Women in Solitary
Women in Solitary

Author: Shanthini Naidoo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-21

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9781032133676

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Women in Solitary offers a new account based around the narratives of four women who experienced detention and torture in South Africa in the late 1960s when the regime tried to stage a trial to convict leading anti-apartheid activists. This timely book not only accords the four women and others their place in the history of the struggle for freedom in South Africa, but also weaves their experiences into the historical development of the anti-apartheid movement. The book draws on extended interviews with journalist Joyce Sikhakhane-Rankin, trade unionists Shanthie Naidoo and Rita Ndzanga and activist Nondwe Mankahla. Winnie Mandela's account of her time in detention is drawn from earlier published accounts. The narrative brings to light the unrelentingly brutal and comprehensive character of the attempt to silence resistance and break the spirit of the activists, both to disrupt organisation and to intimidate communities. It is testament to the triumph and strength of conviction that the women displayed. It also reflects the comprehensive nature of the resistance. The women fought not only as organisers, recruiters or couriers, but also in solitary confinement, resisting all its deprivations, the taunts by interrogators and anxieties about their children. And when they took the fight into the courtroom, they prevailed. The book weaves their experiences into the historical development of the struggle in a way that highlights broader issues, drawing out the particular ways in which women's experience of activism and repression differs from that of men, both in terms of the behaviour of the police and of the women's ties with community, family and children. The book's broad timespan underpins the psychological effects of sustained solitary confinement and its traumatic legacy, asking whether, by not attending more consistently to healing the trauma done to a generation by brutal repression, we allow it to contribute to social ills that worry us today. Women in Solitary is ideal reading for anyone interested in the history of apartheid, the criminalization of activism, and women's imprisonment, as well as scholars and students of penal and feminist studies.

Solitary
Solitary

Author: Albert Woodfox

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2019-03-12

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0802146902

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“An uncommonly powerful memoir about four decades in confinement . . . A profound book about friendship [and] solitary confinement in the United States.” —New York Times Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Solitary is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement—in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, twenty-three hours a day, in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison—all for a crime he did not commit. That Albert Woodfox survived at all was a feat of extraordinary endurance. That he emerged whole from his odyssey within America’s prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit. While behind bars in his early twenties, Albert was inspired to join the Black Panther Party because of its social commitment and code of living. He was serving a fifty-year sentence in Angola for armed robbery when, on April 17, 1972, a white guard was killed. Albert and another member of the Panthers were accused of the crime and immediately put in solitary confinement. Without a shred of evidence against them, their trial was a sham of justice. Decades passed before Albert was finally released in February 2016. Sustained by the solidarity of two fellow Panthers, Albert turned his anger into activism and resistance. The Angola 3, as they became known, resolved never to be broken by the corruption that effectively held them for decades as political prisoners. Solitary is a clarion call to reform the inhumanity of solitary confinement in the United States and around the world.

Hell Is a Very Small Place
Hell Is a Very Small Place

Author: Jean Casella

Publisher: New Press, The

Published: 2014-11-11

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1620971380

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“An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews

Solitary
Solitary

Author: Terry A. Kupers

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0520292235

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“When I testify in court, I am often asked: ‘What is the damage of long-term solitary confinement?’ . . . Many prisoners emerge from prison after years in solitary with very serious psychiatric symptoms even though outwardly they may appear emotionally stable. The damage from isolation is dreadfully real.” —Terry Allen Kupers Imagine spending nearly twenty-four hours a day alone, confined to an eight-by-ten-foot windowless cell. This is the reality of approximately one hundred thousand inmates in solitary confinement in the United States today. Terry Allen Kupers, one of the nation’s foremost experts on the mental health effects of solitary confinement, tells the powerful stories of the inmates he has interviewed while investigating prison conditions during the past forty years. Touring supermax security prisons as a forensic psychiatrist, Kupers has met prisoners who have been viciously beaten or raped, subdued with immobilizing gas, or ignored in the face of urgent medical and psychiatric needs. Kupers criticizes the physical and psychological abuse of prisoners and then offers rehabilitative alternatives to supermax isolation. Solitary is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the true damage that solitary confinement inflicts on individuals living in isolation as well as on our society as a whole.

Six by Ten
Six by Ten

Author: Mateo Hoke

Publisher:

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 9781608469567

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A collection of intimate portraits told directly by people whose lives have been devastated by solitary confinement in America.

