Yesterday would have been Johnny Cash’s 78th birthday. Prison Law Blog dug out this NPR story from 2005 on Cash’s famous visit to Folsom Prison in 1968, which includes a recording of him singing “Folsom Prison Blues” for an audience of inmates. Listen to it here. Since that recording was made, the U.S. prison population has increased seven-fold, […]
Month: February 2010
Charles Dickens on Solitary Confinement: "Immense Torture and Agony"
The history of solitary confinement shows it to be largely an American invention. In a blog post that accompanied the March 2009 publication of Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article on solitary confinement, Mary Hawthorne described its genesis at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia at the end of the 18th century. This Quaker-inspired experiment in incarceration […]
Voices from Solitary: Charles P. Norman on "The Insanity of Solitary Confinement"
Charles Patrick Norman, who has served more than 30 years in Florida’s prisons, is an eloquent and accomplished writer whose poetry, short stories, essays, memoirs, and plays have won several awards, including first place in the memoir category in the 2008 PEN Prison Writing Contest. After reading some of his work, I wrote to him to tell him […]
On Reality TV, Solitary Confinement Is a Game
“Man In Box” is a new British reality show, which started streaming live over the web a week ago. Tim Shaw, a DJ and TV presenter known for his outrageous and sometimes offensive behavior, is spending 30 days in a steel box the size of a large refrigerator, under the gaze of a camera. The public receives clues as to the box’s […]
No Obama Budget Freeze for Prisons
In the nation with the world’s highest incarceration rate, amid talk of dangerously high deficits and budget freezes, the White House proposes dramatically increasing spending on U.S. prisons. A newly released report from the Justice Policy Institute, titled “The Obama Administration’s 2011 Budget: More Policing, Prisons, and Punitive Policies,” analyzes the priorities reflected in the president’s overall spending […]
Solitary Confinement Cells Have Become America’s New Asylums
Our article “Locking Down the Mentally Ill” appeared last week on The Crime Report, the online publication of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College, City University of New York. We’re posting a few excerpts here, but hope you will read the entire piece on The Crime Report‘s site. “If you want to […]
ACLU Calls on U.N. Human Rights Official to Stop Teen's Torture in Montana Prison
A teenager in solitary confinement at Montana State Prison has been subject to such brutal treatment that the American Civil Liberties Union today called upon a U.N. expert on torture to intervene on his behalf. “The conditions of Robert’s confinement are so appalling that they flout universally recognized human rights standards, including his absolute right to be free […]
Two Clinton-Era Laws That Permit Cruel and Unusual Punishment
In an earlier post, we wrote about what the so-called War on Terror of the last ten years owes to the longstanding War on Crime, in terms of how the United States treats its prisoner or detainees, and how willing we are to compromise their Constitutional and human rights. (In fact, UC psychology professor Craig Haney has suggested that […]
What the War on Terror Owes to the War on Crime
One of the reasons we started the Solitary Watch project was what we observed as a disconnect between the public’s awareness of (and reaction to) the abuses brought about by the so-called War on Terror of the last ten years, and those already in place as a result of the longstanding War on Crime. As we […]
Incarceration Nation
While it doesn’t specifically reference solitary confinement, an article in the Boston Globe this morning has a lot to say about the larger environment in which these brutal conditions of confinement become routine. In “Imaginary Fiends,” Joe Keohane asks why Americans stubbornly refuse to believe that the U.S. crime rate has been dropping for at least 15 years. […]
Kids Languish in Solitary While Awaiting Trial in Colorado
An article by Joseph Boven in the Colorado Independent exposes the plight of juveniles who have been charged as adults, and often spend months in solitary confinement as they await their trials. As we’ve written before, kids in adult prisons are highly likely to end up in solitary, either because they are considered disciplinary problems or because they have […]
Georgia's Response to Death Row Suicides: Restrict Family Visits
Three convicted killers on Georgia’s death row died recently in the span of three months–but none of them was executed. In October of 2009, Kim McMichen died of pneumonia. In November, Timothy Pruitt died from what was reported to be a botched suicide attempt. And on New Year’s Day 2010, Leeland Mark Braley was found hanged in his cell. Living for years or decades […]