Our “Solitary 101″ PowerPoint, developed for the recent Midwest Coalition for Human Rights conference on Solitary Confinement and Human Rights, is now available online. The 60-slide PowerPoint includes sections on the history of solitary confinement, solitary as it is practiced in the United States today, and the growing movement against solitary confinement.

We encourage educators and advocates to use, share, and customize the presentation according to their needs (for non-commercial purposes only, with proper attribution to Solitary Watch). No advance permission is necessary, although we will appreciate hearing about how you are using the presentation, as well as any suggestions for improvement.

Solitary Watch’s ‘Solitary 101′ Powerpoint Presentation

November 8, 2012  by Solitary Watch Guest Author Lance Tapley

In 1986 Ojore Lutalo, a black revolutionary in the Trenton State Prison — now the New Jersey State Prison — wrote to Bonnie Kerness’s American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) office in Newark. His letter described the extreme isolation and other brutalities in the prison’s Management Control Unit, which he called a “prison within a prison.”

“I could not believe what he was telling me” about the MCU, she says. She reacted by becoming “this lunatic white lady” calling New Jersey corrections officials about Lutalo.

Kerness immediately went to work trying to stop MCU guards from harassing prisoners by waking them at 1 a.m. to make them strip in front of snarling dogs leaping for their genitals — to arbitrarily have them switch cells. She got this practice stopped.

Lutalo’s letter also began to open her eyes to the torture of solitary confinement, which in the mid-1980s was just starting to spread across the country as a mass penological practice. Coordinator of the AFSC’s national Prison Watch Project, Kerness had worked on prison issues since the mid-1970s. Now she became an anti-solitary-confinement activist. In 2012, she has been one longer and more consistently than, possibly, anyone else.

This Crow Won't Fly  

By MICHELLE ALEXANDER, New York Times  March 14, 2012

by Paul Boden Nov 18, 2010
Organizing Director, Western Regional Advocacy Project

This is the third article in a series we're writing on Quality of Life ordinances, our contemporary version of the vagrancy laws that have been with us for centuries. In the South, they were used to force freed slaves back to the plantation. In the North, they were used to instill a Protestant work ethic in indigent whites. This compulsion to control labor and separate the "worthy" from the "unworthy" is deeply ingrained in our culture and institutions.

"The global elite have repeatedly demonstrated their animosity toward the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Taking down the First Amendment – in addition to the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and most importantly the Second – under the bogus and contrived aegis of a manufactured war on terror amply reveals what they have in mind: a gulag panopticon where resistance is not only futile, but illegal, and where the slaves are disarmed and powerless to effectuate change."

Download the Handbook:  http://jailhouselaw.org/

Speak your mind: Are today’s cops too militarized? 
Jan 05, 2012  from PoliceOne.com

A reader emailed me the other day, concerned about some of the changes he’s seen in law enforcement since he retired four years ago as a county constable in Mississippi. His letter appears below.

How would you respond to the observations and questions he poses?

Dear Chuck,

The Quality of Whose Life? Final Part

May 20, 2011 WRAP Comms

Linocut by Art Hazelwood

By Paul Boden Organizing Director, Western Regional Advocacy Project

"...three shootings — most officers go through their career with no shootings — it just raises a lot of concerns.”

'Deputy involved in June 2 shooting involved in two other shootings'

Tatiana Grant, 5 years old, daughter of Sophina Mesa and Oscar Grant.

There has been a civil lawsuit SETTLEMENT for Tatiana Grant, Oscar's 5 year old daughter.  Oscar's Mother still has a lawsuit against the Oakland BART cops, as do the 5 young men, close friends, who were with Oscar when he was murdered. The young men recieved abuse themselves and witnessed the cops execute their friend who was laying on his stomach in handcuffs.

Detroit Imam Assassinated by FBI Agents    

By Abayomi Azikiwe  Pan-African News Wire, Detroit   Friday, October 30, 2009