High Security Unit

High Security Unit (HSU) was a "control" unit for women within the Federal Correctional Institution in Lexington, Kentucky. In the less than two years that the HSU was operational it became a focus of national and international concern over human rights abuses.

It was opened in 1986 by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). This special unit of 16 isolation cells was sealed off in a basement from the other prisoners. Reports from different human rights organization including Amnesty International brought the attention to the existence of the unit and the inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Read more about High Security Unit:  Conditions, Political and Legal Opposition, Inmates

Famous quotes containing the words high, security and/or unit:

    “She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are,—1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and, 3. Hope to all.”
    —Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

    “During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
    —George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)