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Solitary Watch
Voices from Solitary: In Solitary Confinement at Age 17 and Fighting for My Sanity
Raymond Williams, 42, is incarcerated at the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, Washington. Twenty-five years ago, he was sent to the same prison as a 17 year old. In this essay, Williams looks back on that first experience of being in adult prison. It was 1997, the year riots began in Washington prisons’ Intensive Management Units, and Williams found himself locked in solitary confinement for a year. He writes, “prison was never what I expected back then.” Instead, he says, the intense isolation was worse than anything he could have imagined. —Vaidya Gullapalli.
Seven Days in Solitary [11/2/2022]
• Yesterday, Solitary Watch announced grants available to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated journalists to report on solitary confinement and other harsh and inhumane prison conditions from the inside out. The Ridgeway Reporting Project honors the legacy of the late investigative journalist and Solitary Watch founder James Ridgeway. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2023. A printable description and application instructions, to be shared with incarcerated reporters, can be found here: Ridgeway Reporting Announcement Call for Submissions.
Ridgeway Reporting Project Offers Grants to Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Journalists
Solitary Watch is accepting proposals for grants to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated journalists, with the goal of expanding public awareness and understanding of solitary confinement and other dangerous or inhumane conditions of confinement in U.S. federal and state prisons, local and tribal jails, immigration detention centers, and juvenile facilities. Through the generosity of the Vital Projects Fund and the James Ridgeway Memorial Fund, Solitary Watch will be awarding grants ranging from $500 to $2,500. (Please see below for deadlines and application instructions.)
The Word: Dismantle Prisons or Improve Conditions? As Someone Inside, I Know We Must Do Both
The good people who support change in our highly unjust criminal justice system often see a sharp divide between prison abolition and prison reform. Some who are dedicated to ending mass incarceration have been known to ignore or spurn what are commonly known as “conditions issues” like solitary confinement, prison medical and mental health care, and the availability of education and other programming behind bars.
Seven Days in Solitary [10/26/22]
• On October 27 at 8pm ET, Unlock the Box will host a virtual reading from the 2016 book Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement, edited by Solitary Watch staff, on Facebook and Instagram Live. The event will feature advocates and survivors of solitary, who will read excerpts from the book and lead discussions on the material. For more information and to RSVP, visit the event page here.
Here in San Quentin, I See Why Solitary Confinement Must End
This op-ed by Solitary Watch Contributing Writer Juan Moreno Haines appeared yesterday in the Los Angeles Times. Advocates almost succeeded this year in curbing the use of solitary confinement in California’s prisons and jails. The California Mandela Act, named after the long-imprisoned South African president, received the support it needed in August to pass the Assembly 41-16 and land on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. He vetoed the bill a month later, citing safety concerns.
Seven Days in Solitary [10/19/22]
• Angela Hattery and Earl Smith share an excerpt from their groundbreaking new book “Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement.” In this book, Hattery and Smith reveal the ways in which the structure of solitary confinement produces and fuels the conditions of white racial resentment.
How Solitary Confinement Reproduces Racial Ideologies
What follows is an excerpt from the groundbreaking new book Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement, by Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith, with a foreword by Dr. Terry Kupers. Way Down in the Hole is the twelfth book authored by Hattery and Smith, professors at the University of Delaware. The book’s official release date is tomorrow, and it is available to Solitary Watch readers from Rutgers University Press at a 30% discount with free shipping by going to this link or calling 800-621-2736 and using the discount code RFLR19. (The book is also available for purchase, without the discount, on bookshop.org and on Amazon.)
Seven Days in Solitary [10/12/22]
• The Marshall Project reports that Alabama prisons are in “deadly disarray” one week into a work strike organized by incarcerated people. Two men have been stabbed to death since the strike began, and one man was allegedly beaten by guards and put in solitary confinement for his role in exposing the strike. Last week, the New Yorker spoke with journalist Beth Shelburne about the longstanding problems in the Alabama prison system that served as the impetus for the strike.
Seven Days in Solitary [10/5/22]
• In an essay in our Voices from Solitary series, Cesar Villa offers a searing account of living in prolonged solitary confinement in a Security Housing Unit, or SHU, at California’s notorious Pelican Bay State Prison. “We’re only here to die. The prison administration is paid to put us down. The undesirables. The malignant misfits who have no right to breathe” he writes.
The Word: Torture Before Trial
In 2010, the human rights lawyer Juan Méndez was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. To many people in the United States, despite the domestic history of torture, the word carries associations with faraway places and despotic regimes. But Méndez, who was himself tortured in his native Argentina in the 1970s, saw a pervasive practice in the U.S. that demanded immediate attention and devoted his first UN report to it: the use of solitary confinement against people in prisons and jails.
Seven Days in Solitary [9/28/2022]
• TIME reports that the Department of Justice undercounted nearly 1,000 deaths in United States prisons and jails during the last fiscal year. At a congressional hearing on the matter, Vanessa Fano testified about how her brother Jonathan died by suicide in 2017 after being placed in an isolation cell in East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, a local jail in Louisiana. “Had we been disclosed the information of how horrendous the conditions are in that facility and how few actually receive adequate care,” said Fano, “we would have insisted upon a different outcome.”
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