James Ridgeway

In 1965, James Ridgeway helped launch the modern muckraking era by revealing that General Motors had hired private eyes to spy on an obscure consumer advocate named Ralph Nader. He worked for many years at the Village Voice, has written 16 books, and has codirected Blood in the Face, a film about the far right. In 2012, he was named a Soros Justice Media Fellow.

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Ex-Con Shareholder Goes After World's Biggest Prison Corporation

Alex Friedmann, who did time at a CCA facility, demands it get better on prison rape. And investors are listening.

—By James Ridgeway

| Thu May. 10, 2012 12:01 AM PDT

Tomorrow, at the annual meeting of Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest private prison company, shareholder activist Alex Friedmann will have exactly two minutes to speak about the unconventional resolution he introduced earlier this year to the chagrin of CCA's board.

The resolution is unconventional because it concerns not corporate profits or dividends, but the well-being of the roughly 81,000 inmates in CCA's care. Friedmann, too, is unconventional, for although he holds just $2,000 or so worth of CCA stock, he has inside knowledge of the company's practices—because he served time at one of its prisons.

Indeed, Friedmann spent six years at CCA's South Central Correctional Facility in Clifton, Tennessee—part of his 10-year sentence for attempted murder, armed robbery, and attempted aggravated robbery. Since getting out in 1999, he has been an advocate for prisoners' rights and criminal-justice reform. Now he's an editor with Prison Legal News and head of Private Corrections Institute, a nonprofit watchdog.

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After Years in Solitary, a Mentally Ill Prisoner’s Day in Court

Testing a new legal strategy, Troy Anderson's lawyers will argue that his isolation violates federal disability law.

—By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

| Mon Apr. 30, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Troy Anderson lives in Cañon City, a high-desert town in a dramatic setting at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. But for more than a decade he has neither seen those mountains nor felt the sun on his skin. He spends 23 hours out of each day confined to an 8-by-12 isolation cell at the Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP)—one of the state's supermax prisons—and the remaining hour in a bare exercise room. Well over half of his 42 years have been spent behind bars, most of them in what prison authorities euphemistically call "administrative segregation." In practice, this means Anderson will remain in solitary confinement until prison officials feel it's time to let him out.

Anderson has been in and out of jail since he was a juvenile on account of his erratic and sometimes violent behavior. In 2000, he was sentenced to 75 years for myriad charges stemming from two incidents in which he shot at police, the second time in an attempt to escape custody. Offenses committed in prison have landed him in "ad seg" at CSP. (His last disciplinary infraction was in 2005, when he was written up for somehow managing to get envelopes to another prisoner.)

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Torturous Milestone: 40 Years in Solitary

Constitutional claim may be the last chance for aging Angola 3 inmates.

—By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella

| Tue Apr. 17, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, Angola prison

Herman Wallace (left) and Albert Woodfox with Angola prison in the 1970s (background)

On the world stage, Guantanamo may well stand as the epitome of American human rights abuses. But when it comes to torture on US soil, that grim distinction is held by two aging African American men. As of today, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have spent 40 years in near-continuous solitary confinement in the bowels of the Louisiana prison system. Most of those years were spent at the notorious Angola Prison, which is why Wallace and Woodfox are still known as members of the Angola 3. The third man, Robert King, was released in 2001; his conviction was overturned after he'd spent 29 years in solitary.

Wallace and Woodfox were first thrown into the hole on April 17, 1972, following the killing of Brent Miller, a young prison guard. The men contend that they were targeted by prison authorities and convicted of murder not based on the actual evidence—which was dubious at best—but because they were members of the Black Panther Party's prison chapter, which was organizing against horrendous conditions at Angola. This political affiliation, they say, also accounted for their seemingly permanent stay in solitary.

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"Complete Lawlessness" at Orleans Parish Prison

The notorious New Orleans jail where inmates were abandoned during Katrina faces a new lawsuit over egregious conditions.

—By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella

| Fri Apr. 6, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

As hellholes go, there are few worse places in America than the Orleans Parish Prison.

New Orleans' teeming city jail first hit the radar of most Americans following Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of inmates were abandoned for days in flooded cells without food, water, ventilation, or electricity—some of them "standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests," according to the ACLU. But OPP’s problems did not begin with Katrina, nor end in the storm's wake, when prisoners were shipped back to the jail's surviving buildings.

This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of OPP's inmates. The 38-page complaint—which names as defendants Sheriff Marlin Gusman, along with the jail’s wardens and medical directors—describes a facility where prisoners "are at imminent risk of serious harm." About 44 percent of the inmates are there awaiting trial, and haven't been convicted of the crimes they were charged with. But pretrial detention at OPP, the suit contends, is in itself a brutal punishment that can expose people to physical and sexual abuse, and even death.

"Rapes, sexual assaults, and beatings are commonplace," the lawsuit states. "Violence regularly occurs at the hands of sheriffs' deputies, as well as other prisoners...People living with serious mental illnesses languish without treatment, left vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. These conditions have created a public safety crisis that affects the entire city."

"It's just complete lawlessness in there," Katie Schwartzmann, the SPLC attorney representing the prisoners, told us in an interview. "The place is full of knives. There are tons of assaults, beatings."

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Former Iran Captive Denounces Prison Cruelty—in America

Sarah Shourd spent a harrowing 14 months isolated in an Iranian cell—and wants an end to solitary confinement in her own country.

—By James Ridgeway

| Wed Mar. 14, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Sarah Shourd and Shane Bauer at a news conference in Tehran in May 2010.

Sarah Shourd is one of three Americans who were imprisoned in Iran in July 2009, after they were arrested and charged with espionage while hiking on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan. Her two male companions, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, were jailed together, but Shourd was isolated in a 10-by-14-foot cell in Iran's notorious Evin Prison, and held there for almost 14 months.

In September 2010, Shourd was released on humanitarian grounds, according to Iranian authorities, due to ill health. (Bauer and Fattal were released a year later.) Since returning home, Shourd has spoken out against the widespread use of solitary confinement in the United States, and has appeared in support of the inmates at Pelican Bay and elsewhere in the California prison system who recently engaged in a hunger strike to protest conditions in long-term solitary. Her op-ed on the subject appeared in the New York Times last November. I spoke with Shourd about her time in the hole, and why she has taken a stand on behalf of American prisoners.

Mother Jones: Are there parallels between solitary in Iran and the United States?

Sarah Shourd: There are parallels about solitary confinement everywhere. The really scary thing is that the US government and many governments were very critical of Iran for holding me in solitary for 13 and a half months, but when I got out I was shocked to find that the US had more people in solitary confinement than any other country—and in this country it is used routinely as an administrative practice, not as a very last resort. Which is how it should be used.

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