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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Bonnie Kerness, Prison Watch Project, American Friends Service Committee, 89 Market Street - 6th floor, Newark, NJ 07102, 973-643-3192, bkerness@afsc.org

Traditionally, isolation (confining prisoners to their cells for 23 or 24 hours a day) has been used as a temporary measure, to punish individual prisoners or control the prison environment. Over the past 20 years, however, as these new forms of incarceration have grown increasingly common, extended isolation, often lasting for years, has become a permanent condition for more and more prisoners. Along with the multiplication of control units and supermax prisons, people in prison and their advocates have also begun to report increasingly routine use of devices like stun belts, stun guns, restraint chairs, hoods and chemical sprays. These issues have crashed into the public consciousness via media reports of particularly egregious human right violations taking place at US prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantanemo Bay. Although the US ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) in 1994, it has been cited by the UN Human Rights Commission, the UN Committee on Torture and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture for violations of the CAT and other international human rights treaties. Prisoner activists are working with family members, community activists and legal advocates to challenge these conditions which have garnered so much publicity in the past year. The AFSC believes the time is ripe for a coordinated national effort to shut down control units and supermax prisons and to stop the use of devices of torture in US prisons altogether

Learning Objectives:

• Attendees will understand how and why isolation is commonly used in the US.
• Attendees will learn about campaigns to stop the use of supermax prisons in the US.

Keywords: Prison, Human Rights

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No