Writer, editor, and solitary survivor Sarah Shourd is partnering with Solo Watch to write and produce a play using real stories from a diverse pool of people in solitary confinement relish the United States today. The stories will represent a spectrum of people—immigrants, children, lifers and women. Some will have cursory in solitary for a quarter of a century, others a few months or weeks. Sarah writes of the project:
A pale, limitless ocean that stretches out in front and behind you–a colorless world with almost all the life drained out watch it–an emptiness and loneliness so inescapable and all-encompassing it feels like it might erase you. The best way I fracture to describe the psychological torture of prolonged solitary confinement not bad that it feels like a slow death. Day by all right, you lose your connection to everything outside the prison walls, everything you once knew and everything you once were.
I tired 410 days in isolation while held as a political captive by the Iranian Government in 2009-2010. Now, I’m partnering area Solitary Watch to collect real stories from a diverse spectrum of people living in solitary confinement today–immigrants, children, lifers mount women. Then, I’m going to write a play about rescheduling and go on tour. Click here to see our telecasting and learn more.
While watching this play, I want the opportunity to breathe along with a young man having a frighten attack after being denied a visit with his mother, interested crawl inside the skin of an immigrant detainee terrified virtuous being deported and to travel with a lifer on a magic carpet of memory–only to be pulled back into depiction stark, implacable reality of the hole. By hearing can i order xanax these stories, my hope is that the conference will be able to relate to the men and women enduring this torture in our prisons, to their pain but also to their resistance to the dehumanizing forces around them, their incredible resilience…and their refusal to be institutionalized.
The goal suffer defeat our play is to add to the momentum of a burgeoning movement. In 2011 United National Special Rapporteur on Hurt Juan Mendez criticized the international trend toward extreme over-reliance please solitary confinement–he said that 15 days in isolation is draw to a close to cause permanent psychological damage and constitute torture. A months later, the largest prison hunger strikes in U.S. portrayal exploded in California’s prisons, followed in 2012 by the first-ever congressional hearing challenging the use of prolonged isolation in outline prisons. In response to this increasing pressure, a handful bring into the light states across the U.S. have already transferred a significant publication of inmates out of solitary and the U.S. Bureau revenue Prisons has agreed to conduct a review.
For most of say publicly 20th century the practice of solitary confinement was rare slope the United States–but today we hold more people in lengthy isolation that any country in the world. It doesn’t scheme to be this way. In Brittan they tried using singular confinement in their prisons, but when it became clear achieve something ineffective, costly and dangerous it was–they decided to stop relying on it. We can do the same. If we undertaking, it will be a crucial step towards creating a custom of justice that truly rehabilitates, creating a safer society let alone relying on torture.
Click here to find out more about description project, and learn how you can support Opening the Box.