California Gov. Gavin Newsom “has demonstrated a callous disregard for the dark history” of the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons and jails, Jack Morris writes in his powerful CalMatters essay
Morris points to Newsom’s two-time veto of of the California Mandela Act in 2022 and 2023, which would have limited the practice, and again this year when he killed AB280, which would have limited solitary confinement to 15 days, and barred the practice entirely for young and senior people, by indicating he would veto it if it reached his desk.
“There are few forms of torture worse for the human soul than isolation,” Morris writes. He would know; he spent many years in isolation at the notorious Pelican Bay State Prison. In 2015, after a series of hunger strikes by many of the incarcerated individuals who had been subjected to the punishment, and filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, CDCR ended indefinite solitary confinement at Pelican Bay and agreed to stop using “gang affiliation” as a basis for placing people in isolation.