Jean Casella

Jean Casella is a freelance writer, editor and publishing consultant, and co-editor of Solitary Watch

Articles by this author

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Sunday, October 14, 2012
Kids in Solitary Confinement: America's Official Child Abuse
Molly J said of her time in solitary confinement: "[I felt] doomed, like I was being banished … Like you have the plague or that you are the worst thing on earth. Like you are set apart [from] everything else. I guess [I wanted to] feel like I was part of the human race – not like some animal." Molly was just 16 years old when she was placed in isolation in an adult jail in Michigan. She described her cell as being "a box":
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Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Congress Unlocks America's Hidden Shame of Solitary Confinement
Imagine a place filled with closed, windowless cells. Each cell may be so small that you can extend your arms and touch the side walls. It may contain a bunk of poured concrete, a toilet, perhaps a small table and stool. A few personal possessions – books, family photos – may be permitted, or they may not.
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Tuesday, July 26, 2011
A Hunger for Justice in Pelican Bay
On 21 July, prisoners in solitary confinement at California's notorious Pelican Bay State Prison began accepting the meals that were slipped to them through slots in their solid mental cell doors. For many, it was the first time they had eaten in three weeks.
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Saturday, March 19, 2011
Cruel and Usual: US Solitary Confinement
The spectre of Bradley Manning lying naked and alone in a tiny cell at the Quantico Marine Base, less than 50 miles from Washington, DC, conjures up images of an American Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, where isolation and deprivation have been raised to the level of torture. In fact, the accused Wikileaker, now in his tenth month of solitary confinement, is far from alone in his plight. Every day in the US, tens of thousands of prisoners languish in "the hole".
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Thursday, January 20, 2011
Beyond Bradley Manning: The Lonely Battle Against Solitary Confinement
For the past few weeks, progressive commentators have been burning with outrage over the prison conditions endured by accused WikiLeaks source, Private Bradley Manning. For more than seven months, Manning has been held in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement at a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, denied sunlight, exercise, possessions, and all but the most limited contact with family and friends.
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Friday, June 05, 2009
Life on Permanent Lockdown
Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox are believed to have been held in solitary confinement for longer than any inmate in America-37 years, to be precise, nearly all of them spent in 6-by-9 cells at Louisiana's notorious Angola prison . For 23 hours a day, they pass the time in their cells as best they can. For one hour, they are allowed out to take a shower or a stroll along the cell block.
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
Don't Even Think About It: Enter The Thought Police
Perhaps no campaign tactic is more effective than fearmongering, and in the current presidential race the sum of all fears, once again, is radical Islamic terrorists-or "jihadists," to use the now-ubiquitous term.
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Friday, August 31, 2007
Windfall: How Conservatives, Contractors, and Developers Cashed In on Katrina
In those first emotional days after Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast, widespread predictions of a political sea change arrived from liberal and even some conservative commentators. "Americans are ready to fix their restless gaze on enduring problems of poverty, race, and class that have escaped their attention," Newsweek's Jonathan Alter wrote in a September 2005 cover story. Some went so far as to forecast the dawn of a new America, one stunned out of both complacency and conservatism by the images of suffering on the Gulf Coast.
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