Women in Solitary

By Joanne Pawlowski

Women in Solitary presents the powerful testimony of six women who were confined to solitary confinement in New York State prisons. Based on interviews conducted for Pawlowski's previous book Solitary: The History and Current Reality of Torture as a Means of Social Control, this ebook describes the strategies women use to cope with solitary confinement, including taking overdoses of prescribed psychotropic medications to manage its psychological effects. The women also detail their vulnerability to sexual assault by prison guards. Women in Solitary is a forceful telling of a previously untold story and illuminates women's experiences of solitary confinement in the rest of the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joanne Pawlowski
• Release date: Mar 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310889943

Book preview

Women in Solitary

by

Joanne Pawlowski

Smashwords Edition

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Published by: Joanne Pawlowski on Smashwords

Women in Solitary, Copyright 2016 Joanne Pawlowski

Smashwords Edition License Notes: Thank you for downloading this eBook. This book may not be resold. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for your support.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Knowing What's Coming

Chapter Two: The Indefinite Sentence

Chapter Three: Wishing to be Alone

Chapter Four: Busting Up Windows

Chapter Five: The Nearly Soundproof Cell

Chapter Six: A Philosophical View

Endnotes

About the Author

Introduction

I first learned about conditions in solitary confinement by reading prisoner letters that had been collected by the American Friends Service Committee, a humanitarian service organization. But the letters I read were from men—I wondered how women fared in solitary. With the help of nonprofits who offered support services to prisoners reentering society, I later interviewed women who had spent between three months and two years in solitary confinement in New York State for the book Solitary: The History and Current Reality of Torture as a Means of Social Control Within Prisons. This ebook is a selection of more detailed material from these interviews.

Solitary confinement can be found in the US prison system under different names; supermax, administrative segregation, disciplinary segregation, keep lock, and special housing unit (SHU) are commonly used terms. The routine is the same for all: confinement in a small cell for 23 hours a day with one hour time out for exercise in a cage. Many find the experience brutal and traumatizing. Fifty percent of the suicides in prison occur in solitary.

Four correctional facilities for women are described in these pages. Albion Correctional Facility and Bedford Hills Correctional Facility are medium and maximum security prisons in upstate New York. Rikers Island, a jail complex, and Bayview Correctional Facility, a medium security prison, are located in New York City (Bayview closed recently). Albion has two SHU units. One, which was built relatively recently, has a feature not usually associated with the common picture of prisons: nearly soundproof cells. Nationally, many SHU units for women have been retrofitted from older prisons. The women here report that in older SHU units, prisoners could flout the conditions of isolation and shout through ventilation ducts to establish some sort of social contact with their neighbors. Such contact had been life-saving in times of personal crisis. At the newer unit at Albion, which is representative of recent SHU unit design and was built expressly for solitary confinement, women have no such recourse. This seems to strengthen the pain of solitary.

I view New York SHU units as a proxy for long-term isolated confinement in the rest of the country in part because the regime of 23 hour confinement is consistent among states. New York also has one of the oldest traditions of solitary confinement in the U.S.; more of its prisoners are in disciplinary isolation than any other state, both proportionally and in absolute numbers. Typically, prisoners land in isolation for breaking rules in the prison. The women quoted here were sentenced to SHU for talking back to officers, for disobeying direct orders, for fighting other inmates, and for assaulting staff.

The aim of this research was to generate an accurate picture of the experience of isolated confinement. Although accounts differ, there is sufficient overlap that one can develop an overall impression of the issues and concerns these women faced. Women were either referred to me by staff of prisoner re-entry programs, or they responded to flyers. It was requested that interviewees had experienced at least 60 days of confinement in solitary. The interviews were conducted from 2006 to 2007. Each interviewee was asked the same questions from an open-ended questionnaire about their history in SHU. Additional women were sought until the content of the interviews reached a point of redundancy. The women interviewed ranged in age from the mid-twenties to the late-forties. Several received diagnoses of mental illness either before or during prison. Half volunteered that they were molested as children or as young teenagers. Some asked that they real names be used, others asked that their names be changed to protect their identities.

Sexual violence has not been mentioned in previous writings on long-term isolation. Yet it was of significant concern for the women interviewed here. Sexual harassment on the part of officers was a prominent issue raised by the women. They reported that in SHU, male officers can observe women in various states of undress in cells, showers and during searches. They also stated that officers prostituted inmates and engaged in sex with them. Officers have almost total authority over female inmates. They determine the length of confinement in SHU and they confer all privileges.

New York penal law criminalizes sex with inmates and labels it as first degree rape.

Human Rights Watch has alleged that many line officers have engaged in sexual assault, ranging from sexual intercourse to voyeurism. It has also alleged that staff obstruct women who try to file charges. The women I interviewed told me that officers in isolation units had less supervision than staff in the general population of the prisons in which they were incarcerated and that conditions of confinement in SHU made it very difficult to report on rule-breakers. The women did not have a functional grievance system that allowed them to protest abuses.

It is understandable that women with histories of trauma would try to impose some sense of control over their environment using methods that helped them in the past. Women who felt in danger could look to their own bodies as the place where they could get a predictable reaction. Most found sedation to be the only way they