This chapter explores how civil society advocacy campaigns working to reform and abolish solitary confinement are interacting with recent and ongoing federal litigation. The authors posit that the evolution of policy, practice, litigation, and public knowledge regarding solitary confinement is pushing the law forward. Momentum for greater legal protections is growing in the courts and the combination of people power and jurisprudential development is leading to substantial new protections for prisoners, including the exclusion of vulnerable populations, such as youth, people with mental illness, and pregnant women, from solitary confinement. Additionally, courts are increasingly questioning the extreme duration of solitary confinement in the United States and the reasons used to justify it, such as automatic solitary confinement of people sentenced to death. At the same time, state departments of corrections are settling class action lawsuits brought on behalf of prisoners in solitary confinement by agreeing to major policy innovations and alternatives to the use of segregation.
Demographic, socioeconomic, and health correlates of unmet need for mental health treatment in the United States, 2002–16: evidence from the national surveys on drug use and health