solitary confinement. So yeah, I mean, I think that like, it's important for, you know, readers or your average person to not get confused and turned around by the language games that the state plays here.

You know, even these reforms in November 2023, one of the things that they did was change the name from like the SHU to the RHU. So, you know, the language is changing, but the conditions are staying pretty similar.

Yeah. In the veto statement, the governor says segregated confinement is right for reform in the United States, and the same holds true for California. And that's the first time I had heard the term segregated confinement in connection with, you know, it's this scourge in the community that has to be addressed.

Well, we're talking about solitary confinement. Like, I just don't know. Like, you know, I know this language matters and like, you know, but the reform is just like word choice.

I don't know. No question there. It's just weird.

It's just weird. I agree.

We're just so, so far off from so many other countries. And I think you're absolutely right about sentence length. You know, in California, we have like, you know, wide scale sexual abuse of women who are incarcerated by staff, you know, widespread sexual abuse by staff in a really horrific system.

And I've been to women's prisons in Scotland, the north of Ireland, in Ireland, and it's a completely different tenor. You know, people are wearing their street clothes. Even guards are in street clothes.

They might have badges on. There is a woman who had just given birth and was in a little apartment with her newborn child in and being cared for in the prison. I mean, it's just, it's, to say it's night and day is an understatement.

It's almost like two planets, like in the way that we regard people who are incarcerated. And I think Newsome administration has done a lot of lip service to the California model, and it's just not borne out within the prisons. Like when you go there and when you enter into the prisons, you just feel the control and the oppression in such a physical way.

And it is interesting. And I do want to talk about, or I want to ask you about these articles that you did. Anyway, I don't know.

There wasn't a question there. That was a commentary. So I don't know if you've been to prisons in other countries or have experienced that.

I haven't, but everything you're saying, I mean, like tracks with my understanding. Yeah, I think, to your point about sexual abuse in women's prisons, I'm thinking about the FCI Dublin case, so the federal prison where sexual assault and harassment was so common that they called it the rape club. And one thing I heard from women who had been incarcerated there was that guards would use solitary confinement as retaliation when they would report stuff.

So I mean, I think just another example of how it can be used for things other than sort of just punishment for violence within prisons.

From the Mandela Act and kind of efforts to resuscitate it or bring it back legislatively, is there any, like, you know, was if the Mandela Act was like too much of a reform, you know, are there like incremental reforms, like just taking solitary away from pregnant women, you know, full stop or just having the due process protections that were discussed of like notice and an opportunity to be heard and acted legislatively, even if, you know, that doesn't, I mean, it's if you assume it's torture or, you know, if you believe it's harmful and way out of bounds, then you shouldn't have incremental steps at all. But have you come across any of the kind of people organizing, thinking in those terms or any legislators talking that way?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are differing opinions about this amongst advocates. And actually, this was sort of born out, you know, not last legislative session, but maybe the one before.

No, I think it was 2025. There was an attempt by Newsome's office to compromise with the Mandela Coalition by winnowing the bill down into a bill that did data collection around solitary and also abolished it only for pregnant women. And the Mandela Coalition resisted this because they felt that it was too incremental.

And interestingly, sort of at the same time, there was a bill also meant to outlaw solitary confinement for pregnant women, you know, supported and sponsored by Legislator Rebecca Bower-Kahn, I believe is her name, and the Essie Justice Group. And that, you know, passed, but it ended up, after some last minute reforms, basically accidentally codifying solitary, like, affirmatively for pregnant women for the first time.

So advocates ultimately, like, Essie withdrew their support and advocates ended up being very concerned because basically up until then, there was nothing in, like, state law saying pregnant women can be explicitly be held in solitary, and now there is.

So I don't, we don't know how that's gonna play out in practice, but, you know, I think a good example of how narrowing or winnowing these reforms can really backfire.

Right, right. Have other states passed a version of the Mandela Act, or are other states trying?

I can only really speak to New York, which passed the Halt Act, which was actually inspiration for the Mandela Act. So the Halt Act passed several years back. It was a huge achievement, and it's been really interesting to watch how that's played out in New York, and I think there have been some strong parallels with California.

Yeah, there's been a huge fight at the state level. You know, guards have not been willing to implement aspects of the Halt Act, and we're even, you know, on strike in part because of it. And there have also been some really horrific high-profile killings by guards of prisoners in New York state.

So, you know, it's been playing out. It certainly has not been fully implemented. You know, we'll see what happens.

At the same time, in New York City, the council passed the law outlawing Solitary Records Island, which our former mayor, Eric Adams, blocked. And right now, you know, now that Mom Donnie is mayor, he's sort of trying to figure out how to implement it. But it hasn't happened yet.

