For Solitary Watch readers who are inspired to take action against the pervasive practice of solitary confinement, the Resources section on our website (see top menu) now includes Resources for Action. This curated selection of national organizations and state campaigns offers a starting point for getting involved in the movement to end solitary. Solitary Watch.

The most recent fact sheet in our series covers children in solitary confinement. “Solitary confinement causes serious physical, neurological, and psychological harm to adults, and has even more dire effects on children, whose minds and bodies are still growing and developing,” the fact sheet states. “The United Nations classifies solitary confinement as cruel and inhumane treatment that often rises to the level of torture, and has called for a complete ban on placing children in solitary. Despite this fact, thousands of kids experience isolation every day in adult jails and prisons and in juvenile facilities.” Solitary Watch.

Today, Solitary Watch is publishing the seventh in a series of fact sheets that offer facts, analysis, and resources on a variety of topics related to solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails, and immigrant and juvenile facilities. This fact sheet, written by Ella Whittaker, Abigail Gorman, and Ashanti Bruce, is titled “Children in Solitary Confinement.”

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. After spending more than 22 years in solitary confinement, Frank De Palma is advocating for an end to the practice. He co-wrote a memoir about his experiences, “Never to Surrender!” and testified before the Nevada Legislature on solitary’s damaging effects on his mental health, self-perception, and social interactions. Journalist Natalia Galiczca profiled De Palma, detailing his journey from an arrest as a teenager, through years of degrading solitary confinement, to his release and ongoing recovery. “Occasionally, he’ll walk across the street to a nearby food market for iced tea,” Galiczca writes. “Or just step outside his door to feel the sun against his skin.” In January 2024, Nevada became the third state to restrict solitary to 15 consecutive days or less. Deseret News.

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. Of the nearly one in six transgender people who report experiencing prison or jail, most will also face violence and solitary confinement while incarcerated. Despite knowing the disproportionate harm faced by transgender incarcerated people, their voices often go unheard. “People are the experts of their own lives,” says Kenna Barnes, advocacy manager for Black and Pink National, “Society often sees people who have been incarcerated—or who are incarcerated—as folks who don’t know what they need. And they certainly do.” In a recent series of interviews, the Vera Institute of Justice asked five transgender people about their experiences being incarcerated. The interviewees described facing abuse and being placed in long-term solitary confinement for punishment or “protection,” and called for more humane treatment. Ky (he/him) recalled: “I would lash out when they would say things to me. Then I realized that they would do this just so they could bring charges on me to take me to lockdown in a solitary confinement cell. I would be in lockdown for a month at a time. For a year, I was in and out of lockdown. Sometimes they would turn the lights on and leave them on forever as a way to irritate people. Or they would just leave you in complete darkness. You could go a day, or two days, without them turning the lights on. You had no light except the little light coming in under your door. When we were in lockdown, we would scream to each other through the vents, like, ‘Hey what are you doing over there?’ We would try to slide notes across the floor to other cells, just to have some human contact. If the officers saw us slipping paper under the door, they would step on it and throw it away, or they would get it and read it in front of everybody.” Vera Institute of Justice.

Incarcerated writer and Ridgeway Reporting Grant recipient Kwaneta Harris shares her experience with women’s solitary confinement in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Harris highlights the rampant sexual abuse against women and girls inside TDCJ prisons perpetrated by staff and maintained through threats of solitary confinement. Beyond intimidation, Harris exposes how staff at TDCJ prisons prey on those isolated by solitary and use the harsh conditions to further remove them from any supportive contact. However, despite the terrible environment of solitary and prison, chosen families provide support for those suffering inside. Scalawag Magazine.

The gifted and prolific incarcerated journalist Kwaneta Harris received a grant from Solitary Watch’s Ridgeway Reporting Project to write her latest piece, just published by Scalawag. Harris, who wrote this scathing expose from inside a solitary confinement cell, reveals how solitary units become fertile ground for the sexual abuse and exploitation of women and of girls as young as 16. What follows is an excerpt from that article, which can be read in full at Scalawag. Read more of Kwaneta Harris’s writing on Solitary Watch and on her website. —Jean Casella.

