This article is published in partnership with the Crime Report. During Tashon’s incarceration, prison staff used one word so often to describe him that it became routine. He heard it while having a breakdown in his cell. He heard it when he requested an appointment with a psychologist or asked to be sent to the […]
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 […]
A new report released yesterday highlights the disturbing use of solitary confinement on incarcerated individuals with mental illness. Locked Up and Locked Down: Segregation of Inmates with Mental Illness, released by Disability Rights Washington, details the widespread practice of housing men, women, and children with mental illness in solitary confinement. The report shows that prisons […]
A settlement reached last week in a class-action lawsuit regarding the solitary confinement of individuals with mental illness in Indiana’s prisons promises sweeping reforms that will affect hundreds of people. The suit against the Indiana Department Of Correction (DOC) has been ongoing since 2008, when the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana (ACLU) and the […]
Some of Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable citizens—people facing criminal charges who are not competent to stand trial because of mental disabilities—have begun a class action lawsuit over the state’s provision of mental health treatment. Last month, eleven plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU of Pennsylvania, sued the heads of a state agency and of the two state […]
“Across the United States, staff working in jails and prisons have used unnecessary, excessive, and even malicious force on prisoners with mental disabilities such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.” This is the conclusion of Callous and Cruel: Use of Force Against Inmates with Mental Disabilities in US Jails and Prisons a Human Rights Watch report […]
On July 17, 2012, Brandon Palakovic, 23, committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell while housed in a solitary confinement unit at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Cresson, a Pennsylvania prison that has since closed its doors. Nearly two years later, on July 8, 2014, Palakovic’s parents filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PADOC). […]
Out of Sight, Out Mind: The following infographic shoes the numbers of people with mental illness held in solitary confinement in the state of Colorado. <> *Page compiled by Lisa Dawson
Recently obtained videos which have been exposed to the public show corrections officers using extreme force on incarcerated people suffering from various forms of mental illness. Attack on a Suicidal Man at Denver City Jail Footage of one such video (shown below), taken in September of last year and later obtained by The Colorado Independent through an […]
A graphic video (shown below) recently leaked to the public shows a team of corrections officers make liberal use of prison torture tactics on a man who was, at the time of the incident, incarcerated at Maine Correctional Center and had been held in solitary confinement for two months. A still of the explicit footage, originally […]
A reader alerted us to an excellent article that appeared in March in the Missoula Independent under the headline “For the Mentally Ill Behind Bars in Montana, Life Goes from Bad to Worse.” This long article tracks the stories of several young men who landed in prison–and ultimately, in the hole–due to their erratic and […]
When he was five years old, Adam Hall tried to burn down his family home outside Utica in upstate New York. Afterwards, he drew a picture of his family having a happy reunion in heaven. Adam’s mother, Carole Hall, knew the incident was a cry for help–and possibly an early suicide attempt–but she had no […]
One of our very first posts, when we started the Solitary Watch blog, concerned a suicidal Montana teenager locked in solitary confinement because he was deemed a discipline problem after he damaged prison property. It’s a story so gut-wrenching that we still often tell it as an example of how isolation becomes torture for many […]
Yesterday we reported on the federal class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU, Prison Law Office, and others on behalf of inmates in Arizona’s state prisons. The suit claims that inmates are subject to cruel and unusual punishment due to lack of adequate medical and mental health care, and inhumane conditions in solitary confinement. The Arizona […]
Research by an advocacy group found that inmates with mental illness in South Carolina’s prisons receive inadequate care and “spend an inordinate amount of time in solitary confinement.” The group has sued the state’s Corrections Department in a case that went to court this week. The Associated Press reports: A Columbia-based advocacy group that sued South […]
