• The New Orleans Lens reported that the non-profit Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI) released a report, claiming that prison administrators and staff responded inadequately to the coronavirus pandemic, causing unnecessary death and suffering. The report found, “Principally, correctional officials [in Louisiana] responded to COVID- 19 or exposure to the virus by placing people in solitary confinement or putting portions […]
Photo Requests from Solitary (PRFS) is an ongoing project hosted by Solitary Watch that invites men and women held in solitary confinement to request a photograph of anything at all, real or imagined, and then finds an artist to make the image. The astonishing range of requests includes “the freestanding columns at the Great Temple of Amun, […]
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. • A New York Times investigation found that men at the Clinton Correctional Facility in New York faced retribution after the escape of two individuals earlier this year. Dozens […]
The history of solitary confinement shows it to be largely an American invention. In a blog post that accompanied the March 2009 publication of Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article on solitary confinement, Mary Hawthorne described its genesis at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia at the end of the 18th century. This Quaker-inspired experiment in incarceration […]