Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which an incarcerated person lives in a single cell with little or no contact with other people. It is a punitive tool used within the prison system to discipline or separate incarcerated individuals who are considered to be security risks to other incarcerated individuals or prison staff, as well as those who violate facility rules or are deemed disruptive. However, it can also be used as protective custody for incarcerated individuals whose safety is threatened by other prisoners. This is employed to separate them from the general prison population and prevent injury or death.
Incarceration in the United States is one of the primary means of punishment for crime in the United States. In 2021, over five million people were under supervision by the criminal justice system, with nearly two million people incarcerated in state or federal prisons and local jails. The United States has the largest known prison population in the world. It has 5% of the world’s population while having 20% of the world’s incarcerated persons. China, with more than four times more inhabitants, has fewer persons in prison. Prison populations grew dramatically beginning in the 1970s, but began a decline around 2009, dropping 25% by year-end 2021.
The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Prison reform is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons, improve the effectiveness of a penal system, reduce recidivism or implement alternatives to incarceration. It also focuses on ensuring the reinstatement of those whose lives are impacted by crimes.
Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour that prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.
A prison strike is an inmate strike or work stoppage that occurs inside a prison, generally to protest poor conditions or low wages for penal labor. Prison strikes may also include hunger strikes.
Red Onion State Prison (ROSP) is a supermax state prison located in unincorporated Wise County, Virginia, near Pound. Operated by the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC), it houses about 800 inmates. The prison opened in August 1998.
A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, remand center, hoosegow, and slammer, is a facility where people are imprisoned against their will under the authority of the state, generally as punishment for various crimes. Authorities most commonly use prisons within a criminal-justice system: people charged with crimes may be imprisoned until their trial; those who have pled or been found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment.
The Laotian legal system is not determined by a democratic parliament or by legal precedent, but by the arbitrary rule of Laos's single party. The main source of law is legislation. There are two types of legislation: legislation of general application and legislation of specific application.
A prisoner is a person who is deprived of liberty against their will. This can be by confinement or captivity in a prison, or physical restraint. The term usually applies to one serving a sentence in prison.
Penal labor in the United States is the practice of using incarcerated individuals to perform various types of work, either for government-run or private industries. Inmates typically engage in tasks such as manufacturing goods, providing services, or working in maintenance roles within prisons. Prison labor is legal under the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
In the United States penal system, upwards of 20 percent of state and federal prison inmates and 18 percent of local jail inmates are kept in solitary confinement or another form of restrictive housing at some point during their imprisonment. Solitary confinement (sometimes euphemistically called protective custody, punitive segregation (PSEG) or room restriction) generally comes in one of two forms: "disciplinary segregation," in which inmates are temporarily placed in solitary confinement as punishment for rule-breaking; and "administrative segregation," in which prisoners deemed to be a risk to the safety of other inmates, prison staff, or to themselves are placed in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, often months or years.
Criminal justice reform seeks to address structural issues in criminal justice systems such as racial profiling, police brutality, overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and recidivism. Criminal justice reform can take place at any point where the criminal justice system intervenes in citizens’ lives, including lawmaking, policing, and sentencing.
TheIncarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) is a prison-led section of the Industrial Workers of the World. Its purpose is 'a union for the incarcerated,' with the goal of abolishing prison slavery, as well as fighting to end the exploitation of working-class people around the world.
The 2016 U.S. prison strike was a prison work stoppage that began on September 9, 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising. The strike occurred in 24 states, and over 24,000 prisoners took part in the strike. The involvement of 24,000 prisoners made this strike the largest ever recorded in the U.S. Within a week, inmates from approximately 20 prisons participated. Organizations involved in coordinating the strike included the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee and the Free Alabama Movement.
The Prisoner Human Rights Movement was launched in 2011 by Pelican Bay State Prison inmates in response to large numbers of inmates being moved from general prison populations to solitary-confinement units after allegations of gang affiliation or political organizing. Its goal is to improve living conditions for inmates in California.
The 2018 U.S. prison strike was a series of work stoppages and hunger strikes in prisons across the United States from August 21 to September 9, 2018. It was one of the largest prison strikes in US history. Striking workers demanded improved living conditions, an end to free prison labor, and other prison reforms. The strike was conducted at least partly in response to the April 2018 prison riot at Lee Correctional Institution, which killed seven inmates and was the deadliest US prison riot of the past 25 years.
Kevin "Rashid" Johnson is a revolutionary, writer, artist, social activist, founding member of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, founding member of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party, member of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, and prisoner in the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
Prisoners' Justice Day is a solidarity movement that takes place annually on August 10. The movement began in Canada in 1974 in support of prisoners’ rights and to remember all the people who have died of unnatural deaths while incarcerated. The first Prisoners' Justice Day was held at the Millhaven Institution on August 10, 1975, on the first anniversary of Edward Nalon's death. In addition to a day of mourning, six prisoners took part in an eighteen-day hunger strike. In 1976, August 10 was recognized as a memorial day where prisoners would strike in opposition to the use of solitary confinement and to protest inmate conditions within the Prison System by going on a one-day hunger strike and refusing to work.
The Prisoners' Rights Union (PRU) was a prisoners' rights advocacy group, modelled after labor unions, founded in California in 1970. Its members paid dues and its lawyers sued courts for better conditions. The organization still exists, but became effectively defunct as a mass member-run organization in the 1990s.
