Our latest piece over at Mother Jones concerns an important trial beginning today in Federal District Court in Denver, in which a prisoner with mental illness is challenging more than a decade in solitary confinement in the Colorado State Penitentiary. Also included is background on the groundbreaking work of the University of Denver’s Civil Rights Clinic; on […]
Incarcerated for over 17 years, “Mysterious Offender” (M.O.) has spent over 16 of those years in isolation units in Oregon, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Corresponding with Solitary Watch for nearly 4 months, he has recounted his 12-year incarceration in Oregon’s isolation units. He has said he suffers “significant impairment from isolation.” The following is a […]
Following Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s proposal to close Tamms Prison, the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability held a contentious hearing, with proponents and opponents of the closure voicing their views on the controversial supermax facility. Nearly 700 pages of testimony is available. What follows is a sampling of some pieces of testimony to provide […]
The following is a response by California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement (CFASC), an organization dedicated to raising awareness of the use of solitary confinement in California prisons, to the recent revision of gang validation policies. Gang validation is the primary means by which the over three thousand inmates in Security Housing Units (SHU) are […]
The latest issue of The Nation includes an excellent article by Matt Stroud, about the common practice in Pennsylvania of placing prisoners with serious mental illness in solitary confinement–where, unsurprisingly, they sometimes resort to suicide. The article begins: By the time John McClellan Jr. was found dead inside Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution (SCI) at Cresson last […]
One of our very first posts, when we started the Solitary Watch blog, concerned a suicidal Montana teenager locked in solitary confinement because he was deemed a discipline problem after he damaged prison property. It’s a story so gut-wrenching that we still often tell it as an example of how isolation becomes torture for many […]
Today marks 40 years in solitary confinement for Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. Our article on the Angola 3 appears today on MotherJones.com. On the world stage, Guantanamo may well stand as the epitome of American human rights abuses. But when it comes to torture on US soil, that grim distinction is held by two […]
Premiering today at the Full Frame Documentary Festival in North Carolina is Herman’s House, a film “that follows the unlikely friendship between a New York artist and one of America’s most famous inmates as they collaborate on an acclaimed art project.” The inmate is Herman Wallace, one of the Angola 3, who on Tuesday will mark […]
Late yesterday, the Connecticut Assembly passed legislation to bring an end to the state’s future use of the death penalty. The governor has promised to sign the legislation, making Connecticut the 17th state to repeal capital punishment. This is, of course, a significant victory for death penalty opponents. But the legislation has two troubling components. The first is […]
The European Court of Human Rights ruled yesterday that Britain can extradite five men to the United States to face terrorism charges. In the likely event that they are convicted, they face life sentences in solitary confinment in the notorious ADX Florence, the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” The AP is calling the high-profile case “a European referendum […]
Check out our latest piece over at MotherJones.com, on a new lawsuit filed on behalf of inmates at New Orleans’ main jail. Here are some excerpts: As hellholes go, there are few worse places in America than the Orleans Parish Prison. New Orleans’ teeming city jail first hit the radar of most Americans following Hurricane […]