Each time Stephanie Peña was placed alone in a prison cell the length and width of a parking spot, she could feel herself losing it.
Ms. Peña, 23 and living with post-traumatic stress and antisocial personality disorders, would recoil from the bloodstained mattress and the feeling of pests crawling over her as she slept. Desperate, she sometimes tried to harm herself just so her guards would let her out.
When New York banned the use of long-term solitary confinement in its prisons and barred the practice entirely for certain people, including mentally ill prisoners like Ms. Peña, it was hailed as a groundbreaking measure that would fundamentally change life behind bars.
But since the law took effect two years ago, prison officials have refused to implement it and have continued to hold incarcerated people with disabilities in solitary and in cells in specialized disciplinary units for most of the day, according to a class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.
Ms. Peña is one of hundreds of prisoners who have been held in isolation or in solitary-like conditions for more than 17 hours at a time in violation of the new state law, according to the lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Society, Disability Rights Advocates and the law firm Winston & Strawn.
“Solitary confinement is extremely harmful for people generally and, of course, for people with disabilities specifically,” said Stefen Short, a lawyer working on behalf of the Prisoners’ Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society. “Really what the agencies are doing here is flouting the will of the Legislature and by extension flouting the will of the people.”
Over the past two years, state legislators and oversight agencies have sounded the alarm in reports and letters to the New York Department of Correction and Community Supervision and the state’s Office of Mental Health, warning that the agencies were violating the law.
On any given month from May 2022 to April of this year, more than a quarter of the inmates in solitary had a diagnosed mental illness, according to the lawsuit, in violation of state law.
Representatives of the state prison system and Office of Mental Health could not immediately be reached for comment.
For years, advocates for incarcerated people had sought restrictions on the use of solitary confinement, citing research showing that prolonged isolation exacerbates mental illness, increases the risk of self-harm and suicide and leads to higher rates of death after release.
A survey in 2005 found that nearly half of the suicides in New York prisons had occurred in solitary, which the lawsuit described as “among the most extreme form of punishment which can be inflicted on human beings short of killing them.”
In 2021, legislators approved the law over fierce objection from the unions representing correction staff. The law barred the officials from placing any person with any disability in segregated confinement for any amount of time, and it also restricted the maximum length of time a person could be held in isolation to no more than 15 consecutive days.
Before the law was enacted, thousands of prisoners had been held in solitary or kept in their cells for 22 or 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years on end. They were forced to eat alone and prohibited from seeing other prisoners, working prison jobs or attending programs and other rehabilitative activities.
The new law required the state to create specialized disciplinary units for people with mental illness where they would receive intensive programming to address their behaviors, including at least seven hours of out-of-cell time. But the lawsuit said that people have instead been held in these cells for most of the day and with little access to services, in what amounted to solitary confinement “by another name.”
Prisoners in Residential Mental Health Treatment units were disciplined at the highest rates in the system, the lawsuit said, and they were assigned, on average, eight times more time in segregated confinement than the prison population as a whole.
Eric Lee, one of the nine plaintiffs named in the lawsuit, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia as a child. But Mr. Lee, 32, who is serving 23 years to life in prison for murder and robbery, had been held in solitary confinement at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility for about two weeks. Later, at other prisons, he was kept in cells in alternative disciplinary units for 17 hours a day for months at a time.
During one stint in isolation while at Attica Correctional Facility, Mr. Lee, who had become desperate and paranoid, attempted to kill himself.
“Staring at a blank wall all day everyday just makes me want to give up,” he said, according to the lawsuit.
The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which operates the state’s 44 prisons, and the Office of Mental Health, which provides psychiatric services to thousands of prisoners, have also relied on policies that ensure some people who otherwise would have been shielded from solitary-like confinement were held under those conditions.
For example, the Office of Mental Health allows people who it does not deem to be “seriously mentally ill” to be held in solitary confinement. The agency has adopted a very narrow definition of serious mental illness, limiting it to just a small number of diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, rather than the full spectrum of mental health disabilities that are covered under the law, the lawsuit said.
Other psychiatric problems like post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and adjustment disorder are not considered serious mental illness, and prisoners with those conditions are not protected under the mental health agency’s interpretation of the law, the suit says.
In fact, despite her diagnoses, Ms. Peña had been held in solitary confinement several times since being sent to the Albion Correctional Facility in 2022. On several occasions, she said, she was disciplined for behavior that stemmed from her mental illness. But she should never have been held in solitary in the first place, the lawsuit said.
“It’s just seriously affected me,” Ms. Peña, a plaintiff in the case who was convicted of attempted robbery and remains in custody, said in a response sent through her lawyer. “I will never be the same.”
People with physical, medical and sensory disabilities have also been held illegally in solitary, the lawsuit said.
One man, Maurice Anthony, 42, is legally blind and was approved by the correction department to receive accommodations for his disability. Even so, he has been held in isolation for as many as 23 hours a day for various periods over the past three years. The only recreation he was permitted was by himself in a small semi-outdoor portion of his cell. More recently he has only been allowed one hour a day in a small 10-by-10 foot cage.
Isolation, Mr. Anthony said, is like being kept in a coffin.
Research has shown that solitary can be especially harmful for prisoners like Mr. Anthony, the lawsuit said, because it can worsen vision problems.
The lawsuit seeks a court injunction to prohibit prison officials from placing people with any type of disability in solitary, and to bar the correction department and the mental health agency’s use of policies that narrow the number of people protected under the law.
“They’ve been causing unimaginable harms,” said Joshua Rosenthal, supervising attorney with the nonprofit Disability Rights Advocates.
“There is no rationale,” he added, that the state could give “that would justify the torture of people with disabilities in this way.”
