• The New York Times reports that federal officials announced the temporary closure of the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), a federal jail in Lower Manhattan. They have described it as part of an effort to improve conditions at the jail, which have been dangerous for years, but only received widespread attention in 2019 after the suicide […]
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that a 48-year-old man, Dan Vasalech, has been placed in solitary confinement in the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh for a remark he made criticizing the administration’s decision to lock down the jail so that the corrections officers could attend the funeral of a recently deceased officer. Vasalech received a […]
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. • The New York Times magazine published an article entitled The Shame of Solitary Confinement, which focuses on what’s happening in one Southern state. “Solitary — in theory, a punishment for […]
This past weekend, activists across the country and around the world marked the 12th anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners to the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Detainees there have endured numerous forms of torture, including waterboarding, “stress positions,” prolonged solitary confinement, and force-feeding, as well as indefinite detention without trial, […]
The excerpts that follow come from a declaration by Mahmud Abouhalima, who was convicted of taking part in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (a charge he still denies). Sentenced to 240 years, he initially spent most of his time in the general population at federal maximum security prisons, where he was permitted […]
An important new article by Laura Rovner and Jeanne Theoharis appears in the current issue of American University Law Review. Both Rovner and Theoharis have been deeply involved in the issue of solitary confinement: As director of the Civil Rights Clinic and the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, Rovner has overseen several challenges in the federal courts […]
Long before the War on Terror, there was the War on Crime. And as much as 9/11 was a watershed event, many aspects of the nation’s response to the terrorist attacks find longstanding precedent in the American criminal justice system. In his article “Exporting Harshness: How the War on Crime Helped Make the War on Terror Possible,” Georgetown […]
After reading our post on Cañon City, Colorado, a reader called our attention to a piece on the Huffington Post by Anne-Marie Cusac called “Torture Is American.” As an investigative reporter for The Progressive, Cusac wrote about devices of torture in U.S. prisons, including Tasers, restraint chairs, and stun belts, as well as solitary confinement; she has […]
As we explain in our next post, we are revisiting two posts published back in February–which seem all the more relevant today. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… One of the reasons we started the Solitary Watch project was what we observed as a disconnect between the public’s awareness of (and reaction to) the abuses brought about by the so-called […]
The federal government confirmed on Thursday that it plans to buy Thomson Correction Center. Obama has long envisioned the state prison in rural Illinois as a new home for the detainees from the so-called war on terror who are currently housed at Guantanamo Bay. But it is quite possible that no Gitmo residents will ever live there. According to Lynn Sweet’s […]
One of the reasons we started the Solitary Watch project was what we observed as a disconnect between the public’s awareness of (and reaction to) the abuses brought about by the so-called War on Terror of the last ten years, and those already in place as a result of the longstanding War on Crime. As we […]