The Ten Worst Prisons in America

May 2, 2013 By 4 Comments

10 worst“The Ten Worst Prisons in America,” our eleven-part article, premiered yesterday over at MotherJones.com with the notorious ADX Florence federal supermax. A new worst prison will be published each weekday (with some dishonorable mentions at the end), so please check in from time to time for new postings. What follows is the introduction to the series.

“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” So goes the old saying. Yet conditions in some American facilities are so obscene that they amount to a form of extrajudicial punishment.

Doing time is not supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These, however, are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.

The United States boasts the world’s highest incarceration rate, with close to 2.3 million people locked away in some 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails. Most are nasty places by design, aimed at punishment and exclusion rather than rehabilitation; while reliable numbers are hard to come by, at last count 81,622 prisoners were being held in some form of isolation in state and federal prisons.

Thousands more are being held in solitary at jails, deportation facilities, and juvenile-detention centers. Nearly 1 in 10 prisoners is sexually victimized, by prison employees about half of the time—more than 200,000 such assaults take place in American penal facilities every year (PDF), according to estimates compiled under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act. Suicides, meanwhile, account for almost a third of prisoner deaths, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics, while an unknown number of fatalities result from substandard nutrition and medical care.

While there’s plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of these problems, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We’ve compiled this subjective list of America’s 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy. We will be rolling out profiles of the contenders over the next 10 days, complete with photos and video.

Read the rest at MotherJones.com.

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, due process, featured posts, immigrants, juveniles, physical effects, prison health care, psychological effects, sexual assault, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Seven Days in Solitary [4.20.13]

April 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

solitaryThe 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 a piece by Susan Greene in the Colorado Independent, the “Colorado ACLU reports young people are being forced to spend lengthy stints in cement isolation rooms referred to as ‘reflection cottages’” at the El Pueblo treatment facility. “People need to know what’s going on in there. They need to know that they’re torturing kids,” said the father of a 14-year-old who spent a month in solitary at one of the cottages.

•  The Associated Press reports that a man serving a 10-year sentence in a North Carolina prison died after swallowing multiple objects. The prisoner “had been cited by prison staff at least 25 times for infractions related to attempts to harm himself.  He was in solitary confinement when he died.”

•  According to a radio piece by WKUT in Austin, “An estimated 25 percent of Texas inmates in solitary confinement suffer from mental health issues. A bill in the Legislature would create a task force to find out more about these prisoners and provide them with safer alternatives.”

•  In a powerful commentary, CNN’s John Sutter argues that “No kid should be in solitary confinement.” The piece links to an online petition drive launched by the ACLU, urging U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to “ban the solitary confinement of youth held in federal custody.”

•  The Guardian reports on the European Court of Human Rights’ decision to block the extradition of a UK-based terrorism suspect who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. It did so on the grounds that removing him to an American supermax prison would constitute “inhuman or degrading treatment” under international law. (Other British suspects, including Asberger’s sufferer Talha Ahsan, were extradited and are now in extended pre-trial solitary confinement.)

•  The Pennsylvania-based Human Rights Coalition launched a month-long campaign to have Russell Maroon Shoats released from isolation. Shoats has spent a total of 30 years in solitary, including the last 22 consecutive years.

•  The Other Death Penalty Project, an organization led by life-sentenced prisoners, launched a campaign to print and distribute a collection of writing by lifers, aimed at “raising awareness nationwide that life without parole sentences are the death penalty and must be abolished.”

•  California’s Stop the Torture Campaign, described as “in support of the prisoner-initiated human rights movement to end long term solitary confinement in California,” ramped up its activism with a series of events in the Los Angeles area featuring a model of a cell from the Pelican Bay SHU.

