Russell Maroon Shoatz: Resisting the “Spiritual Death” of Solitary Confinement

April 28, 2013 By 1 Comment
Guest Post by Kanya D’Almeida and Bret Grote

maroonbookcover1“Control unit facilities cannot be allowed to exist,” writes Russell Maroon Shoatz in a piece called “Death by Regulation.” “They serve no purpose other than to dehumanize their occupants. Our collective welfare demands that we do everything within our power to bring about an end to this form of imprisonment and torture.”

Shoatz, a former Black Panther who will turn 70 years old in August, has been held in solitary confinement in Pennsylvania prisons since 1983. His only time in the general prison population in the last 30 years was an 18-month stint spent at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth that ended in 1991.

Maroon has had only one misconduct since 1989. His most recent violation was in 1999, when he covered a vent in his cell that was blowing cold air in an attempt to stay warm.

From 1995 until the end of last month, Maroon had been held at the State Correctional Institution (SCI) Greene in southwestern Pennsylvania. Without warning Maroon was transferred on Thursday, March 28 to SCI Mahanoy in the eastern part of Pennsylvania.

A growing grassroots national movement had been mobilizing to win his release into the general population. This transfer appeared to be a response by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to the gathering legal and political pressure.

On April 8, 2013, Pennsylvania prison officials were given 30 days notice to release Maroon from solitary confinement. If he is not in the general prison population on May 8, his legal team will file a major civil rights lawsuit the following morning.

Represented by Stefanie Lepore and Rick Etter from the international firm Reed Smith, Dan Kovalik of the United Steelworkers, and Dustin McDaniel of the Abolitionist Law Center, Maroon has drawn support from a growing number of civil society groups as well. More than 20 organizations around the country, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Friends Service Committee New England Region have joined the call and mobilized to demand his release from solitary.

On Monday, April 15, the Campaign to Free Russell Maroon Shoatz announced that Maroon and his legal team had been told by prison officials that Secretary John Wetzel personally ordered his transfer to SCI Mahanoy to remove him from solitary. Still, Shoatz remains in solitary confinement, and the campaign cautioned that he has been misled in the past about re-entering the general prison population.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, guest posts, lawsuits/litigation, life without parole, Pennsylvania, race, retaliation, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , ,

To See or Not to See: Capturing Herman Wallace’s 41 Years in Solitary

April 17, 2013 By 1 Comment
Guest Post by Angad Bhalla

hhAngad Bhalla is the director of Herman’s House, a documentary film that examines the injustice of solitary confinement by exploring the creative journey and friendship between artist Jackie Sumell and Herman Wallace. Forty-one years ago today, Wallace was placed in solitary confinement following the murder of a corrections officer at Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. He is believed to have spent more time in solitary than anyone in the history of the American penal system.

Bhalla’s previous projects include U.A.I.L. Go Back, which was used widely as an organizing tool to successfully pressure a multinational corporation to withdraw from a project in rural India that would have exacted a tremendous human and environmental toll on the community, and Writings on the Wall, a short documentary on the lives of Indian street artists. He also contributed to the editing of Families Under Threat, a documentary short produced for the Center For Constitutional Rights, and Tootie’s Last Suit, which was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. He is a 2012 recipient of a Soros Justice Fellowship.

Herman’s House opens theatrically in New York City this Friday, April 19, and will be broadcast nationally July 8 on the PBS series POV.

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Someone once told me that the key to a good documentary is access. I somehow decided to make the film Herman’s House with no access to one of my main subjects, Herman Wallace, or to my primary location, his prison cell. Making a film about a man who has spent more than four decades in solitary confinement, I decided that this turn this lack of access into a creative opportunity.

Considering his status as one of the renowned Angola 3, I never expected to get access to film Herman in his solitary confinement cell. Herman Wallace, along with Albert Woodfox and Robert King, were Black Panther activists targeted and framed to quash their dissent. Several great documentaries on the Angola 3 were released before I finished Herman’s House, and none of them had been permitted access to interview Herman or Albert, so when I received my refusal notice arrived, I was not surprised.

