Today is #GivingTuesday, and our appeal for support comes directly from 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.

Here, 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 world—please consider making a gift today, while your donation will be doubled thanks to NewsMatch.

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My name is Kwaneta Harris, and I am an incarcerated journalist. Today, my byline appears in Teen Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Cosmopolitan. A segment I authored aired on This American Life. But there was a time when no one wanted to hear from a woman who had spent nearly nine years in solitary confinement in Texas. There was a time when my voice, and the voices of countless women suffering alongside me, seemed destined to disappear into silence.

Solitary Watch listened. They didn’t just listen. They believed that what I had witnessed mattered. They understood that the weekly suicides, the brutal assaults by staff, the screams of women drowning in untreated mental illness deserved more than my silent tears. They encouraged me to channel my rage onto paper, to transform my grief into testimony. They gave me the tools to dismantle the dangerous lie that those of us in the hole are the worst of the worst.

Before Solitary Watch, I carried the weight of my friends’ deaths like stones in my chest. I watched women hang themselves with bedsheets. I heard bones crack against concrete walls. I witnessed human beings reduced to animals in cages, their minds fracturing under the pressure of endless isolation. The system counted on our stories dying with us, buried in the administrative segregation units scattered across this country. Solitary Watch refused to let that happen. They offered me something I thought I had lost forever: purpose.

Writing for them became more than journalism. It became my lifeline, my way of ensuring that my friends’ deaths weren’t in vain, that their suffering would be documented and their humanity restored through words. Every article I published was a small act of resistance against a system designed to erase us.

As a monthly Contributing Writer for Solitary Watch, I have written about the unique horrors women face in isolation. I have documented the denial of menstrual products, the sexual harassment that intensifies when you cannot escape, the forced separation of mothers from newborns. I have chronicled the way mental illness is punished rather than treated, how self-harm becomes the only language some women have left. I have given readers a window into a world that many prefer to pretend doesn’t exist.

This work must continue. The fight to end solitary confinement cannot succeed in darkness. We cannot dismantle what we refuse to see. Solitary Watch understands this fundamental truth. They have built a platform where the people society most wants to ignore become impossible to dismiss. They have transformed victims into witnesses, prisoners into journalists, silence into testimony.

Solitary Watch didn’t just give me a platform. They gave me back my voice when the state tried to take it away. They encouraged me to provide an unflinching window into the brutal, shocking, torturous system of solitary confinement as it exists in women’s prisons, a reality that remains largely invisible even as we debate criminal justice reform. Because of them, the void speaks back.

NEWSMATCH MEANS ALL DONATIONS ARE DOUBLED THROUGH DECEMBER 31!

If you or someone you know can afford to give this season, every dollar—up to $1,000—will be doubled with NewsMatch.

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