•  As the week began, hunger-striking detainees at Guantanamo Bay were violently forced from their communal cellblocks into solitary confinement cells. According to Carol Rosenberg in the Miami Herald, “The pre-dawn operation took place hours after delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross left the remote island prison and during a blackout of news media access to the crisis in the prison camps.” And the resultant “scenario described by the military—individual men locked one to a cell, maximum-security style, in a facility designed for communal medium-security confinement—returned the prison camps to an austere detention approach dating back to the Bush administration.”

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, federal prisons, human rights, international, juveniles, legislation, life without parole, mental illness, psychological effects, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , ,

Thirty Days in Solitary

March 30, 2013 By 9 Comments

solitarySolitary confinement is in the news on a daily basis nowadays, though just a few years ago it was a rarity to find any mention of it outside of Solitary Watch. What follows is a roundup of noteworthy stories that came out in the past month but didn’t make it into our posts. We will be running these roundups once a week from now on.

• PRI radio reports that at Guantanamo, the “Hunger Strike Grows As Despair Sets In“–and interviews one of the few reporters who have been inside Gitmo since the strike began.

• Al Jazeera presents a documentary and roundtable discussion on “The Ethics of Solitary Confinement.”

• From Citizen Radio’s Marc Kilstein, a powerful hour-long radio documentary on the history and practice of solitary confinement.

• A bill introduced in Massachusetts aims to limit time in solitary confinement in the state’s prisons and jails. So does a similar bill in Nevada.

• Ted Koppel, on NBC’s Rock Center, reports on the “Criminal justice system’s ‘dark secret’: Teenagers in solitary confinement.”

• The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that solitary confinement is on the rise in Canadian prisons.

• The Atlantic‘s Andrew Cohen writes, “Enough Is Enough—Time for the Feds to Investigate Prison Abuse“–especially prisoners with mental illness held in solitary confinement in federal prisons.

• Individuals with mental illness are held in solitary confinement in strip cells at a Virginia jail.

• Chris Hedges writes about solitary confinement (and about the inspiring Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo) in “The Shame of America’s Gulags.”

• Despite opposition, Arizona plans to build 500 more supermax prison beds.

• New York Advocacy groups, survivors of solitary, and families of the incarcerated unite to form the Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement in New York’s prisons and jails.

• The sister of a man imprisoned at Pelican Bay writes of her brother’s 23 years in solitary confinement, calling it “beyond cruel and unusual.”

• The ACLU and other advocacy groups testify on solitary confinement before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

• Courthouse News Service reports that a “scathing study” on solitary confinement in Illinois was buried amid local politics.

• A Maryland family says that their son, who suffers from autism and mental illness, has been held in solitary confinement for four years, and denied visits and phone calls for two.

• More than 100 men imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay launch a hunger strike to protest conditions at the camp and the hopelessness of their situation.

• The ACLU releases a comprehensive–and inspiring–report on solitary confinement reform in the state of Maine.

• The New York Civil Liberties Union files a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of people in solitary in New York State prisons became a class action suit.

• “Solitary Confinement: Punishment Or Cruelty?“, a segment on NPR, traces the history and current controversies. (Can’t it be both?)

• Advocates from the New York City Jails Action Committee protest recent increases in solitary confinement and brutality on Rikers Island.

• Representatives of the men in Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Units send an Open Letter to the California State Legislature.

• “Death at Dawson: Why Is Texas’ Worst State Jail Still Open?“, from the Texas Observer, tells the story of a woman who gave birth prematurely in a holding cell, and was sent to solitary on a “suicide watch” when her infant died.

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, federal prisons, human rights, juveniles, lawsuits/litigation, legislation, mental illness, politics of punishment, prison health care, psychological effects, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: ,

Florida Bill Would Limit Use of Solitary Confinement on Children

March 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment

When asked to describe his experience in solitary confinement in a Florida jail at the age of 16, Henry R. (pseudonym) stated:

The only thing left to do is go crazy—just sit and talk to the walls… I catch myself [talking to the walls] every now and again. It’s starting to become a habit because I have nothing else to do. I can’t read a book. I work out and try to make the best of it. But there is no best. Sometimes I go crazy and can’t even control my anger anymore… I can’t even get [out of solitary confinement] early if I do better, so it is frustrating and I just lose it. Screaming, throwing stuff around… I feel like I am alone, like no one cares about me sometimes I feel like, why am I even living?

