Supreme Court Justice Kennedy: Corrections System Is “Broken” and “Solitary...
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy on Monday used long-term solitary confinement as evidence that the “idea of total incarceration just isn’t working.” Solitary “literally drives men mad,”...
View ArticleVoices from Solitary: Analyzing Isolation, Part I
This post is the next in a series of pieces Solitary Watch is publishing as part of a project calling for people held in solitary confinement to write on various proposed themes. Our second suggested...
View ArticleHolder Makes Obama Administration’s First Public Statement on Solitary...
In a weekly video message earlier this month, Attorney General Eric Holder made the first public statement on solitary confinement to emerge from the Obama White House (or, as far as we know, any U.S....
View ArticleSeven Days in Solitary [6/8/14]
• On Monday, June 2, the New York City medical examiners office ruled the death of a man who died in a Rikers Island jail cell last fall to be a homicide. Bradley Ballard died of complications of...
View ArticleSeven Days in Solitary [7/27/14]
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. • Footage obtained by the...
View ArticleVoices from Solitary: Cruel and Unusual Punishment for Transgender Women
Dee Dee is a transgender woman serving a sentence of 60 years to life in New York State, where she has been held in men’s prisons. After being raped twice in general population, she was placed in...
View ArticlePennsylvania Prison System Faces Lawsuit Over Suicide of Young Man with...
On July 17, 2012, Brandon Palakovic, 23, committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell while housed in a solitary confinement unit at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Cresson, a Pennsylvania...
View ArticleU.S. Government Tells UN: “No Systematic Use of Solitary Confinement in the...
Today, dozens of advocates will travel from around the country to Washington, DC, to take part in what are called “Civil Society Consultations” with representatives of the U.S. government on the...
View ArticleUN Committee on Torture Questions U.S. Record on Solitary Confinement
Last Wednesday and Thursday, United States government officials met with representatives at the United Nations to discuss the country’s compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture and...
View ArticleAfter 42 Years in Solitary Confinement, Will the Angola 3’s Albert Woodfox Be...
In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the overturning of Albert Woodfox’s conviction. Yet he may remain in prison–and in solitary confinement–for...
View ArticleFates Worse Than Death?
The following article was published earlier this week by the Marshall Project, the new nonprofit news organization focused exclusively on criminal justice. It can be read in full on the Marshall...
View ArticleVoices from ADX: Living “Inside America’s Toughest Prison”
The New York Times Magazine feature story on the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, in Florence, Colorado, appeared under the headline “Inside America’s Toughest Prison.” In...
View ArticleAmerican Outcasts: U.S. Prisons and Modern Day Banishment
The following article was published on Wednesday on The Intercept. It was written with the support of a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation. In 1986, Patty Prewitt was sent to prison for...
View ArticleSupreme Court Justice Kennedy Invites Constitutional Challenge of Solitary...
Guest Post by Samuel Weiss and Amy Fettig Samuel Weiss is Ford Foundation Fellow at the ACLU’s Center for Justice. Amy Fettig is Senior Staff Counsel at the ACLU’s National Prison Project. In March,...
View ArticleAfter Hunger Strikes, Solitary Reforms Come to California’s Prisons—and Leave...
Four years ago today, approximately 6,600 people in California prisons launched a hunger strike in protest of long-term solitary confinement. The protest would be the first of three large-scale actions...
View ArticleIn Landmark Settlement, Solitary Confinement to Be Dramatically Reduced in...
California prison officials have agreed to limit the practice of long-term solitary confinement, four years after the first hunger strike began in protest of the practice. Under a historic agreement...
View ArticleLawsuit Charges Delaware Prison System With Neglect and Solitary Confinement...
Last month, the Community Legal Aid Society Inc. (CLASI), along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), filed a lawsuit against the head of the Delaware Department of Correction (DOC) over the...
View ArticleAt Louisiana’s Angola Prison, Lawsuit Claims, the Sick Face Neglect,...
Men incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola, are suing prison officials and the Louisiana Department of Corrections for failing to provide adequate healthcare to the...
View ArticleSeven Days in Solitary [3/12/2017]
• New Mexico counties have been forced to pay more than $20 million in civil rights about solitary confinement thus far, and may pay out even more in the near future – five solitary...
View ArticleSolitary Confinement Gets Another Sharp Rebuke from a Supreme Court Justice
Late in the night of Tuesday, March 7, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer issued one of the Supreme Court’s starkest opinions yet that solitary confinement may violate the Eighth Amendment’s...
View ArticleSeven Days in Solitary [12/22/13]
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. • Capital Public Radio reports...
View ArticleMentally Ill in South Carolina's Prisons Suffer Decades of Abuse and Neglect
A court ruling out of South Carolina this week deserves the attention of anyone concerned with the use of solitary confinement and other brutal conditions and practices on the hundreds of thousands of...
View ArticleSeven Days in Solitary [1/19/13]
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. • An NPR report by Laura...
View ArticleLawsuit Secures New Limits on Solitary Confinement in New York's Prisons
Under pressure from a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three people held in long-term solitary confinement, New York has agreed to a set of changes to its use of...
View ArticleWay Down in the Hole: Senate Hearing Challenges Solitary Confinement for...
It didn’t take much reading between the lines to decipher the central message of last week’s Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on solitary confinement. Lawmakers and witnesses alike appeared to...
View ArticleTorture on Death Row: Court Rules Against Automatic Use of Solitary...
The Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty itself does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” Yet the treatment of the condemned is nonetheless subject to Eighth Amendment protections,...
View ArticleSeverely Disabled Man Sues New York State Prisons for Neglect, Abuse
At a time when New York State is winning praise for removing vulnerable people from solitary confinement in its prisons, the case of Mark Gizewski offers a sobering counterpoint. Although he suffers...
View ArticleSeven Days in Solitary [10/8/2017]
• The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (IG) found in an investigation, released September 29, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents failed to report to...
View ArticleSeven Days in Solitary [10/29/17]
• According to the Trentonian, James Covington, a physically and mentally disabled man held at the Doylestown detention center in Pennsylvania for unpaid fines, claims that he suffered an unprovoked...
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Could This Be the Worst Solitary Confinement Unit in the Nation?
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...
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