Even as a Legislative committee signaled this week that it does not support limits on the use of solitary confinement for prisoners, including those who are mentally ill, the state's own mental health hospitals have all but done away with the practice. They isolate patients for a matter of hours, not days, and with intense supervision. A group of Maine psychiatrists is urging the rest of the Legislature to consider mental health treatment standards when they take a final vote on LD 1611.

This week, six members of the Criminal Justice Committee voted "ought not to pass" on LD 1611, a bill that would limit the use of solitary confinement -- also known as administrative segregation -- to 45 days for Maine State Prison inmates.

Three committee members, including both committee chairs, voted to turn the bill into a resolve directing further study of the issue. And just two members voted in favor of an amended version of the bill.

"By not having the leadership on the 'ought not to pass" piece, it leaves me with some optimism," says Rep. Jim Schatz, the sponsor of the bill that he hopes can be kept alive as a matter of principle, despite the fact that the corrections commissioner, prison staff and the governor oppose it.

Bolstering Schatz's position that solitary confinement exacerbates severe mental illness, rage and recidivism among inmates is the Maine Association of Psychiatric Physicians, which held a news conference at the State House. The group's president, Dr. Janis Petzel, points to a 2006 investigation by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, a national bi-partisan task force.

She says the task force concluded "that no benefits of solitary confinement could be found; that the harm involved is clear and recommended that the practice should be discontinued."

Petzel says there is substantial data in medical and criminal justice research literature to document the negative effects of segregation in which prisoners are locked down for 23-hours a day with no radio and no TV.

Figures from the Maine Department of Corrections show that more than half of the prisoners in the Special Management Unit, commonly known as the Supermax, have a severe mental illness. Of about 120 prisoners in the unit, seven have spent more than a year in isolation and 21 have been there at least 251 days.

Petzel says lawmakers should look to mental health treatment center policies for guidance.

"In our setting, the average that we would have to do that is in the range of an hour or two," says Dr. William Nelson, the clinical director of the Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta, one of two state psychiatric hospitals that serves people with severe mental illness.

"We follow national Medicare mandated guidelines, as do all accredited hospitals," he says. "So the Joint Commission of Health Care Accreditation, as well as hospital licensure, have very strict controls around what hospitals can do as far as seclusion and restraint."

Nelson says restraints would be used for a matter of minutes. Instead, patients can often be calmed with the use of prescription medication. "And that does seem to reduce the need for solitary confinement or seclusion," he says.

In cases where short-term seclusion is needed, Nelson says Riverview policies call for evaluation and monitoring by a physician. But Rep. Stan Gerzofsky, co-chair of the Criminal Justice Committee, says the difference is that Riverview is a hospital.

"Over at Riverview, they haven't been convicted of a crime," Gerzofsky says. "At the prison, they've been held criminally responsible. We have a mental health ward that's been accredited as the best in the country. And that's where people with serious mental illness in the prison are."

Rep. Schatz counters that the mental health ward cannot accommodate a large number of people, and that many of those prisoners in administrative and high risk segregation likely belong there.

Dr. Janis Petzel and other Maine psychiatists say there's one final place for lawmakers to look for guidance: other states which have begun excluding prisoners with severe mental illness from segregation units, and Great Britain, which has fewer people in solitary confinement than the state of Maine.