The quote comes from the 2012 report Growing Up Locked Down, which covers the use of solitary confinement on children and teens under the age of 18 in U.S. jails and prisons. The comprehensive report, prepared by the ACLU and Humans Rights Watch, calls for an end to the isolation of young people, based on evidence of the profound psychological damage such isolation can cause.

Now, Florida legislators are considering a bill that would help prevent kids like Henry R. from being subjected to the abusive use of solitary confinement. Filed last month by State Senator Audrey Gibson, the bill, called the Youth in Solitary Confinement Reduction Act (SB 812), seeks to reduce the detrimental impact of solitary confinement on young persons by prohibiting the use of the practice except under specific circumstances.

The proposed legislation requires that the confinement be “the least restrictive to maintain the safety of the youth prisoner and the institution.” The bill further imposes time limits on the use of confinement by situation, restricting emergency confinement and disciplinary confinement to 24 and 72 hours, respectively, also requiring time out of solitary cells to lessen the effects of psychological damage.

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Florida, human rights, juveniles, legislation, psychological effects, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Montana Legislature Considers Solitary Confinement Reform

February 25, 2013 By 2 Comments

893100_102050_6aa20db4b3_pOn Friday, February 22nd, the Montana House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on House Bill 536, entitled the “Montana Solitary Confinement Act,” sponsored by legislator Franke Wilmer. The bill, which the National Religious Campaign Against Torture calls a “critical opportunity to lead the way nationally in increasing access to rehabilitation and reducing harm,” would place limits on the use of solitary confinement in the Montana prison system.

Under the bill, juveniles and prisoners diagnosed as “seriously mentally ill” would not be held in solitary confinement for more than three consecutive days. In addition, prisoners within one year of their release would not be subject to solitary confinement beyond three consecutive days unless the director of the Department of Corrections provides written permission.

According to the ACLU of Montana, Montana currently has two “locked housing units” at Montana State Prison, which consist of 80 cells each, in which inmates may be held in solitary confinement for 23-24 hours a day.

The hearing can be viewed at this link (Session Year: 63rd ; Committee Type: House; House Committees: Judiciary ; February 22nd; 2 hours in).

Bill sponsor Wilmer spoke first, arguing that solitary confinement represents a form of sensory deprivation that harms prisoners with mental health problems. She argued that mental health problems are similar to cancer, in that both have physiological sources, and that to place prisoners diagnosed with mental health problems in isolation is to effectively punish people for having a disease.

Patty Jacques told of her son, who has a long record of mental health problems, who spent four months in isolation at Montana State Prison upon his transfer from a psychiatric institution. He was placed in isolation “as a way to stabilize him,” Jacques recalls the warden telling her, who told her the prison was taking ‘really good care of my son.’

“He has never been the same, extreme high anxiety, PTSD, it has made his mental health worse,” Jacque told the committee.

Montana State Prison Warden Leroy Kirkegard told the committee that: “Solitary confinement is not a tool employed today…nor will it be in the future.” Warden Kirkegard dismissed the use of the term “solitary confinement” as dated, as prisoners in segregation units do receive regular contact from correctional and mental health workers. This dismissal of the concept of “solitary confinement” received a tongue in cheek blog post by the ACLU of Montana.

Writes Anna Conley in the post: “Wait a minute… as I recall, there are two ‘locked housing’ units at Montana State Prison with more than 80 single cells each in which inmates are locked down in isolation 23 hours a day. Isn’t this ‘solitary confinement’?