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a panel of experts urged Congress to support legislation or a constitutional amendment to reform the use of forced prison labor. Prison labor is used nationally for farming, fighting wildfires, and other high-risk jobs. Over three-quarters of all incarcerated people are forced to work without minimum wage protections for cents an hour, or not paid at all in many states. The work is mandatory, and those who refuse are subjected to punishments like solitary confinement or loss of family visits. Members of the committee were split along party lines on their responses to the issue, with Senators Dick Durbin and Cory Booker, among other Democrats, supporting the idea of regulating prison labor and working towards more rights for incarcerated workers, while Louisiana Republican John Kennedy dismissed the argument as “emotional” and unproductive. Courthouse News Service ⎸ Prison reform advocate Terrance Winn, Principle Human Rights Researcher for the ACLU Jennifer Turner, Manhattan Institute Fellow Charles Lehman, and Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola University Andrea Armstrong testified at the hearing. U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. Testimonies of people incarcerated all over Texas reveal horrifying conditions, long stays in solitary, and evidence of widespread abuse from correctional officers. Incarcerated people describe being kept in solitary confinement cells no bigger than a bathroom 22 to 24 hours a day in extreme heat. More than 500 people have been kept in solitary confinement in Texas for a decade or longer, more than any other state. Writer Damascus James explains how, in the wake of a post-COVID-19 hunger strike, numerous bills aimed at capping the time that one can spend in isolation, and improving conditions more generally, were introduced to the Texas legislature. Not one of them has passed. Despite glaring evidence that solitary confinement does not reduce violence in prisons, Texas still allows its use for years at a time. James discusses the desire born out of the state’s continuous purposeful ignorance of those suffering in its prisons to uplift their voices and tell their stories. This led to the creation of the TEXAS LETTERS PROJECT, which publishes writing by incarcerated people, highlighting their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The Dallas Morning News | In an interview, James explains the importance of hearing first hand experiences of solitary confinement’s effects and how it harms people. Houston Public Media | Alexis Guereca writes about conditions in solitary, where she has been held for over a year. TEXAS LETTERS PROJECT.

Writing in the American Prospect in an article supported by Solitary Watch, our senior writer Katie Rose Quandt explores the continued use of solitary confinement by the federal Bureau of Prisons despite its numerous proven negative impacts, and the BOP’s continued failure to meet recommendations for reform from its own reports and studies. The vast majority of the more than 11,000 people in federal solitary are there not because they are deemed dangerous, but because they are in “administrative detention,” simply awaiting a disciplinary hearing, transfer, or placement. Interviews with people held in federal solitary providing strong evidence that the BOP’s flawed operations uphold inhumane conditions. Quandt also highlights proposed federal legislation aimed at reducing or ending solitary confinement. The American Prospect.

After some time off, we are reviving “The Word from Solitary Watch,” our monthly series of dispatches by Solitary Watch staff and contributors. The mainstream media has traditionally gotten most of its information about what goes on inside prisons from corrections officials—government employees who feed stories to journalists, aimed at protecting the institution’s image. Mainstream media’s failure to develop and employ not only incarcerated sources, but also incarcerated journalists as community-based reporters, represents a loss of an absolutely critical perspective. The result is that what happens in U.S. prisons is sanitized before it ever reaches the public.

For Mother’s Day, we are reposting this article, originally published in November 2020. It was May 2020, and Esther Arias was finally going to be released from prison. For years of her 14-year sentence, she had held out hope that she would win her appeal and surprise her four kids one day by picking them up from school. But by the time her now-adult children came to the prison gate to welcome her home, her appearance had changed so much from lack of food and sunlight that they didn’t recognize her.

This investigative feature story, written by our Senior Writer Katie Rose Quandt and supported by Solitary Watch, appeared earlier this week in The American Prospect. Visit TAP’s website to read the full piece. • • • • • • • • • •...

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. A lengthy feature in the New York Times explores how prisons and jails across the United States have become the nation’s largest providers of inpatient mental health treatment. It’s estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 currently incarcerated people have a serious mental illness, which is ten times higher than the number of people with serious mental illness in hospitals and treatment facilities. Carceral facilities are often dangerously unequipped to provide adequate treatment to incarcerated people with mental health issues, and many end up in solitary confinement due to behavioral problems resulting from untreated mental illness. Solitary confinement exacerbates mental health issues and can even be deadly. In one case, a man with repeated hospitalizations for mental health lost 50 to 60 pounds over three weeks in solitary confinement before dying of organ failure due to a “refusal to eat or drink.” However, documents from the resulting wrongful death lawsuit showed that prison staff did not attempt interventions like initiating intravenous feeding or transferring the man to a facility with more mental health treatment options. New York Times.

