CHILDREN IN LOCKDOWN Earlier this month, Pete Brook’s Prison Photography blog featured the work of Richard Ross, whose latest project is “Suitable Placement: Juvenile Justice in America.” This large and devastatingly powerful collection of photographs includes many of children held in some form of solitary confinement, from traditional cells to “rubber rooms.” On his web […]

The following accounts have been excerpted from Six by Ten: Stories from Solitary, a recently published collection of thirteen oral history narratives from people impacted by solitary confinement. Part of the Voice of Witness series published by Haymarket Books, the volume was compiled and edited by ACLU attorney and campaign strategist Taylor Pendergrass and multimedia journalist […]

Sentenced: Architecture and Human Rights In the early spring of 2014, Architects/ Designers/ Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) sent a national call for submissions through radio and print outlets intended to reach people currently being held in solitary confinement. Soon after, ADPSR began receiving responses from people around the country, and the conversations continue today. The […]

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. presidential administration). A statement accompanying the 3-minute video on the Department of Justice’s website outlines the position taken by Holder–and, by implication, the DOJ […]

Today, the ACLU released Worse than Second Class: Solitary Confinement of Women in the United States. Recognizing that women in solitary are often ignored, the report examines the gendered impact of solitary and issues a series of recommendations. These recommendations assume that vulnerable populations will continue to be incarcerated and focus on ameliorating the harmful […]

Guest Post by Bonnie Kerness Editor’s Note: As coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee’s Prison Watch Project, Bonnie Kerness is a leading voice for humanitarian reform of U.S. prisons, jails and detention centers. Kerness is also a pioneer in raising awareness about the use of prolonged solitary confinement and in uncompromisingly identifying the practice as 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. •  According to the tally kept by The Miami Herald, 104 of the 166 men held captive at Guantanamo are now on hunger strike, with 41 being force-fed and four hospitalized. The Miami […]

On Thursday, March 14th, U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken denied a motion by the state of California to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights against long term solitary confinement in the California prison system. The lawsuit, filed on May 31st, 2012, argues that California’s segregation of “gang-validated” prisoners in Security Housing […]

The following commentary is by Enceno Macy, the pen name of a young man who is serving a 15-year sentence in a West Coast prison. From the ages of 13 to 17, he experienced solitary confinement as a juvenile in three different settings: juvenile detention, jail, and state prison. Solitary Watch encouraged him to write about […]

We’ve written before about Richard Ross’s powerful photographs of children in the American criminal justice system. Ross’s Juvenile-in-Justice project now includes a book and a website, and his photos are currently being exhibited at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City through February 16. While the project does not focus solely on solitary confinement, a shocking number […]

On his always superb blog Prison Photography, Pete Brooks last week featured a post called “Where Are All The Photographs Of Solitary Confinement?” As solitary confinement increasingly finds its way into the news, he writes, “journalists from across America have contacted me looking for photographs of solitary confinement to accompany their article.” With a few exceptions, Brooks writes, […]

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement: On April 7, a federal District Court judge in Phoenix issued a sweeping Order and Permanent Injunction in response to “constitutional violations in the provision of health care and in housing certain prisoners in isolation” in Arizona’s state prisons. The class-action lawsuit, in which incarcerated […]

Photo: Alicia Barraza, whose 21-year-old son died by suicide while held in solitary confinement, speaks to other advocates gathered in the New York State Capitol in 2020 to lobby state legislators to pass the HALT Solitary Confinement Act. (Courtesy of the #HALTsolitary campaign.) This article is co-published with The Nation. On February 13, at Wende […]

We depend upon the community of readers to support our effort to bring the humanitarian crisis of solitary confinement in the United States out of the shadows, and to bring an end to this torturous practice. Solitary Watch’s investigative reporting, research, outreach, and special projects such as Lifelines to Solitary all rely on your generous […]

Today, the Washington Post published an editorial titled “Call Solitary Confinement What It Is: Torture.” It is the strongest condemnation yet by a major national newspaper of the practice used on tens of thousands of people in U.S. prisons and jails. (Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the estimate was at least 80,000; now the number […]