Kirkegard had more specific critiques of the bill. “It defines long-term as longer than three days,” he said, arguing that investigations of prison rules violations often take longer than that. Further, he critiqued the language of the bill that leaves a definition of “severe mental illness” different than current law defines it.

Kirkegard stated that there were, respectively, 51 and 63 prisoners in the two locked housing units. When asked how many juveniles were held in segregation, he stated he believed the number was “less than ten.”

Colleen Ambrose, Legal Services Bureau Chief of the Montana Department of Corrections, argued that prisoners in segregation receive 1 hour of outdoor exercise, “limited visitation and mail privileges,” library books. Further, she noted that the bill defines pre-hearing detention as solitary confinement, which may hinder investigations. The bill does not, she argued, differentiate between disciplinary hearing time periods for murder or possession of pruno (prison wine).

The hearing revealed a lack of capacity in the prison to handle prisoners with mental health problems. While there are 300 prisoners deemed to have a “serious mental illness”, there only 25 mental health beds in the Montana State Prison.

In 2009, the ACLU successfully filed suit against the Montana Department of Corrections on behalf of juvenile prisoner Raistlen Katka. Katka was at the time a  17-year old who spent 10 months in solitary confinement and twice attempted suicide by biting his wrist to puncture veins. In a settlement, in 2012, the Department of Corrections agreed to limit the use of solitary confinement against both juveniles and prisoners with mental health problems, with written approval by the Director of the Department of Corrections required for keeping prisoners in segregation longer than 72 hours.

According to the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, which supports the bill, a committee vote can be expected as early as the beginning of this week.

Filed Under: juveniles, legislation, mental illness, Montana, psychological effects, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , ,

Voices from Solitary: Disciplined Into Madness and Death

February 18, 2013 By 14 Comments

bedford hillsThe following essay comes from Sara Rodrigues, formerly imprisoned at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for women in Westchester, New York, and now further upstate at Albion. When Sara was sent to prison at the age of 16, she found her friend D there as well. Both Sara and D had life-long struggles with mental health, and while in prison, spent long periods of time in solitary confinement (both Keeplock, which is lockdown in one’s own cell, and SHU, which is the Special Housing Unit).

Sara writes about the difficulty D faced when she was finally released and put on parole, with no transitional assistance to move from prison to the free world. She ultimately ended up back in prison and committed suicide, shortly after giving birth to a baby girl. Sara Rodrigues wrote this piece in the hope of spreading awareness of her situation and the experience of many people around her. She writes, “Too many inmates in New York State under the age of 25 are killing themselves in prisons because they are literally being thrown away like garbage by the court systems.” (Thanks to Jennifer Parish of the Urban Justice Center for forwarding this essay to Solitary Watch.) –Rachel M. Cohen

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

This essay is dedicated to D and all those who have given their minds and/or lives trying to pay their debt to society and to those who will forever be haunted and scarred from our justice system. Once self-worth and hope dies within our souls, what is left behind is a shell of life that can see no future, no redemption and no chance for a normal life. It is then that our minds realize how truly unwanted we are and how on a daily basis we are reminded that society has no use for us. Day by day life becomes very dark, some lose their minds, some will never be the same, and some just give in and take their own lives.

Many people who are sentenced to prisons are very young and have serious behavioral and mental health problems and this environment only makes their sickness worse. This is D’s story and how somehow out of the tragedy of her passing has made me resolve to open people’s eyes to the greater damage that happens to everyone by throwing the very young, mentally and emotionally ill into cages to rot under the pretense that more punishment, isolation, and deprivation will make people change for the better. This story has nothing to do with not doing your time, but doing your time in a healthy corrective facility, not the factories of misery that most of our prisons are today. D’s death had such an impact on me that she inspired me to keep fighting for my sanity, to try to never give up, and to get the word out whether people care to hear the truth or not.

