Thomas Bartlett Whitaker is serving time in solitary confinement on Death Row at the Polunksy Unit in Livingston, Texas, after being convicted in 2007 of hiring a gunman to kill his family. While in prison, Whitaker, now 36, completed a bachelor’s degree in English and sociology, graduating summa cum laude, and he is studying toward a master’s […]
The Correctional Association of New York recently released Voices from Clinton, a report detailing the abuse and isolation many of the incarcerated people at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, face. (See accompanying post.) The report follows how punishments and brutality at an already notoriously violent prison have become worse since an escape made by […]
In 2008, the federal Bureau of Prisons passed a policy prohibiting the use of restraints on women in custody who are in labor, delivery or postpartum recovery. In 2009, Texas passed a law banning the use of shackles on incarcerated pregnant women during labor, delivery and postpartum recovery. But, as both the ACLU of Texas and […]
Jacob Barrett is an Oregon state prisoner who was transferred to Florida under the Interstate Corrections Compact. He was held in the Intensive Management Unit in Oregon, and then in Close Management in Florida—both euphemism for solitary confinement. Barrett has served two decades of a life sentence for a murder committed when he was 19 years […]
The following is a collection of excerpts from an interview with Johnny Perez, who went to prison at the age of 21 and served a total of 13 years in various New York City and State facilities. He spent an accumulated three years in solitary confinement, with his longest consecutive stay being ten months. Since his 2013 release, Perez […]
The following account is by Casha Russell, who has spent the past eight months in the segregation unit at Illinois’s Logan Correctional Facility, a women’s prisons three hours south of Chicago. Russell was sentenced to one year in segregation for allegedly burning her wife and co-defendant with hot water. (Both Russell and her wife insist […]
The following is a compilation of writings by Geri Erwin, who is serving 25 years to life on a second-degree murder charge. Erwin is a transgender woman involved in various facets of activism regarding sexual assault in prison, as well as just treatment of incarcerated individuals who are on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. She began her […]
Peter Collins has been in prison for more than 30 years and is one of Canada’s longest-serving prisoners. He is currently incarcerated at Bath Institution near Kingston, Ontario. Collins is an award-winning human rights activist, writer, artist and peer health educator. In 2008, he was awarded the Canadian Award for Action on HIV/AIDS and Human […]
![[LIFE AT TAMMS ]ADVANCE FOR SUNDAY MARCH 8--FILE-A cell block at the new Tamms Correctional Center in Tamms, Ill., is shown on Feb. 3, 1998, when the facility was dedicated. Illinois' newest and toughest state prison has been designed to isolate the worst inmates from the rest of Illinois' 41,000 prisoners and break them of their violent habits through strict isolation. Tamms will be accepting the first handful of its 500 inmates beginning Monday, March 9, and expects to be at full capacity by the summer. (AP Photo/Mark Christian)](http://solitarywatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/tamms-interior1.jpg)
Fifteen years ago, Gerard G. Schultz, Jr., now 38, was convicted of murder in Phoenix, Arizona. He is serving a life sentence and has been in solitary since 2008, when he was transferred from Arizona to Illinois under the Interstate Corrections Compact. In Illinois, he was placed in Tamms Supermax Prison until it was closed […]
Kijana Tashiri Askari has been in solitary confinement since 1994 after he was “validated” as a member of the Black Guerrilla Family. Until recently in California’s prisons, people who were validated as gang members were sentenced to indeterminate stays in the Security Housing Unit (SHU), where they spent nearly 24 hours in windowless cells. In […]
The New York Times Magazine feature story on the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, in Florence, Colorado, appeared under the headline “Inside America’s Toughest Prison.” In fact, no journalist has been inside ADX for at least 15 years, but 400 men live there, some for years or decades. The story has suddenly spurred interest […]
The following account is by Nicole Natschke, who was incarcerated at Illinois’s Logan Correctional Facility, where she spent significant time — including one year straight — in segregation. Logan, which is about three hours south of Chicago, was repurposed from a men’s prison to imprison women from the shuttered Dwight and Lincoln Correctional Centers. The prison, […]