Did you know June is Torture Awareness Month? It’s okay if you didn’t.
Most people don’t even know that Torture Awareness Month exists. Even fewer know that torture is happening right here, on U.S. soil, every single day.
That’s why Black Lives Matter is teaming up with the Unlock the Box Campaign to break the silence and bring awareness to the human rights crisis happening right here every single day: solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement is torture. That’s a fact. It’s recognized as such by the United Nations, international human rights organizations, and mental health experts around the world, but the U.S. isolates hundreds of thousands of people daily, often for months, years, or decades.
Solitary confinement did not originate in prisons. Its history in the U.S. runs deep.
Solitary confinement was a horrifying tactic developed and used during chattel slavery. Isolation was deliberately weaponized to break spirits, assert dominance, and destroy community bonds. After slavery’s formal end, these practices evolved and persisted, disproportionately targeting Black communities within America’s prisons.
In the 19th century, solitary confinement was briefly promoted as a path to penitence and reform. But its profound psychological harms were quickly evident, prompting the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890 to condemn it as severe, cruel, and torturous.
Yet, with the rise of mass incarceration, a system deeply rooted in racial oppression, solitary confinement was revived and massively expanded. Black and Brown people became its primary targets, continuing a long legacy of racialized torture and control.
The government has damn near always known just how destructive and damaging solitary confinement is, and yet it’s still standard practice in our carceral system.
We’re standing up against this system and calling for the abolition of solitary confinement and the entire prison industrial complex.
This Torture Awareness Month and as we near Juneteenth, honor our ancestors’ resilience by joining the fight against solitary confinement. Sign up for our Torture Awareness Month educational series and toolkit to learn how we can dismantle this oppressive practice together.
From the courageous Pelican Bay hunger strikes to powerful figures like Nelson Mandela and the Angola Three, including Albert Woodfox, who lived through decades of solitary confinement becoming potent symbols of resistance against state-sanctioned torture, our struggle against solitary is a joyful resistance, a reclaiming of our humanity against inhuman practices.
Together, let’s educate, organize, and dismantle systems of torture and oppression.
Justice, not torture.
