On November 27, in a ruling that may have wider implications for the use and abuse of soliary confinement in American prisons, a Massachusetts inmate won a longstanding case against the prison that illegally held him in segregation, as well as the Massachusetts Commissioner of Corrections. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts found that the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center (SBCC) […]
Update, 11/19/12: Bradley Manning took the stand late this afternoon. For live tweets of his testimony, follow @kgosztola and @Edpilkington. The psychiatrist who treated WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning while he was in custody in a Marine brig at Quantico testified yesterday that Manning was held in extreme solitary confinement, in isolated and humiliating conditions, against his medical […]
On his always superb blog Prison Photography, Pete Brooks last week featured a post called “Where Are All The Photographs Of Solitary Confinement?” As solitary confinement increasingly finds its way into the news, he writes, “journalists from across America have contacted me looking for photographs of solitary confinement to accompany their article.” With a few exceptions, Brooks writes, […]
Our “Solitary 101” PowerPoint, developed for the recent Midwest Coalition for Human Rights conference on Solitary Confinement and Human Rights, is now available online. The 60-slide PowerPoint includes sections on the history of solitary confinement, solitary as it is practiced in the United States today, and the growing movement against solitary confinement. We encourage educators and advocates to use, share, and […]
Guest Post by Lance Tapley In 1986 Ojore Lutalo, a black revolutionary in the Trenton State Prison — now the New Jersey State Prison — wrote to Bonnie Kerness’s American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) office in Newark. His letter described the extreme isolation and other brutalities in the prison’s Management Control Unit, which he called a “prison […]
This new infographic from the Prison Policy Initiative shows the impact of felon disenfranchisement laws. While most states forbid people to vote while they are in prison, and many extend that ban to people on parole, only a handful make it next to impossible to regain your right to vote if you’ve ever been convicted of […]
In a horrific story out of Oklahoma, lawyers representing the estate of a prisoner who was found dead in the Tulsa Jail have sued the local sheriff’s office and the jail’s private health care provider. In a motion just filed in federal court, attorneys have asked a judge to release a video made of the man’s final two […]
An excellent article on solitary in North Carolina–the first of its kind, that we know of–appears in the current Indyweek of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. “What Life Is Like in Solitary Confinement at North Carolina’s Central Prison,” by Billy Ball, describes conditions in the intensive control unit, or ICON, at the prison in Raleigh. The piece focuses on […]