• 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 […]
• The Tacoma News Tribune reported that immigrants detained at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC), an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Tacoma, Washington, have engaged in hunger strikes to protest separation from their children, inhumane conditions at the facility, and a forced labor program, among other concerns. Two of the hunger strikers, one of […]
• East Bay Express reported that as of Friday, October 20, 125 out of 412 individuals incarcerated in Glenn Dyer Jail in Oakland had entered their sixth day of a hunger strike. At the forefront of the demands is an end to indefinite solitary confinement. While the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson claims isolation is […]
• The Arthur Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School published a report entitled, “Variations in the Housing of Individuals Sentenced to Death,” which in part looks at the use of solitary on death row. • At a 10-day hearing regarding the constitutionality of a federal capital case, defense witnesses testified that the long-term […]
• The Delaware Supreme Court has reversed a previous ruling, in a decision that will land a person who was formally on death row, back in solitary confinement. Isaiah McCoy, 28, is awaiting a new trial after the Supreme Court overturned his convicrion. McCoy’s lawyers had successfully argued in front of a lower court that […]
• The isolation of transgender women has been in the media since Netflix released its fifth season of Orange is the New Black, including with high-profile interviews on the issue by Laverne Cox and CeCe McDonald. To learn more about the experiences of transgender women in solitary confinement, read an August 2014 Solitary Watch investigation about […]
• A Nebraska outlet profiled the experiences of Jacob Rushner. As a teenager, Rushner was kept in solitary confinement for 41 days at the Douglas County Youth Center in Omaha. • A prison captain who was fired in the wake of Michael Kerr’s 2014 death cannot get his job back, a North Carolina Court of Appeals had […]
According to reports this morning from inside the U.S. Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, CO, eight to nine people held in the super-secret H-Unit are on hunger strike and are being force-fed. While run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the unit has strong FBI involvement in its management. In November of […]
The use of solitary confinement in California prisons can amount to “cruel punishment, even torture.” This is according to a recent news release from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in which UN Special Rapporteur on torture Juan Méndez addresses the issue of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and specifically those in California. The statement […]
Robert Lowell called it “man’s lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die”–the ability of human beings to give their lives willingly in service of a cause greater than their individual selves. But the state of California, with the approval of a federal judge, now has license to deny even this last, most desperate human right […]
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, […]