Sixteen former corrections leaders from across the country are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to use a Virginia case to end the automatic assignment of death row inmates to solitary confinement.
In an amicus brief in Prieto v. Clarke, the officials, who ran prison systems in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Virginia and other states, tell the justices, “There is no penological justification for imposing extreme isolation across the board on a population of inmates based only on their sentence, because the sentence is not predictive of how an inmate will behave in prison.”
