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Solitary Confinement in the US

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Teen's Death in Solitary Cell Shows Health Failures at Rikers Island: Suit - Washington Heights. RIKERS ISLAND — Andy Henriquez, a 19-year-old from Washington Heights, whispered through the walls of his solitary cell on Rikers Island that he was dying.

Teen's Death in Solitary Cell Shows Health Failures at Rikers Island: Suit - Washington Heights

He begged for a doctor while his fellow inmates screamed and kicked their doors in a fruitless bid to get help. It was April 7, 2013, and a tear in Henriquez's aorta, an artery that supplies blood to the body, was making its way down to his groin. After days of chest pain he could barely breathe, but he still cried out, asking for a chance to call his mother to say goodbye. A doctor who visited him that day prescribed him a hand cream and wrote the prescription in the wrong name. Henriquez was found dead on the floor of his cell hours later.

This wrenching account is detailed in court documents filed by Henriquez's mother, Sandra De la Cruz, a home health aide, who said she watched her son suffer with no treatment. New Mexico Inmate Faces 90 Days in Solitary Confinement Over a Facebook Profile. Like more than a billion other people on the planet, Eric Aldaz had a Facebook profile.

New Mexico Inmate Faces 90 Days in Solitary Confinement Over a Facebook Profile

What made Aldaz’s profile different from most is that he was unable to post to it himself: he didn’t hold the login credentials or even have any kind of access to the Internet. He is an inmate of the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) and his family maintained the page on his behalf. New Mexico has an obscure prison policy that forbids inmates from accessing the Internet directly or through “third parties.”

Now, Aldaz is facing 90 days in solitary confinement because he refused to tell his family to take his Facebook profile down. To New Mexico’s credit, the corrections department agreed to reopen Aldaz’s disciplinary case and to review the policy after EFF started asking questions and filing public records requests. Read the letter to NMCD here. In reviewing the records, EFF identified several additional concerns. Prisoners' Struggle Against "Cruel and Unusual Punishment Amounting to Torture" Pelican Bay State Prison.

Prisoners' Struggle Against "Cruel and Unusual Punishment Amounting to Torture"

(Photo: California Department of Corrections / Wikimedia)Revolution Interview: A special feature of Revolution to acquaint our readers with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music and literature, science, sports, and politics. The views expressed by those we interview are, of course, their own; and they are not responsible for the views published elsewhere in our paper. Carol Strickman is a staff attorney at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, a San Francisco-based organization which advocates for the human rights and empowerment of incarcerated parents, children, family members, and people at risk of incarceration. She is a member of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition, a member of the team mediating between the prison hunger strikers and prison authorities (the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation—CDCR), and part of the litigation team in Ashker v.

This interview was conducted June 27, 2013. Ashker v. New York Prisoner Gets Five Years in Solitary for Cell Phone Smuggled in by Guard. Philip Miller was midway through a twenty-year sentence for robbery at Sing Sing Prison in New York, with an almost spotless prison record, when he was caught with a mobile phone in his cell in April 2010.

New York Prisoner Gets Five Years in Solitary for Cell Phone Smuggled in by Guard

He was charged with two disciplinary violations: "possession of contraband" and also "altering state property," since he had hidden the cell phone and charger in "a compartment carved out of the windowsill. " Miller was brought before an internal prison disciplinary hearing and pled guilty to the two charges. But he sought to call various inmates who could attest to his good behavior and to describe what actually had happened.

The hearing officer denied him his request, claiming that he, the prison officer, knew all about Miller and it wasn't necessary to call the witnesses. Miller was found guilty of both charges and sentenced to 60 months—five years—in solitary, with a proviso that 24 months might be suspended if he incurred no further disciplinary charges. Lawsuit Challenges New York State’s Use of Solitary Confinement. December 6, 2012 — The New York Civil Liberties Union today filed a federal lawsuit challenging New York prison officials' system-wide policies and practices governing solitary confinement that are responsible for the arbitrary and unjustified use of extreme isolation on thousands of individuals incarcerated in New York’s prisons every year.

Lawsuit Challenges New York State’s Use of Solitary Confinement

The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiff, Leroy Peoples, spent 780 days locked in a tiny, barren cell the size of an elevator with another prisoner for 24 hours a day as punishment for misbehavior that involved no violence and no threat to the safety or security of others.

“New York’s prison authorities permit the use extreme isolation – one of the harshest punishments one human can impose on another – as a disciplinary tool of first resort for violating almost any prison rule, no matter how minor,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said. The lawsuit maintains that Mr. In 2009, Mr. Indefinite solitary confinement persists in California prisons - latimes.com. Reporting from Sacramento — U.S. prisons typically reserve solitary confinement for inmates who commit serious offenses behind bars.

Indefinite solitary confinement persists in California prisons - latimes.com

In California, however, suspected gang members — even those with clean prison records — can be held in isolation indefinitely with no legal recourse. Indeed, hundreds have been kept for more than a decade in 8-by-10-foot cells, with virtually no human contact for nearly 23 hours per day. Dozens have spent more than two decades in solitary, according to state figures. It's a harsh fate even by prison standards: Under current policy, an inmate who kills a guard faces a maximum of five years of isolation. Long abandoned by many states, the practice of indefinite solitary confinement persists in California as a last resort for prison officials struggling to thwart gang activity and extract information from the most hardened gang members.

But critics say the unending confinement amounts to torture. Officials at the U.S. Pelican Bay State Prison class action - Ashker v. Brown. Synopsis On May 31, 2012, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison who have spent between 10 and 28 years in solitary confinement.

Pelican Bay State Prison class action - Ashker v. Brown

The legal action is part of a larger movement to reform inhumane conditions in California prisons’ Security Housing Units (SHU), a movement sparked and dramatized by a 2011 hunger strike by thousands of SHU prisoners; the named plaintiffs include several leaders and participants from the hunger strike. The class action suit, which is being jointly filed by CCR and several advocate and legal organizations in California, alleges that prolonged solitary confinement violates Eight Amendment prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, and that the absence of meaningful review for SHU placement violates the prisoners’ right to due process.

Status On April 9, 2013 the Judge denied defendants’ motion to dismiss in its entirety. Read the Amended Complaint . Take Action! Description. Groundbreaking Decree in Mississippi Bans Solitary Confinement of Kids Convicted as Adults. On March 22, 2012, a federal court in Jackson, Mississippi, will enter a groundbreaking consent decree, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, banning the horrendous practice of subjecting kids convicted as adults to solitary confinement.

Groundbreaking Decree in Mississippi Bans Solitary Confinement of Kids Convicted as Adults

What's more, the decree will require the state to move such kids out of the brutally violent privately run prison where they are currently housed and transfer them to a stand-alone facility operated in accordance with juvenile justice standards rather than the far harsher adult correctional standards currently applied to them. Currently, youth as young as 13 who have been tried and convicted as adults in Mississippi are sent to the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (WGYCF), which is operated by GEO Group, Inc., the nation's second largest for-profit prison corporation.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws.