“Requests from Solitary / Tamms Year Ten, at Sullivan Galleries” @ Greg Ruffing Blog

Posted on November 16, 2012

November 14, 2012: “The expanded use of solitary confinement in domestic prisons in the U.S. has not come without its fair share of scandal and controversy, for example drawing condemnation from the ACLU as human rights abuse, or from the United Nations — and even organizations that represent the interests of crime victims’ families — who have stated that the practice is tantamount to torture.

Among the more notorious practitioners of this psychological torture and sensory deprivation is the Tamms supermax prison in southern Illinois, which keeps all of its inmates in permanent solitary confinement. The prison opened in 1998 and was actually originally designed to use solitary only as a short-term incarceration method (“shock treatment”, as the Department of Corrections called it). However, now more than a decade later, many of the prisoners housed there are still in long-term isolation………………….”

Read more and see pictures of the exhibit at Greg Ruffing Blog.