Today in Chicago an exhibit opens at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago showcasing the work of volunteer photographers who, hoping to provide some solace, are filling requests from inmates in Illinois solitary confinement. You can read more about what photos were requested, the inmates behind them, and the participating photographer’s experiences by reading this WBEZ article describing the project, which is run by Tamms Year 10, an advocacy group that’s working to close that prison. The future of Tamms is stuck in a legal battle between Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn’s office and AFSCME, the union that represents the prison employees. Quinn wants it closed, but a judge recently ruled in the union’s favor. The governor’s office has said they’d appeal to the state supreme court.
The November/December 2012 issue of Mother Jones also took on this issue with their article, “Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.” by Stephen Bauer. He writes:
“There was a window,” I say. I don’t quite know how to tell him what I mean by that answer. “Just having that light come in, seeing the light move across the cell, seeing what time of day it was—” Without those windows, I wouldn’t have had the sound of ravens, the rare breezes, or the drops of rain that I let wash over my face some nights. My world would have been utterly restricted to my concrete box, to watching the miniature ocean waves I made by sloshing water back and forth in a bottle; to marveling at ants; to calculating the mean, median, and mode of the tick marks on the wall; to talking to myself without realizing it. For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows.
When, after five weeks, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground utterly broken, sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back. Its slow creeping against the wall reminded me that the world did in fact turn and that time was something other than the stagnant pool my life was draining into.
Here, there are no windows.
Stephen Bauer is touring the Pelican Bay SHU in California, where 94 percent of prisoners are celled alone. It’s been seven months since he’s been back in a prison cell. After being apprehended on the Iran-Iraq border, he, Sarah Shourd, and Josh Fattal, were held in Evin Prison’s isolation ward for political prisoners. Sarah remained there for 13 months, Stephen and Josh for 26 months.
You can read more about Stephen’s experience and reflections on America’s prison system as he shares about corresponding with inmates in SHUs around California as part of an investigation into why and how people end up in these conditions. More than 80,000 people were in solitary confinement in the United States in 2005, the last time the federal government released such data.