Riotous Flesh
Riotous Flesh

Author: April R. Haynes

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-10-21

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 022628462X

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The claim that masturbation isn t good for you didn t just come out of nowhere. As April Haynes shows, a range of feminist reformers in nineteenth century America all agreed that the solitary vice caused untold suffering and death; that women and girls masturbated as frequently as did men and boys; that they did so because they lacked access to sexual information; and that therefore, female sex education would save lives. Haynes, in short shows that nascent feminists remade what might have been a puritanical crusade into a basis for envisioning their own sexual self-masterywith mixed results, for Haynes also tells the story of how, before the advent of sexology or even the professionalization of medicine, a great silent army of evangelical female reformers first popularized, then institutionalized, the normative sexual discourse of the nineteenth century."

Inside This Place, Not of It
Inside This Place, Not of It

Author: Ayelet Waldman

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2017-07-25

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1786632306

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“Essential reading” on some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States (Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black) Here, in their own words, thirteen women recount their lives leading up to incarceration and their harrowing struggle for survival once insides. Among the narrators: Theresa, who spent years believing her health and life were in danger, being aggressively treated with a variety of medications for a disease she never had. Only on her release did she discover that an incompetent prison medical bureaucracy had misdiagnosed her with HIV. Anna, who repeatedly warned apathetic prison guards about a suicidal cellmate. When the woman killed herself, the guards punished Anna in an attempt to silence her and hide their own negligence. Teri, who was sentenced to up to fifty years for aiding and abetting a robbery when she was only seventeen. A prison guard raped Teri, who was still a teenager, and the assaults continued for years with the complicity of other staff.

Solitary Confinement
Solitary Confinement

Author: Lisa Guenther

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2013-08-01

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 0816686270

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Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. A searing and unforgettable indictment, Solitary Confinement reveals what the devastation wrought by the torture of solitary confinement tells us about what it means to be human—and why humanity is so often destroyed when we separate prisoners from all other people.

Way Down in the Hole
Way Down in the Hole

Author: Angela J. Hattery

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2022-10-14

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1978823789

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Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with prisoners, correctional officers, and civilian staff conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies. Smith and Hattery explore the outcome of building prisons in rural, economically depressed communities, staffing them with white people who live in and around these communities, filling them with Black and brown bodies from urban areas and then designing the structure of solitary confinement units such that the most private, intimate daily bodily functions take place in very public ways. Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is rarely considered, that such daily interactions produce and reproduce white racial resentment among many correctional officers and fuel the racialized tensions that prisoners often describe as the worst forms of dehumanization. Way Down in the Hole concludes with recommendations for reducing the use of solitary confinement, reforming its use in a limited context, and most importantly, creating an environment in which prisoners and staff co-exist in ways that recognize their individual humanity and reduce rather than reproduce racial antagonisms and racial resentment.

My Time Will Come
My Time Will Come

Author: Ian Manuel

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2022-04-19

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1984897985

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The inspiring story of activist and poet Ian Manuel, who at the age of fourteen was sentenced to life in prison. He survived eighteen years in solitary confinement—through his own determination and dedication to art—until he was freed as part of an incredible crusade by the Equal Justice Initiative. “Ian is magic. His story is difficult and heartbreaking, but he takes us places we need to go to understand why we must do better. He survives by relying on a poetic spirit, an unrelenting desire to succeed, to recover, and to love. Ian’s story says something hopeful about our future.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy The United States is the only country in the world that sentences thirteen- and fourteen-year-old offenders, mostly youth of color, to life in prison without parole. In 1991, Ian Manuel, then fourteen, was sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide crime. In a botched mugging attempt with some older boys, he shot a young white mother of two in the face. But as Bryan Stevenson, attorney and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has insisted, none of us should be judged by only the worst thing we have ever done. Capturing the fullness of his humanity, here is Manuel’s powerful testimony of growing up homeless in a neighborhood riddled with poverty, gang violence, and drug abuse—and of his efforts to rise above his circumstances, only to find himself, partly through his own actions, imprisoned for two-thirds of his life, eighteen years of which were spent in solitary confinement. Here is the story of how he endured the savagery of the United States prison system, and how his victim, an extraordinary woman, forgave him and bravely advocated for his freedom, which was achieved by an Equal Justice Initiative push to address the barbarism of our judicial system and bring about “just mercy.” Full of unexpected twists and turns as it describes a struggle for redemption, My Time Will Come is a paean to the capacity of the human will to transcend adversity through determination and art—in Ian Manuel’s case, through his dedication to writing poetry.