Ryan Jacobs is a senior editorial fellow for Mother Jones in San Francisco. His work has also appeared in the Bay Citizen, Sierra magazine, the Point Reyes Light, The Chicago Reporter, and others. During his short reporting career, his coverage has ranged from the discovery of a potentially new species of phytoplankton to the scene of a quintuple homicide.
In his investigation of solitary confinement in California prisons, Shane Bauer describes a system in which inmates are held in near-total isolation for years, often due to their alleged status as members or affiliates of prison gangs. But when we started looking for details of other states' solitary confinement policies, the information was impossible to find. Not surprisingly, prisons guard facts about their inner workings almost as intensely as they guard their inmates. To get a more complete picture, we contacted every state prison department in the country and asked about their gang and solitary confinement policies. The maps below are based on the replies we received; you'll see that some information is fairly detailed while some is vague or nonexistent. All text in quotes is taken directly from prison press officers' responses or from policies they cited.
Which States use Solitary confinement?
At least 38 states hold prisoners in solitary confinement for various reasons, including breaking rules, posing a security risk, or being a gang member. (Death-row inmates may also be segregated in single cells.) Some state prison departments provided information on inmates' average length of stay in solitary.
Which States keep Inmates in Solitary Indefinitely?
California inmates may be held in single cells indefinitely; in Pelican Bay State Prison, 89 have been in solitary for 20 years or more. In at least 19 other states, inmates may also be kept in solitary without definite release dates.
Which States track Gang Members in prison?
Forty-two of the prison departments that responded to our questions say they identify or "validate" inmates who are members or associates of prison gangs (also known as Security Threat Groups or STGs). Policies and procedures differ, but most are based on inmates' own declarations of gang affiliation, tattoos, possession of gang paraphernalia, and information from police, prison officials, and confidential informants.
Which States Put Gang Members in Segregation?
At least 13 states put inmates in solitary confinement or remove them from the general population due to their gang or STG status. However, most states that provided information about their segregation policies say that behavior and rule violations, not gang affiliation, are the primary cause for putting inmates in segregation.
Source: Mother Jones survey of state prison departments. To see the data behind these maps, see here.
Two black rhinos walk through the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania.
The scene of a rhino crime
On a grassy expanse somewhere in South Africa's Kariega Game Reserve in March, a male rhinoceros struggled to its feet, hobbled several paces, and then thudded back down under its own weight. The beast's iconic horn had been macheted off by poachers, and all that remained was a mound of raw, mutilated flesh. Not too far off, the carnage was even worse. Sprawled beside a bush, a female rhino heaved for air on a patch of grass damp with her own blood. "I just thought surely we can't save this one," says wildlife veterinarian Dr. William Fowlds in the footage below, as he examines the bull's injuries and tends to the aftermath.
After making surprising steps toward recovery, the male rhino, Themba, drowned in a watering hole. Miraculously, the female, Thandi, fought against the odds and successfully survived her brutal skull hacking:
A soldier wounded by a roadside bomb is evacuated from the Kandahar province
A military analyst hunches over a laptop. His screen flashes with real-time data of the war unfolding on the sands outside his base. The machine hums and then quickly spits out a color-coded map forecasting impending violence. Eyeing the contours, he radios a caravan of humvees and informs the soldiers that, according to the calculations, they will be ambushed in roughly twelve hours. The unit veers onto a bushwhacked road, lies in wait, and at the crack of dawn captures its would-be attackers without taking any injuries.
A sci-fi writer's napkin scribblings? Or a peek at the future? Well, according to research published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, such a scene might not be far off.
Drawing from the 77,000 confidential US military logs released in Wikileaks' Afghan War Diary, researchers compiled data tracking the activity of armed opposition groups (AOG) in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009. They then used "spatiotemporal" statistics to model the intensity and location of future violence, down to the provincial level, through the end of 2010 (a year after the leaked data ends). A comparison of the results with safety reports from the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office showed that their predictions were strikingly accurate:
"Extreme Hot Days" to Rise for LA Courtesy of UCLA
A team of UCLA scientists recently fed about 20 global climate models into powerful supercomputers to calculate just how much Los Angeles-area temperatures might increase over the next few decades. After months of complex computing—about eight times as many individual calculations as there are grains of sand on the West Coast of the United States—the scientists' computers spit out some troubling projections.
By 2041, the UCLA team found, temperatures in Los Angeles will rise by an average of 4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit. The number of "extreme hot days"—days with temperatures above 95 degrees—will triple in the downtown area and will quadruple or more in inland valleys, deserts, and mountains.
Dramatic shifts will occur even if the world manages to successfully curtail greenhouse gas emissions. In the unlikely event that the world starts to get its emissions problems under control, Los Angeles temperatures will still reach 70 percent of the study's "business-as-usual" levels, the researchers found.
In the particularly dramatic scene of HBO's The Wire above, a group of Baltimore police brass is instructed to artificially deflate felony and murder statistics or be ousted from their jobs. "I don't care how you do it, just fuckin' do it," snarls Baltimore Police Deputy Commissioner of Operations William A. Rawls.
Inside a lecture room at John Jay College in New York City two summers ago, Molloy College criminologist and retired New York City Police Department Captain John Eterno lectured a group of FBI agents about nearly identical scenarios unfolding within the NYPD's walls. He and his John Jay colleague Eli Silverman had recently published a detailed survey (that later became a book) of 400 retired NYPD commanders who served under the CompStat system, a computer program used to compare crime rates and performance across precincts.
Most of the commanders claimed they were "under enormous pressure" to routinely underreport or misclassify serious crimes, which were then excluded from city's crime reports to the state and FBI. "Once you have one 'CompStat' meeting where they're screaming and yelling at you about your crime numbers," Eterno explains, "you get the hint and then you do what you can to make sure those numbers are looking the way they want them to."
After the presentation, some of the more junior FBI agents approached Eterno. "This is falling on deaf ears," they whispered, referring to their superiors.
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