Source: Financial Times
By: Nick Muscavage
Posted: December 9, 2025

Excessive use of isolation – whether to punish prisoners or for convenience – is in the spotlight

A team of Arnold & Porter attorneys won a landmark victory last year for women at a California federal prison who had persistently reported being sexually abused. Upon complaining, they were subject to retaliation through solitary confinement.

Several staff were convicted before and after the prison’s closure last year on charges of sexually abusing inmates.

A December 2024 order prompted by class actions required the US Bureau of Prisons to provide proper safeguards to prevent further sexual abuse and restrict the use of solitary confinement for women who had been confined at the facility, FCI Dublin, which had housed more than 600 women near Oakland, California.

The two-year court order applied to the rights of hundreds of women, now dispersed to other facilities, through the appointment of a special master — an independent court-appointed official.

The settlement, which stemmed from lawsuits filed by hundreds of inmates of FCI Dublin represented by Arnold & Porter and other firms including Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld, also resulted in a $115mn payment to more than 100 victims, the largest aggregate settlement in the history of the prison agency. It was also the first time the federal Bureau of Prisons was subjected to such oversight, says Arnold & Porter.

122,000 Individuals locked up alone for 22 or more hours a day, according to Solitary Watch in 2022

The abuse of solitary confinement, including as a retaliation against victims who spoke out, was well documented at FCI Dublin, says Stephen Cha-Kim, a partner at the firm, which worked pro bono on the case. However, he says, “it is hardly limited to one facility — studies show tens of thousands of incarcerated individuals in the US continue to be subjected to this abuse, sometimes for weeks on end, without due process and oversight”.

The country’s prison population of 2mn is the largest in the world. More than 122,000 of those individuals are locked in solitary confinement for 22 or more hours a day, according to a 2022 report from the watchdog group Solitary Watch.

An inmate at the window of his solitary confinement cell at Main Jail in San Jose, California © Ben Margot/AP

The case is one of several lawsuits large law firms have brought through pro bono in recent years to address the excess use of solitary confinement in the US.

There are smaller law firms willing and capable of taking on prison reform cases, alongside campaign groups, says Carson Anderson, a senior associate at Arnold & Porter.

“But otherwise work of this type, especially on such a large scale involving a class of more than 500 members, would not be possible without the pro bono efforts of large law firms”, he says.

In Illinois, Winston & Strawn wrapped up a bench trial in October in a pro bono class action case aimed at reforming the state’s use of solitary confinement. The decision is still pending.

The law firm is representing all of the state’s 28,000 prisoners, hundreds of whom have been in solitary confinement for several years.

“The cell is obviously very small and then cramped further with a . . . bed and the sink, and the lights are on all of the time,” says Kristin McGough, pro bono counsel at Winston & Strawn. The lack of human contact is enough to drive anyone “to have some really scary thoughts and mental health concerns”, she adds.

The cell is obviously very small and then cramped further . . . and the lights are on all of the time, Kristin McGough, Winston & Strawn

Studies have found that up to one-third of federal prisoners, and more than 40 per cent of state prisoners, have mental health problems, and solitary confinement “just exacerbates everything”, McGough says.

Ken Berry, Winston & Strawn’s corporate social responsibility and pro bono administrator, knows the effects of solitary confinement first hand. He served eight years in Illinois’s prison system under a wrongful conviction before being exonerated. He joined the law firm, which helped secure his release, as a paralegal 25 years ago, and now helps the firm with its pro bono representation of prisoners.

Solitary confinement may be used by prisons for administrative purposes, not solely as punishment.

Berry was held for three months in solitary confinement around the time of travelling for an evidentiary hearing, as Illinois’s practice is to segregate individuals going to and from facilities.

“That was the worst time that I did,” he says.

Winston & Strawn has been working on the solitary confinement class action for nearly 10 years and estimates it has put in more than 12,400 attorney hours through 85 attorneys, valued at $10.2mn.

The law firm is dedicated to prison reform work because incarcerated people are voiceless and vulnerable, says Greg McConnell, chief pro bono officer.

Much of the work to address solitary confinement and broader prison reform is done by partnerships between large law firms and campaign groups.

David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, says: “There’s no question that their assistance and their partnership is enormously helpful, particularly in the big class actions.”

The ACLU partnered with Perkins Coie in a class action lasting more than a decade to improve the conditions of Arizona’s state 30,000 prisoners. The case challenged “horrifically inadequate medical and mental healthcare as well as the grotesque overuse of solitary confinement”, says Fathi.

Following a trial in late 2021, a federal court found constitutional violations in respect to both healthcare and the excessive use of solitary confinement. Since then, the state has made some progress on its use of solitary confinement, but not as much on the healthcare side, says Fathi.

Given the “persistent non-compliance”, the ACLU and Perkins Coie in early 2025 requested the court appoint a receiver to oversee the healthcare reforms. A decision is still pending.

Achieving prison reform in the US is challenging because of “extreme decentralisation”, Fathi says.

The US has a system of federal and state prisons along with local jails, with profit-seeking private prisons operating in some form in all three levels.

One solution lies in improving the juvenile criminal justice system, says Alexander Shalom, chair of Lowenstein Sandler’s pro bono practice.

The law firm worked pro bono to research juvenile solitary confinement policies state by state alongside the National Center for Juvenile Justice. In 2018, the research was used in a Wisconsin federal lawsuit that led to the state to significantly reduce its use of solitary confinement for juveniles.

“A poorly run youth justice system is going to lead to bad results . . . leading people to more crime and more incarceration,” says Shalom.