• On January 16, Paul Ford died in his solitary cell at Kilby Prison, the second incarcerated person in the custody of Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) to commit suicide this year. Although Ford had been diagnosed with a mood disorder and had attempted suicide several times before while in prison, his mental health screening for placement […]
Al Jazeera English’s media show, “The Listening Post,” has a feature on the challenges that journalists and advocates have faced exposing solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails—a hidden world that is home to some 100,000 people, but has been kept resolutely off-limits to the public and the press. The piece features Solitary Watch’s James […]
• The Guardian published an article on Anthony Ray Hinton’s recently released book The Sun Does Shine, in which he discusses his 30 years of wrongful imprisonment as a Black man in the Alabama prison system for three murders he did not commit. Hinton describes his years spent in solitary confinement, “barely able to breath in […]
• In the Burlington Free Press, Vermont’s Secretary of Human Services Al Gobeille claimed the state is in a “mental health crisis,” as it keeps running out of beds for those in urgent need of inpatient psychiatric treatment once they have entered the criminal justice system. For those awaiting the opening of a bed, the […]
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 federal judge approved the state of California’s plan to reduce the solitary confinement of prisoners suffering from mental illness. According to a recent story in The New York […]
Editor’s Note: The following prayers, along with more than a hundred others, were delivered to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation on Thursday. The same small selection of prayers was printed in Solitary Watch’s latest quarterly print edition, which goes out to some 800 individuals currently in solitary confinement. The complete collection of prayers […]
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 California judge has ruled that the state’s prisons violated the Constitution by using excess force against people with mental illness. State officials will now be required to make […]
The title of this post is the title of an article by Johns Hopkins student and Solitary Watch reporter/researcher Rachel M. Cohen, originally published on the website New Voices. It documents one part of the growing resistance to solitary confinement in the religious community, much of it spearheaded by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. If […]
Protestors outside the LA County Jail Solitary confinement was very much on the agenda during yesterday’s “Occupy for Prisoners”protests at more than a dozen sites around the country. This was particularly true in California, where recent prisoner hunger strikes have called attention to conditons in the state’s all-solitary Security Housing Units (SHUs) and Administrative Segregation […]
Originally formed, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, to address U.S. torture abroad, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture is now one of the leading groups dedicated to ending torture in U.S. prisons, with a specific focus on the widespread use and abuse of solitary confinement. Since its founding in 2006, according to the group, […]
Tonight, a coalition of human rights and civil rights groups and faith communities will host a briefing and panel discussion on solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails, featuring some of the leading experts and advocates on this issue as well as the Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on torture and other cruel, […]