Solitary Confinement: Punished for Life

In 1993, Craig Haney, a social psychologist, interviewed a group of inmates in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison, California’s toughest penal institution.

He was studying the psychological effects of isolation on prisoners, and Pelican Bay was among the first of a new breed of super-maximum-security prisons that states around the country were beginning to build.

Twenty years later, he returned to Pelican Bay for another set of interviews. He was startled to find himself facing some of the same prisoners he had met before, inmates who now had spent more than two decades alone in windowless cells.

Link to full article here.

Williams Receives President's Research Catalyst Award to Address Prison Healthcare Crisis

UC San Francisco’s Brie Williams, MD, was one of five faculty members across the entire University of California system—and the only one from UCSF—to receive the President’s Research Catalyst Awards, chosen from a pool of almost 200 proposals. UC President Janet Napolitano made the announcement on Dec. 10. Link to announcement here.