This was posted on the TA Sidebar.
It's an essay that some prisoner wrote about being in solitary confinement for 26 years. Interesting, IMO.
http://solitarywatch.com/2013/03/11/...se-than-death/
Here's some of it, if anyone is interested.
I was wondering if missy :jail: will have the same conditions in prison that this guy does (except, of course there won't be men yelling and such- like
in this prison). Would this be conditions only if she gets DP, I wonder, while she waits for death by injection?
Some excerpts that sound good: :facepalm:
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"The following essay is by William Blake, who has been held in solitary confinement for nearly 26 years. Currently he is in administrative segregation at Elmira Correctional Facility, a maximum security facility located in south central New York State. In 1987, Blake, then 23 and in county court on a drug charge, murdered one deputy and wounded another in a failed escape attempt. He was sentenced to 77 years to life....
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'...Prisoners call it The Box. Prison authorities have euphemistically dubbed it the Special Housing Unit, or SHU (pronounced shoe) for short. In society it is known as solitary confinement. It is 23-hour a day lockdown in a cell smaller than some closets Ive seen, with one hour allotted to recreation consisting of placement in a concrete enclosed yard by oneself or, in some prisons, a cage made of steel bars. There is nothing in a SHU yard but air: no TV, no balls to bounce, no games to play, no other inmates, nothing. There is very little allowed in a SHU cell, also. Three sets of plain white underwear, one pair of green pants, one green short-sleeved button-up shirt, one green sweatshirt, ten books or magazines total, twenty pictures of the people you love, writing supplies, a bar of soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, one deodorant stick but no shampoo, and thats about it. No clothes of your own, only prison-made. No food from commissary or packages, only three unappetizing meals a day handed to you through a narrow slot in your cell door. No phone calls, no TV, no luxury items at all. You get a set of cheap headphones to use, and you can pick between the two or three (depending on which prison youre in) jacks in the cell wall to plug into. You can listen to a TV station in one jack, and use your imagination while trying to figure out what is going on when the music indicates drama but the dialogue doesnt suffice to tell you anything. Or you can listen to some music, but youre out of luck if youre a rock-n-roll fan and find only rap is playing....
...I have lived for months where the first thing I became aware of upon waking in the morning is the malodorous funk of human feces, tinged with the acrid stench of days-old urine, where I eat my breakfast, lunch, and dinner with that same stink assaulting my senses, and where the last thought I had before falling into unconscious sleep was: Damn, it smells like sh-t in here....
Had I known in 1987 that I would spend the next quarter-century in solitary confinement, I would have certainly killed myself. If I took a month to die and spent every minute of it in severe pain, it seems to me that on a balance that fate would still be far easier to endure than the last twenty-five years have been. If I try to imagine what kind of death, even a slow one, would be worse than twenty-five years in the boxand I have tried to imagine itI can come up with nothing. Set me afire, pummel and bludgeon me, cut me to bits, stab me, shoot me, do what you will in the worst of ways, but none of it could come close to making me feel things as cumulatively horrifying as what Ive experienced through my years in solitary. Dying couldnt take but a short time if you or the State were to kill me; in SHU I have died a thousand internal deaths. The sum of my quarter-centurys worth of suffering has been that bad....
I have served a sentence worse than death."
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Pic from yesterday when I was doing my daily walking around like an idiot.
