Dr. Craig Haney has investigated the psychological effects of prison conditions for more than 40 years, and has spent time in dozens of supermax prisons and solitary confinement units. But the conditions in the Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison’s solitary confinement facility, the Special Management Unit (SMU)—where incarcerated men swallow hacksaw blades and their own […]
Recent landmark court decisions in cases challenging solitary confinement in Canada’s federal penitentiaries could reverberate beyond Canadian prison walls. In two cases launched by prison justice and civil liberties organizations, federal courts found solitary confinement as it is practiced today to be unconstitutional. The rulings would force significant changes in the Canadian penal system—but incarcerated people and their […]
In 2013, tens of thousands of people incarcerated throughout California launched a hunger strike to protest the polices of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) around indefinite isolation in solitary confinement (also known as indeterminate sentences). The strike lasted nearly 60 days and ended only after state lawmakers promised to hold hearings around […]
• A federal lawsuit was filed on behalf of six women against Alameda County, the Alameda County Sheriff’s office, and individual deputies for the alleged “barbaric” and “inhumane” treatment of pregnant women held at the Santa Rita Jail in California. According to the East Bay Times, the lawsuit claims that one woman was misdiagnosed with […]
Imagine row after row of cell doors that rarely open and row after row of people trapped behind those doors, in small cells, day after day. Imagine having to hold most of your conversations by shouting through your cell door at voices whose faces you cannot see; imagine trying to sleep as a cacophony of […]
• According to the Trentonian, James Covington, a physically and mentally disabled man held at the Doylestown detention center in Pennsylvania for unpaid fines, claims that he suffered an unprovoked racist attack when three white corrections officers picked on him for his height, called him the N-word, assaulted him to the point of breaking his […]
In a dissenting opinion written earlier this year, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that “If extended solitary confinement alone raises serious constitutional questions, then 20 years of solitary confinement, all the while under threat of execution, must raise similar questions, and to a rare degree, and with particular intensity.” Yet in a majority of […]
• The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (IG) found in an investigation, released September 29, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents failed to report to ICE headquarters when they place individuals with mental illness in solitary confinement. The investigation, according to an article by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), […]
Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, a former Black Panther who escaped from Pennsylvania prisons twice in the 1970s, was held in solitary confinement for nearly thirty-three years, including twenty-two consecutive years, from 1991 to 2014. During that time, Shoatz was in confined to his cell, in complete social isolation, for 23-24 hours a day. He contends that his time […]
Sometimes overshadowed by the anti-solitary movement in neighboring New York, activists in New Jersey have been fighting a battle of their own against the use of extreme isolation in state prisons and county jails. Earlier this year, they had some success when Governor Chris Christie signed into law a major juvenile justice bill that, among others […]