Solitary Watch

by Voices from Solitary

June 23, 2022

Charles Tooker, 47, has been incarcerated since 2016 and is currently being held at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad California. Having spent three of the last six years in solitary confinement, Tooker told Solitary Watch that creative expression is his biggest coping mechanism. His passion for the arts, he said, was present prior to […]

by Roxanne Barnes

June 23, 2022

New this week from Solitary Watch: • Solitary Watch reports on the latest Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities, data collected by the federal government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), reports 75,505 people were held in solitary confinement in state and federal prisons in 2019. This was the first BJS census to ask prisons […]

by Jean Casella and Vaidya Gullapalli

June 16, 2022

The most recent data collected and published by the federal government found 75,505 individuals in solitary confinement in the nation’s prisons—a significantly higher number than other recent surveys.  The figure comes from the latest Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities, typically conducted every five to seven years by the Bureau of Justice Statistics […]

by Jean Casella

June 15, 2022

Today, Solitary Watch is publishing the first in a series of fact sheets offering facts, analysis, and resources on a variety of topics related to solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails, and immigrant and juvenile facilities. The first fact sheet covers how racism in the U.S. punishment system plays out in relation to the use […]

by Roxanne Barnes

June 15, 2022

New this week from Solitary Watch: • A series of haiku was published this week in the Solitary Watch Voices from Solitary series, featuring work from people incarcerated in Pennsylvania. The project, called Holler with Haiku, was a collection effort by Keystone DBlock, an offshoot from the advocacy group Straight Ahead, in honor of Mental Health […]

by Voices from Solitary

June 9, 2022

This May, members of Keystone DBloc, an offshoot of the Pennsylvania advocacy group Straight Ahead, wanted to use Mental Health Awareness Month to highlight the psychological damage caused by solitary. Several months ago, Keystone DBloc created the initiative “Holler with Haiku” to educate and “engage all members of our community of Decarceration activists: incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, family members, and supporters.”

by Roxanne Barnes

June 8, 2022

New this week from Solitary Watch: • Solitary Watch Director Jean Casella looks at the response from anti-solitary advocates to President Biden’s Executive Order issued last month, which gives the Attorney General (AG) six months to submit a report on progress towards ending long-term solitary confinement. In a press release, the Federal Anti-Solitary Task Force (FAST) […]

by Jean Casella

June 6, 2022

UPDATE, JUNE 6: In a press release, the Federal Anti-Solitary Task Force (FAST) “questioned the impact of provisions in President Biden’s recent Executive Order on Policing and Criminal Justice Practices related to solitary confinement in light of the widespread use of solitary in federal prisons and his and Vice President Harris’s much more far-reaching pledge to end solitary confinement. […]

by Roxanne Barnes

June 1, 2022

New this week from Solitary Watch: • Solitary Watch Director Jean Casella published a piece examining President Biden’s newly signed Executive Order (EO), which includes a paragraph restricting the use of prolonged solitary confinement, highlighting its “non-specific terms.” The EO includes a request for a report from the DOJ about their effort “to ensure that individuals […]

by Jean Casella

May 31, 2022

This is the second in a new series of monthly dispatches from Solitary Watch. It isn’t uncommon to hear people who have traditionally been excluded from the public discourse—and who, more broadly, lack political and economic power and visibility—described as “voiceless.”  This vast group of Americans includes individuals and entire communities who are people of […]

by Jean Casella

May 25, 2022

In a press conference this afternoon, President Joe Biden announced and signed a new executive order, primarily focused on policing, that also includes a directive on reducing the use of solitary confinement in the federal prison system.  The portion of the executive order referring to “restrictive housing”—the federal term for solitary—appears as part of Section […]

by Roxanne Barnes

May 25, 2022

• The Vera Institute of Justice published an article writing about the “Crisis of Isolation” in lockup as a response to the pandemic. They describe the emotional toll on families when prisons denied visits between incarcerated people and their loved ones, and Clinique Chapman, associate director for Vera and MILPA’s Restoring Promise initiative, states, “The impact […]

by Roxanne Barnes

May 19, 2022

New this week from Solitary Watch: • Thomas Bartlett Whitaker published a piece in Solitary Watch’s Voices from Solitary series, describing his time on “Deathwatch,” a solitary confinement section of Texas’s Polunsky Unit for those with execution dates. Whitaker was housed there before his death sentence was commuted to life in prison. He says, “Nobody wants […]

