22 Years in Prison Taught Me That Outdoor Access Is a Human Right

Before 2006, the San Bruno County Jail had an outside exercise yard bigger than a football field. That year, the city of San Francisco unveiled a new jail on the same 242 acres of land, this one without any secure outdoor space. Now, exercise takes place in an indoor gym or in a cell—which means that people incarcerated there may not see the sun at all. In 2019, a group of former inmates who spent up to eleven years awaiting a trial date in the jail sued the city and its law enforcement. The individuals in custody reported getting less than a minute of sunlight a day during their time at San Bruno. The lawsuit, which went to court in 2023, alleged that denying these people access to the outdoors amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

In an October ruling, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim wrote that the city of San Francisco acted with “reckless indifference” to those people’s health and wellbeing by denying them time outside. Kim ruled that individuals who serve more than a year have a right to 15 minutes a day of direct sunlight. I’ve never been to the San Bruno County jail, but I have been incarcerated, and I can imagine how cruel it must feel to be stuck inside all day, every day.

I served 22 and a half years in prison, three of those in the Los Angeles County Jail system, often going days without sunlight. I served eight months in administrative segregation, more commonly known as solitary confinement. I still remember what it felt like to be in “the hole”: flesh encased in metal, the stale air, the stiff muscles, pacing two steps in either direction to combat stir-craziness. With nothing to do, mere minutes warped into what felt like hours. Outdoor yard was the only relief available.

I would walk, shackled, for 400 feet to an area with outdoor cages. Once inside my cage, a correction officer removed the cuffs, and yard time began. An outdoor cage serving as respite from an indoor cage might sound like madness, but it was a bigger space that provided an opportunity to talk with other people and provided fresh air and sunshine. It helped me make it home alive.

Montrail Brackens spent 11 years in the San Bruno county jail without direct access to sunlight. While there, he developed abnormal blood pressure, blood in his stool, obesity, a vitamin D deficiency, painful headaches, and diabetes. Lack of access to direct sunlight can lead to these and myriad other health complications, testified Dr. Charles Czeisler during federal court proceedings. These include ulcerative colitis and bowel problems, nearsightedness, increased risk of certain kinds of cancer and diabetes, and inflammation in the body which can adversely affect the immune system and increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

The San Bruno County Jail’s argument in court centered on the fact that it does not have a secure outdoor yard area, but the court responded that state regulations require the jail to have one. Therefore, the fault lies with the decision not to include an outdoor exercise area with their latest renovation of the jail. “Defendants created a situation in which they cannot securely allow inmates to go outside, and they cannot hide behind that reason when the denial creates harm,” Magistrate Kim wrote.

It is a small win. “Compared to nothing every day…15 minutes is great,” said Yolanda Huang, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, according to a San Francisco Chronicle article. But I question whether it is enough. In practice, the outside time will feel like it’s ending as soon as it begins.

Furthermore, based on a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, I wonder whether Magistrate Kim’s ruling will stand. In November, the court dismissed a case brought by a man named Michael Johnson, who had been kept in solitary confinement without outdoor access for three years, leaving his cell just once a week for a short shower. He asserted that this was cruel and unusual punishment, and tried to get his situation in front of the Supreme Court after losing a Seventh Circuit trial. In declining to review the case, the court let the existing ruling stand.

In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayer and Elena Kagan, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, “During that time, Johnson spent nearly every hour of his existence in a windowless, perpetually lit cell about the size of a parking space. His cell was poorly ventilated, resulting in unbearable heat and noxious odors. The space was also unsanitary, often caked with human waste.” With no space to exercise or breathe fresh air, his mental health and physical health suffered, and he eventually became suicidal. He would smear feces all over his body, hoping to provoke the guards to kill him, according to Justice Brown. Johnson, who filed the suit on his own and was denied a lawyer, was faulted for not building a proper record for the higher court to review.

Reading about this case brings tears to my eyes. Often, the choice to side with the oppressor rather than the blatantly oppressed is based on the flawed theory that prison officials must be allowed to run their jails however they see fit to keep the public safe. The Supreme Court favored prison officials over justice, allowing obvious injustices to continue.

That false notion turns a blind eye to the fact that the people wearing the prison uniforms are not just “inmates.” They are human beings, endowed with a sacred dignity. No human should live in a cage in the first place. At the very least, they deserve an hour outside a day.  When a prison system treats people like animals, it breeds animals, and we are all worse off for it.

Crime is a symptom of societal ills. The judicial system punishes the symptom and ignores its root cause. I believe we must fight for humane conditions in prisons, but battles like this distract from the true goal: we must fix the systems that create crime in the first place. If we address the root causes, we won’t need prisons at all.