The latest article supported by Solitary Watch’s Ridgeway Reporting Project for incarcerated journalists was published yesterday by the local news site New York Focus, which has provided unparalleled coverage of the state’s resistance to implementing the groundbreaking HALT Solitary Confinement law. Additional support for the article was provided by Empowerment Avenue, an organization that works for the inclusion of incarcerated writers and artists in mainstream venues.

The author, Sara Kielly, is an investigative journalist, poet, and jailhouse lawyer whose work has appeared in Slate, Spotlong Review, the New York Daily News, Guild Notes, and In Solidarity. As an Irish-American transgender woman incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, she works to change conditions of confinement for minority prisoners and the conversation surrounding our mass carceral state. She is invested in joining with other minority people to build a society that prioritizes equity, inclusion, and the power of minority lives.

A brief excerpt appears below. Read the full article on New York Focus.

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In early 2022, Sam, a woman incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, stood accused of possessing drug contraband and was placed in solitary confinement prior to a disciplinary hearing. At the hearing, officials wouldn’t produce photos of the alleged contraband, she said. Still, a hearing officer found her guilty, sentenced her to 90 days in solitary, and took away her visitation privileges.

An appeals committee eventually reversed the guilty verdict. But in the approximately 30 days it took to come to that decision, Sam missed out on a planned visit with family from Arizona.

“It broke my heart. My family does not have the money to throw away on plane tickets and vacation time to come see me from across the country,” she told me, in tears.

“I was denied the ability to defend myself at the hearing and to present evidence of my innocence,” Sam said. “I had no chance.”

A few weeks after Sam’s ordeal, New York overhauled how it handles solitary confinement cases like hers. The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act went into effect at the end of March 2022, and was meant to be a game-changer for carceral punishment in New York.

The law limited the types of infractions that can land someone in isolation and barred New York state prisons and local jails from sending the youngest incarcerated people, the elderly, and those diagnosed with mental illnesses or disabilities to solitary. It also prohibited them from holding anyone in typical “segregated confinement” — which involves being locked in a cell, alone, for up to 17 hours a day — for longer than 15 consecutive days (or 20 days within a two-month period). For those with longer isolation sentences, which can last weeks or months, HALT created special units to provide a less punitive, “rehabilitative” environment, with guaranteed access to recreation and programming.

The law also included a relatively novel and crucial provision that granted people facing the possibility of solitary the right to representation at disciplinary hearings “by any attorney or law student, or by any paralegal or incarcerated person,” with limited exceptions. This aspect of HALT is critical in shielding incarcerated people from erroneous solitary sentences — as evidenced by Sam’s story, as well as the prison system’s well established history of improperly using segregation for retaliation or as punishment for minor offenses.

But at Bedford Hills, New York’s only maximum-security prison for women, implementing HALT has been an uphill battle. My own experience as a prisoners’ rights advocate and jailhouse lawyer currently incarcerated at Bedford Hills, together with accounts by other women and a former employee, illustrate how the prison, as well as the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) administration, have circumvented both the spirit and the letter of the law…

Read the full article on New York Focus.