• Jessica Schulberg from The Huffington Post and incarcerated journalist Christopher Blackwell interviewed dozens of people from across the country of the hundreds of thousands who were put in solitary confinement as a COVID prevention tactic. “Even under regular conditions, solitary confinement is a dehumanizing, tortuous form of punishment that often leads to depression, anxiety, paranoia, […]

This article is published in partnership with the Crime Report.   When the pandemic started, many prisons and jails throughout the country responded by locking people down in their cells for 22 to 24 hours a day, and using solitary confinement cells as quarantine units. In some ways, these lockdown measures seemed like an intuitive response to […]

• The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a second wave of the coronavirus is hitting Pennsylvania prisons and jails, despite a statewide lockdown in March, keeping people locked in their cells for over 23 hours a day. Claire Shubik-Richards, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society said, “What we’re seeing is a full-blown resurgence of […]

• The Cornell Chronicle published an article highlighting the findings of a study released in March, studying the affects of short stints in solitary confinement on a person’s experience once they are released from prison. In their study, professor Christopher Wildeman and researcher Lars Andersen found those held in solitary—even for as short as one or […]

• The New York Daily News reported that prosecutors for the Bronx District Attorney will not pursue criminal charges related to the death of Layleen Polanco, a 27-year-old Afro-Latinx, transgender woman, last June. Polanco died from an epileptic seizure while being held in punitive segregation, or solitary confinement, at Rikers Island jail in New York […]

• The Boston Globe reported that prison administrators locked down the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts, following an incident on January 10 when three correctional officers were reportedly assaulted. Dozens of incarcerated people interviewed by Prisoners’ Legal Services reported being locked in their cells all day and all night, only let out for fifteen […]

We stood in the middle of the Cook County Jail’s Special Management Unit dayroom, its perimeter lined with cells. Five African American men sat on steel stools connected to small steel tables, each with shackles around his belly, hands, and feet, bolted to the center of the table. The SMU, located in the maximum security […]

• According to the Hartford Courant, Judge Stefan Underhill has called the conditions “unconstitutional” for people held on Connecticut’s death row. While Connecticut has abolished capital punishment, a “compromise law” passed in 2012 mandated that in the absence of the death penalty, those sentenced to death must be held in solitary confinement for the rest of […]

• The ACLU of Virginia announced that a lawsuit against the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) has moved forward, after Federal District Court Judge Robert Payne dismissed an attempt by the VDOC to dismiss the suit. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Nicolas Reyes, a Hispanic man who spent over twelve years in solitary confinement at Red […]

• The Appeal reported that incarcerated hunger strikers protesting the use of solitary confinement and “retaliatory transfers” have been kept in appalling conditions at Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama. An incarcerated organizer described what happened when the water was shut off in cells: “They was forced to stay in a cell with urine in the commode […]

• According to WHYY public radio, neurological researchers Michael Zigmond and Richard Smeyne have recently aimed their studies at understanding the physical impairment of the brain caused by solitary confinement. While the damaging psychological effects of isolation have been widely examined, Smeyne says that physical damage might prove more powerful than psychological damage in legal proceedings. The researchers’ […]

• According to the Chicago Reporter, the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago increased its use of solitary confinement on children by nearly 25 percent from 2016 to 2017, despite a twenty percent drop in the detained juvenile population. Superintendent Leonard Dixon believes that solitary is “something that you use to ensure that your […]

• This week, a federal judge ruled that the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) has failed to uphold a 2016 settlement that mandated at least eight hours of out-of-cell time per week for people with mental illness held in solitary confinement. According to NPR Illinois, about 12,000 out of the 40,000 people incarcerated in Illinois […]

Update, July 2018: Recently Dennis Hope, whose story is featured in this article, shared with us the complaint from a lawsuit he has filed pro se in federal district court in Texas. Hope challenges the constitutionality of his nearly 25 years in extreme solitary confinement, and particularly the lack of justification or any meaningful review process […]