Sara Kielly is an investigative journalist, poet, and jailhouse lawyer currently incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York. Identifying as “an Irish-American transgender woman,” Kielly “works to change conditions of confinement for minority prisoners.” Her work has appeared in Slate, Spotlong Review, New York Amsterdam News, New York Focus, and Film Comment. She is a 2023 recipient of Solitary Watch’s Ridgeway Reporting grant and is currently working on a memoir titled Slow Bleed: A Transgender Woman’s Journey to Survival in Men’s Maximum-Security Prisons. Kielly’s latest piece, written in collaboration with Chris Gelardi and published in NY Focus, describes the recent lockdown at Bedford Hills amidst the statewide wildcat corrections officers’ strike, which caused heightened restrictions, medical emergencies, and an increase in suicidal ideation at the prison.

In the following piece, Kielly travels back to her time at a men’s maximum security facility, exposing the indifference and cruelty she was met with when she attempted suicide in her solitary cell. Among the many forms of abuse suffered by transgender individuals in prison, more than 90 percent report spending time in solitary confinement, according to a survey published in 2024. This is especially true for the majority of incarcerated trans people who are placed in prisons that do not match their gender identities, as Kielly was for many years before her transfer to a women’s facility.

With the end of the corrections officers’ strike hinging on the suspension of the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act—which has been notoriously difficult to implement, largely due to resistance from prison officials—this piece is particularly timely. Kielly reminds us that passing the HALT Solitary Act was the first of many critical steps in a long-term process of transformation away from a culture rooted in dehumanization. —Kilhah St Fort 

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Dawn had not begun to break over Five Points Correctional Facility in Romulus, New York, when I saw my reflection in the pool of blood spreading around me on the cell floor. I saw a tired and scared 28-year-old woman who knew she had lost a dangerous amount of blood. The pain was severe, and I knew the testicular artery I had severed and the blood thinner medication I was prescribed could result in death. 

The prison nurse and the two correctional officers charged with my care that morning showed no interest in saving my life. These staff members laughed as I bled out. At 3:30 a.m., the facility doctor on-call from home ordered the infirmary nurse to withhold all medical care. All I could do was cry as I lay bleeding on a concrete floor, feeling a cold and unexplainable pain. I can still remember whispering the words, “Please help.”

This waking nightmare occurred while I was in solitary confinement due to a disciplinary charge and sanction from officers who did not want me in the unit or in their program. For the nearly six years I had been incarcerated, my serious medical needs as a transgender woman were treated with deliberate indifference by facility staff. I finally hit rock bottom while housed in segregated confinement in a regional mental health unit, which is the Special Housing Unit (SHU) for seriously mentally ill incarcerated individuals. 

It was not my first experience with solitary confinement. During the years that I was in men’s maximum-security facilities in New York State, at least half of my time was served in some form of segregated or solitary confinement—whether administrative segregation, disciplinary segregation, protective custody, or suicide watch in the residential crisis treatment programs. My years in solitary proved what decades of research have shown regarding the effects of solitary confinement on those subjected to those conditions. My mental health had devolved to a point where I could have easily been diagnosed with what Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, called “SHU syndrome”—a psychological state that often includes paranoia, self-harm, confusion, and hallucinations.

While that is serious and catastrophic enough, what was even more heartbreaking was the response of correctional staff as I faced a self-inflicted, life-threatening medical emergency with a severed artery. I was moments from death as corrections officers, a sergeant, and two nurses stood around watching me bleed out with smiles on their faces, laughing and joking. I was lucky enough to survive that suicide attempt despite the cruelty and devastation that solitary confinement subjected me to. I am only here today to tell this story because of a resolve to survive, the power of education prior to incarceration, the love and support of family and advocates in my community, and what I believe to have been divine intervention because God still had a plan for my life. 

That plan has played out since my transfer in September 2021 to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the only female maximum-security prison in New York State. This transfer gave me opportunities that would never have been available to me while incarcerated in a men’s maximum-security prison. These include gender affirmation and enrolling in the Marymount Manhattan College program at Bedford Hills, where I have earned 51 credits, with a 4.0 GPA, toward my associate’s degree in social science. I’ve also been elected to represent my peers on the Bedford Hills Inmate Liaison committee as a unit rep and vice president; I have hosted transgender Visibility and Remembrance Day events; and I currently work in the facility’s law library as a certified paralegal, providing legal assistance and disciplinary representation to other incarcerated individuals. 

The darkest corners of my life in men’s maximum-security prisons, which were overwhelmingly relegated to the four concrete walls of solitary confinement cells, taught me what it means to feel forgotten and abandoned by a system that is mandated to protect. When I represent incarcerated individuals facing possible solitary confinement in their disciplinary hearings, I know how high the stakes are. Because of my years in solitary, I use my empathy, education, and resolve to ensure that no other incarcerated individual ever has to experience a dark night like I did on that concrete prison floor in Romulus, NY. 

The New York State Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act is a strong step and commitment towards ending the practice that nearly took my life. However, there is so much more to be done. We have a commitment to recognize that those of us who have survived or are currently enduring solitary confinement are human beings. They are your brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons. A day must come when we no longer condone the caging of human beings like animals in a zoo.