New this week from Solitary Watch: 

The deadline to submit an application for the 2025 Fall/Winter round of the Ridgeway Reporting Project has been extended to December 31. The project offers grants and editorial support for incarcerated journalists for stories about solitary confinement. If you know someone who may be interested, please share the full application instructions available on our website. Solitary Watch

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For #GivingTuesday, our appeal for support was made by incarcerated writer Kwaneta Harris, Contributing Writer for Solitary Watch and recipient of a grant from our Ridgeway Reporting Project. Kwaneta is now widely published in leading media outlets, and was named Prison Journalist of the Year by the Society of Professional Journalists—achievements made all the more remarkable by the fact that until recently, Kwaneta was writing from solitary confinement at the women’s prison in Texas where she is still held. In this appeal, Kwaneta writes of an earlier time, when Solitary Watch helped to bring her voice out of the void. “Every article I published was a small act of resistance against a system designed to erase us.” If you are moved by what you read—and by Solitary Watch’s steadfast dedication to nurturing and amplifying the voices of people locked away in the darkest corners of our society—please consider making a gift now, while your donation will be doubled thanks to NewsMatch. Gifts at all levels are deeply valued and appreciated; please consider making your donation today. Solitary Watch

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

New York corrections officers have long attribute the recent increase in use of force to the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act making their jobs more dangerous. Staff claim that the law’s limits on solitary confinement deprive them of an essential tool for controlling certain incarcerated people. However, use of force in New York prisons has been on the rise since 2014—long before the HALT Act was passed. New York Times | In the past decade, there have been 120 incidents of New York prison staff assaulting or abusing restrained incarcerated people. In 2016, Lieutenant Troy Mitchell shackled the hands and feet of an incarcerated man named Matthew Raymond and waterboarded him inside the medical unit at Auburn Correctional Facility. Raymond was immediately placed in solitary confinement following the incident, where he stayed for months without receiving medical care. Although Mitchell faced several other accusations of abuse, he remained at Auburn until he was allowed to retire in 2018. New York Times | The recent high-profile death of Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Institution, combined with the New York Times’s investigation, has spurred New York lawmakers to urge Governor Kathy Hochul to protect the HALT Act and sign into law a set of reforms introduced earlier this year. The set of bills, which passed the state legislature in June, would require 24-hour surveillance camera coverage of nearly all areas of state prisons and the collection of data on deaths in custody and filed grievances. New York Times

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Pregnant women in jails face severe medical neglect that often carries deadly consequences. Between 2017 and 2024, 57 women or their families filed federal civil rights lawsuits alleging medical negligence. More than two dozen pregnant women reported being placed in solitary confinement for requesting medical care. One woman chewed through her umbilical cord after giving birth in a Kentucky jail, and another woman in Louisiana gave birth in a toliet after a nurse told her to “shut the fuck up. Go back to your corner.” NBC News

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The 37 people on federal death row were granted clemency under the Biden administration. Earlier this year, President Trump ordered them transferred to ADX Florence in Colorado—the only federal supermax prison—where they will spend 22 to 24 hours a day in solitary confinement cells the size of a parking space. According to Bureau of Prisons guidelines, placement at ADX Florence is reserved for people “who have demonstrated an inability to function in a less restrictive environment without being a threat to others.” Rejon Taylor, like most of the men being transferred, has had a clean disciplinary record, and even a job, while on death row at USP Terre Haute in Indiana. Now, with the looming isolation of ADX Florence, he says he wishes he’d never been granted clemency. BOLTS | Rejon Taylor recently contributed an essay to Solitary Watch’s Voices from Solitary series, titled “After Biden’s Clemency, Trump Has Condemned Us to a Life Worse Than Death.” Solitary Watch

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Nearly 1400 people have participated in the Pima County (Arizona) Restoration to Competency Program (RCP), which requires people who are unable to be tried due to the severity of their mental illness to undergo mandatory treatment until they are deemed competent to face trial. For the last several years the RCP, a jail-based program, has been “profoundly understaffed.”  As a result, people in the program are often locked down without access to treatment or programming, and non-medically trained staff are left to manage people with high mental health needs. Arizona Luminaria 

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Incarcerated journalist and reform advocate Kenneth Shaun Traywick, who also goes by the name Swift Justice, is in the second week of his hunger strike at Bullock Correctional Facility in Alabama. Since going on hunger strike, Traywick has been threatened with disciplinary charges, denied welfare checks, and prevented from communicating with his family and legal team. In an official statement, the nonprofit Unheard Voices of the Concrete Jungle (UVOTCJ) stated the situation revealed “an alarming pattern of retaliation and information suppression” and called for increased transparency and oversight.” Alabama Political Reporter | Traywick is also a 2023 Ridgeway Reporting Project grant recipient.  His story documents the reality of forced labor in Alabama prisons and retaliation against incarcerated people who resist it. Solitary Watch

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Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon publicly claims that June 2025 was when he became aware children were being held in solitary confinement at Shelby County (Memphis), Tennessee, detention centers. However, his claims contradict the findings of an MLK50 investigation, which indicates Sugarmon may have been aware of the use of solitary as early as 2023. Despite internal oversight reports showing the over reliance on isolation, the Sheriff’s Department also continues to deny the use of solitary confinement. MLK50 

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Attorneys for Tina Peters, a former Colorado official whose conviction for election interference drew the attention of President Trump, claims that she has been unfairly punished with solitary confinement for filing a grievance against a prison officer. According to reports, the officer violated prison confidentiality rules by discussing the details of Peters’s ongoing legal case in front of her GED class. President Trump has called for Peters’s release several times, and the Bureau of Prisons has requested that she be transferred from state to federal custody—a move that Colorado officials have called “a transparent attempt to bypass the President’s inability to pardon Ms. Peters or commute her sentence.” Western Slope Now

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