But after reading James Ridgeway’s “Fortresses of Solitude,” in the Columbia Journalism Review, I discovered that keeping my camera out of Angola’s isolation unit was far from unique. Given the pattern of keeping journalists away from solitary cells around the country, my experience only confirms a pattern of keeping our country’s torturous policies hidden from public view. What does it mean for our democratic project when filmmakers and other journalists are denied access to the solitary confinement cells that house upwards of 80,000 of our country’s residents?

The prison industrial complex has always functioned to disappear large segments of our population. Solitary confinement cells are often described as prisons within the prison, so disappearing those within them requires more than the standard practice of locating the prison in a rural hinterland away from any population center. As we are seeing, disappearing those in solitary requires full state censorship.

With Herman’s House, I hope to use this censorship to my advantage. I felt that, if done right, not having access to Herman or his cell could only reinforce his confinement and separation from the audience. I also was telling the story of the remarkable expression his struggle found in an unusual project proposed by artist Jackie Sumell–imagining Wallace’s “dream home”–so I had a palette of other visuals to work with.

Only audiences will be able to decide whether my choices of animation and other effects convey the true horror of what spending 23 hours a day in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell for years on end might feel like. But of course, to actually end this torturous practice in our prisons, using our imaginations is just the first step in a journey that will require us to stop the state from concealing solitary cells from our view.

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, guest posts, Louisiana, media, race, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , ,

Louisiana Attorney General Says Angola 3 “Have Never Been Held in Solitary Confinement”

March 21, 2013 By 4 Comments
woodfox wallace 70s

Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace in the early 1970s, when they were placed in solitary confinement. (Photo from “In the Land of the Free.”)

James “Buddy” Caldwell, attorney general of the state of Louisiana, has released a statement saying unequivocally that Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, the two still-imprisoned members of the Angola 3, “have never been held in solitary confinement while in the Louisiana penal system.”

In fact, Wallace, now 71, and Woodfox, 66, have been in solitary for nearly 41 years, quite possibly longer than any other human beings on the planet. They were placed in solitary following the 1972 killing of a young corrections officer at Angola, and except for a few brief periods, they have remained in isolation ever since.

The statement from Caldwell follows on the heels of a ruling by a federal District Court judge in New Orleans, overturning Albert Woodfox’s conviction for the third time–in this instance, on the grounds that there had been racial bias in the selection of grand jury forepersons in Louisiana at the time of his indictment. Subsequently, Amnesty International, along with other activists, mounted a campaign urging the state of Louisiana not to appeal the federal court’s ruling. In the absence of an appeal, Woodfox would have to be given a new trial or released.

Caldwell’s statement–which was rather mysteriously sent out to an email list that included numerous prisoners’ rights advocates who have supported the Angola 3–begins: “Thank you for your interest in the ambush, savage attack and brutal murder of Officer Brent Miller at Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP) on April 17, 1972. Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace committed this murder, stabbing and slicing Miller over 35 times.”

Caldwell clearly states that he has every intention of appealing the District Court’s decision to the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit: “We feel confident that we will again prevail at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. However, if we do not, we are fully prepared and willing to retry this murderer again.” Caldwell asserts that the evidence against Woodfox is ”overpowering”: “There are no flaws in our evidence and this case is very strong.”

These statements belie the fact that much of the evidence that led to Wallace and Woodfox’s conviction has since been called into question. In particular, the primary eyewitness was shown to have been bribed by prison officials into making statements against the two men. (For more details on the case, see our earlier reporting in Mother Jones, here, here, here, and here.) The two men believe that they were targeted for the murder, and have been held in solitary for four decades, because of their status as Black Panthers and their efforts to organize against prison conditions. (The third member of the Angola 3, Robert King, convicted of a separate prison murder, was released after 29 years in solitary when his conviction was overturned in 2001).

