Seven Days in Solitary [5/19/13]

May 19, 2013 By 1 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.

•  Coverage of Guantanamo was heavy again throughout the past week as the hunger strike reached its 100th day. An estimated 102 of the 166 detainee are refusing food, and some 30 are being subjected to force-feeding in violation of international human rights standards.

•  New York City Council Member Daniel Dromm continues his crusade to “end torture in New York” with an op-ed in the Queens Times-Ledger.

•  A (somewhat overly sanguine) CBS News piece reported on the federal government’s internal plan to review its use of solitary confinement, and noted reductions that have taken place thus far in a handful of states.

•  Mashable reports that hacker Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer has been placed in solitary confinement in his minimum security federal prison to prevent him tweeting and posting phone calls to his soundcloud.

• As a guest column in the Orlando Sun-Sentinal notes, the Youth in Solitary Confinement Reduction Act failed to make progress in the current legislative session. It’s sponsor has vowed to reintroduce it in the next session, as awareness of children held in solitary grows in Florida and around the country.

•  An op-ed and letter to the editor in the Albany Times-Union argue that solitary confinement as practiced in New York is both brutal and futile. The pieces respond to an article in the Times Union on the effects of solitary, and a subsequent op-ed by the local corrections officers’ union supporting the practice.

• The New York Times reports that after years of litigation and negotiation, a federal judge has “approved a settlement meant to guarantee alternatives to segregation for mentally ill inmates in Massachusetts prisons.”

Filed Under: solitary confinement Tagged With: , ,

Voices from Solitary: “Extradition”

May 13, 2013 By Leave a Comment
talha family

Talha Ahsan’s brother, mother, and father in their London home.

Today we arrive in London, where on Thursday we will speak at a forum entitled “Extradited to a Future of Torture: The Reality of Solitary Confinement in America.” Hosted by the International State Crimes Initiative (ISCI) at Kings College London, the event features the premiere of a film made by the Yale Visual Law Project, The Worst of the Worst, about Northern Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s supermax prison. It will also include talks by Tessa Murphy of Amnesty International and Hamja Ahsan, the brother of Talha Ahsan, a young British national who is currently being held in pre-trial solitary confinement at Northern.

Talha Ahsan is one of five UK residents extradited last year to the United States to face terrorism-related charges. The story of their extraditions was not big news in the United States (though we covered it on Solitary Watch, here, here, and here). In the UK, however, it was a huge and controversial story involving inside British politics and the European Court of Human Rights. The story of the extraditions–and particularly, of Talha Ahsan, who suffers from Asberger’s Syndrome and is accused under vague “material support” charges of participating in a jihadist website–is told in dramatic detail by the ISCI’s Ian Patel in a recent New Statesman article, “The Impossible Injustice of Talha Ahsan’s Extradition and Detention,” which deserves to be read in full.

Talha Ahsan is a poet who has continued to write throughout his imprisonment. The following poem was composed while he was being held in (comparatively unrestrictive) detention in Her Majesty’s Prison Long Lartin. It refers to ADX Florence federal supermax prison in Colorado, which is where Ahsan, with good reason, fears he will end up.

. . . . . . . . . .

Five years ago they brought me to a cell

and ever since a waiting game plays here.

As they decide on sending me away,

my parents grow so grey and sad at home.

How will they manage visiting me there

or must they wait until the end of time?

 

Ma, hear my oath, by him whose hand is time,

bars stand in worship with me in this cell.

So even if I’m extradited there

and taken from my humble parents here,

then tell them paradise is our true home

whose gardens years will never fade away.

 

To Florence prison I’ll be sent away

It doesn’t matter what will be my time.

No prison ever can be called my home,

how ever long they put me in a cell.

A higher power occupies me here

who’s closer to me even over there.

 

Perhaps they’ll clean their hands of me once there.

And then my country feels I’m wiped away.

Though germs stay always floating from me here:

these particles will gather born in time,

a culture breeding from a tiny cell,

to carry on infecting every home.

 

Theresa May, a minister at home

though feeble servant to her masters there;

a solitary torture chamber cell,

To put me in, she’ll simply say, ‘Away!’

So let me while I can devote my time

to work for my own justice over here.

 

I pitch a tent for battle waiting here.

And in this heart of mine you’ll find a home,

free from the crumbling effects of time

or any rotting thoughts of being there.

It is a sin for me to run away

As patience brings my glory to this cell.

 

For time will be a brief sojourning here,

and there, or anywhere I make a home -

Away! A caravan escapes my cell.

