37 Years

That's how long Daniel Decker has spent in solitary confinement. Except DOC doesn't want to call it that.

by Matt Stroud

[ semantics ]

Solitary confinement.

In Pennsylvania, the phrase itself is controversial. Last month, in testimony before the state House Judiciary Committee, Michael D. Klopotoski, deputy secretary of the Department of Corrections' (DOC) Eastern Region, said no prisoners in this state — not even one — can be classified as serving time in "solitary confinement." Susan McNaughton, a DOC press secretary, clarified his semantic stance via e-mail last week: "Solitary confinement is considered where an individual has no contact with other individuals. This is just not the case [in Pennsylvania]."

The Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee hearing was organized by state Rep. Ronald Waters (D-Phila./Delaware) to discuss the practice of solitary confinement. Waters wanted to better understand why some prisoners end up spending years in the hole, and others are released back into the general public after serving long periods of time in potentially psychically disturbing isolation. In DOC's view, even the vilest Pennsylvania inmate in state prisons' restricted housing units (RHUs) has contact with prison staff and is granted brief outdoor recreation time, where, according to McNaughton, "they may have non-contact interaction with others, including other inmates in the individual exercise pens. ... So, that is why we don't consider it to be 'solitary confinement.' They are housed in our restricted housing units, which are maximum security units within our prisons."

Sharon Shalev, a researcher at the London School of Economics who has studied solitary confinement since the mid-1990s, defines it in A Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement as "a form of confinement where prisoners are held alone in their cell for up to 24 hours a day, and are only allowed to leave it, if at all, for an hour or so of outdoor exercise." No matter what DOC wants to call it, that pretty well describes DOC's arrangement: Troublesome inmates are segregated from the prisons' general populations in a "prison within a prison" — a phrase Klopotoski deemed appropriate at the Judiciary Committee hearing — that generally entails 23 hours a day in a 6-foot-by-8-foot concrete cell with one hour per day in a similarly sized outdoor cage.

Shalev is among a growing group of activists and academics who suggest that solitary confinement is a form of psychological sadism: "Solitary confinement can amount not only to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment but even to torture," she writes. She quotes an inmate who spent years in solitary confinement in Uraguay, who told her that "electricity [torture] is mere child's play in comparison to prolonged solitude."

That echoes the conclusions of the Philly- and Pittsburgh-based Human Rights Coalition (HRC), which, in early August, released its second report in six months, "Resistance and Retaliation: Continuing Repression at SCI Dallas," detailing claims from inmates of abuse at the hands of corrections officers inside the RHU at State Correctional Institution at Dallas in Dallas, Pa., and alleging that DOC policies allow inmates to be held in solitary confinement for perverse lengths of time. HRC's first report, "Institutionalized Cruelty: Torture at SCI Dallas and in Prisons Throughout Pennsylvania," alleges that corrections officers at SCI Dallas physically abuse, assault and deprive inmates of "food, water and other rights" [Cover Story, "A Death in Solitary," Matt Stroud, Aug. 5, 2010]. According to the HRC reports, it's not unusual for prisoners to spend years in the state's RHUs.

DOC spokespeople insist that just about everyone serving time in an RHU has a reasonable opportunity to get back into general population if they act like reasonable human beings. But the key words in that sentence are "just about."

There are 85 prisoners on the state's Restricted Release List. Those prisoners have very little chance of ever leaving RHU. Those 85, who haven't necessarily been told they're on this list, have been placed there because, as Klopotoski told the Judiciary Committee, they pose "a threat to the secure operation of the facility," and because a transfer to another facility "would not alleviate the security concern."

In other words, these folks are the worst of the worst. And if that's true, that might make Daniel Delker the worst of the worst of the worst. Delker has been serving time in one form or another of solitary confinement-type housing since September 1973 — 37 years.

The charge that originally landed him in prison wasn't murder or rape or child molestation: In 1967, at age 19, Decker was locked up for the armed robbery of a supermarket. He could have been paroled after six years, but he got into fights, and ended up in the State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh's previous incarnation of solitary confinement. Back then, it was called the Behavioral Adjustment Unit (BAU); the only difference between the BAUs and today's RHUs is that, instead of being escorted into metal cages for free time, inmates in BAUs were allowed "contact recreation," meaning they could hang out in a recreation room with other inmates and guards.

Delker helped change that policy.

In December 1973 — shortly after he says his brother was killed in Lehigh County by a black man — he and two other inmates brutally murdered black corrections officer Walter Peterson.

Delker and two accomplices lured Peterson into a recreation room. There, they punched and kicked him, before unsheathing razors they'd stashed in tobacco pouches and slicing Peterson repeatedly, viciously, in the head and neck. According to court documents from the subsequent investigation and trials, Peterson managed to escape and run for a few seconds, before collapsing in a heap onto the floor.

A corrections officer who witnessed the crime — and was unable to stop Delker and his accomplices because he had been locked, powerless, outside the recreation room —testified that Delker threw a coat over Peterson's head before the three of them took turns bashing Peterson's head into the ground with metal folding chairs. Minutes later, a group of corrections officers finally entered the room and apprehended Delker and his accomplices. They went without a fight

Both of Delker's accomplices are now dead: One committed suicide in 1978, and the other died of an aneurism in 2001. Since then, Delker has remained in the hole. He has sued the state multiple times to be released from restricted housing, all unsuccessful.

Susan McNaughton declined to comment specifically about Delker's case, but did verify that Delker has been on the Restricted Release List for a long time — probably since it was instituted in the mid-1990s. John McCullough, a former superintendent at the State Corrections Institute at Houtzdale, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2003 that perpetual solitary confinement was necessary for violent offenders like Delker. "I'll be frank here," he said. "I doubt that I could ever release an inmate who killed a staff member."

Keeping him in the RHU indefinitely is meant to be both a preventative and deterrent: It limits the likelihood that Delker will kill again, and serves as an example to other inmates. And yet, some activists, including Human Rights Coalition investigator Bret Grote, are calling for Delker's release from the RHU — not because he's a reformed man who deserves sympathy, but because the prison is doing itself and its population a disservice by keeping him, and perhaps other inmates, in solitary for years or decades.

"The regime of solitary confinement the DOC is operating is not based on legitimate security needs," says Grote. " ... [A]ggressive violence should be understood as the manifestation of a psychopathology and be treated as such" by trained psychologists and psychiatrists, and not "by deliberately inflicting psychological suffering in order to punish."

(editorial@citypaper.net)