Reform Solitary Confinement Practices in Michigan Prisons Now!

May is Unlock the Box Mental Health Awareness Month. The Unlock the Box Campaign is a coalition of organizations and movement leaders who partner with state and local campaigns across the United States with the common goal of ending the use of solitary confinement for all people. Currently active in 22 states and the District of Columbia, including Michigan. Open MI Door is the organization leading the fight in Michigan. OMD is seeking to affect policies and practices in all Michigan prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities. Current focus is on ensuring transparency, accountability, and independent oversight in the use of isolation and in conditions of confinement in general.

The statistics regarding the effects of solitary confinement are alarming. Right now, there are at least 122,000 people being held in solitary confinement in the United States. Over a third of people subjected to solitary confinement become psychotic and/or suicidal within the first 15 days. Individuals who have been in solitary confinement are 78% more likely to commit suicide within a year of their release from prison.

The Michigan Department of Corrections, or MDOC, does not usually use the phrase “solitary confinement” in its internal rules. Instead, it describes the practice as “segregation” or “restrictive housing.” That language matters, because bureaucratic terms can make an extreme practice sound routine. But the reality described in the department’s own policy materials and in the references collected here is unmistakable: segregation means isolating people from the general prison population, often for 23 to 24 hours a day, with sharply restricted movement, limited human contact, and minimal access to ordinary programming. MDOC policy presents segregation as a management tool used for discipline, control, and protection, while critics argue that it functions as a deeply harmful form of isolation that causes lasting psychological damage and undermines rehabilitation.

Michigan’s system illustrates the central contradiction in the national debate over solitary confinement. Prison administrators defend segregation as necessary in some cases to manage violence, serious misconduct, escape risk, or threats to vulnerable prisoners. At the same time, decades of reporting, advocacy, and international human-rights standards have increasingly challenged prolonged isolation as unsafe, inequitable, and incompatible with basic human dignity. Even MDOC’s own reporting shows that the department has sharply reduced administrative segregation over time, suggesting that the state itself recognizes that heavy reliance on this practice is neither inevitable nor desirable. The question is no longer whether segregation is severe. The question is whether Michigan should continue to rely on it in its current form. The strongest answer, based on the material in this document and the cited sources, is no: prolonged segregation should be discontinued and replaced with tightly limited, reviewable, therapeutic, and safety-focused alternatives.

What Segregation Means in the MDOC

According to MDOC policy, segregation is not a single category but a system with several forms. Temporary segregation is short-term isolation used while staff investigate alleged misconduct or await a hearing. Punitive segregation is imposed as a disciplinary sanction after a person is found guilty of a major misconduct violation. Administrative segregation is the most troubling category because it can become long-term. It is reserved for people that the department considers serious threats to institutional safety, major escape risks, unmanageable in general population, or in need of protective separation. On paper, each category has a different purpose. In practice, all three involve versions of extreme separation from ordinary prison life.

The living conditions are severe. People in long-term segregation may spend nearly the entire day alone in a cell of roughly 70 to 80 square feet. Human interaction is drastically limited. When they leave the cell, they may be shackled. Exercise is restricted and often takes place in enclosed spaces rather than meaningful recreation areas. Meals are delivered through a slot in the door. Showers and other basic activities are tightly controlled. These are not incidental inconveniences. They are the core features of an environment built around deprivation, surveillance, and social isolation.

What a typical solitary confinement cell looks like.

MDOC also emphasizes that segregation is regulated through reviews. Placement decisions are supposed to be examined by a housing unit team, the Security Classification Committee, wardens, and in longer cases higher-level administrators. Those review requirements are important, but they do not erase the underlying harm of isolation. The system can be procedurally structured and still be substantively damaging. If the practical result is that a person spends months or years in near-total isolation, repeated reviews do not change the nature of the confinement. They only document it.

