Dear Friends: We are heartbroken to announce the passing of Solitary Watch’s founder and co-director, James Ridgeway. Jim died on Saturday at the age of 84, after a brief illness. Some of you were fortunate enough to know him personally. Anyone who has visited this site, read his other reporting, or learned about the travesty of solitary confinement—which […]
Dear Donors, Readers, and Friends: We founded Solitary Watch more than a decade ago with the belief that accurate information and authentic storytelling could serve as powerful antidotes to ignorance and injustice, and help bring change even to a powerful and secretive institution like prisons. We started out as a small, shoestring operation—which to a […]
This is one of the first posts we ever published on Solitary Watch, more than ten years ago, and we now share it with our readers every year. Once a year, we also ask you to consider supporting the work we do: shining a light on the darkest corners of our criminal justice system and bringing a glimmer of […]
Dear Readers, Supporters, and Friends: In the past nine months, those of us on the outside have been given just a glimpse of the isolation, idleness, and deprivation faced by the thousands of incarcerated men, women, and children held in solitary confinement. Unlike them, most of us have been confined along with loved ones, and […]
Dear Readers, Supporters, and Friends: Today, #GivingTuesday, has become an important day for all nonprofit organizations, especially small, lean ones like Solitary Watch. It’s the day when we count on the people who read and value our work all year long—and who care about the issue of solitary confinement—to give back, at whatever level they can, […]
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 only people who cannot access Solitary Watch’s work online are also its most important potential readers: the men, women, and children who live in solitary confinement. For this reason, we have long been producing a print edition in newsletter format, published as many times a year as we can afford. The print edition now […]
This post has become an annual tradition at Solitary Watch. To all our readers, warm wishes for the holidays. Special thanks to those who have helped (or plan to help) us shine a light on the darkness of solitary confinement by generously supporting our work. –Jean and Jim . . . . . . . . . . […]
Dear Friends, Colleagues, Readers, and Supporters: With just 10 days left in 2017, we are writing to you one last time to ask that you consider a donation to Solitary Watch. No matter what your beliefs, this time of year tends to be one that is rich in human fellowship, as family and friends gather […]
Dear Friends: Yesterday, we wrote about people living in solitary confinement who found the strength and courage to bring us news from inside a secret world of torment and abuse. We shared with you a few of their most powerful stories telling what it is like to live for years or decades deprived of all […]
Years ago, when we were down in Louisiana working on a story about the notorious plantation prison called Angola, a man who had served nearly 20 years shared with us what he thought to be a common misconception about prisons. He knew that most people looked at the wall around the perimeter of a prison, and […]