Beyond Prisons

Beyond Prisons Editor Ellis Maxwell introduces a new series called "Beyond Solitary," exploring solitary confinement as a site of struggle and featuring interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones. In recent years, due to tireless work from individuals and organizations around the world, we’ve seen a growing understanding of the horrors of isolation. Long-term solitary confinement—a practice widely used in U.S. prisons and hardly anywhere else in the world—is torturous, causing major physical and psychological harm to prisoners. In this series we dive deep into the importance of solitary as a site of struggle. Prison officials force people into solitary—which is often called “the prison within the prison,” or simply, “the box”—for many reasons: to silence influential voices, to deter movements towards consciousness and an abolitionist critique of the carceral state, to re-inscribe the rule of patriarchy and white supremacy, to suppress inside organizing, and to prevent upri