In December 2008, I tripped and fell down the rabbit hole. Instead of “Alice in Wonderland,” I became Sara in Prisonland and I am still to do this day trying to wake up from my nightmare. I was 16 years old entering RCOD (reception) in a maximum-security prison, Bedford Hills. My sentence was eight, years flat and 5-post release supervision, I was scared and in definite culture shock, it was all so alien and overwhelming. Later I learned D was there, to me D was my cousin, my best friend, and a sister all rolled into one. We could talk about anything, she helped me so much to get used to this crazy way to survive my new life. We also argued a lot as young teenage girls often do, now in hindsight I regret ever getting angry and wish I had been a better friend.

Some months later, she was paroled and went home but it did not take long and here she was again. Being so young when she went into prison, the outside world was just too overwhelming for her. This and coupled with the fact that there are no transitional programs for people leaving prisons in the area we live in, which is Jefferson County, this leaves all parolees pretty much on their own. Get out of prison, go report to parole, go to Credo, (drug and alcohol counseling), go to mental health, get a job, pay your rent, don’t drive till we say you can, pay parole, pay credo, be home at curfew. You give up because it is all to stressful, can’t get a decent job because you are just out of prison and no one wants to hire you, zero job programs or training programs for parolees. One can’t even go to VESID (vocational training) until 6 months after you get out of prison and by then it is usually too late.

People need these services as soon as they come home and because of all this lack of support, every parolee is set up for failure. So she just gave in to all the temptation around her and started partying and having a good time, and even though her mother begged parole to try to live in a drug and alcohol program instead of sending her back to prison, they didn’t care and did what they do best. That is to not keep people out of prison but to make sure they end up back in. Do the math, almost zero services and supports for parolees in this country why is this and who lets this happen?

By this time she came back to Bedford Hills, she was pregnant. D’s time in the prison system was not easy, she was an outsider even in prison, she had a extensive disciplinary record which was making her mental health issues worse, and she had a long history of suicidal behavior, she had been hospitalized before incarceration and during. Making matters worse, she was always in Keeplock or SHU and this did nothing to help her problems. In coming back to prison, it was so much harder to deal with than the time before and at that point, I believe she thought nothing would ever change, she was in a cycle she could not get out of and I think she was just getting soul tired.

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Filed Under: juveniles, mental illness, New York, psychological effects, solitary confinement, suicide, Voices from Solitary Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Scarred by Solitary: Experiencing Prison Isolation As a Kid

February 13, 2013 By 5 Comments

RR 0The 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 this experiences and how they affected him. We are proud to have facilitated publication of his powerful essay, which was published yesterday by the McClatchy Group and picked up by McClatchy-owned papers around the country.

Solitary confinement is no place for a kid. I know this from firsthand experience. As a young person in the criminal justice system, I was placed in solitary — locked down in a small cell for up to 24 hours a day — several different times before I was out of my teens. And although you can’t see them, I bear permanent scars from this treatment.

I first experienced a kind of solitary confinement in juvenile detention when I was 13 years old. We would get sent to lockdown for bad language or being too loud, or for forgetting to ask permission to talk, get up from our seats, or change the card game we were playing — basically, for acting like kids. Where I was, the time in isolation usually lasted a few days. I know that in some juvenile facilities, children get locked down for weeks or months at a time.

When I was 15, I was accused of a serious felony, and while awaiting trial I was placed in “involuntary segregation” in county jail. I was put there solely due to my age and “for my own protection,” but I was treated the same way as adults who were put in solitary for serious rule violations. We received two books a week, two sheets of paper, and a golf pencil. There was no access to any form of education or counseling for youth (or anyone else). In the wire cages we sometimes went to for exercise, the space was not much bigger than the cell. I spent seven and a half month in those conditions.

Once convicted, I was sent to adult prison, where I experienced several stays in “disciplinary segregation,” usually lasting a few months each – for fighting, leaving my job early, arriving back late from a meal, and copying out the lyrics to a song that they deemed “gang related,” probably just because it was rap.