 

–HMP Long Lartin, 19 July 2011

 

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Connecticut, federal prisons, human rights, international, international agreements, media, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, terrorism cases, Voices from Solitary 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: , , ,

Opposing the Architecture of Isolation: Architects Against Solitary Confinement

April 15, 2013 By 9 Comments
Guest Post by Raphael Sperry

Raphael Sperry is an architect, green building consultant, teacher, and outspoken advocate on the role of architecture in social justice issues. He founded and directs the “Alternatives to Incarceration / Prison Design Boycott Campaign” of the non-profit Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) and has presented his research at numerous professional association conventions and architecture schools. He teaches the Green Architecture studio at Stanford University’s Architectural Design program and has championed sustainability strategies for a wide variety of institutional and commercial projects. Sperry was named a 2012 Soros Justice Fellow for the project he describes in the following essay, which originally appeared on the website of the Open Society Foundations.

= = = = = = = = = =

Photo: Christoph Gielen, Untitled XVI Arizona, 2010.

Photo: Christoph Gielen, Untitled XVI Arizona, 2010.

When I say that I’m an architect researching criminal justice, many people think that I want to design “better” prisons. In fact, I want architects to stop designing supermax prisons altogether. As the incoming president of the small non-profit organization Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, I have just launched a campaign asking my mainstream professional organization, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), to amend its code of ethics to ban the design of spaces intended for execution and prolonged solitary confinement.At its root, this is a human rights campaign. The human rights community agrees that the death penalty should be ended and that prolonged solitary confinement is a form of torture. AIA’s code of ethics already calls on architects to “uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors,” and so  you might think that this would be a relatively simple amendment. But this ethics code is not currently enforceable; a new 500-bed solitary isolation prison is now out for design bids in Arizona and as recently as 2010, the State of California redesigned and rebuilt their death chamber. I am hopeful that AIA will do the right thing, but know that there is a fear of challenging government and general misconceptions about the public’s view of the death penalty and harsh treatment of prisoners. Many architects will need to more fully understand the issues before things can change.

I have begun contacting chapters of the AIA and other architecture and design organizations, looking for opportunities to speak to their members and encourage their decision-makers to consider endorsing our campaign. AIA is a member-oriented organization, but architects hold public licenses and have public responsibilities. We care about public opinion.

Professional responsibility is a major theme of this campaign. Architects are responsible for, among other things, protecting public “health, safety, and welfare” in the buildings we design. It shouldn’t be asking too much to ensure that our buildings aren’t intended to hurt or kill members of the public. In this respect, I take inspiration from doctors and nurses. Their professional associations prohibit members from participating in executions or torture. Medical professionals understand that they cannot agree to government requests to hurt or kill their patients; it would violate their ethics. I expect that public respect for architects will increase as we expand our own commitment to human rights.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: corrections industry, guest posts, human rights, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , ,

Obama’s 2014 Budget Confirms Plans for “ADX Thomson,” New Federal Supermax Prison

April 13, 2013 By 13 Comments

Thomson-CC-1The Obama Administration’s 2014 budget request for the Department of Justice, released this week, confirms that the federal government will open a second ultra-secure supermax prison within the next two years. The new prison will be an “Administrative Maximum U.S. Penitentiary.” Administrative Maximum is a security classification currently held only by the notorious ADX Florence in Colorado, where some 400 individuals are held in isolation and sensory deprivation so extreme that it has been challenged in a series of lawsuits and widely denounced as torture.

The new supermax will be created by renovating Thomson Correctional Center, an unused maximum security prison in Illinois, which was purchased by the federal government last year. Originally, the Obama Administration envisioned Thomson as a future home for Guantanamo detainees–a move that was blocked by Republicans in Congress. Instead, while Guantanamo remains open, the Bureau of Prisons is moving ahead with plans to open hundreds, and perhaps thousands of new isolation cells at Thomson to “reduce crowding in high security facilities.”

The following summary appears in a Budget Fact Sheet on “Prisons and Detention,” released along with the federal budget numbers last week:

The FY 2014 Budget requests a total of $8.5 billion for federal prisons and detention, a 3.5 percent increase over the FY 2012 appropriated level. Of this amount, $6.9 billion is requested for the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), which is a 4 percent increase ($195.1 million) over FY 2012…

For BOP, the current services level includes resources to fully activate two prisons: Federal Corrections Institution (FCI) Aliceville, AL, and FCI Berlin, NH. These prisons received partial activation funding in FY 2012, and full activation will increase federal prison capacity and alleviate overcrowding and related security issues.

