Dear Donors, Readers, and Friends: We founded Solitary Watch more than a decade ago with the belief that accurate information and authentic storytelling could serve as powerful antidotes to ignorance and injustice, and help bring change even to a powerful and secretive institution like prisons. We started out as a small, shoestring operation—which to a […]
This article was originally published by The Root. “I was coughing up blood for two days this week,” M said. “I have not seen a doctor. I have been telling sick call but they just walk past me.” M, held at the District of Columbia jail, was describing his life behind bars as the COVID-19 pandemic […]
• USA Today published an opinion piece by solitary survivors Johnny Perez, Jack Morris, and Pamela Winn, all of whom now advocate for the rights of incarcerated people. All three recounted their own experiences being trapped in prison for the holidays. Perez, the director of the U.S. Prisons Program at the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, […]
This is one of the first posts we ever published on Solitary Watch, more than ten years ago, and we now share it with our readers every year. Once a year, we also ask you to consider supporting the work we do: shining a light on the darkest corners of our criminal justice system and bringing a glimmer of […]
Elizabeth Hawes is an award-winning prison writer and former editor of Reflector, the prison news magazine at Minnesota Correctional Institution (MCI)—Shakopee, where Hawes is serving her Life Without Parole sentence. In November 2020, Hawes won an award in the PEN America Prison Writing Contest. In 2018, Hawes completed the play Supernova, examining women’s incarceration and […]
• The New Orleans Lens reported that the non-profit Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI) released a report, claiming that prison administrators and staff responded inadequately to the coronavirus pandemic, causing unnecessary death and suffering. The report found, “Principally, correctional officials [in Louisiana] responded to COVID- 19 or exposure to the virus by placing people in solitary confinement or putting portions […]
Dear Readers, Supporters, and Friends: The torture of solitary confinement is something that takes place not only behind closed doors, but behind layer upon layer of steel and concrete. It happens deep inside places that have been called “prisons within prisons,” which in the name of “security” are kept strictly off limits to all observers, including […]
• The Intercept reported that a group of immigrants held at the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsen, Alabama banded together in July, all demanding coronavirus tests. But instead of providing testing, prison officials locked down the unit and transferred ten of the most vocal people to solitary confinement. One immigrant, Sebastian Abalo Cunna, wrote, […]
Dear Readers, Supporters, and Friends: In the past nine months, those of us on the outside have been given just a glimpse of the isolation, idleness, and deprivation faced by the thousands of incarcerated men, women, and children held in solitary confinement. Unlike them, most of us have been confined along with loved ones, and […]