Why MDOC Uses Segregation

MDOC’s own policy language makes its rationale clear. Segregation is used, in the department’s words, to achieve effective administrative management, maximum disciplinary control, and individual prisoner protection. That means the practice is justified on three main grounds. First, it is used as punishment for major misconduct. Second, it is used as a security tool when officials believe someone presents a danger to staff or other incarcerated people. Third, it is used, at least sometimes, to separate people who may themselves be at risk of harm in the general population.

Those reasons are not frivolous. Prisons are coercive environments, and correctional administrators are responsible for preventing violence and responding to emergencies. There are situations in which immediate separation is necessary. A person who has just committed a serious assault, threatened staff, or faces a credible risk of being attacked may need to be removed quickly from the general population. Any honest analysis should acknowledge that reality. The problem is that a short-term emergency separation tool is not the same thing as a long-term isolation regime. What may be justified for hours or days becomes far harder to justify when it stretches into weeks, months, or years.

Michigan’s own recent policy developments suggest that the state understands this distinction. The department has reported large reductions in segregation since 2008 and has developed Structured Alternative to Administrative Segregation (START) units as alternatives for some prisoners with serious mental illness. Those reforms implicitly recognize that segregation has often been overused and that at least some of the people once held there can be managed differently. If safer alternatives exist for many cases, then prolonged segregation is less a necessity than a policy choice.

What the Outcomes Show

One of the clearest outcomes in the record is that Michigan has reduced its use of administrative segregation substantially. The data table shows a decline from 479,791 total segregation days and a daily average population of 1,314 in fiscal year 2007–2008 to 102,395 days and a daily average of 281 in 2024–2025. That is a dramatic drop. It undermines any claim that Michigan must rely on segregation at the levels it once did. If the prison system can function with far fewer people in administrative segregation than it held there in 2008, then the older level of use was not an unavoidable feature of prison management. It was an institutional practice that could be changed.

At the same time, a reduction in volume does not resolve the moral and practical concerns. Hundreds of people are still held in administrative segregation, and some remain there for periods exceeding 3, 6, or 12 months. That matters because the harms of segregation are not measured only by how many people are isolated, but also by how long the isolation lasts. The United Nations Nelson Mandela Rules define solitary confinement as confinement for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact, define prolonged solitary confinement as anything beyond 15 consecutive days, and prohibit indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement as inconsistent with minimum standards for humane treatment. Michigan’s own reports showing people in segregation for months or longer place the state in direct tension with those standards.

The human outcomes described in the references are equally serious. Advocates, family reports, legal analyses, and broader research on solitary confinement consistently associate prolonged isolation with anxiety, depression, cognitive deterioration, self-harm risk, hopelessness, and worsening symptoms for people with mental illness or developmental disabilities. Even when corrections officials present segregation as a safety measure, the evidence suggests that isolation can destabilize the very people the institution is trying to manage. That creates a damaging cycle: distress leads to misconduct, misconduct leads to more isolation, and more isolation deepens distress.

There are also broader institutional outcomes. Segregation can make reentry into the general prison population harder by eroding social functioning and increasing distrust. It can also make release into the community more dangerous when people leave prison directly from highly isolating conditions without adequate step-down support. And the practice appears to fall unevenly across the prison population. The materials in this document point to racial disparities in segregation use, with Black men overrepresented in segregated housing compared with their share of the overall prison population. That raises an additional reform concern: segregation is not only severe but may also be administered inequitably.

Additional support for ending prolonged segregation comes from the Unlock the Box campaign, a national coalition focused on abolishing solitary confinement in the United States. The campaign argues that solitary is not only harmful but also counterproductive. Its public materials describe solitary confinement as extreme isolation for 22 or more hours a day, note that an estimated 85 percent of people in solitary are there for nonviolent disciplinary reasons, and report that as many as one-half of those in solitary live with mental illness that isolation can worsen. Unlock the Box also emphasizes that prolonged solitary confinement does not make prisons or communities safer, and that people of color are disproportionately subjected to it beyond their already disproportionate representation in prison populations. Those points reinforce the case that prolonged segregation in Michigan should not be treated as an unfortunate but necessary norm; it should be understood as a policy choice with predictable harms and unequal effects that demand correction.