The guards were petty, and liked to single out youngsters who had a lot of time to do — to try to “break” us, I guess. Something as simple as using profanity when speaking with a state employee would get us a couple of weeks in “seg.” In other words, actions that would qualify as everyday misbehavior for most American teenagers would get us placed in conditions that have been widely denounced as torture, especially when used on young people.

Read the rest of the essay here on McClatchy’s website.

Read the recent ACLU/Human Rights Watch report on youth in solitary, Growing Up Locked Down, here.

View Richard Ross’s powerful photographs of kids in solitary, part of ”Juvenile In-Justice,” here.

Filed Under: juveniles, psychological effects, solitary confinement, Voices from Solitary Tagged With: , , , ,

Photography Exhibition Highlights Children in Solitary

January 13, 2013 By 6 Comments

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 of photographs show children–including some very young children–in isolation in facilities across the country. To see the full gallery of photos, click here.

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Filed Under: juveniles, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , ,

Voices from Solitary: Haunted by Memory’s Ghosts

December 30, 2012 By 19 Comments

The following account comes from our faithful reader Alan CYA #65085. He recalls time spent, more than 40 years ago, in a juvenile jail in California–and a Christmas spent in solitary.

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

“To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” — Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis,” 1897

One of the biggest ironies in my life is that after years of incarceration, I opened my business a block away from two large jails and a halfway house. Since 1987, I have worked practically in the shadows of these institutions while attempting to ignore the human misery found inside. Like most people, I find that out of sight means out of mind–but unlike most people, I know firsthand the horrors that take place within such confines. My prior silence about these conditions would eat away at my soul whenever I allowed myself to ponder the purpose of these structures. Like ghosts wandering the hallways of a dwelling, the faces of the many victims of institutional violence that I have witnessed, read about, or just heard of over the years haunt the corridors of my mind.

Writing about my past has always been a difficult process for me to undertake. I liken it to ripping off a scab in order to take a closer look at the wound. But I am driven by ghosts, with my own brother’s tortured soul at the wheel.

You see, after spending over a decade in continuous isolation in about a half-dozen of California’s worse prisons, my nonviolent half-brother Victor died in Salinas Valley Prison’s SHU sometime in early 2007. The prison claims he hanged himself. “But why would he kill himself when he was about to be released?” we all asked. In fact, none of us believes that Victor killed himself. Everyone in the family believes that the guards were involved. (The Sacramento Beehas written extensively on the Green Wall of silence at Salinas, which is a reference to the color of the correctional workers’ uniforms and their coordinated cover up during investigations of alleged abuses taking place there.)

Although my own experience pales in comparison to my brother’s and countless others, I am still haunted by my own painful memories of the years I spent incarcerated in the California Youth Authority (CYA), and other such juvenile facilities. Possibly my worst memories are of the many stints I spent in solitary confinement, beginning when I was nine years old.

Recently, I found a series of photos that included shots of the Preston School of Industry in Ione, California, including its solitary confinement unit. It is a place I hadn’t seen since I was held there myself, 44 years ago, at the age of seventeen. The opportunity to take photographs of the bowels of Preston was only made available after Preston Youth Correctional Facility (it had under gone a name change in 1999) closed its doors on June 2, 2011, under pressure from the public due to claims of abuse.

Located in a pastoral setting on the western slope of the Sierras, Preston opened on July 1, 1894. It included two noteworthy landmarks. The first was an extremely high watchtower, and the second was Preston Castle, with its Romanesque Revival facade, both eerie and spectacular. Inmates were housed in this intimidating, decaying structure until 1960, when the new facilities were completed.

