The following roundup features noteworthy news, reports and opinions on solitary confinement from the past week that have not been covered in other Solitary Watch posts. • At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Robert King of the Angola 3, University of California Santa Cruz Professor Craig Haney and […]
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Videos Show Abuse of Mentally Ill in California Prisons
Videos of California prison guards pumping pepper spray into the cells of prisoners – some of whom were naked and screaming, all of whom suffer from mental illness – and then forcibly extracting them from their cells were shown at trial in a federal court room in Sacramento on Tuesday. The trial, part of a federal case […]
Seven Days in Solitary [7/14/13]
The following roundup features noteworthy news, reports and opinions on solitary confinement from the past week that have not been covered in other Solitary Watch posts. • According to the tally kept by The Miami Herald, 81 of the 166 men held captive at Guantanamo are now hunger-striking, with 45 being force-fed and three hospitalized. The New York Times reports that, […]
Seven Days in Solitary [6/16/13]
The following roundup features noteworthy news, reports and opinions on solitary confinement from the past week that have not been covered in other Solitary Watch posts. • According to the tally kept by The Miami Herald, 104 of the 166 men held captive at Guantanamo are now on hunger strike, with 44 being force-fed and two hospitalized. The Miami Herald also […]
California Assembly Reviews Solitary Confinement Policies As Prisoners Threaten New Hunger Strike
On Monday, February 25th, the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, chaired by Assembly Member Tom Ammiano, held a hearing on the state’s Security Housing Units (SHUs). The hearing comes 18 months after the committee held a similar hearing prompted by a three-week long hunger strike in June 2011 that involved thousands of California prisoners across […]
Prisoners in Solitary Confinement in California Respond to Prison Policy Reforms
Prisoners in California’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) have offered their opinions of the recent reforms of the California prison system’s controversial gang validation policies. In correspondences with Solitary Watch, people held in SHU at Pelican Bay and Corcoran prisons have consistently been critical of the reforms, which among other things reform the gang validation point system […]
Family of California Prisoner Who Died on Hunger Strike Speaks Out
The family of Christian Gomez, the 27-year-old prisoner who died while on hunger strike at California’s Corcoran State Prison, is speaking out about the loss of their family member in the hope that similar incidents in the future are avoided. In a phone call with Solitary Watch, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Terry Thornton confirmed that Gomez […]
Update: Prisoner Dies During Hunger Strike at California's Corcoran State Prison
Update (February 13): Theresa Cisneros, Public Information Officer at Corcoran, confirmed to Solitary Watch that Christian Gomez, 27, was hunger striking at the time of his death in the Administrative Segregation Unit. Official autopsy results still pending. Nancy Kincaid of California Correctional Health Care Services told Solitary Watch that Gomez had been “medically monitored for hunger strike […]
California Considers New Rules for Solitary Confinement in State Prisons
The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition today reports on the content of a meeting held in late December with an undersecretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), regarding the future of the state’s Security Housing Units (SHUs). Prisoners in the SHUs at Pelican Bay, Corcoran, and elsewhere are held in round-the-clock solitary […]
Voices from Solitary: Christmas in the Hole, 1968
by Alan CYA #65085 Editors’ Note: In this memoir, the author–who prefers to be identified only by his first name and California Youth Authority number–recalls a Christmas spent as a 17-year-old inmate in the juvenile jail then known as the Preston School of Industry, since renamed the Preston Youth Correctional Facility. Opened in 1894, Preston was […]
Voices from Solitary: "There Must Never Be A Time When We Fail To Protest"
The following is a series of excerpts from letters written by a prisoner who has been in solitary confinement in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison for nearly two decades. He participated in the July hunger strike for changes to conditions in and policies governing California’s SHUs, and resumed during the second phase of the strike in September. The […]