But Caldwell’s most controversial assertion is that Wallace and Woodfox’s conditions of confinement over the past 40 years do not qualify as solitary confinement:

Contrary to popular lore, Woodfox and Wallace have never been held in solitary confinement while in the Louisiana penal system. They have been held in protective cell units known as CCR. These units were designed to protect inmates as well as correctional officers. They have always been able to communicate freely with other inmates and prison staff as frequently as they want. They have televisions on the tiers which they watch through their cell doors. In their cells they can have radios and headsets, reading and writing materials, stamps, newspapers, magazines and books. They also can shop at the canteen store a couple of times per week where they can purchase grocery and personal hygiene items which they keep in their cells.

These convicted murderers have an hour outside of their cells each day where they can exercise in the hall, talk on the phone, shower, and visit with the other 10 to 14 inmates on the tier. At least three times per week they can go outside on the yard and exercise and enjoy the sun if they want. This is all in addition to the couple of days set aside for visitations each week.

These inmates are frequently visited by spiritual advisors, medical personnel and social workers. They have had frequent and extensive contact with numerous individuals from all over the world, by telephone, mail, and face-to-face personal visits. They even now have email capability. Contrary to numerous reports, this is not solitary confinement.

Caldwell’s description does not, in fact, refute the fact that the two men are held for 23 hours a day in closed cells that measure approximately 6 x 9 feet–smaller than the average parking space. CCR, or Closed Cell Restricted, is the Louisiana prison system’s euphemism of choice for solitary confinement. [Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, Eighth Amendment, featured posts, lawsuits/litigation, Louisiana, older prisoners, physical effects, political prisoners, psychological effects, race, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Hidden History of Solitary Confinement in New Jersey’s Control Units

March 13, 2013 By 4 Comments
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 form of torture. Since the 1990s, she has coordinated AFSC’s STOPMAX Campaign, which ”works to eliminate the use of isolation and segregation in U.S. prisons” through “research, grassroots organizing, public education and policy advocacy.”

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

newjerseystateprisonBetween the 1913 closing of Eastern State Penitentiary’s isolation cages and the 1983 lockdown of the federal facility in Marion, Illinois (recently recounted in Nancy Kurshan’s book Out of Control) is a history of struggle against the use of extended solitary confinement in New Jersey, which is little known.

In 1975, after the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement, the Viet Nam War and the prisoners’ rights movement, Trenton State Prison (now New Jersey State Prison) established an administrative isolation unit for politically dissident prisoners. The warden and his staff decided to use this technique, which was modeled after a unit in Soledad Prison in California. The Management Control Unit housed those prisoners who had not broken institutional rules, but who were, as a result of their political convictions and expressions, seen to be a threat by prison administrators. Thus, the New Jersey MCU pre-dated the advent of the control unit in federal system.

Sundiata Acoli was one of the first people interred in this new unit. Sundiata writes, the warden “began rounding up prisoners, 250 all told, of which I was the first. They took me to a cell block, another guard brought my property, stopped in front of a prisoner’s cell, took him out, put me in his cell, and escorted him and his property to my old cell. They switched prisoners all night like this so the next morning they had rounded up, switched 250 prisoners to create an instant Management Control Unit. In less than a month, they had released 200 of the MCU prisoners back into population and kept the 50 prisoners in the MCU for which the roundup was actually intended.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, guest posts, New Jersey, political prisoners, race, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

California Assembly Reviews Solitary Confinement Policies As Prisoners Threaten New Hunger Strike

February 26, 2013 By 10 Comments

˜¡@On Monday, February 25th, the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, chaired by Assembly Member Tom Ammiano, held a hearing on the state’s Security Housing Units (SHUs). The hearing comes 18 months after the committee held a similar hearing prompted by  a three-week long hunger strike in June 2011 that involved thousands of California prisoners across the state. The 2011 hearing, which was subsequently followed by an additional three-week long hunger strike in September 2011, lead to significant attention on the controversial SHU system. Chief among the demands of the hunger strikers was an end to long term solitary confinement and the controversial gang validation process. Corrections officials have officially stated that reforms first announced in March 2012 were considered and crafted independently of the demands of the hunger strikers.

