This article is published in partnership with the Crime Report.  When the pandemic started, many prisons and jails throughout the country responded by locking people down in their cells for 22 to 24 hours a day, and using solitary confinement cells as quarantine units. In some ways, these lockdown measures seemed like an intuitive response to […]
• 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), […]
• A federal judge has established guidelines for the amount of time that youth locked up at Wisconsin’s Lincoln Hills and Cooper Lake juvenile facilities can be held in solitary confinement. State officials have previously testified that children at the facilities have been held in solitary for more than 50 consecutive days; under the new guidelines children will […]
“When we were sentenced to death,” wrote Carlos M. Argueta from death row in California, “we weren’t sentenced to be mistreated, humiliated, discriminated against, psychologically tortured and kept in solitary dungeons until the day of our executions. Never once did the judge say that was to be part of our sentence.” He was speaking about […]
Today is day 36 of a statewide hunger strike that began on July 8th with the participation of 30,000 individuals in prisons across California. As of yesterday, 270Â people in six institutions were on hunger strike; 152 of them continuously since July 8 according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). Chief among the […]
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 […]
Written in the weeks leading up to the current California prison hunger strike, the following essay by San Quentin death row inmate George Hernandez describes his experiences in isolation. Having been in and out of prison since 1995, including various experiences in Administrative Segregation and Security Housing Units, Hernandez wrote this essay as a way of […]
With what the Sacramento Bee called a “twisted sense of timing,” California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced in mid-August that he plans to borrow $64.7 million from the state’s general fund to move forward with construction of a new death row at San Quentin State Prison. According to a Bee editorial, “the administration’s call for bids to build new digs for condemned […]