Solitary Watch offers interns an opportunity to gain reporting, research, and outreach skills while working on an important human rights issue. Individuals with a background or interest in journalism, law, and criminal justice, including formerly incarcerated persons, are especially encouraged to apply, as are those interested in utilizing the media and social networking to advance social justice. […]
Public Intelligence, a web-based project that describes itself as “an international consortium of independent researchers who wish to aggregate and defend public information while maintaining its accessibility around the globe,” has published a series of documents relating to the Communications Management Units at two federal prison. As we’ve written before, these “experimental” units, sometimes referred to as […]
Eddie Griffin, a former Civil Rights Movement activist and Black Panther, spent 12 years in federal prison for bank robbery, beginning in the early 1970s. After he was injured doing prison labor at Terre Haute Federal Prison, and refused to return to work under unsafe conditions, he was labelled “incorrigible” and transferred to the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, […]
An article by Sharon Shalev in the latest issue of the UK’s New Humanist magazine, provides one of the best descriptions we’ve seen of the contours of daily life inside an American supermax prison. Shalev, a fellow at the London School of Economics, is author of the book Supermax: Controlling Risk Through Solitary Confinement and of […]
Now available in our Resources section is a unique collection of U.S. court cases relevant to solitary confinement. This collection was compiled and annotated by Solitary Watch Research Associates Daniel H. Goldman and Ryan Brimmer. They are students at the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse, Washington & Lee University School of Law, which is our lead […]
The ongoing story of Massachusetts inmate Timothy Muise demonstrates in detail how freedom of expression ends at the prison gate. When Muise has sought to expose what he alleges is a sex-for-snitching ring run by guards at MCI Norfolk, a state prison south of Boston, he was charged with “inciting a group demonstration,” along with various other rule […]
Jamie and Gladys Scott walked out of prison today into the free world. The sisters were convicted, on dubious grounds, of an $11 armed robbery, and sentenced to life in prison. Both sisters lost 17 years of their lives behind bars before Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour suspended the remainder of their draconian sentences; Jamie also forfeited her health, and […]
Four prisoners have at the supermax Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown have gone on a hunger strike to protest their solitary confinement. Their only demand: that they be moved to the state’s Death Row. The prisoners—Bomani Shakur, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb and Namir Abdul Mateen—were sentenced to death for their involvement in the 1993 prison uprising in Lucasville, […]
For the past few weeks, progressive online media sources have been burning with outrage over the conditions in which accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning is being held. Manning (as we first noted on Solitary Watch back in July) is in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement at a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, denied sunlight, exercise, possessions, and all but the most limited contact […]