Monday’s hearing focused on the implementation of new CDCR policies and considerations of their appropriateness.

In California, prisoners determined  (“validated”) by prison investigators (Institutional Gang Investigators, or, IGI) to be members or associates of one of seven prison gangs are placed in a SHU at one of three prisons (Pelican Bay State Prison, Corcoran State Prison, and Tehachapi State Prison). Prisoners in the SHU typically spend 22 1/2 hours in solitary confinement, being allowed out for exercise and showering on an infrequent basis. At Pelican Bay State Prison SHU cells have been described as “small, cement prison cell. Everything is gray concrete: the bed, the walls, the unmovable stool. Everything except the combination stainless-steel sink and toilet…You can’t move more than eight feet in one direction.”

Currently, over 3,000 prisoners in California are held in a SHU. More are held in Administrative Segregation Units (Ad Seg), which are designed similarly to the SHU, pending openings of SHU cells.  Prisoners validated as gang members or associates have been held for indeterminate terms in the SHU, with over 500 prisoners spending over 10 years in isolated confinement, and over 70 prisoners spending over 20 years in the SHU. Until recently, the policies around SHU confinement of gang validated prisoners required that prisoners prove that they have not been active in gang activity for six years, or they must “snitch” on fellow prisoners in order to be transferred out of the SHU.

At Monday’s hearing, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR)  Deputy Director in charge of the Division of Adult Institutions, Michael Stainer, defended the gang validation as a necessary component to institutional and public safety. It was argued that restricted housing is necessary to curtail the ability of gang leaders to continue to operate their criminal enterprises, order murders, and orchestrate attacks within the prisons and on the streets.

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Filed Under: California, featured posts, race, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

New from Solitary Watch: “Solitary 101” PowerPoint Presentation

November 12, 2012 By 12 Comments

Our “Solitary 101″ PowerPoint, developed for the recent Midwest Coalition for Human Rights conference on Solitary Confinement and Human Rights, is now available online. The 60-slide PowerPoint includes sections on the history of solitary confinement, solitary as it is practiced in the United States today, and the growing movement against solitary confinement.

We encourage educators and advocates to use, share, and customize the presentation according to their needs (for non-commercial purposes only, with proper attribution to Solitary Watch). No advance permission is necessary, although we will appreciate hearing about how you are using the presentation, as well as any suggestions for improvement.

Solitary Watch’s ‘Solitary 101′ Powerpoint Presentation

Solitary Watch’s ‘Solitary 101′ Powerpoint — Printable Version

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, human rights, media, mental illness, psychological effects, race, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons, terrorism cases, torture Tagged With: , ,

Bonnie Kerness: Pioneer in the Struggle Against Solitary Confinement

November 8, 2012 By 7 Comments
Guest Post by Lance Tapley

In 1986 Ojore Lutalo, a black revolutionary in the Trenton State Prison — now the New Jersey State Prison — wrote to Bonnie Kerness’s American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) office in Newark. His letter described the extreme isolation and other brutalities in the prison’s Management Control Unit, which he called a “prison within a prison.”

“I could not believe what he was telling me” about the MCU, she says. She reacted by becoming “this lunatic white lady” calling New Jersey corrections officials about Lutalo.

Kerness immediately went to work trying to stop MCU guards from harassing prisoners by waking them at 1 a.m. to make them strip in front of snarling dogs leaping for their genitals — to arbitrarily have them switch cells. She got this practice stopped.

Lutalo’s letter also began to open her eyes to the torture of solitary confinement, which in the mid-1980s was just starting to spread across the country as a mass penological practice. Coordinator of the AFSC’s national Prison Watch Project, Kerness had worked on prison issues since the mid-1970s. Now she became an anti-solitary-confinement activist. In 2012, she has been one longer and more consistently than, possibly, anyone else.

