OCO Solitary Confinement Parts I & II — WA prisoners in segregation suicide at 33x national average; 400-page legislative report
Two legislative reports from Washington’s Office of the Corrections Ombuds, published June and September 2024, document that more than 3,000 prisoners were held in prolonged isolation in DOC facilities. The suicide rate in Washington segregation units is 467 per 100,000 — 33 times the U.S. average of 14.2. DOC received approximately one-eighth of the funding needed to meet the Legislature’s mandated 90% reduction goal under 2021’s HB 1090.
What happened
The Washington Legislature directed the Office of the Corrections Ombuds to conduct a comprehensive investigation of solitary confinement in state prisons following the 2021 passage of HB 1090, which established a statutory requirement for DOC to reduce the use of isolation. OCO’s Solitary Confinement Research Team (OCO-SCRT) produced a two-part report series.
Part I (June 30, 2024) catalogued the full scope and structure of isolation practices in Washington DOC facilities. Key findings:
- More than 3,000 individuals were held in prolonged isolation between 2014 and 2023 — defined as 45 or more consecutive days or four or more months in total.
- DOC operates isolation under multiple names and unit designations: Intensive Management Units (IMUs), Administrative Segregation (AdSeg) Units, and Close Observation Areas (COAs), together comprising over 1,000 beds across state prisons.
- The most common reason for an initial solitary placement was refusal of a housing assignment (36% of first placements). Violence accounted for only 4% of first placements.
- DOC policy states that people should not be in administrative segregation for more than 30 days without clear justification, but the OCO found that the department routinely extends placements beyond that threshold without documented cause.
- DOC received approximately one-eighth of the funding identified by the Legislature as necessary to meet the HB 1090 90% reduction goal — a structural underfunding that the OCO documented as the primary barrier to compliance.
Part II (September 19, 2024) examined what happens to people while in isolation and documented patterns of self-harm, dehumanizing restraint practices, and indeterminate stays. Key findings:
- 14 deaths by suicide occurred in DOC segregation units during the study period. The resulting rate of 467 suicides per 100,000 is 33 times the U.S. average of 14.2 per 100,000 (CDC estimate, 2022).
- 176 suicide attempts were documented in segregation units over 10 years.
- 13 individual prisoners were profiled; their cases documented indeterminate stays without clear criteria for release from isolation.
- Guards used restraint devices and compliance tactics that OCO researchers characterized as “dehumanizing and traumatizing.” Prisoners described showers provided only three times per week, with water running for only seconds at a time.
- Rules and sanctions were applied inconsistently, creating subjective and indeterminate stays in segregation that could not be resolved by prisoners through any defined behavioral pathway.
What the primary sources say
The Part I report states that the OCO found DOC’s own data to be incomplete and sometimes inconsistent, limiting the reliability of DOC-supplied counts. Part II documents the 33x suicide disparity as the report’s top statistical finding. Prison Legal News coverage of the September 2024 report described the self-harm data as “eye opening.”
Status
DOC has not implemented a plan bringing it into compliance with the HB 1090 90% reduction mandate as of the date of this registry entry. OCO has indicated Part III of the solitary confinement series is forthcoming. The 90% reduction goal remains unfunded at the level the Legislature itself identified as necessary. As of April 2026, the OCO director who led the period of this reporting was fired (see WA-2026-OCO-BOURGEOIS-FIRING), and the office is operating under acting leadership.
Why it’s in the registry
The 33x suicide disparity is not a marginal finding. It is a documented, quantified harm — 467 deaths per 100,000 against a national average of 14.2 — produced by a practice that the Washington Legislature directed DOC to reduce and for which DOC received one-eighth of the necessary funding. The OCO reports are the primary public documentation of what happens to people in Washington’s segregation units during the gap between a statutory mandate and the conditions required to implement it.
Reform implication
The solitary confinement findings produce two distinct reform arguments. First, the Legislature’s 90% reduction goal is a statutory commitment that became unenforceable the moment it was unfunded — a budget process failure that requires either a dedicated, protected funding stream or an automatic compliance trigger (e.g., if DOC does not receive 100% of the identified funding by a fixed date, the 90% reduction timeline shifts accordingly). Second, the OCO’s role as a documenting and recommending body — without enforcement authority, subpoena power, or the ability to compel a corrective action plan — means that two comprehensive reports documenting a 33x suicide disparity produce documentation without remediation. See [reform: solitary_confinement_reform], [reform: behavioral_health_capacity], and [reform: independent_inspector_general].
Reform implication
The two-part OCO solitary confinement report is the most comprehensive available documentation of the gap between Washington's stated policy commitments on isolation and the reality inside its prisons. In 2021, the Legislature passed HB 1090 establishing a mandate to reduce solitary confinement. DOC pledged a 90% reduction within five years. By the time Part I was published in June 2024, DOC had received approximately one-eighth of the funding that the Legislature had identified as necessary to meet that goal — a structural funding failure that guaranteed non- compliance regardless of agency intent. The suicide data in Part II is the clearest measure of harm produced by this failure. A rate of 467 suicides per 100,000 in segregation against a U.S. average of 14.2 is not a statistical anomaly — it is a documented, quantified consequence of prolonged isolation without adequate behavioral health intervention or a credible path out of segregation for high-need individuals. The 176 attempted suicides documented across the study period confirm that the 14 completed suicides represent the severe end of a much larger distribution of harm. The structural reform argument here is double-layered. First, the 90% reduction goal is meaningless without a funding mechanism that cannot be raided by the executive during budget cycles — the one-eighth funding problem is a Legislature-level failure, not just a DOC failure. Second, the OCO's role in this case is advisory and reporting: it documented the harm but cannot compel DOC to act. An ombuds office with subpoena authority and the ability to impose or trigger corrective action plans with statutory timelines would have a different institutional relationship to this finding than the OCO currently has. As it stands, two 400-page reports exist documenting a 33x suicide disparity, and the agency responsible for remediation received one-eighth of the funds needed to do it. See [reform: solitary_confinement_reform], [reform: behavioral_health_capacity], and [reform: independent_inspector_general].
Sources
- Solitary Confinement: Part I — The Many Faces of Isolation in Washington Prisons“More than 3,000 people have been officially in solitary confinement in Washington DOC — more than 20% of the prison population.”
- Solitary Confinement: Part II — Conditions, Restraints, and Self-Harm in Washington Segregation Units“There were 14 deaths by suicide in DOC segregation units, a rate of almost 467 per 100,000 — dwarfing the United States average of 14.2.”
- Report: Prisoners still routinely isolated in WA
- 'Eye Opening' Self-Harm Found in Washington DOC Solitary Confinement