So, yeah, we'll see on that front too.

Right, right. I want to talk about an earlier article you wrote. It's the article you wrote in 2022.

It was also in Bolts, and it was about the closure of a prison in Susanville, California, the CCC. But it was one of two prisons, maybe more, in Susanville. There's High Desert State Prison, which is a maximum security, or a level four, as they say, I believe.

And this one was, the CCC was many levels, and maybe up to a level three prison. And that was closed by the Newsom administration. So after a lot of organizing by people, four prison closures.

So can you just, I'm just interested about your experience going up to Susanville, talking to locals, talking, like being in a prison town, and talking about what that meant for the local economy when the prison came, and what it meant when the prison shut down, and what it meant for incarcerated people.

Yeah, this was such an interesting story to report out. And I was interested in it because it felt like it was complicated. I think, you know, at first, Newsom closing down prisons seemed like kind of an uncomplicated positive thing for the state.

But I started to think about, you know, maybe the ways in which this wasn't as big of a change as it looked from the outset. And one of those was that there was no difference in how the incarcerated people in Susanville were treated. There was no sort of corresponding like maybe re-sentencing or early release or anything like that.

They were just going to be transferred to other prisons. And, you know, I think that this is a big question for people who want to close prisons and change the way the criminal legal system operates. It's like, what do you do with all the workers who are reliant on and who sustain the carceral system?

Because, you know, it's the same thing to some extent with, like, police as well and, you know, probation officers and, like, all of these categories of people. I think that the left, you know, hasn't quite made up its mind in terms of how it looks at people who work within the criminal legal system. Are they workers or are they the enemy?

And how do you, you know, confront these people as you seek to create a, you know, a transformed criminal legal system? And I, Susanville seemed like kind of an opening to think about those questions because it's an economy that's so reliant on incarceration. I mean, it was shocking to me when I went up there.

Like, I knew this intellectually, but it was still shocking just how many people had a connection to the prison. You know, if they hadn't worked there, their uncle had or their brother had or their son had. And it really structures life in these towns.

And I think also in some ways, it has made life worse. You know, there's the very palpable economic good that it has provided. It has provided jobs in a place where there really aren't very many good jobs anymore.

But it also really hollowed out the town's economy. Like there are no mom and pop stores in Susanville anymore. It's all like sort of McDonald's and other chains that are on the outskirts of town that came in because of the prison.

And then, you know, like put these other stores out of business. So yeah, I think, you know, it's complicated, but it was interesting to me how many people I met who like didn't, weren't just gung ho about the prisons. Maybe they understood the economic benefit, but also were frustrated by the ways that it had sort of hollowed out the town in other ways.

Right. And it's never seemed to me to be a position as a guard or working in a prison as a job with particularly high job satisfaction. So it's a really, I think, just going to work in a prison must be actually quite awful.

So it would be hard to, but people need the work, you know. So I think, I mean, I don't know if you saw that, that people were not in love with their jobs necessarily.

But definitely not. This is not like an incredible job, even if it does come with pension. I think like two things can be true.

I think correctional officers have higher rates of suicide, domestic violence, depression. And then also the prisoners in Susanville, most of whom were black and Latino men from places like Los Angeles, were subjected to racist abuse by the guards. They routinely hear that Susanville is one of the worst places to be incarcerated just in terms of the racism.

And to some extent, I think it just proves like how, yeah, how prison hurts everyone involved.

Right. And this is just so California's example of building an economy in these small towns around prisons is so unfortunately prescient these days, when there are ICE detention centers that are getting built and 24 billion dollars or however much federal money going to this. And it feels like, oh, God, once you create an economy where there are jobs that are dependent on that, that creates the political will to continue these programs, to continue mass detention, because now you have an infrastructure in a town or in a community that's dependent on that detention center.

And so it's one of those things where it becomes really that much more difficult to dismantle at once it's built and once the community becomes dependent on that.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's much easier to stop a prison from coming to town in the first place than it is to close one, even if you want that. And I think a lot of times these towns become dependent on the prisons and don't want that.

I spoke to one woman for this piece who was a former prison guard at Susanville and she had, you know, as part of her job, she got dispatched by CDCR around the state to sort of convince local communities of the benefits of placing a prison in their midst. And they essentially had to lie to people. I mean, they would say we're going to hire locals.

And that really wasn't true because you can't hire people for a prison with brand new people. You need people who have some experience. And she was so interesting to talk to because, I mean, she just had a really complicated experience there.

She endured anti-Semitic comments from other guards and sexual harassment. And she also just saw how many of the prisoners there were there because of poverty. And by the end, she actually ended up protesting when another prison was going to be built nearby.

