It was May 2020, and Esther Arias was finally going to be released from prison. For years of her 14-year sentence, she had held out hope that she would win her appeal and surprise her four kids one day by picking them up from school. But by the time her now-adult children came to the […]
• New York City has agreed to pay out nearly $5 million to people who were placed in solitary confinement immediately upon arriving Rikers under the “old time policy,” whereby former prisoners who were released before completing disciplinary solitary sentences, were forced to finish them if they were rearrested. According to the New York Daily News, […]
• The Federal Bureau of Prisons has systematically violated the Eighth Amendment rights of people with mental health issues locked up at Lewisburg prison in Pennsylvania, according to a lawsuit filed by the DC Prisoners’ Project of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. “The isolation of prisoners with mental illness and […]
• Social entrepreneur Marcus Bullock and writer Dwayne Betts, who both spent time in solitary confinement as kids, wrote about their experiences for The Hill. “The hole became a rite of passage. A cauldron meant to destroy. And of course, the loneliness that seeps into your bones does not leave — regardless of what follows.” […]
At the Lincoln Hills School for Boys (LHS), a juvenile correctional facility in far northern Wisconsin, two entire buildings called the Krueger Unit and the Roosevelt Unit exist solely for the purpose of holding children in solitary confinement for 22 to 23 hours a day. Each unit holds two-dozen isolation cells, which measure seven by […]
Perhaps no story captures the injustice and horror of juvenile solitary confinement more than that of Kalief Browder, the Bronx sixteen-year-old who was wrongfully accused of stealing a backpack in 2010 and spent three years on Rikers Island awaiting trial. Two of his three years on Rikers were spent in solitary confinement, where Kalief was […]
• United Nations representatives and human rights experts are calling on governments to implement the Revised Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also know as the Nelson Mandela Rules. “The revised rules have more specific provisions on solitary confinement, defining it as the confinement of prisoners for 22 hours or more a day […]
• The Guardian launched “6×9: A virtual experience of solitary confinement,” a project for which Solitary Watch served as Consulting Producers. A host of accompanying articles about isolation included an introduction to solitary written by Solitary Watch’s Jean Casella and Sal Rodriguez. • Other key material published on the Guardian included an op-ed by Cory Booker […]
• The Crime Report published a report from a two-day colloquium about the use of segregation that occurred last fall and involved corrections agencies, academic experts and advocates. The colloquium aimed to “further a national consensus on ending the over-use of extreme isolation in prisons.” • A Colorado statistician who accused state prison officials of manipulating statistics […]
• RH Reality Check published an article about trans people in prison “suffer[ing] rape, coercion, denial of medical treatment.” The piece also discusses the frequency with which trans people are placed in solitary confinement, ostensibly for their own protection. • San Francisco is considering placing limits on the time incarcerated youth can spend in solitary confinement. The […]
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. • The Chronicles of Social Change published an article, called Holding on to Humanity, about “a social worker’s visit with youth offenders at Pelican Bay State Prison.” • Fresno County has […]