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 UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Crime Justice has revised its international standards for the treatment of prisoners. The rules call for solitary confinement to be limited to a […]
The American prison system is rife with euphemistic acronyms for the places where inmates are held in solitary confinement: Our prisons contain SHUs, SMUs, ASUs, CCRs, and most recently CMUs.* Now, a powerful two-part expose by Charles Pillar in the Sacramento Bee shows what goes on inside the BMUs–the “Behavior Modification Units”–in several California prisons. These units are supposed to combine SHU-style isolation and deprivation […]
Denny Walsh at the Sacramento Bee reported recently on a federal court case in California, where prisoners were placed in solitary based entirely on their race. When a couple of African American inmates assaulted staff, the prison decided that more than 100 others should be placed in lockdown because they, too, happened to be black. The case raises […]