• A woman has filed a lawsuit against New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), alleging that she was wrongfully thrown in solitary confinement for 90 days for having a cake knife in her cell. Pamela Smart, 48, is a former high school teacher who was convicted of convincing one of her students […]
Thomas Bartlett Whitaker is serving time in solitary confinement on Death Row at the Polunksy Unit in Livingston, Texas, after being convicted in 2007 of hiring a gunman to kill his family. While in prison, Whitaker, now 36, completed a bachelor’s degree in English and sociology, graduating summa cum laude, and he is studying toward a master’s […]
• United Nations representatives and human rights experts are calling on governments to implement the Revised Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also know as the Nelson Mandela Rules. “The revised rules have more specific provisions on solitary confinement, defining it as the confinement of prisoners for 22 hours or more a day […]
In the New Jersey’s Essex County Correctional Facility, immigrant detainees are frequently subjected to weeks or months in solitary confinement, according to a new report, Isolated in Essex: Punishing Immigrants Through Solitary Confinement, released by the New Jersey Advocates for Immigrant Detainees, the American Friends Service Committee and the New York University School of Law Immigrant […]
• The Arthur Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School published a report entitled, “Variations in the Housing of Individuals Sentenced to Death,” which in part looks at the use of solitary on death row. • At a 10-day hearing regarding the constitutionality of a federal capital case, defense witnesses testified that the long-term […]
“Despair. Do you know what it is like to live in despair? To feel trapped, suffocated, like the walls are closing in for good?” wrote an incarcerated person from inside a segregation unit in Rhode Island. “To be buried alive and witness your own humanity escaping without your body. I sit in a cell where […]
• The Delaware Supreme Court has reversed a previous ruling, in a decision that will land a person who was formally on death row, back in solitary confinement. Isaiah McCoy, 28, is awaiting a new trial after the Supreme Court overturned his convicrion. McCoy’s lawyers had successfully argued in front of a lower court that […]
• The isolation of transgender women has been in the media since Netflix released its fifth season of Orange is the New Black, including with high-profile interviews on the issue by Laverne Cox and CeCe McDonald. To learn more about the experiences of transgender women in solitary confinement, read an August 2014 Solitary Watch investigation about […]