Tag: solitary confinement

Solitary confinement is not a substitute for medical isolation and its conditions are not conducive to care or recovery, but rather a tool to manage and silence those struggling with trauma exacerbated by conditions they are trapped in indefinitely.

From the New York Daily News: "One candidate for New York governor, Cynthia Nixon, wants to abolish solitary confinement in our prisons. To New...

From The New York Times: According to international standards for the treatment of prisoners, keeping someone in solitary confinement for longer than 15 days is...

From Dissent Magazine: In her recently published book 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement, scholar and advocate Keramet Reiter discusses the...

The rate of incarceration for lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals is roughly three times that of the general population and they experience significantly higher rates of victimization and mistreatment in prison.

With reports of the horrid abuse at Oak Ridge surfacing frequently over the years, how could this travesty have continued unabated for so long? What is wrong with the “therapeutic” community that what happened here was hailed as a major advance?

In this piece for The Atlantic, Natalie Chang explores the devastating psychological trauma of solitary confinement. "That is the legacy and the cost of solitary confinement: The...

I have been here at Western State Hospital for almost five years. While I’ve been told that I’ve met all the criteria for a conditional release, the hospital won’t grant me this because I can’t prove that I won’t be dangerous in the future. Can anyone prove this? Even convicts don’t have to prove they’re ‘safe’ before they are freed.

“Won’t they know I’m lying?” I asked. “Won’t they know I’m an impostor?” “No,” he said, “not at all. You can tell them you’re suffering from delusions and they’ll believe it almost without question. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any history of psychiatric illness or hospitalization, just make up some nonsense about hearing voices and they’ll swallow the whole thing hook, line and sinker.”