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The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors placed a ban on solitarity confinement for juveniles held in the county’s detention facilities because they concluded it's comparable to torture.
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The decision came after L.A. County Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Hilda Solis proposed the change, citing multiple studies concluding that the practice is both ineffective and inhumane.
“We need a more therapeutic approach, finding ways to help these youngsters who have probably been traumatized all of their lives, instead of treating them like rats,” said Hilda L. Solis, a county supervisor who was a sponsor of the legislation.
Solis went on to point out that the conditions in the solitary confinement cells she’s visited at county youth lockups are deplorable.
Los Angeles County has the nation’s largest juvenile justice system, with about 1,200 youth detained in its three halls and 13 camps.
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One widely-cited 2014 study by the University of North Carolina School of Law, in conjunction with the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, found that solitary confinement was a “cruel, inhumane, and degrading form of punishment that is — or at the very least approximates — torture.”
During Tuesday’s vote, Kuehl argued that juveniles placed in solitary confinement have higher recidivism rates compared to other juvenile offenders.
“It doesn’t improve behavior, it doesn’t secure public safety and it doesn’t promote rehabilitation,” Kuehl said. “Those who experience solitary confinement recidivate at higher numbers.”
The ban is part of a wider set of recommendations by the White House to reform certain elements of the justice system. Last January, President Barack Obama announced the decision to ban the practice of holding juveniles in solitary confinement in federal prisons.
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