While it never uses the term “solitary confinement,” the front-page story in yesterday’s New York Times titled “Beyond Guantánamo, a Web of Prisons for Terrorism Inmates” is in effect a survey of long-term solitary at the federal level. The article describes “an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back […]
Solitary Watch was among the many co-sponsors of a public panel discussion on “Isolation Units within U.S. Prisons,” organized and hosted by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was held in San Francisco on April 5. The following report on the event comes from David Id, a reporter and editor for San Francisco Bay Area Indymedia. You can listen […]
Public Intelligence, a web-based project that describes itself as “an international consortium of independent researchers who wish to aggregate and defend public information while maintaining its accessibility around the globe,” has published a series of documents relating to the Communications Management Units at two federal prison. As we’ve written before, these “experimental” units, sometimes referred to as […]
In response to questions at his September 10 press conference, President Obama spoke about his failure to fulfill his clear campaign promise to close the military prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He blamed fear and “political rhetoric” for blocking his plan to move Gitmo detainees to prisons in on U.S. soil. In the course of […]
Today we’re cross-posting an entry from my blog Unsilent Generation, because of its relevance to an issue we’ve written about before: environmental and animal rights activists placed in federal supermax Communications Management Units (CMUs) under the vastly overreactive Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA). The gist of this is that if you pursue some modest reforms through […]
We’ve written before about Communications Management Units, the federal prison wings where inmates are kept not only in solitary confinement but in a new type of extreme isolation, with severely curtailed ability to communicate with one another as well as with the outside world. The Bureau of Prisons now proposes to make these units permanent. Today is the last […]
Part of Obama’s plan for fulfilling his campaign promise to close Guantanamo calls for moving a piece of the notorious detention camp, virtually intact, onto mainland American soil. In a letter sent to members of Congress this week, a coalition including the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and the Center for Constitutional Rights warned against this portion of the White House plan for Gitmo detainees, which the groups believe “could […]
The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in D.C. on behalf of five prisoners held in solitary confinement in the “Communications Management Units” (CMUs) of two federal prisons. The “experimental” units were supposedly designed to hold high-risk inmates, including terrorists, whose crimes warrant heightened monitoring of their external and […]