Placed in solitary confinement for more than 300 days, Samuel Smalls remembers looking out of his window and realizing the dogs being walked by fellow prisoners outside enjoyed more freedom than he did.

“Confined to a cell all day like that, it’s dehumanizing,” said Smalls, who recently reached a $185,000 settlement with the state for improper confinement. “It’s mentally and emotionally challenging.”

Smalls is one of thousands of Maryland prisoners who have done stints in confinement — a controversial management tool that corrections officials are using far more frequently in the face of a staffing crunch and rising violence.

Criminal justice reform advocates say the long stretches of forced solitude are known to cause mental health issues and equate the conditions to torture.

Of Maryland’s 16,350 state prisoners, nearly 6,000 of them were placed in “restrictive housing” at some point in the fiscal year 2024, according to the most recent department figures. That’s a nearly 15% increase from the year before, and the largest single-year increase in six years.

The increase has been driven by disciplinary charges, according to the department’s “restrictive housing” report. Most of the charges were related to assaulting other prisoners, but other lesser infractions included disobeying orders and manufacturing weapons. Most placements lasted 45 days or less, the report found.

At the same time, incidents of violence between prisoners and against staff are rising in Maryland prisons, and seizures of contraband weapons tripled in a single year, according to the most recent figures.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services said “solitary confinement” is not the right term to describe how it manages prisoners in segregation.

Solitary confinement, the department said, “refers to a harsh form of isolation — with little to no human contact or movement — that was once enforced during a bygone era of corrections decades ago.”

“Instead, the department utilizes restrictive housing, in which an individual is housed with another individual wherever possible, and maintains out of cell movement and other activities, though those activities are sometimes curtailed,” said Lowell Melser, a department spokesperson.

The department uses “restrictive housing” to describe different forms of segregation. That includes administrative segregation, which the department says is “non-punitive” and has “much of the same accessibility to activities as the general population.”

It also includes disciplinary segregation — a more restrictive setting used for prisoners who are found guilty of rule violations — and “maximum II” housing, the most restrictive setting, designed for violent and difficult-to-manage prisoners.

Some advocates and prisoners say they find the distinction largely meaningless.

Olinda Moyd, a prison reform advocate who serves on a state correctional oversight board, said that whatever the label used to describe it, “isolation is isolation.” She described solitary confinement as a tool that is overused by prison administrators to control the population, despite the fact that is known to cause mental harm.

“Whatever you call it, it really does amount to torture,” Moyd said. “And that’s not just my words, that’s what the United Nations has agreed people should not be subjected to.”

Smalls, 49, was first placed in confinement at the Eastern Correctional Institution in Westover for wearing jeans with pockets to court. He became eligible for release into general population 11 days later, according to his attorneys.

Instead, Smalls, who is serving a life sentence on a first-degree murder charge, spent nearly a year in confinement, where he said he witnessed other prisoners take extreme measures to avoid his fate.

Some, he said, smear themselves in their own feces in an attempt to be placed in a psychiatric ward instead. Others, he said, died by suicide.

In court filings, the corrections department said Smalls remained in confinement due to a lack of available beds and argued that he consented to his placement there.

A district court sided with corrections officials, but the case was overturned on appeal. Smalls’ attorneys attributed their victory in part to judges becoming more open to recognizing the harms of solitary confinement.

Criminal justice reform advocates in Maryland have railed against the practice of solitary confinement. Some state lawmakers have introduced legislation that would restrict it but have been unable to pass the measures.

Delegate N. Scott Phillips, a Baltimore County Democrat, said he recently visited the same prison where Smalls was held in confinement, and noticed that “restrictive housing is being used at a higher rate.”

Phillips said he and other legislators would like to see the use of restricted confinement reduced. But he acknowledged that the prison system is also challenged by aging and outdated facilities which can make it difficult, especially with limited staff, to move prisoners around the buildings.

In 2021, Disability Rights Maryland, a nonprofit advocacy group, filed suit against the state, claiming the corrections department was violating the constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” by placing people with severe mental illness in segregation, which they defined as being confined to a cell for 22 hours per day or more, with or without a cellmate.

Luciene Parsley, the group’s litigation director, said she welcomed the settlement in the Smalls case, but remained “concerned that it won’t result in system reforms or ensure that others, including people with serious mental illness, are protected from very significant harm from the extended use of solitary and restrictive housing.”

Melser, the corrections department spokesperson, said the agency “has undertaken a series of initiatives to reduce reliance on restrictive housing,” including forming specialized mental health units and instructing wardens to review those currently in restrictive housing.

Enduring his nearly yearlong stretch in confinement, Smalls said he used to “pray for fortitude,” reminding himself not to give up.

At most, he said he received three hours out of the cell per week in an empty dayroom, but staffing shortages sometimes prevented even that.

“What does that say about society, a free society?” Smalls said. “That our tax dollars are actually facilitating this inhumane practice.”