Segregation and Human Rights

The international human-rights case against prolonged segregation is powerful and increasingly specific. The United Nations Nelson Mandela Rules do not treat isolation as a neutral administrative option. They treat it as a practice requiring strict limits because of its potential to become cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Under those rules, prolonged solitary confinement means more than 15 consecutive days, and indefinite solitary confinement is prohibited. The rules also emphasize that solitary confinement should be used only in exceptional cases, as a last resort, for the shortest possible time, and subject to independent review. They further state that it should not be used when a prisoner’s mental or physical disability would be exacerbated by the measure.

Measured against that standard, Michigan’s regime raises serious concerns. The state may call the practice administrative segregation, temporary segregation, or punitive segregation, but a change in terminology does not change the lived reality of isolation. If a person is locked down for 22 to 24 hours a day with little meaningful human contact, then the practice falls within the human-rights framework developed by the United Nations. And if that confinement continues for months, as Michigan’s own reports show happens in some cases, then the state is operating beyond the threshold the Mandela Rules identify as prolonged solitary confinement.

Some defenders of the current system argue that prison safety justifies these departures. Safety is important, but human-rights standards already account for that argument. The Mandela Rules do not forbid every temporary emergency separation. They forbid turning isolation into a routine or open-ended instrument of prison governance. That distinction is crucial. A correctional system can protect staff and prisoners while still rejecting prolonged solitary confinement. In fact, Michigan’s own reduction in segregation usage suggests that reform is compatible with institutional order. The human-rights issue is therefore not whether prison officials ever need tools for emergency separation. It is whether the state should keep using prolonged isolation after it knows the damage it causes and after alternatives have already been shown to exist.

Should Michigan Discontinue Segregation?

If the question means whether Michigan should eliminate every form of temporary emergency separation, the answer is probably no. Prisons need a narrow capacity to separate people immediately after violence, during investigations, or when a person faces an imminent threat. But if the question is whether Michigan should discontinue prolonged segregation as a standing correctional practice, the answer should be yes. Long-term isolation should end.

There are several reasons for that conclusion. First, the harms are too severe. Segregation can intensify mental distress, undermine stability, and damage the social capacities people need both inside prison and after release. Second, the practice is inconsistent with modern human-rights standards once it extends beyond very short periods. Third, the state’s own declining segregation numbers show that Michigan can reduce its use substantially without abandoning prison administration altogether. Fourth, indefinite or months-long isolation invites arbitrary and unequal outcomes, especially where racial disparities and mental health concerns are already present.

Discontinuing prolonged segregation does not mean ignoring violence or misconduct. It means replacing a blunt and damaging tool with more precise responses: short emergency separation, intensive mental-health intervention, structured step-down units, restorative or behavior-based programming, and individualized safety planning for those who need protection. A prison system committed to safety should prefer methods that reduce future harm rather than deepen it.

What Reform Should Look Like

Real reform in Michigan should begin with a clear legal time limit that brings state practice closer to the Mandela Rules. The legislature should prohibit prolonged solitary confinement, ban indefinite segregation, and require meaningful out-of-cell time, programming, and regular independent review for anyone held apart from the general population. People with serious mental illness, developmental disabilities, and other especially vulnerable conditions should not be placed in isolating units that predictably worsen their condition.

Reform should also require transparency. Michigan already reports some segregation data, but durable accountability needs more than aggregate totals. Public reporting should include duration, facility-level usage, demographic patterns, mental-health status, reasons for placement, and release pathways from segregation. The point of transparency is not only to monitor numbers; it is to expose whether the system is relying on isolation as a substitute for staffing, treatment, training, or conflict resolution.

Finally, reform must include culture change. Segregation survives not only because policies authorize it, but because institutions become accustomed to treating isolation as normal. That habit is hard to break. Michigan should invest in staff training, behavioral de-escalation, therapeutic housing, and transition units that prepare people to return safely to prison programming and eventually to the community. If the state is serious about rehabilitation, it cannot continue to rely on a practice that strips people of meaningful human contact and then expects them to emerge healthier, safer, or more prepared for life after incarceration.

