Mathew Davis is in prison at the Western Illinois Correctional Center, where he is serving a life sentence. He was first incarcerated nearly two decades ago, in 2004, when he was 24. He is now 42. Davis previously wrote for Solitary Watch about his experience surviving extreme isolation in prison. His past writings can also be […]
After years of unsuccessful attempts to secure funding, the Arkansas Department of Corrections (ADC) recently obtained the go-ahead to add more beds to the state’s prison system. In March, state lawmakers passed legislation dedicating $75 million to add 498 high-security beds to the North Central Unit, a men’s prison in Calico Rock. Advocates like those […]
This is the third in a new series of monthly dispatches from Solitary Watch. COVID-19 infection rates continue to rise and fall. Death rates for vaccinated people, however, remain relatively low, so many, if not most, Americans are unmasking and reclaiming the freedom of their pre-pandemic lives. Still, a virus that persists for this long […]
This article was published in partnership with Truthout. When the Omicron variant of COVID-19 spiked across the nation in late 2021, approximately 1,350 people incarcerated in the District of Columbia Jail were sequestered in solitary confinement conditions in their cells for 22 hours a day. “It was dehumanizing,” said Russell Rowe, of the repeated COVID lockdowns […]
The following piece is written by Juan Moreno Haines, an award-winning journalist incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison. Haines is an editor at the San Quentin News, a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, a past recipient of a Solitary Confinement Reporting Project grant, and a Contributing Writer at Solitary Watch. Since the COVID-19 […]
This exposé of abusive practices at the ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, was written by Renée Feltz, who received a grant from the Solitary Confinement Reporting Project, administered by Solitary Watch with funding from the Vital Projects Fund. Feltz is the Co-Director of Democracy Now! News and an award-winning investigative journalist who has covered criminal justice and […]
Juan Moreno Haines is an award-winning journalist incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison , a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, and a regular contributor to Solitary Watch. On May 30, San Quentin had zero cases of the coronavirus, but after prison officials transferred 121 men from the California Institution for Men at Chino […]
For much of this year, Solitary Watch has been working with Juan Moreno Haines, Senior Editor at the award-winning prison publication the San Quentin News. A recipient of a grant through our Solitary Confinement Reporting Project, he is now a Contributing Writer. Haines, 63, continued reporting even as he fought COVID-19 from a solitary confinement cell during the […]
Editor’s Note: Juan Moreno Haines is an award-winning journalist incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. In February, before the pandemic visibly hit the United States, Haines wrote a prescient piece that was published in The Appeal (and supported by a grant from the Solitary Confinement Reporting Project) documenting how San Quentin […]
This afternoon, Unlock the Box: The National Campaign To End Solitary Confinement released a report based on research and analysis by Solitary Watch. The press release for the report follows. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Washington, D.C.—The Unlock the Box Campaign announced today the […]
In early April, as reports of deaths from COVID-19 began to emerge from U.S. prisons and jails, Aaron Campell posted a desperate 20-minute Facebook Live video shot using a contraband cell phone. The video showed sick people gasping and coughing on his unit in the low-security federal FCI Elkton in Ohio, and one of the […]
The following piece originally appeared in the Opinion section of The Guardian on March 30. • • • • • On Wednesday, March 18, while New York was emerging as the national epicenter for the novel coronavirus, a desperate message was dispatched from the city’s notorious Rikers Island. “A storm is coming,” tweeted Dr. Ross […]
On April 1, the federal Bureau of Prisons activated its first nationwide lockdown in nearly 25 years. In an effort to limit the spread of the coronavirus, the nearly 146,000 men and women held in BOP facilities are spending 14 days confined to their cells for up to 24 hours a day, in what is […]
New from Solitary Watch: A new fact sheet from Solitary Watch looks at the relationship between solitary confinement and prison violence. The fact sheet, written by Sara Rain Tree, draws from a broad range of research and reporting to debunk the myth that solitary reduces prison violence, and explores how limiting solitary can in fact […]
