Uptown People’s Law Center
UPLC was founded by former coal miners and their widows in 1975. Its original mission was to secure black lung benefits for disabled coal miners; however, it quickly expanded beyond these origins and became a full-service, community-based legal clinic. Our community work focuses on tenants’ rights issues and Social Security disability benefits, and our statewide work involves protecting the civil rights of those incarcerated in Illinois’ prisons. For many of our clients, UPLC is their last and only legal resort against negligent or unethical landlords, a slow-moving and insensitive public benefits bureaucracy, or a prison system that violates civil rights.
THE CASE
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In June 2016, UPLC brought Davis v. Jeffreys against the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) on behalf of six prisoners who were facing, or had faced, extreme isolation in Illinois prisons. These individuals had been held in extreme isolation for between 6 months to 17 years. The conditions described by the prisoners included being confined, often for 24 hours a day, to small, airless cells with no natural light; reduced food; minimal yard time (and even then, alone in a bare concrete box). Cells are often infested with rodents and insects, are cold in the winter, and stiflingly hot in the summer. All these prisoners were deprived of meaningful contact with other people–including other prisoners and even their own family members. In June 2021, the case was certified as a class action. We are now in the process of completing discovery and collecting witness statements, looking towards a trial.
The case is part of a strategic national effort to challenge the overuse of solitary confinement in US prisons. UPLC has used its experience litigating this case to advise lawyers in both Texas and Florida who are challenging their states’ use of solitary. In addition, UPLC was one of the founding members of, and is still an active participant in, the national Stop Solitary campaign coordinated by the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