Unlock the Box also helps clarify what reform can look like in practice. Its campaign materials highlight legislative approaches that prohibit solitary confinement beyond 15 days in line with the Mandela Rules, create independent oversight, protect vulnerable groups, and in some proposals reduce isolation for emergency de-escalation to only a few hours while requiring safe and humane alternatives. That framework supports a practical reform agenda for Michigan: narrow the grounds for separation, impose strict time caps, expand therapeutic and program-rich alternatives, increase meaningful out-of-cell time, and ensure that any temporary separation is genuinely brief and tied to a clear transition plan back to less restrictive conditions.

Segregation in the Michigan Department of Corrections was built on the idea that isolation can produce order. The evidence suggests something more complicated and more troubling: isolation may sometimes create temporary control, but it does so at high human cost and with serious legal and moral consequences. Michigan has already shown that it can reduce segregation. The next step is to go further by ending prolonged isolation, preserving only tightly limited emergency separation, and building a correctional system centered on safety, treatment, accountability, and human dignity.

Open MI Door is fighting for the passage of bill SB493, which seeks to expand the powers and duties of the Legislative Corrective Ombudsperson’s Office as a meaningful step forward in bringing our state into full compliance with the UN’s Mandela Rules. If you know someone in prison or who has been in prison check out the mental health resources available on the OMD website.

References

Michigan Department of Corrections. Policy Directive 04.05.120: Segregation Standards. Effective June 1, 2019.

Michigan Department of Corrections. Report to the Legislature: Administrative Segregation Report. March 30, 2026.

United Nations General Assembly. United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules), A/RES/70/175. January 8, 2016.

U.S. Department of Justice. Report and Recommendations Concerning the Use of Restrictive Housing. January 2016.

Luigi, M., Dellazizzo, L., Giguère, C.-É., Goulet, M.-H., & Dumais, A. “Shedding Light on ‘the Hole’: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on Adverse Psychological Effects and Mortality Following Solitary Confinement in Correctional Settings.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11 (2020).

Vera Institute of Justice. The Impacts of Solitary Confinement. April 2021.

Unlock the Box Campaign. About Us; Resources: Solitary by the Numbers; and Experience. Accessed May 16, 2026.

https://unlocktheboxcampaign.org

https://openmidoor.org/

Locked Down: How Prison Lockdowns Undermine Mental Health and Rehabilitation in U.S. Prisons

Lockdowns are supposed to keep prisons safe. Too often, they function as mass isolation: damaging mental health, stalling rehabilitation, and deepening a humanitarian crisis.

During my 8 years of incarceration, I experienced numerous lockdown events. It could be due to a fight in the yard or chow hall, an outbreak of an infectious disease like Norovirus, or a security sweep for weapons and contraband. It might last for a few hours to a few days. A security sweep might result in my property being tossed like a fruit salad onto my bed and my body strip searched, but that was the extent of my inconvenience. My few delayed meals or a sack lunch, a few missed shifts as a school tutor, canceled medical or library callouts, even a few missed visits do not begin to compare to what is happening now across the country. Lockdowns were just part of the prison experience, but that all changed with Covid-19.

My wife is a Medical Assistant and was hired during Covid to work in the state prison near our house. During the pandemic everything changed. Just like out in the world, prisons went into complete lockdown. No prisoner movement. What necessary minimal services like medical came to the housing units. All offsite prisoner transport stopped. No visits, no school or programing, no yard, weight pit of gym callouts, no church services or outside volunteers. Prisoners were not allowed to interact with other people from outside their housing units. The routine upon which prison is built was stopped completely. In most prisons this condition lasted not for a couple of months, but for over a year. In a previous blog post entitled Anti-Social Distancing I wrote about the devastating effects that the pandemic had on prisoners. The ripple effects of that time still reverberate in prisons.