by Voices from Solitary

May 16, 2022

Thomas Bartlett Whitaker‘s writing has been previously published on Solitary Watch (here and here); was selected for inclusion in our 2016 anthology Hell Is a Very Small Place; and received a grant from our Solitary Confinement Reporting Project in 2019. His work has also taken top prizes in the PEN Prison Writing Awards for both fiction and essay. Hundreds of pieces […]

by Roxanne Barnes

May 11, 2022

New this week from Solitary Watch: • Chris Wilson published in the Voices from Solitary series, about his experience entering prison as a 17 year old, about the 117 days he spent locked up, and about the art he created after leaving solitary. He describes, “Going into it, I knew I wanted to create something beautiful […]

by Voices from Solitary

May 11, 2022

Born and raised outside of Washington, DC, Chris Wilson is a formerly incarcerated author, artist, advocate, and entrepreneur. At the age of 17, Wilson was sentenced to life in prison, and, over the next 16 years, spent over 117 days in solitary confinement.

by Roxanne Barnes

May 4, 2022

New this week from Solitary Watch: • In the first of a series of monthly dispatches from Solitary Watch, Vaidya Gullapalli writes about the ineffective, inhumane use of punishment for rehabilitation in lock-up. She describes the extreme of this punishment, noting that ​“the response to difficult or dangerous behavior, acts of survival or resistance, or even […]

by Vaidya Gullapalli

April 29, 2022

This is the first of a new series of monthly dispatches from Solitary Watch. Two weeks ago, a Tuesday morning in New York City, where I live, began with shock and horror. A man riding the subway at rush hour shot multiple passengers in a crowded car. Ten people suffered gunshot wounds and at least thirteen others […]

by Roxanne Barnes

April 27, 2022

New this week from Solitary Watch: • Melat Eskander interviews a man with several mental disorders incarcerated in Pennsylvania for Solitary Watch, highlighting the anti-Black racism he has experienced as well as treatment neglect. Eskander describes how “[i]n jails and prisons throughout the country, people with mental illness of all races suffer mistreatment and medical neglect, […]

by Voices from Solitary

April 27, 2022

In May 2021, Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania became the first jurisdiction in the United States to ban nearly all uses of solitary confinement by a referendum of the county’s voters, following years of abuse allegations and multiple suicides at the county jail. The new policy was supposed to go into effect in December, but, as […]

by Melat Eskender

April 22, 2022

This article is published in partnership with the Crime Report.   During Tashon’s incarceration, prison staff used one word so often to describe him that it became routine. He heard it while having a breakdown in his cell. He heard it when he requested an appointment with a psychologist or asked to be sent to the […]

by Mirilla Zhu

April 20, 2022

• On the New York Times’ The Daily podcast, reporter Adam Liptak discusses the case of Dennis Wayne Hope, a Texas man who has spent the past 27 years in solitary confinement. Hope’s lawyers have asked the Supreme Court to consider whether such prolonged isolation violates his Eighth Amendment rights. If the Supreme Court decides to […]

by Mirilla Zhu

April 13, 2022

• Spectrum News Albany reports that New York’s HALT Solitary Confinement Act went into effect on April 1st. The legislation, which was signed into law in 2021, ends the use of solitary confinement in state prisons and local jails for some groups and limits its use to 15 days for everyone else. Though it has been […]

by Roxanne Barnes

April 6, 2022

• The Vera Institute of Justice published a report outlining their guidelines for humane and ethical medical quarantine, insisting that because of COVID-19, “far too many people were left behind in unsafe facilities that have used solitary confinement cells and implemented solitary confinement conditions in regular cells.” Among their list of requirements are a sanitary living […]

by Roxanne Barnes

March 30, 2022

• The Lens NOLA reports about two bills that have been introduced in the Louisiana legislature to protect the health of incarcerated people, one to create a medical advisory council to approve  policies, and another to eliminate co-pays. In 2016 Solitary Watch’s Katie Rose Quandt and James Ridgeway wrote about substandard medical care at Angola prison […]

by Roxanne Barnes

March 23, 2022

• KTVH reports that the Montana Department of Corrections has settled a case with Disability Rights Montana, agreeing to provide people with “severe mental illness” with “appropriate care, treatment, and housing.” While the litigation was ongoing, 12 people with mental health issues died by suicide in the prison. Recently, the Western News reported on the “unreasonable […]