Solitary Confinement in The United States
In the US Federal Prison system, solitary confinement is known as the Special Housing Unit (SHU), pronounced /ˈʃuː/. California's prison system also uses the abbreviation SHU, but it stands for Security Housing Units. In other states, it is known as the Special Management Unit (SMU).
Current estimates of the number of inmates held in solitary confinement are difficult to determine, though generally the minimum held at any given time has been determined to be 20,000, with estimates as high as 80,000.
In May 2012, California's prison system faced a lawsuit from the Center for Constitutional Rights and a group of California attorneys for the use of long terms of solitary confinement, some lasting for decades.
Read more about this topic: Solitary Confinement
Famous quotes containing the words united states, solitary, confinement, united and/or states:
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)
“The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine ... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)