In many U.S. prisons, “lockdown” no longer describes a rare emergency response to a riot or a narrowly targeted security incident. It has become a recurring operational mode: housing units sealed, movement halted, yard and dayroom time canceled, phones restricted, visits suspended, and education, treatment, and job assignments paused—sometimes for days, weeks, or even months. Reporting in recent years has documented extended lockdowns tied not only to violence but also to chronic understaffing and overcrowding, raising a stark question: When a prison can’t run its basic schedule safely, are we still operating a rehabilitative institution or merely warehousing human beings behind steel doors? [1]

What a Prison Lockdown Actually Means

Lockdowns vary by facility, custody level, and the event that triggered them. But in practice, a lockdown is a temporary suspension of normal movement and routines—often applied to an entire housing unit or whole prison—so staff can regain control, search for contraband, respond to violence, manage a shortage of officers, or contain disease outbreaks. Some lockdowns allow limited “controlled movement” (brief showers, medication lines, or staggered recreation). Others are near-total confinement to cell, with meals delivered to doors, minimal human contact, and sharply reduced access to healthcare, law library, religious services, and family contact.

Even when it is not formally “solitary confinement,” a prolonged lockdown can replicate many of the same risk factors: sensory deprivation, social isolation, loss of autonomy, and the collapse of predictable routines that help people regulate stress. That overlap matters because research on restrictive housing and solitary confinement consistently links extreme isolation to psychological deterioration, self-harm, and elevated suicide risk.

Mental Health: Why Lockdowns Hurt So Much

People enter prisons with high rates of mental illness and trauma histories, and many facilities already struggle to meet their clinical needs. The Prison Policy Initiative’s research library summarizes how common mental health diagnoses are in custody and how gaps in treatment persist. In that environment, lockdowns act like gasoline on a smoldering fire: they intensify stressors while simultaneously cutting off the very support: structured activity, social contact, counseling, movement, sunlight, and exercise that can keep symptoms from spiraling. [10]

Loss of routine and control: Predictability is a core mental-health stabilizer. Lockdowns replace schedules with uncertainty—When will the door open? Will medication be on time? Will family calls work today?
Isolation and conflict: Confinement increases loneliness and rumination, but it can also increase tension with cellmates in cramped spaces, producing hypervigilance and sleep disruption.
Reduced physical activity: Yard closures and canceled recreation remove one of the most accessible mood regulators.
Disrupted healthcare access: Even brief interruptions in psychiatric care, counseling, and medication continuity can trigger withdrawal, relapse, or acute crises.
Family separation: Suspended visitation and restricted phone access remove a major buffer against despair—especially for parents.

We should be careful with language: lockdowns and solitary confinement are not identical. Still, a large body of evidence on solitary confinement provides a warning label for prolonged, near-total lockdown conditions. A major systematic review and meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychiatry found solitary confinement was associated with adverse psychological effects and higher risks of self-harm and mortality, especially suicide. When whole housing units are kept in conditions that approximate isolation, it is reasonable to expect similar patterns—particularly among people with preexisting mental illness. [3]

Lockdowns also leave residue. After weeks of enforced inactivity, people may emerge dysregulated—more irritable, less trusting, and more prone to impulsive behavior. That dysregulation can feed a vicious loop: tension increases, violence increases, administrators respond with more lockdown, and the psychological and social environment degrades further. Meanwhile, the skills needed for successful reentry: emotion regulation, conflict resolution, consistent participation in treatment—are precisely the skills lockdowns erode.

Rehabilitation: Lockdowns Don’t Just Pause Programs—They Break Them

Education classes, vocational training, substance use treatment groups, cognitive behavioral programs, faith-based services, work assignments, and reentry planning often depend on predictable movement and staff availability. Lockdowns disrupt all of it. Even “temporary” cancellations can have outsized effects because correctional programming is built on momentum: attendance requirements, sequential curricula, waitlists, and limited seats. Miss enough sessions, and a person can lose their spot—then wait months to re-enroll, if they can at all.

