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By Jean Dunbabin

This book explores the growing importance of prisons, both lay and ecclesiastical, in western Europe between 1000 and 1300. It attempts to explain what captors hoped to achieve by restricting the liberty of others, the means of confinement available to them, and why there was an increasingly close link between captivity and suspected criminal activity. It discusses conditions within prisons, the means of release open to some captives, and writing in or about prison.

Springer, Oct 23, 2002, 207 pages

By Partnership for the Public Good

Solitary confinement exacts an incalculable human toll. It also imposes heavy financial costs for New York State and localities across the state. Reducing the use of solitary confinement by enacting the Humane Alternatives to Long Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act1 could not only most importantly stop inhumane practices and save lives, but also save New York State and localities over $1.32 billion over 10 years. New York State is grappling with the economic devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, while also in the midst of the largest protests against racial inequality in a generation. Meanwhile, Black and Latinx people continue to suffer disproportionately, and often fatally, from solitary confinement. As these crises converge, it is both a fiscal and moral imperative for New York State to reduce the billions of dollars spent on its incarceration system and use the savings to better fund education, housing, health care, and employment opportunities for the communities most harmed by COVID-19 and longstanding systemic racism and inequality.

New York: Partnership for the Public Good, 2020. 32p.

By The # HaltSolitary Campaign

In the U.S. criminal legal system, individuals sentenced to prison are required to relinquish their liberty as redress for the crimes for which they have been convicted. They are not supposed to also give up their humanity, their physical and mental health, or their lives. Yet in New York’s state prisons, these are the terrible prices many incarcerated people end up paying. Some of the incidents of suicide and self-harm in the state’s prisons may be beyond the control of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). But there can be no doubt that prison conditions profoundly affect the level of suffering and despair felt by incarcerated people, and that inhumane conditions often lead to desperate responses. This report provides hard evidence, drawn from data provided by DOCCS and other state agencies, that the rate of suicides in New York’s prisons far exceeds the national prison average. It also establishes an undeniable link between the use of solitary confinement and higher rates of suicide, suicide attempts, and self-inflicted injury. Taken together, these numbers demand immediate and drastic change in DOCCS policies and practices in relation to solitary confinement. They demand that New York’s lawmakers put an end to preventable suffering, self-harm, and death in our prisons by enacting the HALT Solitary Confinement Act, A.2500/S.1623.1 Preventing self-injury and suicide by enacting HALT is even more imperative now, as COVID-19 increases the levels of anxiety, fear, and risk of self-harm for people in solitary during the pandemic.

New York: The New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement (CAIC) , 2020. 22p.