New this week from Solitary Watch: 

Solitary Watch is honored to announce that award-winning incarcerated journalist Kwaneta Harris has joined our team as a part-time Senior Writer and Editor. A former nurse, business owner, and expat, Harris now writes from the depths of the largest state prison in Texas. Harris’s writing shines a light on the unique experience of women living in a system rooted in state-sanctioned, gender-based violence. We’re grateful to have Kwaneta’s voice, expertise, and vision as part of the Solitary Watch team.

Harris is a 2026 Galaxy Changemaker Fellow, a 2025 Movements Against Mass Incarceration Social Change Fellow, and a former Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow. In 2025, the Society of Professional Journalists and Prison Journalism Project named her Prison Journalist of the Year at the annual Stillwater Awards. Harris’s journalism has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, The Marshall Project, Scalawag, Prism, The Appeal, and Teen Vogue, among others. Harris is also a co-author of the book Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement and is working on a book about the teenagers who were her neighbors during the nearly nine years she spent in adult solitary confinement. Solitary Watch 

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

Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores are being held in the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, following their capture and extradition to the United States. MDC Brooklyn is the only federal jail for people awaiting trial in New York City, and has a long-standing reputation for violence and inhumane conditions. As with other high-profile pretrial detainees, such as Sean “Diddy” Combs and Luigi Mangione, Maduro and Flores are confined to their cells for 23-hours-a-day. Reuters | According to one source in contact with MDC employees, the entire facility went on lockdown upon Maduro’s arrival. He has since been placed in solitary confinement, with checks every 15 to 30 minutes “to make sure that nothing’s happened to him.” Vanity Fair | Despite it’s long history of violence, MDC receives little media attention outside of high-profile cases. Yet lawsuits from current and former detainees paint a grotesque picture, according to an expose published last year by Solitary Watch and The Appeal. Solitary Watch | Sean Cheney, a formerly incarcerated artist who spent 15 months at MDC, described the treatment and conditions as having “a level of disregard for human life that should shock the conscience of any decent person.” Solitary Watch 

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has signed an executive order temporarily extending the emergency declaration governing the city’s jails. The long-standing declaration allows the city’s Department of Correction (DOC) to bypass numerous laws regulating jail conditions and conduct, including Local Law 42, a City Council measure passed in 2024 that would sharply limit solitary confinement. Under the new directive, however, Mamdani is requiring the DOC to develop and submit, within 45 days, a compliance plan for all laws suspended under the Emergency Executive Order. The City

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After striking a deal with Governor Kathy Hochul to pass a major omnibus reform package, some New York lawmakers are continuing to push for more reforms to the state’s criminal justice system. Created out of a list of 30 items, ten provisions were included in the final bill to address the conditions inside New York prisons that led to the death of Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility. Brooks’s death in solitary confinement, along with a wildcat strike by prison guards, pointed a spotlight on the safety of incarcerated people and staff. Times Union | Brooks’s death was not the first of its kind in New York’s prisons. In 2022, Ladale Kennedy died during a cell extraction under eerily similar circumstances. Although Kennedy’s death was also caught on camera, the incident received minimal public attention. New York Times 

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Thirty-eight incarcerated women have filed a class action lawsuit alleging male staff at the Century Regional Detention Facility (CRDF) in Los Angeles County, California, frequently engage in sexual voyeurism and assault. According to the lawsuit, the area next to the showers in the solitary confinement unit at CRDF is routinely used by staff to watch women as they bathe. Additional testimony describes how staff members grope women during shower escorts and intentionally increase water temperatures so the women “squirm erratically to avoid the pain.” San Gabriel Valley Tribune

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Corey Michael Dean died in solitary confinement just a month after being admitted to the Vista Detention Facility in San Diego County, California. A new lawsuit filed by Dean’s parents alleges that staff were aware of Dean’s medical and mental health needs yet refused to provide care or place him in housing for mentally ill detainees. Dean’s neighbors in solitary testified that his pleas for medical assistance, including covering himself in urine and feces to gain staff’s attention, were ignored in the days leading up to his death. Times of San Diego 

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When the infamous Menendez brothers appeared before separate parole boards in August 2025, their appeals for discretionary release were ultimately denied. Although their sentences were reduced from life without parole, their prison disciplinary records played a pivotal role in the boards’ decisions. With a different standard of evidence and less due process protections for incarcerated people facing sanctions, the prison system’s internal disciplinary process promotes punishment, like solitary confinement, and has long-lasting consequences for parole, while providing few opportunities for redemption or rehabilitation. Witness LA 

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