• Prison and Detention Conditions

    Prisoners and detainees in many local, state and federal facilities, including those run by private contractors, confront conditions that are abusive, degrading and dangerous. Soaring prison populations due to harsh sentencing laws—which legislators have been reluctant to change—and immigrant detention policies coupled with tight budgets have left governments unwilling to make the investments in staff and resources necessary to ensure safe and humane conditions of confinement. Such failures violate the human rights of all persons deprived of their liberty to be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, and to be free from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

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Prison and Detention Conditions

  • Incapacitated Prisoners Too Costly to Keep
    Dec 28, 2012
  • US: Prison Officials Thwart Compassionate Release
    Nov 30, 2012
    The Federal Bureau of Prisons blocks all but a few federal prisoners from compassionate release, Human Rights Watch and Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) said in a report released today. The 128-page report is the first comprehensive examination of how compassionate release in the federal system works.
  • US/California: Continue Effort to Halt Death Penalty
    Nov 7, 2012
    California voters’ failure to abolish the death penalty perpetuates a barbaric practice and places the state out of step with national trends
  • How Not to Rehabilitate Young Prisoners
    Oct 18, 2012
    Prisons across the country rely too much on solitary confinement for prisoners young and old. It costs too much, does nothing to rehabilitate prisoners and exacerbates mental health problems. All of that is never more evident than when young people are locked away in solitary. It is time to ban the practice.
  • US: Teens in Solitary Confinement
    Oct 10, 2012

    Young people are held in solitary confinement in jails and prisons across the United States, often for weeks or months at a time.

  • Canada: Rehabilitate and Reintegrate Ex-Child Soldier
    Sep 29, 2012
    The government of Canada should rehabilitate and reintegrate into society former child soldier Omar Khadr, and seek to remedy abuses he suffered during a decade in United States custody.
  • Guantánamo's perversion of justice
    Sep 4, 2012

    In the course of three days in late August, I travelled from Courtroom 600 in Nuremberg, Germany, where an international military tribunal tried 21 top Nazi leaders in 1945-46, to Courtroom 2 at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Courtroom 2 is the site of proceedings against Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the four others accused of masterminding the attacks on 11 September 2001. The contrast could not be more stark.

  • US/California: Chance for Justice for Youth
    Aug 16, 2012
    The California State Assembly’s approval on August 16, 2012, of a bill to allow review of life without parole sentences for youth offenders is a step toward justice.
  • Kangaroo Court
    Jul 26, 2012

    I had not planned on paying a visit to Camp X-Ray on this trip to Guantánamo. The remains of the old facility, originally set up to house Haitian refugees and later used as the first detention center for prisoners captured in the "war on terror," are not much to look at: pieces of wood and razor wire, cobbled together at the bottom of a green hill. It held detainees in what were essentially small fenced-in cages, exposed to the elements. It's been closed for a long time, though it is still standing, the military escorts tell me, under a court order.

  • US: Look Critically at Widespread Use of Solitary Confinement
    Jun 18, 2012
    Human Rights Watch submitted this written statement to the Senate Committe on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, for their hearing on solitary confinement. Based on years of research and analysis, we are convinced the unnecessary, counter-productive, and devastating use of this harsh form of confinement in many US prisons cannot be squared with respect for human rights.
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