The latest four-page Solitary Watch Print Edition includes a report from June’s historic Senate hearing on solitary confinement, a powerful essay by prisoner Enceno Macy, and news briefs from around the country. The print editions is available for download as a PDF file, below. (For PDFs earlier editions, click here.) <Solitary Watch Print Edition: Fall 2012> Hard copies […]
Month: September 2012
Amnesty International Releases Report Condemning California Prison Isolation Units
On Thursday, September 27, Amnesty International published its report on the conditions of California’s supermax units, entitled The Edge of Endurance: Conditions in California’s Security Housing Units. The Security Housing Units (SHUs), which currently house over 3,000 inmates in predominantly single-cell isolation, hold inmates in small cells for at least 22 1/2 hours every day. The report notes […]
New Report Calls for End to Use of Solitary Confinement in Immigrant Detention
“Are you broken yet?” Each day Rashed spent in solitary confinement at the Tri-County Detention Center in Illinois, the warden asked him this question. An observant Muslim, Rashed had tried to advocate on behalf of another Muslim who could not speak English well. That was the “offense” that earned him his second stint in solitary, where […]
The Other Death Sentence: Aging and Dying in Prison
The title of this post is the title of a new article by James Ridgeway that appears on Mother Jones and New American Media. It begins this way: William “Lefty” Gilday had been in prison 40 years when the dementia began to set in. At 82, he was already suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease and […]
Federal Government Seeks Dismissal of Supermax Suicide Lawsuit
The U.S. government is currently contending with two federal lawsuits that challenge the torturous conditions at the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum (ADX) in Florence, Colorado. Both suits allege that the social isolation and sensory deprivation at ADX are so extreme that they drive prisoners to madness, self-mutilation, and suicide–yet the Bureau of Prisons offers them next to nothing […]
Solitary Policies in California Revised, As Prisoner Leaders Promote End to Racial Hostilities
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has recently circulated a memo regarding the most recent revised edition of its Step Down Program (SDP) and Security Threat Group (STG) Program proposal. The revised policies come one year after a series of statewide hunger strikes by prisoners in the Security Housing Units (SHU) in Pelican Bay and […]
Pennsylvania Lawmakers Hear Testimony on the Torture of Solitary Confinement
Well over one hundred people filled a conference suite at Temple University in Philadelphia on Tuesday, September 18, to hear testimony on the effects of solitary confinement. They included survivors of solitary, family members, community members, advocates, and lawmakers. The hearing was held by the Democratic Policy Committee of Pennsylvania at the request of Representative Ronald G. Waters […]
New York Prisoner Gets Five Years in Solitary for Cell Phone Smuggled in by Guard
Philip Miller was midway through a twenty-year sentence for robbery at Sing Sing Prison in New York, with an almost spotless prison record, when he was caught with a mobile phone in his cell in April 2010. He was charged with two disciplinary violations: “possession of contraband” and also “altering state property,” since he had hidden the cell phone […]
Scientists Discover How Social Isolation Damages Young Brains
In his groundbreaking 2009 New Yorker article on solitary confinement as torture, Atul Gawande described a researcher in the 1950s who raised a group of baby Rhesus monkeys in complete isolation from one another. While they grew up physically healthy, the monkeys “were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for […]
Mumia Abu-Jamal Challenges Death Row Solitary Confinement and Life Without Parole
Guest Post by Bret Grote In a story that has received scant attention so far, former death row occupant, political prisoner, and world-renowned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal filed a legal challenge to the imposition of a sentence of life without parole. Mumia is basing his case, in part, on the idea that his thirty years in solitary confinement […]
Portrait of a Prison Whistleblower—and His Punishment
Guest Post by Lance Tapley I often tell people—perhaps shocking some—that a prison inmate I know, Deane Brown, is one of the most moral individuals I’ve ever met. This despite the fact that he had gotten in deep trouble since early childhood because, he once told me, he felt no moral compunction about taking things […]