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 […]
A long-awaited audit of the use of solitary and other forms of isolated confinement in the federal Bureau of Prison (BOP) recommends minor reforms while affirming the overall legitimacy and efficacy of a system that holds more than 10,000 people in extreme isolation. At 242 pages in length, the Federal Bureau of Prisons: Special Housing Unit Review […]
This piece was written by Tewhan Butler, whose blog is featured on the site Live from Lockdown. A Bloods leader, he is 11 years into a 30-year sentence in federal prison on RICO charges. Since beginning his sentence, Butler has been in and out of solitary confinement in a series of prisons. In 2010, Butler was […]
The following comes from Georgia prisoner Carlos Grier, also known as Mr. BigMann. Grier was convicted in 1999 for the shooting death of a girlfriend (he maintains his innocence). For over two years, he has been incarcerated at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison’s Special Management Unit, where 192 inmates are held in solitary confinement. […]
In the latest issue of the Portland Phoenix, Lance Tapley interviews Maine’s new corrections commissioner, Joseph Ponte. Before Ponte’s appointment, a grassroots movement in Maine raised public awareness around use and abuse of solitary confinement in Maine State Prison’s Special Management Unit (SMU), and led to an attempt to pass legislation limiting solitary. Since he was installed last winter, Ponte has […]
A new article in The Crime Report describes a “dramatic reduction of solitary confinement” in Maine State Prison. The changes have taken place under the leadership of a new Commissioner of Corrections, Joseph Ponte–and under a Republican governor and state legislature. But as author Lance Tapley points out, the path to reform was paved by a grassroots political […]
As Lance Tapley reported last week, recent developments in Maine demonstrate the difference that reform-minded leadership can make to prison conditions, including the use and abuse of solitary confinement. Even as it has grown exponentially over recent decades, the use of solitary has generally been treated not as a human rights issue but as a matter of correctional […]
This account of life in Special Management Unit at SCI-Fayette in Pennsylvania comes to us via the Human Rights Coalition, a Philadelphia-based prison reform and social justice organization. As HRC describes it: “The Special Management Unit, or SMU, is billed by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections as a program designed to alter the behavior of […]
Maine Attorney General Janet Mills reportedly will review the results of an investigation by the state police into the death of a prisoner named Victor Valdez, who died last November in the Special Management Unit (SMU) of Maine State Prison. While the Maine Department of Corrections says he died of natural causes, inmates who say they witnessed the […]
Our article “Locking Down the Mentally Ill” appeared last week on The Crime Report, the online publication of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College, City University of New York. We’re posting a few excerpts here, but hope you will read the entire piece on The Crime Report‘s site. “If you want to […]
Most Americans’ knowledge of the Maine prison system probably ends with the grim, gray penitentiary depicted in The Shawshank Redemption. But the prison of Stephen King’s imagination is a benign place compared with the current reality of incarceration in Maine’s state prisons–especially its 100-man solitary confinement unit. Conditions in the lockdown unit have become the subject of public debate in recent […]