• A new federal lawsuit alleges that men held in solitary confinement in Georgia State Prison are dangerously deprived of adequate mental healthcare, reports News Channel 9. Filed on September 10, the proposed class-action lawsuit seeks “to stop prison officials from isolating people in deplorable conditions.” In the last two years, at least 12 people in […]
Ronald Clark, 53, is currently held on Florida’s Death Row at Union Correctional Institution in Railford. Death-sentenced individuals held by the Florida Department of Corrections are confined in a 63-square-foot cell for upwards of 23 hours a day, and subjected to additional isolation for disciplinary infractions. On his blog The Death Row Poet, Clark writes […]
After a Thanksgiving Day meal, “J,” who was incarcerated at North Central Correctional Institute in Massachusetts, complained of a stomach ache. His friend Carlos, who requested to be identified by his first name only, leaned down from his top bunk and rubbed J’s head jokingly. “There, there,” he said, as the men laughed. Later that […]
• A Time Magazine retrospective reflects on prison conditions 50 years after the Attica Correctional Facility uprising. Heather Ann Thompson, author of the prize-winning book on Attica, Blood in the Water, writes that back in 1971, ending solitary confinement was high on the uprising’s list of demands. Thompson describes that although the uprising’s stated intentions were […]
First published in 2016 by The New Press, ​Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement​ is the first book to feature firsthand accounts—both writing and oral history—about the experience of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers. It includes pieces by 16 currently and formerly incarcerated men and women. This […]
• On September 10th, National Suicide Prevention Day, Unlock The Box will be held a vigil on Twitter to “to honor those ”who died by suicide both in and out of solitary confinement.” Unlock the Box invited people to fill out a form so that loved ones could be recognized and honored, and provided this link […]
• The New York Times reports that federal officials announced the temporary closure of the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), a federal jail in Lower Manhattan. They have described it as part of an effort to improve conditions at the jail, which have been dangerous for years, but only received widespread attention in 2019 after the suicide […]