Program increases totaling $236.2 million provide for the activations of newly constructed prisons and for new contract beds, allowing BOP to keep pace with the increased number of inmates. Specifically, increases for BOP include $53.4 million to begin activating two prisons: FCI Hazelton, WV (1,280 beds), and U.S. Penitentiary Yazoo City, MS (1,216 beds), for which construction will be completed in FY 2013. There is $15 million to renovate the Thomson Correctional Center and $43.7 million to begin activating the facility as an Administrative-Maximum U.S. Penitentiary in FY 2014. [Emphasis added.] The request also includes $26.2 million to procure 1,000 new contract beds. These resources are essential for ensuring the secure detention of a growing inmate population.

A subsequent section of the Budget Fact Sheet, detailing “Program Increases,” states that Thomson will have 2,100 beds, employ 749 corrections officers, and cost $58.7 million to renovate and operate.

ADX USP Thomson, IL: $58.7 million and 1,158 positions (749 correctional officers)

$15 million to renovate the Thomson Correctional Center for high security federal prison use. $43.7 million to begin activating ADX USP Thomson (2,100 beds) as an administrative-maximum high security facility. ADX USP Thomson is expected to reduce crowding in high security facilities from 59 percent by 43 percent by the end of FY 2015…

Solitary Watch has requested additional information from the Bureau of Prisons to determine precisely what conditions of confinement will be for the 2,100 prisoners held at Thomson. When we asked about Thomson for an article published back in February, BOP spokesperson Chris Burke said in an email that “Thomson will be a high security prison holding inmates with various security needs, including SMU and ADX type inmates.” Federal SMUs, or Special Management Units, such as those found in Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, hold their prisoners in 23-hour-a-day lockdown in two-person cells. At ADX, prisoners are in 23- to 24-hour solitary confinement. Both are forms of long-term isolated confinement, and both have been denounced by human rights and prisoners rights groups as an inhumane and ineffective form of punishment often amounting to torture.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, cost/budget issues, featured posts, federal prisons, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Video Shows Maine Prisoner with Mental Illness Brutally Subdued by Guards

April 5, 2013 By 18 Comments

spit-mask, cloud of pepper-sprayA graphic video (shown below) recently leaked to the public shows a team of corrections officers make liberal use of prison torture tactics on a man who was, at the time of the incident,  incarcerated at Maine Correctional Center and had been held in solitary confinement for two months. A still of the explicit footage, originally obtained by the Portland Press Herald, captures Captain Shawn Welch spraying pepper spray directly into the face of the restrained man as the team of guards use brutal force to thwart any efforts at resistance.

The man, Paul Schlosser, who suffers from mental illness, was at the time taking several medications to treat his bipolar disorder and depression. Allegedly leading up to the incident, which took place in June 2012, was Schlosser’s refusal to go to the prison medical unit to be treated for a self-inflicted injury on his arm. Next, in what is referred to as a “cell extraction,” corrections officers wearing protective gear removed Schlosser from his cell, putting him into a restraint chair. At first, Schlosser was compliant, but, as reported by the Press Herald:

[W]hen one of the officers pins back Schlosser’s head, as his arms are being put into the chair’s restraints, Schlosser starts to struggle. When he spits at one of the officers, Welch sprays him with pepper spray, also called OC spray.

Schlosser becomes compliant and complains about not being able to breathe. One officer puts a spit-mask on him, trapping the pepper spray on Schlosser’s face.

Welch tells him he must cooperate to avoid similar treatment. Schlosser is in distress for 24 minutes before he is allowed to wash his face.

Welch, who sprayed the OC without warning, held the canister about 18 inches away from his target’s face, despite the fact that this particular canister type has the potential to stop multiple people dead in the tracks from over six feet away. After the story broke, Welch was terminated but, following an appeal that took into consideration his service to the Maine Department of Corrections, he was reinstated.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: human rights, Maine, mental illness, physical effects, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons, torture, video 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: ,

Tracking the Rise of Solitary Confinement in America———-and of the Struggle Against It

March 1, 2013 By 1 Comment

marion lockdown_demoThe use of long-term solitary confinement was born in the United States in the late 18th Century, at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail and later its Eastern State Penitentiary. It was largely abandoned after it was found to cause madness and death, and was used only sparingly for a century and a half. The widespread use of long-term solitary was reborn in 1983, in what came to be known as the Marion Lockdown. Following the murders of two prison guards at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, the entire prison was put on lockdown status–and never taken off. Prisoners were held in round-the-clock solitary confinement, and Marion became the model for “control unit prisons”–the supermaxes and Special Housing Units that were built in large numbers in the two decades following the lockdown.

A new book by Nancy Kurshan, published by the Freedom Archives in San Francisco, details the history of the movement that rose up in response in the form of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown (CEML), which Kurshan co-founded in 1985 and which eventually turned into a broader campaign against isolated confinement. Out of Control: The Fifteen Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons, is available online in an abridged version, and the book can be purchased from the Freedom Archives.

