About a week after Thanksgiving of 2004, I stabbed a cop (prison guard) when I was at the Barrington Unit, located between Houston and Galveston. I spent the next fifteen years in administrative segregation, or, "ad-seg," as it's known. I was [...]
Gabriele was an upbeat cat for a prisoner with a life sentence. I remember the day that I met him. I was having a difficult day trying to navigate all of the negativity that prison has to offer when suddenly [...]
Mainstream media, the outside public, and the average layperson have no idea what goes on in the prison system that they support. America’s prisons are strategically placed in desolate, uninhabitable and rural parts of the U.S., which makes it hard for [...]
Editors Note: Mustafa Zulu spent 20 years in solitary confinement in the harshest Federal Prison in America: ADX Florence in Colorado. One day, he was told he was moving to a STATE prison in North Carolina. 1) STRESS MANAGEMENT: Stress kills. [...]
Solitary confinement is now firmly embedded in this country’s prison system. Indeed, the control units that specialize in housing prisoners in solitary by the tens of thousands throughout the US have become the new normal. Slowly, people out in society [...]
The hole, the new term for solitary confinement. It’s the place they take you when you break one of their “rules,” or at least they say you did. It’s supposed to be a deterrent from future acts of whatever they deem [...]
After spending 3 years in a medium security Ohio prison, a friend of mine once asked me if the time spent there had institutionalized me. At the time my idea of what it meant to be institutionalized consisted of simply forming [...]
After spending over five years in solitary confinement, I have finally come to realize that solitary confinement is known torture -- and the prisoners aren’t the only ones who know this. There have been extensive studies that have shown that lengthy [...]
Courtesy of Brad Simpson Hello. My name is Brad but everyone calls me Lou. I’m in prison for killing an inmate while doing time for another crime. The reason I tell you this is so you’ll know, upfront, [...]
Like thousands of other inmates across the nation, I had a job. I worked in the kitchen. In the stock room area, out of sight in the back of the kitchen, my partner Zeke and I were joined by a few [...]
After spending over five years studying how prolonged periods of solitary confinement harms the brains, the only conclusion that I could come up with is that it’s torture and I’m not the only one who knows this. There have been extensive [...]
Being tossed into prison at the young age of 18 forced me to endure growing up before having the actual chance to live. I never envisioned witnessing and experiencing life in a world depicted in books and movies. Unlike the happy [...]
By: Mustafa Zulu, Contributing Writer It was 4:00 in the morning, just one month shy of my 39th birthday. I was sound asleep in my prison cell. A guard and a property officer beamed a flashlight in my face and started [...]
BY C.F. VILLA On July 1, 2011, California prisoners launched a massive hunger strike to call attention to what we were all forced to endure: inhumane conditions in solitary confinement in California's Special Housing Units (SHU’s). The physical and psychological torture [...]
BY CHARLES SELBY For three decades, I have witnessed countless occasions in which Emergency Response Teams are assembled to carry out chemical cell extractions of disruptive prisoners, in this case an African-American prisoner. Equally-hued guards are dissuaded by the more [...]