Dear Readers and Friends:

Before you enter full holiday mode, we hope you’ll take just a moment to consider those who will be spending this time of year alone in a solitary confinement cell. For many, this means not only the extreme isolation and loneliness that comes with being deprived of all meaningful human contact. It also means being subject to the unspeakable abuses that take place when no one is watching.

We know about these abuses in large part due to the courage of people held in solitary, including prison journalists who risk further isolation and retaliation to make sure this vital information comes across prison walls to the world outside. 

Kwaneta Harris—who has just joined Solitary Watch as a Contributing Writer—recently reported on the rampant sexual abuse visited by staff upon girls as young as 16 in the solitary unit of a Texas women’s prison, where Kwaneta herself spent more than eight years. She witnessed guards forcing girls into stripping competitions, and performing sexual favors in return for a cup of water or a few minutes out of their cells. Unsurprisingly, she also witnessed suicides and horrific instances of self-harm.

Jeremy Busby, also reporting from Texas, captured the horror of the telephone-booth-sized “containment cages” where people in mental health crisis are placed, and often left for days on end, unable to lie down and surrounded by their own in urine, excrement, and blood. His article, which picked up by Slate, brought hundreds of thousands of readers the news that torture is alive and well in American prisons.

We support the work of these journalists, and dozens of others, through the Ridgeway Reporting Project—named for our late founder, the distinguished investigative journalist James Ridgeway. The project, which I am privileged to run from inside San Quentin, provides grants and editorial support to dozens of writers working behind bars. But for every story we are able to bring across the walls, there are countless others that remain to be told. 

As it now stands, less than 3 percent of the people who read and share Solitary Watch stories also donate to our work. If that number were to triple, to just 10 percent, we could tell so many more of these stories, which have proven to be some of the most powerful ammunition in the fight to end the torture of solitary confinement.

Right now, through NewsMatch, all donations made through December 31st are being doubled, and all recurring donations will be doubled throughout the year. Please consider giving $5 or $10 a month—or more, if you can—to keep support flowing to the brave souls who tell the stories we will hear nowhere else, and cannot ignore.

With gratitude and warm wishes for the holidays,

Juan Moreno Haines, Editor-in-Chief
San Quentin, CA