The John Oliver segment on solitary confinement. Which is torture. See also this video from the Real News Network, where "Mansa Musa, who spent 48 years in prison, talks about what John Oliver’s recent Last Week Tonight segment on solitary confinement gets right and what it leaves out, including the fact that solitary was used to isolate Black Panthers and other radicals entering the prison system in the ’70s."
"When I got locked up and I went into Maryland Penitentiary in ’73, they had what they called the hole, and the hole would have been consistent with the concept of solitary or isolation, because they basically had made about four or five cells and they would isolate people in them that they deemed to be unruly. But overall, you had punitive segregation, which was you stayed locked in your cell, but you was in an environment where you had access to people, you could talk to the person in the cell next to you.
But when solitary confinement reemerged, when they started locking up radical elements, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, Puerto Rican nationalists, anybody who was fighting, anybody who was antiestablishment, anybody who would stand up for human rights and self-determination, that’s when it became a tool, a mechanism to suppress that. This massive prison population exists and in its existence it creates a threat. The threat being the potential for organization, and organizing to combat and fight fascism, racism."
— Mansa Musa
"John Oliver and his team of writers talk about the reemergence of solitary in the 1980s, coinciding with the explosion of the prison population. So we’re entering the age of mass incarceration, more people are coming into the prisons, and the way that they explain it is that there’s overcrowding, there’s fighting, and then solitary emerges as this punitive weapon to try to get this prison population under control.
But what you’ve added to the conversation is that, you, like our dearly departed brother Eddie Conway, like so many other radicals that we’ve talked to on this show, knew they were targeted for solitary confinement because they are these radical elements coming in, they’re going to organize, they’re going to talk to other inmates, they’re going to build and develop that revolutionary consciousness.
So for a prison warden, they’re like, “Well, we don’t want that, so let’s just isolate these guys.” That was a really crucial additional context to the John Oliver segment. I just wanted to clarify for folks watching and listening, like you said, before solitary really became the weapon of choice in the prison system, there were other proto mechanisms for isolating, proto solitary confinement mechanisms."
"Albert Woodfox, another lifelong activist and Black Panther, was incarcerated after being wrongfully imprisoned for over 40 years, spent over 44 years in solitary confinement in Angola, was released I believe in 2016, and died only a few years after that. Just the thought of 44 years in solitary confinement breaks my brain a bit."
— Maximillian Alvarez