Incarcerated men on Texas death row filed a lawsuit challenging their placement in indefinite solitary confinement. The state’s male death row, which is housed in the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, has held men in near-total isolation since 1999, after a person escaped from death row. The lawsuit states that the men are locked in their […]
Yesterday, a three-week-long hunger strike by people in Texas prisons came to an end. The strikers were trying to draw attention to the use of solitary confinement in the state. At a time when there is a vigorous movement to end mass incarceration in the United States, it is worth remembering that imprisoned people who […]
Today, Unlock the Box released the first comprehensive report on legislation related to solitary confinement that has been passed or introduced in states and cities across the country, along with an interactive legislation tracking tool. Unlock the Box is “a coalition of organizations and movement leaders who partner with state and local campaigns across the […]
New from Solitary Watch: Katie Rose Quandt, senior contributing writer at Solitary Watch, reports on Republicans’ complaints on the treatment of January 6 defendants at the D.C. Jail. Republican legislators have vocally criticized the use of solitary confinement on those allegedly involved in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, but have remained silent […]
This article was published in partnership with Truthout. Republicans are not known for championing the rights of incarcerated people. Doing so would run counter to their purposefully cultivated “tough on crime” image, which often includes a penchant for harsh prison and jail conditions. But in the two years since the January 6 attack on the U.S. […]
New from Solitary Watch: • Director Jean Casella shares one of Solitary Watch’s first posts from 2009, “Santa Was in Solitary and Jesus Got the Death Penalty,” which tells us more about the two figures at the center of the Christmas holiday. Here in the United States, she writes, “Christians go to church to worship an […]
For 27 years, I’ve lived the cruel reality that is incarceration. I’ve experienced the relentless hypervigilance it creates, the isolation, the feeling of being forgotten and not cared for. I know that the “average American” rarely sees or hears authentic accounts of what I experience. This blindness/deafness to the toxicity of prison life—and of the […]
Today, at least a dozen men incarcerated at Nevada’s Ely State Prison entered the 14th day of a hunger strike protesting “the continued and extended use of solitary confinement.” They are not the first to take a courageous and desperate stand against solitary confinement using the only means available to them, and they will surely […]
A Note to Our Readers: Since its founding, Solitary Watch has maintained a correspondence with thousands of people in the deepest, darkest corners of the U.S. punishment system, cut off from human contact and out of sight of the public and the press. They have served as our eyes and ears as we report on […]
New from Solitary Watch: • Yesterday, Solitary Watch announced grants available to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated journalists to report on solitary confinement and other harsh and inhumane prison conditions from the inside out. The Ridgeway Reporting Project honors the legacy of the late investigative journalist and Solitary Watch founder James Ridgeway. The deadline for submissions is […]
The good people who support change in our highly unjust criminal justice system often see a sharp divide between prison abolition and prison reform. Some who are dedicated to ending mass incarceration have been known to ignore or spurn what are commonly known as “conditions issues” like solitary confinement, prison medical and mental health care, […]
This op-ed by Solitary Watch Contributing Writer Juan Moreno Haines appeared yesterday in the Los Angeles Times. Advocates almost succeeded this year in curbing the use of solitary confinement in California’s prisons and jails. The California Mandela Act, named after the long-imprisoned South African president, received the support it needed in August to pass the […]
New from Solitary Watch: • Angela Hattery and Earl Smith share an excerpt from their groundbreaking new book “Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement.” In this book, Hattery and Smith reveal the ways in which the structure of solitary confinement produces and fuels the conditions of […]
In 2010, the human rights lawyer Juan Méndez was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. To many people in the United States, despite the domestic history of torture, the word carries associations with faraway places and despotic regimes. But Méndez, who was himself tortured in his […]
New this week from Solitary Watch: • Type Investigations and The American Prospect published an investigation by Solitary Watch contributing writers Katie Rose Quandt and Juan Moreno Haines. Quandt and Haines investigated San Quentin State Prison’s continued use of its infamous Adjustment Center, a death row unit designed for solitary confinement, to house people who have […]