For World Press Freedom Day Friday, May 3, at 12 pm PT / 3 pm ET, Solitary Watch Editor-in-Chief Juan Moreno Haines joins a panel of distinguished incarcerated writers to discuss the limits of First Amendment rights. Although the Federal Bureau of Prisons bars incarcerated people from being journalists and many states prohibit incarcerated writers from being compensated for their work, Haines and others continue to work to expose the reality of life in prison. The Zoom event, called “Behind Enemy Lines: Incarcerated Journalists Fight for Press Freedom,” is free, but registration is required. Freelance Solidarity.

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. In 2022, Appling County Jail officer William Rentz allegedly wrapped a chain around Tremar Harris’s neck while he and three other guards restrained Harris to a chair in solitary confinement. During the assault, Rentz, who is white, is also accused of telling Harris, who is Black, that he was “gonna put you back in the cotton field with the other boys.” Although Rentz was fired after the incident and is currently facing criminal charges, Harris recently filed a civil complaint against the other three guards present during the incident. According to the complaint, the failure of the other staff members to intervene amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Miami Herald | Video footage of the incident shows Harris restrained to a chair in solitary confinement with his eyes closed in mouth open when Rentz wrapped a loose leg restrain around his neck. The suit alleges that not only did the other three officers fail to intervene, but they also did not document or report the incident. WTOC.

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on solitary confinement. Titled Legacy of Harm: Eliminating the Abuse of Solitary Confinement, the hearing opened with remarks from solitary survivor Damon Thibodeaux, who stated, “life in solitary is made all the worse because its often a hopeless existence.” Over the next two hours, the committee heard testimony from witnesses regarding the conditions of solitary confinement and the longstanding mental, physical, and psychological harm it causes. United States Committee on the Judiciary | Committee member Cory Booker (D, NJ) said at the hearing: “This is sick, this is unacceptable and this is un-American.” He stated that solitary confinement “is a practice that is so byzantine, so universally condemned by other peer nations, so torturous to individuals … it is stunning to me that this practice goes on in our nation at such a widespread level.” Courthouse News Service | Ahead of the hearing, the Federal Anti-Solitary Taskforce (FAST) held a press conference featuring advocates and solitary survivors, urging federal lawmakers to pass the End Solitary Confinement Act. WHIO-TV.

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:. A new report from the Vera Institute of Justice and Black & Pink documents the disproportionate abuse faced by transgender incarcerated people. Of the 280 respondents across 31 states, 90 percent stated they had been placed in solitary confinement. Current housing policies inadequately address the needs of transgender incarcerated people, and reforms are difficult to implement due to the group’s unique needs. While 66 percent of incarcerated trans women say they wish to be housed in women’s facilities, so do 58 percent of trans men. According to Jennifer Pierce, a senior researcher at Vera, addressing the needs of trans people in prison “goes against the way that prisons operate, which is having a single set of rigid rules that are applied unilaterally for everybody.” The Appeal.

Xandan, a trans-masculine writer incarcerated in Texas, has been in solitary confinement for over seven years due to his gender identity and as retribution for his journalism exposing the inhumane conditions faced by transgender incarcerated people. As a 2023 recipient of a Ridgeway Reporting Project grant, Xandan’s latest article “The Horrific Reality of Transgender Individuals in Texas Prisons,” was published in The Advocate. In addition to the article’s searing descriptions of his life in solitary confinement, Xandan also shared with Solitary Watch the diary entries that vividly recount his experience following a brutal 2020 assault. Solitary Watch.

Xandan (Britney Gulley) is a female-to-male trans person and writer who is incarcerated in Texas state prison. Xandan has been held in solitary confinement for over seven years due to his gender identity and as retribution for his published exposés that unveil the inhumane conditions that transgender prisoners face. Some of his articles can be found in the San Francisco Bayview, Texas Letters Project, Southern Cultures Journal, and Prison Insider.