Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement

by Jean Casella (Editor), James Ridgeway (Editor), Sarah Shourd (Editor)

Overview

NOW IN PAPERBACK The "elegant but harrowing" (San Francisco Chronicle) collection of writing from solitary confinement that lifts the veil on this widespread modern-day form of torture

On any given day in America, over 80,000 people are held in solitary confinement—held in utter isolation for twenty-three or twenty-four hours a day, moved there from the general population without any legal process or justification. In a "potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole" (Kirkus Reviews), Hell Is a Very Small Place offers rare accounts from the people who are now or have been in solitary confinement. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, "The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read."

These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement, and a comprehensive introduction by Solitary Watch co-founders James Ridgeway and Jean Casella. Sarah Shourd, herself a survivor of more than a year of solitary confinement, writes eloquently in a preface about an experience that changed her life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620973516
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	382,584
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jean Casella is a co-director of Solitary Watch, a web-based watchdog project, and a Soros Justice Fellow. She is the editor of two previous anthologies and lives in Brooklyn, New York. James Ridgeway (1936–2021) was an investigative journalist for more than fifty years and was the author of seventeen previous books. He was a co-director of Solitary Watch and a Soros Justice Fellow. Sarah Shourd, a journalist and playwright, was held as a political hostage by the Iranian government, including 410 days in solitary, an experience she chronicled in A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran. She lives in Oakland, California.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Hell Is a Very Small Place:
“A book that people of conscience must read and share. The stories in it will not simply haunt us. They will inspire us to act.”
—Heather Ann Thompson (Blood in the Water), Favorite Book of 2016 in Publishers Weekly

“A gutsy book. . . . The essays in Hell Is a Very Small Place are not only fascinating, but also expose readers to a whole way of life that is otherwise invisible.”
—Bookslut

“An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement.”
—New York Review of Books

“Hell Is a Very Small Place is composed of communication and observation that is not supposed to exist: it is a book as a minor act of rebellion.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Elegant but harrowing.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“The personal accounts by prisoners contained in this book are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read. There were many points throughout the book when my emotions became very overwhelming, and I had to pause and catch my breath.”
—Chelsea Manning

“[I]f I were to recommend just one book on this topic to an interested citizen, I would recommend this one.”
—Counterpunch

“[T]hese stories pack a visceral punch and make a convincing case for more humane conditions, better oversight, and continuing prison reform.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.”
—Kirkus

“Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day for months, sometime for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. It's not going to make us stronger.”
—President Barack Obama

“Solitary confinement in American prisons has become one of our nation's most horrendous human rights problems. Much more public attention is needed to this shameful, wasteful, cruel travesty. Hell Is a Very Small Place is vitally important.”
—Ralph Nader

“This important book leaves no doubt that solitary confinement has no place in a civilized society. The story of each person subject to solitary shows that he or she is somebody and that the life that is thrown away is not beyond redemption. Together they demonstrate the urgency of turning from hatred to understanding and from vengeance to reconciliation if we are going to have a decent, moral, and compassionate society.”
—Stephen Bright, president and senior counsel, Southern Center for Human Rights

“Confronts the moral catastrophe of solitary confinement through compelling and courageous testimonies by the world's premier experts on the matter: the confined themselves.”
—Glenn E. Martin, founder and president, JustLeadershipUSA

From the Publisher

10/26/2015
In this grim, no-holds-barred exposé, 21 essays and academic papers critique the use of solitary confinement in prison, looking at the ruinous effects on those forced to endure it for weeks, months, years, or even decades at a time. Casella and Ridgeway are no strangers to this topic: they’re the cofounders of Solitary Watch, a watchdog group formed to investigate the practice. Shourd, a journalist who spent 410 days as a political hostage in Iran from 2009 to 2010, brings firsthand knowledge. Selections written by former and current inmates assemble a litany of horror and shocking treatment, backing the argument that no one deserves this level of punishment, regardless of the crimes committed. “Solitary confinement for the length of time that I have endured it... is torture of a terrible kind,” states William Blake, who has been held in solitary for more than 20 years after murdering a deputy and wounding another in an escape attempt from a courtroom, in his essay “A Sentence Worse than Death.” While it’s obvious that the editors are pursuing an agenda and the contributors likewise have an undeniable bias, these stories pack a visceral punch and make a convincing case for more humane conditions, better oversight, and continuing prison reform. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2015
Solitary confinement is the practice by which certain prison inmates are locked in small dungeon-like cells for an indefinite time Here, Casella and James Ridgeway of the watch-dog group Solitary Watch, and Sarah Shourd, who was once a political prisoner in Iran, bring together 16 accounts by people still in solitary confinement, or those who have survived it, and several authorities on criminal justice. Far from light bedside reading, these are horrifying accounts of madness and a struggle for survival. It is often difficult to believe that the a experiences described are happening right now in America and not at some distant place in the Middle Ages. Many of the accounts will stick in one's mind, but this reviewer found among the most memorable to be William Blake's "A Sentence Worse Than Death," which won honorable mention in the 2013 Yale Law Journal's Prison Law Writing Contest. Once violent but now subdued, Blake writes eloquently of his attempt to make sense of it all. VERDICT A book for everyone who is at all interested in prisons, and certainly for students and teachers in the field of criminal justice.—Frances O. Sandiford, formerly with Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY

Library Journal

2015-11-10
The founders of a watchdog group dedicated to stopping the practice of solitary confinement gather voices from victims of this hellish punishment. The editors of this slim but powerful collection of essays may wear their political agendas on their sleeves, but they make their arguments with undeniable efficacy. Casella and Ridgeway are co-founders of Solitary Watch, and journalist Shourd chronicled her 410 days of solitary confinement in her memoir A Sliver of Light (2014). In collecting essays from prisoners and mental health experts, the editors dig deep into the frailties of the human mind as well as the savagery of the American penal system and its ilk. Many of the men and women whose voices are captured here measure their time in solitary not in years but in decades. Some are soul-deadening, such as William Blake describing his nearly 30 years of solitary in "A Sentence Worse Than Death": "I've experienced times so difficult and felt boredom and loneliness to such a degree that it seemed to be a physical thing inside so thick it felt like it was choking me, trying to squeeze the sanity from my mind, the spirit from my soul, and the life from my body." Other writers are startlingly articulate and unnervingly funny, despite the violence and grief spilled out on the page. Take Thomas Bartlett Whitaker, whose essay "A Nothing Would Do as Well" starts with an attention-getter: "The first time I met Mad Dog, he nearly shot me with a Hepatitis C-infected blowgun dart." The stories by people victimized by solitary confinement are followed by articulate essays by medical and legal professionals about the human costs of the practice. In her introduction, Shourd says it best: "Locking a person in a box is a sick and perverse thing to do. It benefits no one—not even the governments who allow it. It's torture." A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.

Kirkus Reviews