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Safe Alternatives to Segregation (SAS) initiative

VERA Selects five Corrections Departments for initiative aimed at reducing the use of solitary confinement.

 Mar 24 2015

NEW YORK – The Vera Institute of Justice announced today that it has selected five state and local corrections departments to participate in its Safe Alternatives to Segregation (SAS) initiative aimed at reducing their use of solitary confinement and other forms of segregated prisoner housing. The state corrections departments in Nebraska, Oregon, and North Carolina, and local departments in New York City and Middlesex County, New Jersey were chosen after a competitive bidding process.

The purpose of segregated housing is to isolate inmates deemed threats to the safety and security of facilities. But over the past three decades, departments of corrections have increasingly used it to punish disruptive but nonviolent behavior, protect vulnerable inmates, or temporarily house inmates awaiting the completion of a facility transfer. Individuals are held in segregation for days, years, and in some instances, decades.

A growing body of evidence suggests that segregation is counterproductive to facility and public safety. According to

My Night in Solitary

NY Times Op Ed piece, My Night in Solitary, click the inmate to read.

one report, nearly every study of segregation’s effects conducted over the past 150 years has concluded that subjecting an individual to more than 10 days of involuntary segregation negatively impacts his or her emotional, cognitive, social, and physical well-being. Segregation is also expensive, as isolated housing can cost tens of thousands of dollars more per inmate than general population housing. READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE

De-Incarceration of California youth

Radical de-incarceration article

By Mike Males

Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice

California has undertaken two gigantic experiments in de-incarceration, one of youths and the other adults. They were largely forced on the state by court mandates and budget constraints—but also by some key policy changes.

The first experiment is so radical that even the most progressive reformers could never have envisioned it. California has all but abolished state imprisonment and has sharply reduced local incarceration of youths to the lowest levels ever recorded—by far.

Child Trends Data Bank article Monopoly Jail