I don’t know if there is a word for it. There was this shared realization in the room that a grave injustice was being done and lives were at stake but those in the room with the nominal authority to stop it lacked the tools to do so.

In a sparsely populated lecture hall on Rutgers’s main campus, a small assembly of prison justice activists and loved ones of incarcerated people gathered on November 22nd to hear about the conditions in New Jersey state prisons from the Office of the Corrections Ombudsperson.

The Corrections Ombudsperson is tasked with overseeing the Department of Corrections–gathering complaints, investigating incidents, and mandating recommendations to get the DOC in compliance with the law and with its own policies.

The conversation began around an investigative report from the Office looking into conditions inmates endure in the restorative housing unit or RHU–an Orwellian moniker the DOC uses for solitary confinement.

Solitary confinement has been all but illegal in the state of New Jersey since 2020 as a result of the 2019 Isolated Confinement Restriction Act. The Act defines isolated confinement (their term for solitary) as being held in lockdown for 20 or more hours per day.

According to policy, RHU at its most severe meets exactly this legal limit. In practice, inmates go days, weeks, months locked down with little to no time to do any of the tasks they might do outside their unit. Inmates often report to me (and the Ombudsperson confirmed) that they may be given ten minutes to choose to shower or make a call or send an email or go outside.

Several family members of inmates incarcerated at Northern and elsewhere reported horrid conditions, particularly in previously abandoned housing blocks reopened to facilitate mass solitary confinement.

Brown and black water from faucets, with no access to bottled water. No working outlets to operate fans. No air conditioning or heat. No access to medical or mental health care. No bedding or clean laundry. Sewage spilling out of leaky toilets and pipes onto the floor.

All of these conditions were confirmed both reported and witnessed by the Ombudsperson’s Office at the meeting. They told us of a situation in which understaffing pushed Northern to choose to put wings on a rotating lockdown to minimize staff necessary to facilitate the daily activities of inmates as they move from place to place.

So while you have RHU being used (illegally) as a disciplinary measure, you also have it used simply as a cost saving measure. You also have it used as the primary measure to keep trans women safer in men’s prisons.

But RHU is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to solitary confinement in New Jersey. The DOC has several obfuscatory names for housing statuses that amount to solitary confinement including temporary autonomous housing (TAH), protective custody (PC), constant watch (CW), and emergency confinement (EC).

NJDOC actually has quite the history of renaming solitary confinement to avoid confronting the reality of its actions. RHU originally stood for restrictive housing unit. Prior to that it was called detention and administrative segregation or ad seg.

But amidst all these heavy facts came the most difficult: That despite the Ombudsperson’s nominal authority to mandate change within NJDOC, the Office has no power to compel Corrections to abide by their timetables for compliance.

We were told the Office does not litigate. It mostly tries to keep matters internal to the lowest level of administrative authority before escalating up the chain of command.

It seems the Office represents a constant negotiation of positive publicity in exchange for partial compliance. Surely the Office has more tools at its disposal than passing out investigative reports, right?