This isn’t a minor inconvenience. Research syntheses and policy reviews consistently find that prison programming, especially education and job training, can reduce recidivism and improve post-release employment. RAND’s work on correctional education summarizes evidence that educating incarcerated people improves post-release outcomes, and federal reviews describe programming as a key lever for reducing reoffending. When lockdowns suspend programming, they effectively suspend one of the few tools’ prisons have to make future communities safer. [8] [9]

Lockdowns also damage the human infrastructure of rehabilitation: relationships. Family visitation is often suspended, and calls may be limited or unreliable. Staff may interact with incarcerated people primarily through orders and door slots. Over time, this can shift the culture from “managed community” toward “permanent crisis mode.” Recent accounts describe facilities held in extended lockdown conditions because agencies lack enough staff to safely run normal schedules—an operational failure with deep human costs.

Are Lockdowns Increasing? What U.S. Data Shows—and What It Doesn’t

If you’re looking for a single national dataset that tracks the frequency and duration of prison lockdowns across all U.S. state and federal facilities over decades, you’ll quickly hit a wall: lockdowns are not consistently defined, measured, or publicly reported across jurisdictions. National statistical agencies such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) produce detailed annual reports on prison and jail populations, admissions, staffing, and mortality, but “lockdown-days per facility per year” is not a standard published metric. The Prison Policy Initiative even maintains resources explaining that many commonly requested criminal-justice datasets simply don’t exist in unified form—lockdowns being a prime example. [10] Here is one of the few examples from the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Example of lockdown data from the Illinois Department of Corrections for FY2020 to FY2025 showing the marked recent increase in lockdowns.

Still, we can responsibly analyze lockdown trends by triangulating from: (1) periods when lockdowns were system-wide (notably the COVID-19 era), (2) staffing and overcrowding indicators that predict operational lockdowns, and (3) investigative reporting and oversight findings documenting prolonged, non-emergency lockdown use. Note that throughout this article I have specifically included a series of images related to two state prisons in Wisconsin that made the news due to public protests regarding prolonged lockdowns and prison conditions.

1) The COVID-19 Shock: Lockdown as Public-Health Control

From March 2020 through early 2021, many prisons entered “modified operations” that resembled extended lockdowns: movement restrictions, suspended visitation, reduced programming, and quarantine/isolation practices. BJS documented the broader system impacts of the pandemic in prisons—including testing, infections, deaths, and major shifts in admissions and releases—showing how deeply COVID-19 altered daily operations behind bars. [4] Refer to my post Speech-less to read about the devastating effect that Covid-19 had on those incarcerated at that time.

Federal oversight also highlighted the mental-health danger of pandemic isolation. In a capstone review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ COVID-19 response, the DOJ Office of the Inspector General reported that the BOP told investigators that seven incarcerated people died by suicide from March 2020 through April 2021 while housed in single-cell confinement in quarantine units related to COVID-19—an alarming signal of how extreme isolation can interact with crisis stress. The OIG also described staffing shortages and morale challenges during the pandemic. [5]

At the time the BOP published facility-level COVID-19 statistics, which helped document disease burden and operational strain. That reporting was quickly ended even before the pandemic was declared over and the information was never translated into a standardized national ledger of lockdown frequency and duration.

2) The Staffing Squeeze: Lockdown as a Substitute for Adequate Operations

Outside of pandemic emergencies, one of the most commonly cited drivers of extended lockdowns is understaffing. When there aren’t enough officers to safely escort people to chow, yard, school, or the clinic, prisons cut movement. In its analysis of the national staffing crisis, the Prison Policy Initiative argues that understaffing becomes a self-reinforcing loop: fewer staff leads to more restrictive conditions and fewer services; conditions worsen; violence rises; staff burnout increases; recruitment becomes harder; and lockdown becomes routine. [2]

Data-driven reporting has underscored how severe the staffing decline has been. The Marshall Project reported that state correctional workforces dropped sharply after 2019, reaching the lowest mark in more than two decades in 2022, while many state prison populations began rebounding—creating a mismatch between staffing capacity and operational demands. In that context, lockdown becomes a predictable management response rather than an exceptional security measure. [6]

