New this week from Solitary Watch:

The Lifelines to Solitary 2026 Match has successfully wrapped-up! Donors old and new stepped up to the challenge, and we reached our goal of $25,000, which will be doubled thanks to a very generous matching grant. To all the supporters, donors, friends, and family who helped make it happen: Thanks to you, we’ll be able to clear our waiting list for pen pals, and begin to reach out to many more people in solitary. Lifelines is a vital program that relies on the kindness of strangers to help provide the most isolated among us with the connection and care we all need and deserve. If you haven’t yet, you can learn about Lifelines, become a pen pal to someone in solitary confinement, or support Solitary Watch (it’s never too late!)

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In an article originally published by The American Prospect, Solitary Watch Senior Writer and Editor Katie Rose Quandt reports on efforts to repeal New York’s Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act, amid support for the practice among prison staff and their allies. Responding to limits imposed on solitary by the HALT Act, and following the summer 2025 statewide wildcat strike by corrections officers, correctional unions have doubled down on their claims that solitary confinement is a needed and necessary tool to isolate “dangerous people” and deter violence. This reinforces and weaponizes a false narrative about solitary, and sets a dangerous precedent for other states facing similar barriers to reform. In contrast, the nonprofit group Amend, among others, offers examples of successful alternatives to solitary that reduce prison violence. In New York, Amend has proposed creating a panel of senior staff, incarcerated people, and other stakeholders to suggest improvements in the implementation of the HALT Act. Eldon Vail, who helped reform Washington state’s prison system, argues that in these situations “you continue to try to learn from things that go wrong, but you don’t abandon the principle and say, ‘Well, this didn’t work because one incident happened.” The American Prospect/Solitary Watch

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

“She had a smirk on her face. She knew what was going on. She knew all these people were watching. She knew it was very humiliating,” said Karla Padilla of the time a female guard at FCI Dublin forced her to strip, squat, and cough inside the prison’s chapel while she was menstruating and five male guards watched. Prior to its closure in 2024 due to rampant sexual abuse, women at the California federal prison lived in constant fear of being sent to solitary confinement if they disobeyed or refused these searches. Argued to be a necessary security protocol, strip searches are more often another form of gender-based violence used to abuse incarcerated women or punish them for resisting. Although FCI Dublin’s closure resulted in a nationwide consent decree forcing oversight of other federal women’s prisons, this acknowledgement does not undo the harms, especially the numerous suicides, caused by the pervasive culture of sexual exploitation. With threats of Dublin’s reopening as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility, advocates across the country continue to push for restrictions on strip searches and promote alternative security measures. In These Times

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Illinois prisons now restrict electronic tablet access for people in solitary confinement, leaving them to “just look at a wall all day.” In addition to being unable to access legal materials and educational programming, people in solitary can no longer communicate with family through tablets. Howard “Ken” Ellis, who spent six months in solitary at Menard Correctional Center, claims that access to tablets was the “one thing that [kept] him calm and at peace,” saying “we are human so we are prone to make mistakes along the way as long as we learn from them.” The new policy ends audio-visual “privileges” upon entering solitary unless required by a mental health professional, or unless a person appeals after 60 consecutive days in solitary. In response, 25 men have gone on a hunger strike at the Lawrence Correctional Center. WTTW

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For decades, Jimmie Duncan spent 23 hours a day in solitary confinement on death row at Louisiana State Penitentiary Angola, often in 115-degree heat. With only sporadic glimpses of the world outside his cell, Duncan’s concept of time deteriorated alongside his health. Duncan would get out of bed not knowing if he was left or right-handed anymore, and there were days when he even forgot his own name. He also experienced severe heart pain from a bacterial infection. Although a judge ordered air conditioning be installed throughout death row, the decison was overturned by the federal appeals court. Instead of losing all hope, Duncan said the brutal conditions hardened his resolve to keep fighting and to never abandon his claim of innocence. Finally, at the end of June this year, the Louisiana Supreme Court threw out Duncan’s conviction, and he is now working to bring attention to the flawed criminal justice system in Louisiana and the conditions in Angola prison. ProPublica

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Valentina, a transgender woman in immigration detention, spent nine days in solitary confinement at Arizona’s Eloy Detention Center after being accused of “propositioning someone for sex.” Forcibly housed in facilities opposite their gender, trans immigrants, especially women, are often subjected to solitary confinement as a “horrible moral punishment.” Under the Trump administration, prison and immigration detention agencies are not required to provide gender-related healthcare, which can be unhealthy or deadly for those whose hormone treatments are suddenly cut off. Tucson Sentinel

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With temperatures rising every summer, there has only been an increase in extreme and dangerous conditions for the nearly 2 million people in carceral facilities across the country. In Colorado, this past July was the second hottest on record, and the internal temperature of south-facing cells reached above 90 degrees for days. While some facilities use fans and “swamp coolers” to keep common areas cool, there is no consistent legal standard for climate control inside prisons, and most do not have air conditioning. Attempts to mitigate the heat become almost nonexistent in solitary confinement, where incarcerated people have less access to showers, water, and very few opportunities to leave their cells. As weather gets more extreme, researchers are trying to bring more attention to the worsening climate conditions that incarcerated people face. CU Boulder Today

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New Jersey’s corrections officers union is encouraging lawmakers to expand solitary confinement in state prisons, arguing it will help reduce assaults on guards. Currently, state laws prohibit solitary confinement for vulnerable people and limit its use for everyone else to no more than 20 hours a day, for 20 consecutive days or 30 days during a 60-day period. Officers and unions say the label of “vulnerable” is too easily acquired, claiming “all you have to do is say you’re LGBTQ and you’re vulnerable.” The state has already implemented numerous initiatives to improve officer safety, including hiring more staff, increasing staff protections, creating incentives for good behavior, increasing efforts to prevent and intercept illicit substances, and removing more items from restricted housing units that could be used as weapons. Rev. J. Amos Caley, an organizer with the New Jersey Prison Justice Watch, argues “when you treat people like animals, you can expect that their behavior is going to be in accordance with the desperation and recklessness with which they’ve been treated.” New Jersey Monitor

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New York prison staff are leaving their jobs at an increasingly high rate. According to correctional unions, the culprit is unsafe working conditions created by limits to solitary confinement under New York’s HALT Solitary Confinement Act. Gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman is campaigning on repealing HALT, saying “we got along fine without [it].” Officers who have left their jobs say increasing risk of exposure to synthetic drugs is also to blame. Prison reform advocates argue that rolling back the HALT Act “would make conditions worse for everyone in prison and do nothing to solve the staffing crisis.” Wandra Bertram from Prison Policy Initiative says that “instead of expanding solitary, the state should keep shrinking the prison system by closing facilities, condensing the inmate population, and releasing elder inmates.” NCPR

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“I look like the Walmart version of Noah from ‘The Notebook,’” wrote Trevor Hendrix in a letter to his mother after spending five years of his nine-year sentence in a 12-square-foot solitary confinement cell at Washington State Penitentiary. During Hendrix’s time in solitary, he reconnected with his childhood friend Micaela Romero, who studies biology and epigenetics at Washington’s Green River College. Romero’s work uses bumblebees to study the effects of isolation on the brain, showing that social isolation significantly disrupts brain development and alters bees’ social behaviors. Her studies demonstrate how animals, including but not limited to humans, rely on social environments and cooperation to survive and thrive. PRISM

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