California’s settlement with prisoners will massively reduce the state’s use of isolation—and is the latest win for the movement against the practice. Solitary confinement may be activists’ most successful battlefront in the growing war against mass incarceration. They scored another victory on Tuesday when they reached a “far-reaching settlement” with the state of California that “fundamentally alters all aspects” of the state’s solitary-confinement system, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which led the lawsuit. By almost any conceivable measure, Tuesday’s announcement was a resounding victory for plaintiffs inAshker v. Brown, for California inmates, and for the criminal-justice-reform movement as a whole. The settlement includes a raft of changes to the state’s corrections system, including the end of indeterminate-length sentences in the SHU, or “special housing units,” a common internal term for solitary. Almost all prisoners who spent more than 10 years in prolonged isolation, including more than 400 inmates in Pelican Bay State Prison, will be immediately released into the general inmate population. California prisons will also no longer place inmates in solitary for their gang affiliations without other causes.

The settlement requires speedy review of all prisoners currently held in a California SHU based on gang affiliation. With very limited exceptions… those who have not been found guilty of a SHU-eligible offense within the last two years will be immediately released to a general-population unit … It is currently estimated that only a small minority of those currently held in a SHU based on gang affiliation have a recent SHU-eligible offense, so that the overwhelming majority of prisoners should be released into general population under this settlement.

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