Preston_Castle_(Ione)

I was transferred to Preston on November 12, 1968, and I can still remember my escort taking me down the hill to my new residence. Sequoia Lodge was located a good distance away from all the other lodges in the far left hand corner of the institution from the main gate. This was because it housed the most violent prone wards in the California Youth Authority system. At Sequoia Lodge we were housed in individual cells, not dorms. Looking back on it, this was a blessing, because most of those housed with me were convicted murderers, rapist, or child molesters. I, however, was there for disturbing the peace, and my parole was suspended under section 602W&I of the penal code, which defined a “Delinquent Child” as “An individual of not more than 18 years of age who has violated criminal laws or engaged in disobedient, indecent or immoral conduct, and is in need of treatment, rehabilitation, or supervision.”

The institution’s grounds were dotted with clusters of nondescript one-story, concrete and cinderblock buildings, interconnected by narrow asphalt roads. These roads were used to march us in formation military-style to various locations. Numerous concrete walkways intersected these roads, leading to our lodges, schoolrooms, chow halls, work areas, recreational facilities, auditorium, clinic, and other administration buildings. The recreational facilities such as the football field, gym, and pool were only window dressing designed to appease visiting social activists, for we only rarely had access to any of them. School was devoid of lectures and the instructor was no more than the custodian of educational materials.

Tamarack Lodge, previously called Company G, was built in 1929 on the grounds of Preston School of Industry and was used as a solitary confinement unit when I arrived.

I have discovered that under the Penal Code of Preston School of Industry, youths could originally be held in solitary confinement for up to one year: “Every person who commits an assault upon the person of another with a deadly weapon or instrument, or by any means or force likely to produce great bodily injury, is punishable by imprisonment in Company G, or in Company F, not exceeding one year, or by fine not exceeding thirty-six dollars or by both.”

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Filed Under: California, juveniles, psychological effects, solitary confinement, Voices from Solitary Tagged With: , ,

Kids in Solitary Confinement: America’s Official Child Abuse

October 11, 2012 By 16 Comments

The title of this post is the title of our most recent piece for The Guardian. It draws on a new report released yesterday by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, titled Growing Up Locked Down: Youth in Solitary Confinement in Jails and Prisons Across the United States. The report is a shocking and powerful document, and should not be missed. Our piece on it follows.

Molly J said of her time in solitary confinement: “[I felt] doomed, like I was being banished … Like you have the plague or that you are the worst thing on earth. Like you are set apart [from] everything else. I guess [I wanted to] feel like I was part of the human race – not like some animal.”

Molly was just 16 years old when she was placed in isolation in an adult jail in Michigan. She described her cell as “a box”: “There was a bed – the slab. It was concrete … There was a stainless steel toilet/sink combo … The door was solid, without a food slot or window … There was no window at all.”

Molly remained in solitary for several months, locked down alone in her cell for at least 22 hours a day.

No other nation in the developed world routinely tortures its children in this manner. And torture is indeed the word brought to mind by a shocking report released today by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. Growing Up Locked Down documents, for the first time, the widespread use of solitary confinement on youth under the age of 18 in prisons and jails across the country, and the deep and permanent harm it causes to kids caught up in the adult criminal justice system.

Ian Kysel, author of the 141-page report, interviewed or corresponded with more than 125 young people who had spent time in solitary as children in 19 states. To cope with endless hours of extreme isolation, sensory deprivation and crippling loneliness, Kysel learned that some children made up imaginary friends or played games in their heads. Some hid under the covers and tried to sleep as much as possible, while others found they could not sleep at all.

“Being in isolation to me felt like I was on an island all alone dying a slow death from the inside out,” a California teen wrote in a letter to Human Rights Watch.

One young woman, who spent three months in solitary in Florida when she was 15, described becoming a “cutter” while in isolation: “I like to take staples and carve letters and stuff in my arm … Each letter means something to me. It is something I had lost.” She started by carving into her arm the first letter of her mother’s name. Another girl who cut herself in solitary said, “because it was the only release of my pain.”

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Filed Under: Eighth Amendment, featured posts, human rights, international agreements, juveniles, psychological effects, sexual assault, solitary confinement, suicide Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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