Earlier this month, Angola 3 News published a long interview with Nancy Kurshan. The first few questions and answers are reprinted below; the full interview can be read on the A3 News site.

Angola 3 News: Your new book chronicles fifteen years of organizing against control unit prisons, from 1985-2000. Can you begin the interview by explaining exactly what a control unit prison is?

Nancy Kurshan: There are at least 2 ways to answer that question. One is to describe the daily workings. The other is to elucidate the underlying dynamics.

There are variations from prison to prison, but generally speaking, a control unit prison is one in which every prisoner is locked away in their own individual box about 23 hours a day under conditions of severe sensory deprivation. The prisoner eats, sleeps and defecates in the windowless cell. Meals come through a slot in the door. In some cases the prisoner may be out of the cell a couple of times a week for exercise, but in other circumstances the exercise area is even more limited and is attached to the cell itself. Most control unit prisons have little access to education or any recreational outlets.

Usually, control units severely restrict the prisoner’s connection not just with other prisoners, but with family and friends in the outside world. At Marion, only family members could visit, upon approval, and only for a small number of visits per month. The amount of time allowed per visit was severely restricted, and there was no privacy whatsoever and no contact permitted between prisoner and visitor. Visiting took place over a plexiglass wall and through telephones. Guards were always within earshot. The prisoner had to be searched before and after, sometimes cavity searched. The visitor had to undergo a body search as well. The prisoners were brought to the visit in shackles.

Regarding the underlying dynamics, the intent is to make the prisoner feel that his or her life is completely out of control. That is not an unintended consequence. The purpose of the control unit is to make the person feel helpless, powerless and completely dependent upon the prison authorities. The intent is to strip the individual of any agency, any ability to direct his or her own life. A control unit institutionalizes solitary confinement as a way of exerting full control over as much of the prisoner’s life as possible.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, federal prisons, political prisoners, solitary confinement, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , ,

State Bar Association Calls on New York to “Profoundly Restrict” Its Use of Solitary Confinement

January 30, 2013 By 4 Comments
Upstate supermax prison in Malone, New York

Upstate supermax prison in Malone, New York

The New York State Bar Association last week passed a resolution calling for a dramatic transformation and curtailment of solitary and other forms of isolated confinement it its state prisons and city jails. The strongly worded resolution, written by NYSBA’s Civil Rights Committee, cites “the damage caused by prolonged solitary confinement and the ability to ensure prison and public safety without resorting to its use.”It urges the New York State legislature to hold hearings on solitary confinement, and on Governor Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the state and city departments of corrections to undertake sweeping changes in their prison practices.

After laying out the problem, the document presents the following resolution:

RESOLVED, that the New York State Bar Association calls upon the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) and New York City Department of Correction (DOC) to profoundly restrict the use of long-term solitary confinement, by adopting clear and objective standards to ensure that prisoners are separated from the general prison population only in very limited and very legitimate circumstances and only for the briefest period and under the least restrictive conditions practicable.

FURTHER RESOLVED, that the New York State Bar Association calls upon the Commissioners of DOCCS and DOC to adopt stringent criteria, protocols and safeguards for separating violent or vulnerable prisoners, including clear and objective standards to ensure that prisoners are separated only in limited and legitimate circumstances for the briefest period and under the least restrictive conditions practicable; and auditing the current population in extreme isolation to identify people who should not be in the SHU, transitioning them back to the general prison population, and reducing the number of SHU beds accordingly.

FURTHER RESOLVED, that the New York State Bar Association urges the Governor of New York State, the Mayor of the City of New York and the Commissioners of DOCCS and DOC to take necessary steps to proscribe the imposition of long-term solitary confinement on persons in the custody of DOCCS and DOC beyond 15 days.

FURTHER RESOLVED, that the New York State Bar Association calls upon the State Legislature to hold public hearings to inquire into the harmful effects of long-term solitary confinement and to solicit both professional and academic commentary on the matter and comments from persons who have been placed in long-term solitary confinement, and to otherwise conduct these hearings in a manner that will best inform lawmakers and the public at large regarding the effects of long-term isolation.

An excellent report attached to the resolution takes as its epigraph a statement from a former prisoner at Guantanamo: ”Please torture me in the old way … Here they destroy people mentally and physically without leaving marks.”

The report traces the history of solitary confinement both nationally and in New York State; documents the psychological and physical damage caused by isolation and its widespread abandonment by the international community; and notes that solitary is counterproductive to the goals of prisoner protection, discipline, rehabilitation, and reintegration.” It concludes: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Constitution, New York, physical effects, politics of punishment, psychological effects, solitary confinement, supermax prisons 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: , , , , , ,
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