So she had kind of done a complete 180 on the benefits of having a prison in a real time like this.

Yeah, that was fascinating. One sort of last thing I want to talk about is the project of journalism on and about the criminal legal system. Can you talk about, you know, you started, you said, focusing on the criminal legal system around 2020.

And what has, what was support like then for this kind of reporting? What's the support like now for this kind of reporting?

Yeah, I think in 2020, when I started reporting on the criminal legal system, it was a really particular moment. You know, the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor had really woken a lot of the country to the systemic injustice of the criminal legal system, of policing, but also prisons and also the court system. And there was a lot of money kind of flooding into that space, into the non-profit journalism space from foundations who, you know, thought that it would be important to inform the public more about this.

You know, for a long time before that, I have heard from friends who also report on the criminal justice system that there was just like zero interest in in-seers reporting on this, and you know, not that much ability to do work that didn't just reproduce like the police's take on like a crime or, you know, crime in community, like it was, it was just a lot of a lot of regurgitation of police talking points. I think 2020 really did change a lot of that, and hopefully change for the better. I think there's a lot more good reporting and nuanced reporting about policing in prisons out there now.

But obviously, we also saw a huge backlash. There was a really concerted backlash to the demands, the radical demands that people put forth in 2020. And also, you know, there's just a lot of other stuff going on, like the country is really focused on, you know, and rightly so, I think violence by ICE officers right now.

But there was just a horrific police killing in Wisconsin the other day. And you know, this is like one of these cases that has the potential to, or could have had the potential to be a George Floyd case. But I don't think that anyone is, very few people are talking about it, you know, out of state.

So there's just a lot, like the money is really dried up for criminal justice reporting, and there's less interest from editors as well. You know, they'll still take pieces on it, but it has to be like a really big piece that like represents something like, you know, there's just not as much interest in like day-to-day sort of unglamorous criminal legal system reporting.

And which is ironic, I think, because, you know, when I have occasion to watch local news reporting, or if I'm in a public space and I can, you know, the TVs are on and there's the, what do they call it? The car on, yeah. At the bottom, it is one crime story after another.

You know, woman assaulted, perpetrator arrested. The next thing is like person arrested, you know, person sentenced for retail theft in X community, just one after the other, so that it feels limitless in terms of the level of quote unquote crimes that the media will cover, but any kind of systemic look at, you know, why there are crimes or how we define crimes or our criminal legal system, it feels very, very limited to a few outlets and maybe a few stories within the larger outlets over the course of a year.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was just thinking about this because I'm writing a book review of Pamela Koloff's new book, which is amazing, people should read it. So she's a investigative reporter who focuses on the death penalty.

And I have written about the death penalty as well. And it's just not a topic that people really want to hear about. And on the one hand, that seems intuitive.

I mean, it's extremely grim, but so is true crime. Right. You know, like these are about fundamentally the same topics.

It's like horrible crimes and the system's response. And people are obsessed with true crime. I mean, it's a huge, it's one of the most popular genres in the US.

So, yeah, so why don't people want the sort of more, the more sober appraisal of the systems involved?

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know the answer.

I don't know the answer either. It's just, it strikes me that people, like you said, they want one type of, or they're, and I don't know if people want it or the media outlets want it. Like there's one type of like crime story that works, but when, you know, but we'll talk about the gangs within the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department for maybe, you know, six or eight months, and then that's it.

Like, they don't, they don't want, we covered that already. So there's not like continuing coverage of some of these bigger stories. That there's not an interest in continued coverage of some of these bigger stories.

Yeah, definitely. And I think that, like you said, people will do a one-off story, but there's like less interest in the sort of day in and day out accountability reporting that is necessary. You guys were talking on your interview with Kenneth Mejia, which I listened to the other day, about the gap between passing a good law and enforcing it.

The devil is really in the details with this stuff. Like, implementation is such a big part of getting anything done. And when reporters are not following the story, and you know, pointing out that, like, sure, this is a good law, but is it actually, is anything happening with it?

Like, then, you know, things can just kind of continue. So I guess that was one of the reasons that I was interested in this solitary story is because it's very easy to cover, like, an exciting new bill. And I wanted to make sure to sort of capture the other side of things, which is like when nobody's looking, you know, the system just kind of tries to, like, quietly unwind the reforms that's put in place.

And yeah, and that deserves coverage too. And, you know, I was sure more of it.

Thank you, Piper, for talking with Avi and I. This has been fantastic. And hopefully we'll talk again regarding future stories that you have coming out.

Thanks so much. And yeah, absolutely. Would love to talk again.