Susan Greene is the winner of the February Sidney Award for The Gray Box: An Investigative Look at Solitary Confinement, a story and documentary video about the agony of solitary confinement in American prisons, published in the Dart Society Reports.

Some 80,000 prisoners are housed in isolation on any given day in U.S. prisons, typically in cells no bigger than a pair of queen-sized mattresses.

Solitary confinement was invented by Quaker prison reformers in the 1800s. They hoped that keeping prisoners in strict isolation would encourage them to reflect and repent. However, it rapidly became clear that instead of spurring reform, solitary confinement was literally driving inmates insane. “[Solitary confinement] devours the victims incessantly and unmercifully,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of a New York prison in the 1820s. “It does not reform, it kills.”The practice was banned as inhumane by the late 1880s, only to reappear in 1983 as a response to prison violence.

Over the course of years of reporting, Greene was able to piece together the lives of some of the most isolated people in the world. She corresponded with prisoners in solitary and interviewed others after they were released. She found that survivors of solitary confinement are ill-equipped to rejoin society after prolonged isolation.

Read my interview with Susan Greene at The Backstory.

The Sidney Award is given once a month in recognition of an outstanding work of socially conscious journalism.

• Workers at New York City’s biggest hotels will get panic buttons, along with raises and fully paid health coverage, as part of their new long term contract, Patrick McGeehan reports for the New York Times.
• TWU Local 100 mourns Dr. Stephen Levin (1942-2012), a champion of workers’ health and safety: “Dr. Levin devoted his life to worker health and safety and to the prevention of work-related illnesses, injuries and deaths. Dr. Levin may have known more about the health status of transit workers than anyone else. He was our “primary care doctor” for work-related health problems for decades. When we met with Steve it was like meeting with another worker, but a worker who not only knew our problems, but also knew the difficulty of getting our employer, New York City Transit/MTA, to take our work-related health problems seriously.”
• The highly profitable Caterpillar corporation is closing its 62-year-old locomotive plant in Ontario, Canada and relocating to newly right-to-work state of Indiana, throwing nearly 500 members of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) out of work, Mike Elk reports for Working In These Times. The auto workers are considering occupying the plant.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Karen Handel resigned as a vice president of the Susan G. Komen Foundation amid allegations that she urged the organization to cut off breast health grants to Planned Parenthood. When the news broke that Planned Parenthood had been defunded, suspicion centered on Handel because she had recently campaigned on a pledge to defund Planned Parenthood during her unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in Georgia.

Handel’s links to the anti-choice movement have been well-reported, but her opposition to voting rights remains obscure. Chris Kromm of Facing South has the story:

Who is Karen Handel? A Republican from Maryland, Handel got her start in politics as deputy chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle’s wife, Marilyn. But her rise to national prominence began in 2006, when she became the first elected Republican secretary of state in Georgia.

Handel’s aggressive changes to Georgia’s election systems provoked a quick backlash. She became a leading figure in the push for a restrictive voter ID bill, which was enmeshed in litigation for more than three years over charges that it disenfranchised African-Americans, Latinos, students and the elderly.

Even more controversially, in 2007 Handel engineered a system to “purge” thousands of Georgia voters who didn’t match Social Security Administration and other government data. The purge system, which a federal panel later ruled had been wrongfully implemented without approval from the Justice Department, identifed more than 200,000 “no match” voters. […]

Read the rest at Facing South.

[Photo credit: Jon Scheiber, Creative Commons.]

Last night, the Sidney Hillman Foundation kicked off Black History Month with an exclusive preview of the documentary Slavery By Another Name, which premieres Feb 13 on PBS. The film’s Hillman Award-winning director, Sam Pollard, and the source book’s Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Douglas Blackmon, joined SEIU executive vice president Gerry Hudson for a spirited panel discussion and audience Q&A at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Slavery By Another Name debunks the cherished assumption that slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. In fact, as Blackmon and Pollack show, the enslavement of black Southerners persisted under the guise of convict labor from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II. This new kind of slavery wasn’t a necessarily a life sentence, and it didn’t pass from generation to generation, but it was every bit as brutal and arbitrary as the old system.

The polite term for the new slavery was “convict leasing.” Southern states criminalized the slightest infractions by black people, real or imagined. It was a crime to be unemployed, or to be employed and look for a better job without permission. Unauthorized black job-seekers could be sent back to their employers to work off their “debt” as convict laborers. Walking along the railroad tracks or speaking loudly in the presence of white women could also condemn a black person to a term of hard labor. 

Strictly speaking, debt peonage was against the law. So, a farmer couldn’t force a black person to work to pay off a private debt; if he did, the U.S. Department of Justice might step in. However, the state could force black people to work to pay off fines levied against them; and the state could sell that labor to factories and farms. The Justice Department couldn’t do anything about that. A loophole in the 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as a sentence for a crime.

Director/producer Sam Pollock added that the convict lease system was comforting to white Southerner because it allowed them feel like the South hadn’t lost the Civil War after all. Defeat did nothing to extinguish the white ruling class’s sense of entitlement to indentured black labor.

Employers paid the state to “lease” the prisoners. As under slavery, the hardiest-looking men fetched the highest prices. About 95% of the people in the convict labor system were black men between the ages of 14 and 30, because they were the most desirable laborers. Some women were also forced to work as laundresses and cooks. Blackmon’s resesarch shows how arrest rates rose to meet the demand for labor.

When black and white coal miners joined forces under the banner of the United Mineworkers in 1908, the mine owners used convict labor to help break the strike.

“Money explains most things,” said Blackmon, a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter. He later observed that a “potentially diabolical” conflict of interest arises when the people responsible for making arrests stand to profit by arresting more people.

Blackmon dates the technical end of slavery to 1943, when the first prosecution of de facto slave owners took place. FDR had decided that the plight of blacks in the South was too good a propaganda tool to hand to the Japanese and empowered his Attorney General to go after the neo-slavers. Whites were occaisionally prosecuted for enslaving blacks into the late sixties.

Today, the private prison industry stands to benefit from harsh laws and strict enforcement and lobbies accordingly. At least today the state doesn’t have the same direct profit motive to lock up more people as it did under the convict lease system. However, the criminal law was the lynchpin of the convict lease system. The state decided what was a crime and the elites who profited from prison labor had a vested interest in criminalizing black people to ensure a steady supply of convict labor. The energetic private prison lobby fosters a similar dynamic today, although today’s private prisons aren’t as powerful as the mining and farming barons of the old South during the era of neo-slavery. The explicit legal double standard for whites and blacks is gone, but the war on drugs has the effect of putting disproportionate numbers of black Americans behind bars.

As Douglas Blackmon pointed out, the convict lease system was how our society got used to “locking up large numbers of similar-looking people.”

[Photo: Gerry Hudson, Douglas Blackmon, and Sam Pollard. By Lindsay Beyerstein. More photos of last night’s screening, here.]