“I try not to use the word ‘pioneer’ lightly,” says David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, “but it certainly applies to Bonnie. She did the groundwork for the progress and success we are now having.”

Corey Weinstein, a California physician who also was a pioneering activist against solitary confinement, says Kerness made a huge contribution early on by bringing a human-rights vision to the effort. It provided “the intellectual framework that we could grasp onto” to understand what was happening.

Reflecting on how difficult it has been for solitary confinement to be publicly recognized as torture, Stuart Grassian, a Massachusetts psychiatrist — another trailblazer who is credited with identifying long-term isolation as the cause of a devastating psychiatric syndrome — observes: “How frightening it is to see people choose not to see what’s in front of them.”

Many years ago Bonnie Kerness chose to see what was in front of her.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, featured posts, guest posts, human rights, New Jersey, political prisoners, politics of punishment, psychological effects, race, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Former Hostage in Iran Reports on Solitary Confinement in California

October 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Photo: James West

Not to be missed is Shane Bauer’s article in the November/December issue of Mother Jones, now available online. Bauer was one of the three American hikers arrested on the Iran/Iraq border and held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for 26 months. In his article “No Way Out,” which is both highly personal and factually detailed, he compares his own experience with that of the thousands of prisoners in solitary confinement in California. The article begins this way:

It’s been seven months since I’ve been inside a prison cell. Now I’m back, sort of. The experience is eerily like my dreams, where I am a prisoner in another man’s cell. Like the cell I go back to in my sleep, this one is built for solitary confinement. I’m taking intermittent, heaving breaths, like I can’t get enough air. This still happens to me from time to time, especially in tight spaces. At a little over 11 by 7 feet, this cell is smaller than any I’ve ever inhabited. You can’t pace in it.

Like in my dreams, I case the space for the means of staying sane. Is there a TV to watch, a book to read, a round object to toss? The pathetic artifacts of this inmate’s life remind me of objects that were once everything to me: a stack of books, a handmade chessboard, a few scattered pieces of artwork taped to the concrete, a family photo, large manila envelopes full of letters. I know that these things are his world.

“So when you’re in Iran and in solitary confinement,” asks my guide, Lieutenant Chris Acosta, “was it different?” His tone makes clear that he believes an Iranian prison to be a bad place.

He’s right about that…We were held incommunicado. We never knew when, or if, we would get out. We didn’t go to trial for two years. When we did we had no way to speak to a lawyer and no means of contesting the charges against us, which included espionage. The alleged evidence the court held was “confidential.”

What I want to tell Acosta is that no part of my experience—not the   uncertainty of when I would be free again, not the tortured screams of   other prisoners—was worse than the four months I spent in solitary   confinement. What would he say if I told him I needed human contact so   badly that I woke every morning hoping to be interrogated? Would he   believe that I once yearned to be sat down in a padded, soundproof room,   blindfolded, and questioned, just so I could talk to somebody?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: California, civil liberties/civil rights, due process, psychological effects, race, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Extradited to a Future of Torture in a U.S. Supermax Prison

October 6, 2012 By 5 Comments
Guest Post by Laura Rovner

ADX Florence: “This is what torture looks like.”

Last week, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights rejected appeals from five terror suspects challenging their extraditions from Britain to the United States. The unanimous decision from the judges affirmed the Court’s earlier ruling that “detention conditions and length of sentences of five alleged terrorists would not amount to ill-treatment” if they were extradited to the U.S. and held in solitary confinement in ADX, the U.S.’s only federal supermax prison. The decision is profoundly troubling, not only its outcome, but also the process by which the Court rendered its decision and in the public silences surrounding it.

The decision stands in stark contrast to international opinion that has grown increasingly critical of the use of prolonged isolation, viewing it in some instances as a form of torture. Indeed, the week after the Court released the decision, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture resoundingly condemned it: “As we speak my office is sending a communication, dealing with the possible extradition to the US of five people who will be subjected to solitary confinement…The UN Convention Against Torture states you cannot extradite or deport someone to any place if he or she could be tortured.” He concluded, “I think there [are] very good arguments that solitary confinement and SAMs ["special administrative measures," which impose severe restrictions on communication with other inmates or the outside world) would constitute torture and prevent the UK from extraditing these men."

