The Devil's Chair - misuse of restraint chairs - Editorial

Progressive, The, April, 2000 by Anne-Marie Cusac

In early January of this year, a group of Erie County, Pennsylvania, inmates asked a federal judge to ban use of the chair. Their suit against the prison, which is still pending, says that inmates have been held for two to eight hours in the chair for such behaviors as "making insolent remarks," cursing, and throwing towels at one another.

In Ventura County, California, a class-action lawsuit led a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction banning the chair on November 15, 1999. That order is being appealed. The lawsuit alleged that during one eighteen-month period, 377 people had been strapped into the chair at the Ventura County Jail and that one inmate had been left in the chair for thirty-two hours. "Data ... shows that the Sheriff's Department's misuse of that chair flows from a practice of restraining nonviolent arrestees for extended periods of time in violation of the arrestees' Fourteenth Amendment rights," wrote U.S. District Judge Lourdes Baird in her fifty-page decision. "The policy allows deputies to require restrained arrestees to either urinate or defecate on themselves and be forced to sit in their own feces or `hold it.'"

Amnesty International is deeply troubled by the restraint chair. Such chairs "are being widely deployed" and appear "to be completely unregulated," says Wright. "The reports we have been getting suggest they are so easily abused that they should be banned for use in detention facilities." Amnesty believes that there should be "an urgent national inquiry" into thier use, says Wright. But though Amnesty has asked the U.S. government to conduct such an inquiry, it has "not responded in any way."

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of the Progressive. This article was made possible in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Inc.