In what promises to be “the first in an occasional series of columns and editorials on mental illness and Michigan’s criminal justice and mental health care system,” the Detroit Free Press has published a powerful piece by Jeff Gerritt on the fate of prisoners with mental illness, who end up languishing in solitary–or worse. According to […]
“Dear America” wrote Anthony Gay, who is being held in solitary confinement in Tamms supermax prison in Illinois, “It is like this place is designed to psychologically kill you. How could America be so cruel to its own people?… Is there a need to psychologically kill prisoners?” In Gay’s case, his lawyers claim, a seven-year term […]
A lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee claims that one prisoner at a privately run Nashville jail was placed in solitary confinement, where he was denied health care and did not shower, exercise, or leave his filthy cell for nine months. The suit, filed after a guard blew the whistle on the inmate’s condition, suggests a […]
Yesterday, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) issued a compilation of staggering statistics on the criminalization of people with mental illness in the United States. As NAMI points out, “Over the past 20 years, state spending on correctional systems has increased 350 percent from $10 billion to $45 billion,” while the same states have cut […]
A story on Thursday in the Alexandria (Virginia) Gazette Packet begins: “Did health-care providers at city jail leave a mentally ill inmate to die in 2008? That’s the allegation at the center of a wrongful death lawsuit filed last week in the Eastern District of Virginia, charging the jail’s medical services violated the constitutional provision against […]
A reader recently called our attention to an article that appeared back in April in the Salem (Oregon) Statesman Journal, titled “Oregon State Penitentiary Adapts to Mental Illness.” According to the Oregon Department of Corrections, about half of the state’s 14,000 prisoners— 6,797—are mentally ill. This is ten times greater than the population of the state’s primary psychiatric […]
A recent article in the Charlottesville, Virginia, weekly C-Ville exposes conditions at the nearby Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women. The report is based in part on statements from representatives of the Virginia Insitutionalized Persons Project of the Legal Aid Justice Center. Project director Helen Trainor and long-time volunteer Cynthia Neff have talked to inmates and read hundreds of letters […]
A potentially far-reaching federal lawsuit filed last week claims that a vulnerable young man was so ravaged by his 600 days in solitary confinement at Virginia’s notorious Red Onion prison that he lost the ability to speak coherently, recognize his own mother, or understand who or where he was. The suit names as defendants not […]
On May 31, 2016, a settlement was released in the longstanding class-action lawsuit between South Carolina-based Protection and Advocacy for People with Disabilities Inc (P&A) and the South Carolina Department of Corrections. If approved by a judge, the settlement would benefit the approximately 3,500 individuals with mental illness incarcerated in South Carolina. P&A and SCDC […]
Oregon corrections officials have agreed to reduce the isolation of people with serious mental illness in the Behavioral Health Unit (BHU) at Oregon State Penitentiary, settling over a year of discussions with Disability Rights Oregon (DRO), the state’s federally designated Protection and Advocacy System. The agreement, signed January 8, has the potential to significantly improve the […]
People held in Illinois prisons will receive an improved level of mental health care in coming years, thanks to a major class action settlement in late December. In the case of Ashoor Rasho v. John Baldwin, the Illinois Department of Corrections agrees to: Hire 300 new mental health workers, as well as additional security and […]
Last month, the Community Legal Aid Society Inc. (CLASI), along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), filed a lawsuit against the head of the Delaware Department of Correction (DOC) over the department’s treatment of incarcerated people suffering from mental illness. CLASI argues that the DOC’s current practices violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. […]
The following article originally appeared on Counterpunch. A Solitary Watch investigation into the sites of the federal government’s two “supermax” facilities—the first open for two decades, the second slated to open soon—reveals a number of possible serious environmental hazards. The prisons, ADX Florence in Colorado and AUSP Thomson in Illinois, are built to hold men […]
As the year ended, The Marshall Project provided a comprehensive roundup of reforms to solitary confinement practices across the country. Eli Hager and Gerald Rich write: “In 2014 one of the most controversial practices in criminal justice, solitary confinement, faced unprecedented challenges. As a result of legislation or lawsuits, ten states adopted 14 measures aimed at […]