Red Emma’s

Reiter uses the history of California’s notorious Pelican Bay to explain how a form of punishment deemed inhumane in the 1800s, implemented at costs that make private college tuition look small, became widespread without ever receiving the formal approval of taxpayers or their representatives. Her dogged investigation of a system designed to be opaque challenges the assumption that residents of solitary units are “the worst of the worst.” Reiter’s 15 years of research inside and outside prisons includes analysis of data not previously released, as well as interviews with prison administrators, judges on key cases, current prisoners (including participants in a recent high-profile hunger strike), and people who spent time in solitary and are now living in the community. Reiter explains what current science tells us about the general impact of solitary confinement on human mental and physical health, and presents the vivid, surprising, unsettling stories of individual supermax prisoners. She provides essential historical context, helping readers understand how the unanticipated consequences of decisions large and small combined to normalize this extreme and disabling form of punishment. 

Keramet Reiter, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and at the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, has been an associate at Human Rights Watch and testified about the impacts of solitary confinement before state and federal legislators. She first became interested in prisons as a volunteer tutor to prisoners in Massachusetts while an undergraduate at Harvard. She lives in Los Angeles, CA.