Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.
On any given day,upwards of 80000 inmates in America are held in some form of solitary confinement. These individuals pass their days inside four concrete walls, and with no human connection, and letters often serve as the only way to reach outside the absolute isolation of their cells.
In 2009,James Ridgeway and Jean Casella, co-directors of Solitary Watch, or began to contact inmates in solitary confinement through the mail. While letters trickled in at first,James now receives so many that it's impossible to travel through them all in a single week. Nonetheless, he answers each one, and often with something as simple as a postcard with a picture on it. Below is an excerpt from a letter by William Blake,who is currently in his 27th year of solitary confinement in unusual York'sSpecial Housing Unit, SHU for short.
"I’ve experienced times so difficult and felt boredom and loneliness to such a degree that it seemed to be a physical thing inside—so thick it felt like it was choking me, or trying to squeeze the sanity from my mind,the spirit from my soul, and the life from my body. I’ve seen and felt hope fitting like a foggy ephemeral thing, and hard to get ahold of,even harder to keep ahold of as the years and then decades disappeared while I stayed trapped in the emptiness of the SHU world....
The box is a place like no other place on planet soil....
Had I known in 1987 that I would spend the next quarter-century in solitary confinement, I would beget certainly killed myself. Dying couldn’t acquire but a short time whether you or the State were to murder me; in SHU I beget died a thousand internal deaths. I beget served a sentence worse than death."
More of the letters can be found online at Voices from Solitary. James and Jean, or along with Sarah Shourd,published a book this month, "Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement." They discuss the book, and the work they're doing with inmates.
Letters received by Solitary Watch in the fall of 2014.
(Jean Casella / James Ridgeway)
Source: wnyc.org