Stateline’s national reporting similarly describes prolonged lockdowns, sometimes lasting weeks or months—linked to understaffing and overcrowding, not disciplinary need. The key trend described is not necessarily “more lockdown events,” but longer lockdowns and more frequent reliance on lockdown-like restrictions as a default operating posture. [1]

Talib Akbar speaks during an Oct. 10, 2023, protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis. WISDOM, a statewide faith-based social justice organization, organized the protest. Akbar was incarcerated for 20 years before his release in 2013 and spent at least 10 stints in solitary confinement, including a stretch lasting nearly a year. WISDOM and partner organizations called on the short-staffed Wisconsin Department of Corrections to lift restrictions on prisoner movement, reduce the prison population and invest in community-based programs that aid prisoner rehabilitation. (Meryl Hubbard / Wisconsin Watch)

3) Security Threats: Contraband, Drugs, Phones, and Violence

Lockdowns are also frequently used after violent incidents, when administrators suspect weapons, or when contraband flows overwhelm routine searches. A National Institute of Justice summary of a RAND-facilitated workshop on correctional security threats ranked insufficient staffing as the top concern among experts, with contraband (drugs, weapons, cellphones) generating the largest number of priority needs. Each of these threats can precipitate facility-wide shakedowns and movement freezes, especially when an agency lacks the personnel and technology to target responses precisely. [7]

So, are lockdowns increasing? We cannot prove a clean nationwide time-series increase in lockdown frequency and duration because the U.S. lacks standardized, publicly reported lockdown metrics across prisons. But multiple converging indicators suggest a real shift toward more extended lockdown conditions since 2020: pandemic-era modified operations, followed by persistent staffing shortages and overcrowding pressures that make normal programming schedules difficult to sustain. The lived reality described by oversight bodies and national reporting is consistent with longer and more routine restrictions—even if the number of discrete “lockdown events” is not measured uniformly.

Underlying Causes: Why Lockdowns Keep Spreading

Chronic understaffing and burnout: When posts go unfilled and overtime becomes constant, prisons cannot safely move large groups. Lockdown becomes the operational workaround. [1] [2] [6]
Overcrowding and facility design: Crowded units, dorm settings, and aging infrastructure make it harder to separate conflicts, quarantine illness, or run staggered movement without enormous staffing. [1]
Contraband markets and violence cycles: Illicit phones, drugs (including opioids), and weapons drive shakedowns and retaliatory violence, often followed by facility-wide lockdown. [7]
Policy incentives that favor control over care: It is administratively easier to cancel activities than to build staffing, training, clinical capacity, and targeted security approaches.
Unmet mental health and substance use needs: When treatment access is thin, crises escalate; crises prompt lockdowns; lockdowns worsen mental health; and the cycle continues. [3] [10]

Protesters call on the short-staffed Wisconsin Department of Corrections to improve prisoner conditions and lift restrictions on prisoners’ movement during a protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Oct. 10, 2023, in Madison, Wis. *Meryl Hubbard/Wisconsin Watch*

What Can Be Done: A Humane, Evidence-Based Path Out of the Lockdown Spiral

Calling this a “humanitarian crisis” is not hyperbole: prolonged, population-wide confinement in stressful environments predictably harms mental health and sabotages rehabilitation. The good news is that the solutions are not mysterious. They require political will, operational discipline, and transparency.

