• A Kaiser Health News report co-published with NPR details the trauma that survivors of solitary confinement carry with them years after their imprisonment. Pamela Winn, founder of nonprofit RestoreHER, which fights against mass-incarceration, describes her lasting mental health effects from spending eight months in solitary confinement. Her time in solitary continues to make it difficult […]
In 2013, Solitary Watch published an essay called “A Sentence Worse Than Death” by William Blake, who wrote about his experience of living in solitary confinement for what was at that time more than 25 years. It received more than half a million hits on this site alone, and has been widely reprinted and translated into several […]
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 […]
• According to the Mercury News, 57-year-old Todd Ashker filed a complaint about the “torturous” conditions in solitary at Kern Valley State Prison. Ashker was the lead plaintiff in a 2016 landmark settlement that ordered Ashker and hundreds of others to be released from solitary confinement at the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit (SHU). But years […]
• USA Today published an opinion piece by solitary survivors Johnny Perez, Jack Morris, and Pamela Winn, all of whom now advocate for the rights of incarcerated people. All three recounted their own experiences being trapped in prison for the holidays. Perez, the director of the U.S. Prisons Program at the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, […]
• The Arizona State Law Journal published an article written by law professor Laura Rovner and assistant professor Nicole Godfrey, entitled, “COVID-19 in American Prisons: Solitary Confinement is Not the Solution.” By mid-November, at least 182,593 incarcerated people in the U.S. have tested positive for the coronavirus and 1,412 incarcerated people have died. The article […]
• The Boston Globe reported that the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. attorney’s office conducted an investigation, finding “reasonable cause to believe” that the Massachusetts Department of Correction (MDOC) has been violating the rights of people with mental health conditions by failing to provide them with proper care. MDOC has been placing people in […]
• The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a second wave of the coronavirus is hitting Pennsylvania prisons and jails, despite a statewide lockdown in March, keeping people locked in their cells for over 23 hours a day. Claire Shubik-Richards, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society said, “What we’re seeing is a full-blown resurgence of […]
• The Georgetown Law Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, along with 68 current and former prosecutors and U.S. Department of Justice officials, filed a brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit calling for Dennis Hope to be released from solitary confinement in Texas. Hope has spent the last 26 years in […]
• Sara “Mariposa” Fonseca, who has been incarcerated for eighteen years in the California state prison system, including several years in solitary confinement, will be released from prison on September 11, 2020. During her lonest stinct in solitary, Fonseca wrote a play about her experience, in partnership with artist and activist Julia Steele Allen, called Mariposa […]
By Kenneth E. Hartman Kenneth Hartman, an award-winning writer and prison reform activist, served 38 years of a life without parole (LWOP) sentence in California state prisons before his sentence was commuted and he was granted parole and released. While in prison he founded the Other Death Penalty Project to work toward an end to […]