Prison administrators and inmate advocates agreed last week on one facet of the debate on solitary confinement: Prisons need to be more careful about putting people in “the hole.” On Tuesday,...
Lonnie Rose spent 26 years in California’s high security state prisons. Now, walking into a crowded supermarket makes him feel overwhelmed and panicky. “I start to look around and feel the need to...
Confronted with two cases claiming chimpanzees should be deemed persons under the law, New York’s high court missed an opportunity to issue its shortest decision ever. Three words would have sufficed...
I have been out of prison for 10 years, but my eight years in solitary confinement in the Pelican Bay Special Housing Unit still haunts me. It affected the very core of my being. The sensory...
George Ruiz, a seventy-two-year-old inmate in California, has spent the last thirty-one years in solitary confinement, most of it in Pelican Bay State Prison. He has been held in a windowless cell,...
Lawyers for a Guantánamo prisoner on hunger strike are challenging a military doctor’s assertion that prisoner Tariq Ba Odah is clinically stable even though his weight has dropped to 74 pounds. Ba...
Lawyers for a Guantanamo prisoner on hunger strike are challenging a military doctor’s assertion that he is clinically stable even though his weight has dropped to around 75 pounds (34 kilograms)...
The Supreme Court seems eager to hear a case on the constitutionality of a distinctively American form of punishment: prolonged solitary confinement. “Years on end of near total isolation exact a...
When the detention facility at the U.S. Naval base in Guantánamo Bay opened in early 2002, I was a junior in high school. This week, nearly 14 years later, I’m making my first visit to the base as an...