Measure lockdowns—then publish the numbers. States and the federal system should track at minimum: lockdown start/end times, scope (unit vs. facility), reason codes, services suspended, and out-of-cell hours provided. Without data, the public can’t distinguish emergency necessity from routine deprivation. (The current lack of standardized lockdown metrics is a central barrier to trend analysis.) [10]
Set enforceable limits and minimum conditions. Even during lockdowns, people should receive daily out-of-cell time, access to showers, medical and mental health care, and meaningful communication with counsel and family, with clear exceptions only for immediate, documented threats.
Stabilize staffing—but don’t pretend hiring alone can solve mass incarceration. The staffing crisis is real, but it is tightly linked to the scale of incarceration. Breaking the cycle means improving working conditions (training, safety, schedules, pay) while also reducing the incarcerated population so staffing ratios are feasible. [2] [6]
Protect program continuity as a public-safety priority. If education and treatment reduce recidivism, then suspending them for long periods should be treated as a risk to community safety. Build “lockdown-resilient” programming: cell-front coursework, tablet-based learning (where feasible), small-group controlled movement, and make-up sessions that prevent people from losing their place in sequenced programs. [8] [9]
Expand mental health support during and after lockdown periods. Lockdowns are predictable stress spikes. Facilities should implement surge mental-health checks, peer-support access, and rapid referral pathways during restrictions, especially for people with known risk factors for self-harm. The evidence linking extreme isolation to self-harm and suicide risk makes this essential. [3] [5]
Modernize contraband control without collective punishment. Targeted searches, intelligence-led investigations, and technologies aimed at drones and illicit phones can reduce the perceived need for sweeping lockdowns—while still addressing the very real threats highlighted by correctional security experts. [7]
Strengthen independent oversight. Prolonged lockdowns should trigger automatic external review: documentation of necessity, timeline for restoration of normal operations, and a plan for services. Oversight findings during COVID-19 show why independent scrutiny matters. [4] [5]

Conclusion: Safety Without Humanity Isn’t Safety

Lockdowns will always exist in some form; prisons are volatile places, and emergencies happen. The crisis is the normalization of lockdown as routine management, whether driven by pandemic protocols, staffing collapse, overcrowding, contraband economies, or a deeper policy choice to prioritize control over care. The mental-health consequences are predictable, and the rehabilitation costs are measurable in missed education, stalled treatment, and weakened family ties.

Because the United States does not systematically publish lockdown frequency and duration data across jurisdictions, we can’t chart a definitive national curve the way we can for incarceration rates or admissions. But the available evidence strongly suggests the experience of lockdown has intensified since 2020; first through widespread pandemic restrictions documented by BJS and federal oversight, then through persistent staffing and capacity failures that keep prisons from operating normally. Treating this as a humanitarian crisis starts with telling the truth in numbers: track lockdown-days, publish them, and make “days of life” behind bars a metric of accountability alongside safety. [4] [5] [1] [2] [10]

Endnotes

Stateline. Amanda Hernández (December 3, 2024). “State prisons turn to extended lockdowns amid staffing shortages, overcrowding.”
Prison Policy Initiative. Brian Nam-Sonenstein & Emmett Sanders (December 9, 2024). “Why jails and prisons can’t recruit their way out of the understaffing crisis.”
Luigi, M., Dellazizzo, L., Giguère, C.-É., Goulet, M.-H., & Dumais, A. (2020). “Shedding Light on ‘the Hole’: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on Adverse Psychological Effects and Mortality Following Solitary Confinement in Correctional Settings.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11:840.
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Carson, E. Ann; Nadel, Melissa; & Gaes, Gerry (August 2022; published August 25, 2022). Impact of COVID-19 on State and Federal Prisons, March 2020–February 2021 (NCJ 304500).
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General (March 2023). Capstone Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Response to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic (Report 23-054).
The Marshall Project. Shannon Heffernan & Weihua Li (January 10, 2024). “New Data Shows How Dire the Prison Staffing Shortage Really Is.”
National Institute of Justice (April 6, 2020). “Experts Identify Priority Needs for Addressing Correctional Agency Security Threats.”
RAND Corporation. Davis, L. M., Bozick, R., Steele, J. L., Saunders, J., & Miles, J. N. V. (2013). Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education: A Meta-Analysis of Programs That Provide Education to Incarcerated Adults (RR-266).
Office of Justice Programs / Federal Probation. Byrne, J. M. (2020/2022). “The Effectiveness of Prison Programming: A Review of the Research Literature Examining the Impact of Federal, State, and Local Inmate Programming on Post-Release Recidivism.”
Prison Policy Initiative. “Data toolbox” (includes guidance and a list of commonly requested data that doesn’t exist in unified form).