New York's Black Sites

[midnight]

On June 19 a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee chaired by Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin held the first-ever Congressional hearing on solitary confinement. Focused on the “human rights, fiscal and public safety consequences” of the practice, the hearing signaled a new level of official concern over its widespread use. Among those who testified was Anthony Graves, exonerated from Texas death row after eighteen years, ten of which he spent in isolation. He discussed suicides and self-harm by other prisoners and described how he remains haunted by his own years in solitary. “Today I have a hard time being around a group of people for long periods of time without feeling too crowded,” he testified. “No one can begin to imagine the effect isolation has on a human being.”

The hearing also featured Christopher Epps, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, whose reduction of solitary confinement in his state (largely under pressure from the ACLU) won national acclaim. The few states that have reduced their SHU populations—some by as much as 75 percent—have seen drops in both prison violence and, ultimately, prison costs.

In New York, reform has been modest and hard-won. In 2002, advocates started an effort to ban mentally ill inmates from being placed in the SHUs. Family members and former inmates joined a coalition of activists to form Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement, which organized a “Boot the SHU” campaign. “We held marches and press conferences,” says Leah Gitter, the godmother of a former SHU prisoner named Robert Pena. “We did street theater in Albany—we had a funeral march, referring to suicides in the SHU.” They also baked “the loaf” and handed it out to state senators.

In 2008 the “SHU exclusion bill” was finally signed into law. Sarah Kerr, who is tracking its application for the Legal Aid Society, calls it “a sea change” that will “alleviate the suffering” of hundreds of prisoners with mental illness. “But it isn’t perfect,” she says. While all prisoners are now screened for “serious mental illness,” critics charge that the state Office of Mental Health, which handles the diagnoses, tends to be overly conservative. And the law still allows for mentally ill prisoners to be held in the SHU under “exceptional circumstances.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/168839/new-yorks-black-sites#

[qwlauren35]

1. Questions

What does the title have to do with the article? And what is an SHU?

[limpyhobbler]

2. SHU == Special Housing Unit

The Box” is how New York prisoners refer to solitary confinement. Less colloquially, it’s the SHU (pronounced “shoe”), for Special Housing Unit, the state’s euphemism for its isolation cells. Officially, New York places prisoners in “disciplinary” or “administrative” segregation, but regardless of the label, the conditions are the same as in prisons across the country: twenty-three hours a day in a cell the size of the average suburban bathroom.

Black sites is a euphemism for the secret US torture prisons in Asia and Eastern Europe. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site)

The article is comparing isolation to the black sites.

While a lot of New Yorkers “are concerned with the torture that’s gone on in Iraq and Afghanistan or at Guantánamo,” she adds, “they’re living with black sites in their own backyards.”