![]() | This article may contain excessive or inappropriate references to self-published sources .(November 2024) |
Available in | English |
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Created by | James Ridgeway |
Editor | Jean Casella and James Ridgeway |
URL | solitarywatch |
Commercial | No |
Solitary Watch is a web-based project that aims to bring public attention to the widespread use of solitary confinement in the United States. Its mission is to provide the public—as well as practicing attorneys, legal scholars, law enforcement, and people in prison and their families—with a reputable source of unfolding news, original reporting, firsthand accounts, and research on solitary confinement and other harsh prison conditions to generate public debate and policy change. [1]
Solitary Watch launched its website in December 2009. Created by journalist James Ridgeway and writer/editor Jean Casella, the website features original reporting, fact sheets, resources and information, and the "Voices from Solitary" project, which collects firsthand narratives from people who have served time in solitary confinement. Within its first nine months, the website attracted over 100,000 visitors. [1]
In 2015, as part of its "Lifelines to Solitary" initiative, Solitary Watch started a pen pal program designed to connect individuals in solitary confinement with volunteers on the outside. [2] The organization also coordinates the "Photo Requests from Solitary" project, which invites individuals in solitary to request images of real or imagined scenes. These requests are fulfilled by outside artists and sent back to the person who made the request. [3]
As of July 2023, Solitary Watch has collected over 150 personal essays, stories, and poems written by individuals who have survived the lived experience of solitary confinement. Titles in the series include "Living on Deathwatch," "Books are a Spark in the Dark," "Everyday Torture," and "A Sentence Worse Than Death." [4]
Solitary Watch's James Ridgeway and Jean Casella, along with survivor of solitary Sarah Shourd, published Hell Is a Very Small Place in 2016. The first major anthology of essays written by people in solitary confinement, the book aims to shed light on the humanitarian crisis taking place in United States prisons and jails and has been described in the Los Angeles Review of Books as a "minor act of rebellion" for being "composed of communication and observation that is not supposed to exist." [5] The firsthand accounts in the book are supplemented by writings from medical, legal, and human rights experts. [6]
Since 2019, Solitary Watch has worked with currently and formerly incarcerated journalists to craft long-form articles on solitary confinement that are co-published with other media outlets. The journalists are selected through a competitive application process and are supported by grants ranging from $500 to $2500. Originally known as the Solitary Confinement Reporting Project, the initiative was renamed the Ridgeway Reporting Project after Solitary Watch co-founder James Ridgeway passed away in February 2021. [7]
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.
Evin Prison is a prison located in the Evin neighborhood of Tehran, Iran. The prison has been the primary site for the housing of Iran's political prisoners since 1972, before and after the Iranian Revolution, in a purpose-built wing nicknamed "Evin University" due to the high number of students and intellectuals detained there. Evin Prison has been accused of committing "serious human rights abuses" against its political dissidents and critics of the government.
Rikers Island is a 413-acre (167.14-hectare) prison island in the East River in the Bronx that contains New York City's largest jail.
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 Louisiana State Penitentiary is a maximum-security prison farm in Louisiana operated by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections. It is named "Angola" after the former slave plantation that occupied this territory. The plantation was named after the country of Angola, from which many enslaved people originated before arriving in Louisiana.
James Fowler Ridgeway was an American investigative journalist. In a career spanning six decades, he covered many topics including automobile industry safety, American universities, far-right movements including the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazism, and campaigns against solitary confinement. He was the Washington correspondent for The Village Voice for over 30 years between the mid-1970s to mid-2000s, and had also worked for The New Republic, and Mother Jones. He had also contributed to magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist among others.
Charles Victor Thompson is an inmate sentenced to death in April 1999 and currently resides on Texas Death Row. He was sentenced to death for the murder of his girlfriend Dennise Hayslip, and her other boyfriend, Darren Cain, on 30 April 1998. Thompson made headlines in 2005 by escaping from Harris County Jail in Houston, Texas, after a re-sentencing hearing where he was sentenced to death for a second time, using a forged ID badge, claiming to be with the Attorney General's office. He was captured four days later outside a liquor store in Shreveport, Louisiana where he was using a pay phone while intoxicated. He was able to get food and clothing, he told investigators, posing as a Hurricane Katrina evacuee. He also got money from Good Samaritans in Shreveport.
The Angola Three are three African American former prison inmates who were held for decades in solitary confinement while imprisoned at Louisiana State Penitentiary. The latter two were indicted in April 1972 for the killing of a prison corrections officer; they were convicted in January 1974. Wallace and Woodfox served more than 40 years each in solitary, the "longest period of solitary confinement in American prison history".
Nathan Burl Cain is the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections and the former warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in West Feliciana Parish, north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He worked there for twenty-one years, from January 1995 until his resignation in 2016.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people face difficulties in prison such as increased vulnerability to sexual assault, other kinds of violence, and trouble accessing necessary medical care. While much of the available data on LGBTQ inmates comes from the United States, Amnesty International maintains records of known incidents internationally in which LGBTQ prisoners and those perceived to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender have suffered torture, ill-treatment and violence See Homelessness among LGBT youth in the United States, and LGBT youth vulnerability.
Sarah Shourd is an American journalist, author and playwright. She is an advocate against the overuse of solitary confinement in prisons. In 2009 and 2010, she was held as a political hostage in Iran's Evin Prison for 410 days under accusations of espionage. She subsequently coauthored a book about the experience with her fellow hostages, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer. On September 14, 2010, the Iranian government released Shourd to the care of the Omani government.
Robert Hillary King, also known as Robert King Wilkerson, is an American known as one of the Angola Three, former prisoners who were held at Louisiana State Penitentiary in solitary confinement for decades after being convicted in 1973 of prison murders.
Orleans Parish Prison is the city jail for New Orleans, Louisiana. First opened in 1837, it is operated by the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office. Most of the prisoners—1,300 of the 1,500 or so as of June 2016—are awaiting trial.
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.
People with mental illnesses are over-represented in jail and prison populations in the United States relative to the general population.
Kalief Browder was an African American youth from The Bronx, New York, who was held at the Rikers Island jail complex, without trial, between 2010 and 2013 for allegedly stealing a backpack containing valuables. During his imprisonment, Browder was kept in solitary confinement for 800 days.
While segregation as a disciplinary measure or a precaution that protects other inmates is allegedly reserved for offenders who have committed violent acts while in prison, women in particular are often put into solitary confinement for much smaller offenses, such as throwing things or talking back to guards. Solitary confinement is also often applied to women who complain of sexual assault from prison guards or other inmates. Once they are in solitary confinement, women are often monitored more closely and disciplined more harshly than are men.
Thomas Bartlett Whitaker is an American convicted under the Texas law of parties of murdering two family members as a 23-year-old. Whitaker was convicted on December 10, 2003, for the murders of his mother and 19-year-old brother; he was sentenced to death in March 2007. He spent years on death row at the Polunsky Unit near Livingston, Texas, before the commutation of his sentence.
Minutes Before Six is an American blog that publishes articles, poetry and art from inmates held in prison in the United States. The website was founded by former Texas death row inmate Thomas Bartlett Whitaker with the help of volunteers in the free world. The name of the website refers to the hour at which executions start to take place in Texas. The website provides a channel for prisoners to express themselves to the outside world.
Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement is an American collection of essays by people who have experienced solitary confinement and by academics giving their perspectives on the topic. It was published in 2016 by The New Press in collaboration with Solitary Watch, a website which collects personal stories about solitary confinement. The editors were James Ridgeway, Jean Casella and Sarah Shourd. The former United Nations special rapporteur Juan E. Méndez wrote an afterword for the book.