At about this time last year, we published a commentary called “What Will It Take to End Torture in U.S. Prisons?” In it, we called out solitary confinement for what it is: “the largest incidence of mass torture in the United States today.”. This massive assault on...

In a recent article published in collaboration with The Stranger in Seattle, incarcerated journalist Kevin Light-Roth examines current efforts to pass legislation limiting the use of solitary confinement in Washington state. Although advocates were hopeful that HB 1087 would be passed this year, efforts stalled following an exorbitant fiscal note from the state Department of Corrections and opposition from prison staff. Throughout the article Light-Roth describes the impact this bill would have on incarcerated people and the ongoing struggle by advocates to get it passed. Solitary Watch.

This article is published in partnership with The Stranger. This was going to be the year for solitary confinement reform, Anthony Blankenship remembers thinking. A legislative coalition organizer for Civil Survival, he’d seen many bills start out with promising momentum only to die later in the legislative session. But 2023 had a different feel to it.

Only two days remain in November, when all donations to Solitary Watch will be TRIPLED through NewsMatch. Donations in any amount are deeply valued and appreciated. Please consider making a donation today. ___________________________________________________________________________. This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. In mid-October, as part of a...

For tens of thousands of people locked away in U.S. prisons and jails, the extreme deprivation and isolation of solitary confinement causes unimaginable suffering. One person living in solitary described his existence to us as “a soul-destroying loneliness that never ends.”. In this context, even the smallest human connection...

Solitary Watch has appointed award-winning journalist Juan Moreno Haines to serve as editor-in-chief. With this appointment, Haines becomes one of a very few currently incarcerated individuals to hold a leadership position at a newsroom or nonprofit organization. Haines has spent 27 years in the California prison system and served for 15 years as a writer and editor at the San Quentin News, an award-winning newspaper produced entirely by incarcerated people. His work has also been widely published by outside outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, The American Prospect, Next City, and The Appeal. Haines, who has been a senior contributing writer at Solitary Watch since 2020, assumes this leadership role at a time when the publication is devoting growing attention and resources to the vital work of incarcerated writers, who are uniquely positioned to report on conditions behind bars and to envision solutions to the U.S. crisis of mass incarceration. Solitary Watch.

Since its founding, Solitary Watch has maintained contact with thousands of people who inhabit the darkest corners of the U.S. punishment system, cut off from human contact and out of sight of the public and the press. They have served as our eyes and ears as we report on solitary confinement.

Earlier this week, Solitary Watch announced some very exciting news with the following press release. The appointment of incarcerated journalist Juan Moreno Haines as our editor-in-chief ushers in a new era for us, in which we will deepen our longstanding commitment to supporting and publishing the work of incarcerated writers. Juan is the perfect person to help lead us into this future, and we are profoundly fortunate to have him.

The Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal from an incarcerated man in Illinois who argued that his prolonged solitary confinement and denial of outdoor exercise violates the Eighth Amendment. Michael Johnson, the plaintiff, spent three years in solitary in a small, windowless cell at Pontiac Correctional Center in Illinois, where he was routinely denied the ability to exercise as punishment for behavioral symptoms of his mental illness. In response to the Court’s rejection, Johnson’s lawyer stated “we are saddened to live in an era where imposing such cruelty—let alone on a person known to suffer from mental illness — is acceptable to any federal judge.” NBC News | According to the dissenting opinion from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, the denial of exercise resulted in the severe deterioration of Johnson’s mental and physical health. Johnson “suffered from hallucinations, excoriated his own flesh, urinated and defecated on himself, and smeared feces all over his body and cell.” New York Times.

NewsMatch is back, and it’s more exciting than ever! This year:. Every dollar you give—up to $1,000—will be matched… and then matched again!. As a small-but-mighty organization, our time and resources are spent all year exposing the hidden torture taking place deep within prisons and jails throughout the United States.

The gifted and prolific incarcerated writer Tony D. Vick has served 28 years in prison in Tennessee, three of them in solitary confinement. In a new essay in our ongoing series Voices from Solitary, Vick reflects on the time he spent in solitary, the lingering effects of isolation, and the tension between “solitude and community” in prison. “In solitary,” Vick writes, “I read the graffiti scratched into the concrete walls. Words written by great poets before me. A few words scratched with fingernails or etched with blood can reveal the urgency and desperation of the writer. ‘K-Dog was here,’ are letters pressed into the wall as evidence of life, and where blood, sweat, and tears are shed. And the words ‘Fuck Prison,’ yell out like a harmonious hymn echoed by all inhabitants of this hallowed space.” | Solitary Watch.

Tony D. Vick has served 28 years in prison on a double life-with-parole sentence in Tennessee. During that time, he was in solitary confinement on and off for three years. A prolific writer, Vick has been published in magazines such as Filter and Truthout. Hopeful of the current prison reform movement, he writes about the realities of captivity in order to shorten the distance between those inside and outside of prison walls. In his most recent book, Locked In and Locked Out: Tweets and Stories on Prison and the Effects of Confinement, Vick sheds light on how confinement affects a person’s ability to be successful while incarcerated. He has also begun book clubs, writing workshops, and prisoner-led elder care programs. Follow Tony Vick on Twitter: @cellsecrets. —Kilhah St. Fort.

