• As reported by the Baton Rouge Advocate, the Vera Institute of Justice’s Safe Alternatives to Segregation Initiative last week released its report on Louisiana’s use of solitary confinement last week. The report, based on two years of research by Vera in cooperation with the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (LADOC), found more than 17 percent […]
• The Appeal reported that incarcerated hunger strikers protesting the use of solitary confinement and “retaliatory transfers” have been kept in appalling conditions at Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama. An incarcerated organizer described what happened when the water was shut off in cells: “They was forced to stay in a cell with urine in the commode […]
• According to WBRC, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released their investigation of the Alabama Department of Corrections, which found “violations are severe, systemic, and exacerbated by serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision.” The report found a “high level of violence that is too common, cruel, of an unusual nature, and pervasive” and “the use […]
• The WAMU radio show “1A” hosted Terry Kupers, a leading expert on the psychological effects of solitary confinement, and Robert Hood, former warden of the ADX federal supermax in Florence, Colorado, for an episode addressing the reality incarcerated people face at ADX under conditions of severe isolation. Kupers, who has visited 30 supermaxes across the […]
• As temperatures in New York dropped to ten degrees last week, the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn—a facility operated by the federal Bureau of Prisons that houses 1,600 mostly pretrial individuals—lost power and administrators locked down the facility for several days, leaving many detained individuals without heat, lighting, warm meals, clean clothing, medical […]
In the United States, being locked away in long-term solitary confinement is arguably the worst thing that can legally be done to a human being, short of the death penalty. Solitary’s deeply harmful effects on emotional, psychological, and physical well-being are now so well-documented as to be irrefutable, and a growing international consensus equates the […]
• KOB4 reported that Keith Kosirog and Adonus Encinias, two men held in solitary confinement at the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas, committed suicide last Sunday. Albuquerque attorney Matt Coyte, who has represented individuals held in solitary, noted that evidence showed Kosirog had a psychiatric disability. Coyte expressed disappointment that Gov. Susana Martinez had vetoed […]
Dear Readers, Supporters, Colleagues, and Friends: We started Solitary Watch, nine years ago this month, simply because we felt we had no other choice. Through our reporting on the case of the Angola 3, we had learned about the best-kept secret of the U.S. criminal justice system: In prisons and jails across the country, tens […]
• According to Jeffrey Kaye writing on Medium, the ACLU obtained recently declassified documents revealing collaboration since the early 2000s between the CIA’s Office of Medical Service (OMS) and the Federal Bureau of Prison (BOP) in sharing interrogation and torture techniques used at the CIA’s Salt Pit black site in Afghanistan and the BOP’s supermax ADX Florence […]
This week, voters elected a new host of Democratic legislators and governors, flipping the balance of power in many state governments and in the U.S. House of Representatives. Although Democrats in Congress, in particular, will have their hands full dealing with the Trump White House, elected officials who find the time and wherewithal to address […]
• San Jose Inside reported on the settlement of the 2015 class action lawsuit Chavez v. County of Santa Clara, which challenged the use of solitary confinement at San Jose’s Main Jail as unconstitutional. The lawsuit alleged that many of those held at the Main Jail had not yet been convicted of the crime with which they […]