Yet in the days since the European Court issued its decision, the silence from human rights organizations and the American media has been deafening. The silence is especially striking in light of the considerable—and warranted—criticism of the use of prolonged solitary confinement in correctional facilities other than our federal prisons. This past week alone saw condemnation of California’s supermax prisons in a report by Amnesty International that criticized conditions in the strongest terms—conditions that are, in the main, nearly the same as those at ADX. Other reports have highlighted the detrimental mental health effects of prolonged solitary confinement. And at a time when the conditions of the men detained in Guantanamo still appropriately command significant attention from human rights advocates who have repeatedly decried the lack of accountability for Bush-era torture, the discussion of ongoing torture in our domestic federal prisons has received significantly less coverage.

It’s hard not to wonder whether the silence from human rights groups about the European Court’s decision is born of the same mindset underlying the decision itself, namely, the resistance to believing that the U.S. could be engaging in torture in its federal prisons. Or perhaps this abuse is harder to see because it runs counter to current campaigns focused on the states, on massively overcrowded California prisons or deep South prisons that seem like holdovers from Jim Crow days—with the implicit corollary that federal penitentiaries are well run and well regulated. Maybe the reluctance to speak stems from the still-pervasive Islamophobia that makes us blind to the treatment of Muslims, especially those who are being prosecuted for terrorist crimes. Given the prioritization of advocacy urging the closure of Guantanamo and the prosecution of terror suspects in the federal courts, many human rights groups and advocates have been reluctant to scrutinize and speak out against the practices in our federal prisons for fear of complicating their message. If torture is happening at ADX, what does it mean for these groups to be calling for men to be tried in the federal system?

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, featured posts, federal prisons, guest posts, human rights, international, psychological effects, race, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, terrorism cases, torture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

New Report Calls for End to Use of Solitary Confinement in Immigrant Detention

September 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

“Are you broken yet?” Each day Rashed spent in solitary confinement at the Tri-County Detention Center in Illinois, the warden asked him this question.

An observant Muslim, Rashed had tried to advocate on behalf of another Muslim who could not speak English well. That was the “offense” that earned him his second stint in solitary, where he remained for 30 days. The first time, Rashed had asked the guards at the Dodge County Detention Facility in Wisconsin to excuse him from meals so that he could fast for Ramadan. Instead, they placed him in solitary for the remainder of the month-long observance.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had placed Rashed in detention when he arrived in the United States from his native Yemen, seeking asylum. For three years he remained in detention, transferred among several ICE-contracted facilities, as he awaited resolution of his asylum claim.

Both times Rashed was sent to solitary, it was without any formal charges being filed, any hearing, or any opportunity for review from a higher authority. “It was crazy,” he said in a press teleconference on Tuesday. He had fled Yemen to escape persecution, only to arrive in the United States and face more persecution.

This is but one of the instances of abusive and discriminatory use of solitary confinement described in a new report produced in partnership by the Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). Invisible in Isolation: The Use of Segregation and Solitary Confinement in Immigration Detention asserts that the use of solitary confinement for ICE detainees is unnecessary, costly and harmful to detainees’ physical and psychological health. It calls for an end to the practice of solitary confinement for immigration detainees.

In preparing the report, investigators interviewed detainees in segregation and solitary confinement at 14 of the 250 detention facilities, state and federal prisons, and county jails where the Immigrant and Customs Enforcement branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security detains more than 400,000 individuals per year. Many ICE detainees are actually lawful permanent residents and asylum-seekers awaiting adjudication of their cases. Their numbers include survivors of human trafficking, LGBT individuals, the elderly, and people with mental health conditions. Many do not speak English.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, due process, federal prisons, immigrants, psychological effects, race, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , ,
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