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. A new series from The Guardian explores the widespread sexual abuse by prison staff at California Central Women’s Facility. Analysis of court records and misconduct reports reveal a system that allows some guards to prey on incarcerated women, and silences the women with threats of disciplinary write-ups and solitary confinement. Since 2014, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has moved to terminate approximately 17 officers accused of sexual misconduct. However, only four were successfully terminated—the other thirteen retired or resigned before being found guilty. One officer, Gregory Rodriguez, is currently awaiting trail after pleading not guilty to 96 sexual abuse charges. Rodriguez has been accused of sexually assaulting more than 22 incarcerated women over the last decade. According to one of Rodriguez’s accusers, “we’re not only prisoners in here, we’re women, and we’re reminded of that through widespread male violence.” | The Guardian.

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. In letters written to the Massachusetts Attorney General, a group of incarcerated men announced their hunger strike over conditions in the “Secure Adjustment Unit” at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Massachusetts. The 19 men request an immediate investigation, stating that they suffer chronic abuse by prison staff and are being kept in conditions almost identical to solitary confinement. Many of the men protesting were transferred to Souza from a disciplinary unit at MCI-Cedar Junction after the facility closed in June following a lawsuit over the use of solitary confinement. WBUR | While the Secure Adjustment Unit was created “in an effort to end solitary confinement, [it] has mirrored the same conditions as previous restrictive housing units.” Boston College Law School Civil Rights Clinic director Reena Parikh says some people were pepper sprayed or given black eyes for asking to speak with a supervisor and “people are being told that you can be in this unit for 18 months to six years.” According to one letter, the men on the unit feel as if they are “out of options” for addressing the chronic abuse. Boston Globe.

In a recent article, published in partnership with the Davis Vanguard, James Anderson investigates the use of solitary confinement on vulnerable populations at Maguire Correctional Facility, the main jail in San Mateo County. Approximately one-fifth of Maguire’s population is housed in solitary confinement—nearly four times higher than the national average. Interviews with people who’ve been incarcerated at Maguire show a long history of people with disabilities and mental illness being placed in solitary for prolonged periods of time. Solitary Watch.

This article is published in partnership with the Davis Vanguard and Kansas City Defender. Maguire Correctional Facility lies just a few blocks from San Francisco Bay, and serves as the main jail for San Mateo County. A largely affluent suburban area that connects the city of San Francisco to the north and famed Silicon Valley towns like Palo Alto to the south, San Mateo County hosts the headquarters of Facebook, and the median price of a home is about $1.5 million. Last year, the county broke ground on a new $50 million “modernized, state-of-the-art headquarters” for the Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the county’s jails..

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has issued new guidelines aimed at reducing the use of solitary confinement. Under the proposed policy, the number of offenses punishable by solitary would be reduced from 34 to 19 and individuals in solitary would be granted at least 20 hours of out-of-cell time per week, including increased access to programming. However, unlike the California Mandela Act, which Gov. Newsom vetoed last year, these new guidelines do not place a specific limit on the amount of time a person can spend in solitary and offer far less out-of-cell time to those in solitary. SF Chronicle | Newsom’s administration withheld the regulations until the last days of the legislative session and invoked an emergency process limiting the window for public comment to just over a week. In response, the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice issued a statement urging “the Governor and CDCR should open this process up to a true public comment period, in order to obtain meaningful stakeholder input, and should modify their regulations to actually restrict the use of solitary confinement.” CCIJustice | The deadline for public comments on the proposed regulations is October 14. People wishing to comment can quickly do so using this online tool: Unlock the Box.

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. A lawsuit originally filed by incarcerated people pro-se documents severe constitutional and human rights violations by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections in a unit called the Security Threat Group Management Unit (STGMU) at State Correctional Institution Fayette. The lawsuit alleges that 30 to 40 mostly Black and Latinx men are warehoused in the indefinite solitary confinement unit due to “secret evidence” of gang affiliations, in direct violation of due process rights. Several of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit spoke about the appalling conditions in the unit, which drove many of them to attempt suicide numerous times. T Montana Bell, one of the plaintiffs, said his time in the unit “deteriorated me into into a shell of who I used to be” and called the unit “torture in its highest form.” The lawsuit demands that the unit be closed immediately and the plaintiffs be provided compensation for the violation of their rights. The Appeal.

In an article this week for Solitary Watch, Spencer Weinreich explores the origin of solitary confinement during the witch trials in the seventeenth century city of Bamberg. Writing about the prison Malefizhaus, Weinreich draws parallels between the torture faced by accused witches and the torture of modern solitary confinement. __________________________________________________________________________

Spencer Weinreich is a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and Lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard University. He is currently working on a history of solitary confinement, entitled An Experimental Box. The Malefizhaus, described in this piece, is also the subject of Dr. Weinreich’s recent article in the Journal of Social History, “Why Early Modern Mass Incarceration Matters: The Bamberg Malefizhaus, 1627–31.”