23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement

How America’s prisons turned a “brutal and inhumane” practice into standard procedure

Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend twenty-three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators’ discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one “supermax,” California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners. This book describes how Pelican Bay was created without legislative oversight, in fearful response to 1970s radicals; how easily prisoners slip into solitary; and the mental havoc and social costs of years and decades in isolation. The product of fifteen years of research in and about prisons, this book provides essential background to a subject now drawing national attention.

About the Author :
Keramet Reiter is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and at the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. In 2017, she received the American Society of Criminology’s Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award for outstanding scholarly contributions to the discipline.
 

Review :
"Fascinating. . . . A penetrating look at an insidious problem from the inside out. . . . Reiter challenges us to rethink the country’s approach to punishment, and she questions the unexamined politics that sustains the practice of solitary confinement. . . . I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding the roots of institutional malaise and deprivation by social design. 23/7 is an accessible, cogent and insightful work of scholarship."—Bruce A. Arrigo, British Journal of Criminology

"Engaging, meticulously researched, and deeply disturbing, 23/7 is more than a history of Pelican Bay Prison. Keramet Reiter opens a window onto the secretive decisions that produced the contemporary supermax and sensitively explores the harmful results. This remarkable book is essential reading for anyone concerned about prisons in the United States."—Lorna A. Rhodes, author of Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison

"Keramet Reiter uncovers the history and consequences of California's unfortunate modern experiment with solitary confinement—a tale of public policy gone awry through ignorance, callousness, cruelty and self interest, inflicting untold psychological pain and emotional misery on thousands."—Jamie Fellner, Human Rights Watch

"23/7 is a convincing, heartbreaking, enraging explanation of how prison bureaucrats, empowered by a fearful electorate, gained the power to entomb human beings for five, ten, twenty years and more in small boxes without windows where the lights are never turned off. I have not read a book in recent years that has made me angrier than this or explained more about how, when it comes to prisons, Americans have dug ourselves such a very deep hole."—Ted Conover, author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

"23/7 tells a compelling story of the banality of evil in correctional planning and penal confinement."—Franklin E. Zimring, University of California, Berkeley