New this week from Solitary Watch:

In the latest entry in our Voices from Solitary series, James Daly reflects on four and a half decades of incarceration, examining the effects of prolonged solitary confinement on himself and those around him. His piece explores the suffocating nature of restrictive housing, detailing how isolation in supermax prisons, where Daly spent 24 years, instills gradual yet potentially horrific levels of mental decline in individuals. It also uncovers the frequent abuse and constant surveillance incarcerated individuals face at the hands of prison officials, further accentuating what Daly names “a slow drift into the abyss.” Solitary Watch

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This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:

In an exclusive interview, a former social worker who left employment on Rikers Island three weeks ago reported that some people with severe mental health conditions are unofficially “deadlocked”—locked in solitary confinement in their cells for weeks and months without treatment, often until they completely decompensate. The whistleblower reported that medical staff were “prevented from giving them medication to stabilize their conditions, triggering behavior like relentless screaming, banging on cell doors and smearing their cells with their own feces.” These practices are in violation of a law passed by the New York City Council, meant to sharply limit the use of solitary; in July, Mayor Eric Adams blocked implementation of the law in an “emergency” executive order. New York Daily News

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Prison officials at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York confiscated incarcerated journalist Sara Kielly’s typewriter and ransacked her cell after she published an article detailing the prison’s violation of New York’s HALT Solitary Confinement Act. (The article was supported by a grant from Solitary Watch’s Ridgeway Reporting Project). Kielly possessed the permits necessary to own the prison-approved typewriter she’d bought herself. The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision maintained that the confiscation of the typewriter was unrelated to Kielly’s article, claiming the raid was related to an ongoing investigation into contraband. “We do what we can to hold them accountable,” Kielly told New York Focus. Prison officials have since returned Kielly’s typewriter. New York Focus

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Activists from New Jersey Prison Justice Watch, a prison watchdog group, accused New Jersey prisons of violating a 2019 law restricting solitary confinement hours. According to a new report, two out of every three incarcerated individuals surveyed by the group claim they are allotted less than an hour out of their cells a day, with most people only rationed around half an hour of out-of-cell time. The advocates emphasized that these findings directly violate the Isolated Confinement Restriction Act, which prohibits people from being isolated for more than 20 hours a day for more than 20 consecutive days, or 30 out of 60 days. “These are not just abstract numbers,” New Jersey Prison Justice Watch advocate Donte Hatcher briefed reporters. “They represent real human suffering.” New Jersey Monitor

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A new court filing requests class-action status for a federal lawsuit against the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, calling for an end to solitary confinement for children. According to personal accounts, officials enclosed children in their rooms for 23 hours a day for weeks as labor shortages struck juvenile detention centers. If class-action status is granted, thousands of children condemned to juvenile detention could potentially join the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. The North Carolina’s Division of Juvenile Justice contends that confining children to their rooms was neither the plan nor the goal, with Deputy Secretary William Lassiter still maintaining that it doesn’t qualify as solitary confinement. The News & Observer

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In a federal civil rights lawsuit against three New York state prison officials, a jury ruled in favor of an incarcerated person subjected to solitary confinement for nine consecutive years. The landmark case is the first in New York to render prolonged solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment in over 25 years. The team of attorneys representing Wonder Williams, the plaintiff who spent nine years isolated in restrictive housing, presented evidence of Williams’s “standard parking space” sized concrete cell, where he was isolated 23 hours out of the day. New York Law Journal

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C Dreams, a formerly incarcerated writer and advocate, argues for prison civilian review boards in an opinion piece for Filter. Her article recounts her time imprisoned at the Georgia Department of Corrections, stressing the severe lack of representation for individuals facing internal disciplinary hearings, often for trivial reasons. It spotlights how individuals face weeks to months of solitary confinement as their trials unfold and they await sentencing, emphasizing the need for external civilian review boards to regulate this treatment. Filter

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