Capping a year of reporting about teens held in solitary confinement, The Center for Investigative Reporting is releasing our documentary “Alone,” which can now be seen on our YouTube channel, The I Files.
This follows stories we’ve done in print, for broadcast on PBS NewsHour, as part of CIR’s new “Reveal” radio show, and in an animation (“The Box”) and graphic novel.
With the publication or broadcast of each version of our reporting, we have seen the issue of teenage solitary confinement become part of a growing national debate.
In May, after more than a year of lobbying by youth advocates, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called on states to end the excessive use of solitary confinement on juvenile inmates.
CIR began investigating the solitary confinement of teenagers in prisons, jails and juvenile halls across the U.S. in March 2013. Juvenile justice experts had been pressing the Department of Justice to flex its muscle on behalf of young inmates, to no avail. Holder’s shop declined all interview requests by CIR.
Our reporting quickly zeroed in on Rikers Island, the massive jail complex in New York City, where last year about a quarter of juvenile inmates were held in isolation for 23 hours a day. We spent almost a year requesting to see Rikers’ teen solitary units, but the city’s Department of Correction denied those requests, as did officials at Cook County jail in Chicago and five county jails in Florida. We figured out quickly that juvenile solitary was an often secretive practice, largely unregulated and rampant in most states.
Our investigation early on pointed to thousands of American teenagers held in solitary every day. We wanted to show what that looked like and how it affected kids. We talked to criminal justice experts in California who said virtually every juvenile hall in the state used some form of prolonged isolation.
That’s when we remembered Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall. Covering juvenile justice over the years, Trey Bundy had heard again and again that officials in Santa Cruz had created a model that had reduced the use of isolation so much that corrections officials around the country routinely traveled to California’s Central Coast to see how they did it.
Santa Cruz Chief Probation Officer Fernando Giraldo and Sara Ryan, the hall’s superintendent, allowed us to film inside their facility for five days, unescorted, and talk to anyone we wanted. Our resulting documentary, “Alone,” toggles between New York City and Santa Cruz, where young people tell their own stories of isolation and how the justice system can do better.
Now that Holder has said he wants to end excessive solitary for youth, we’ll keep watching for changes. In the meantime, watch “Alone” and see for yourself what it’s like for kids in isolation and how one facility is trying to keep them out.
“Alone” was produced Daffodil Altan. It was reported by Altan and Trey Bundy, edited by David Ritsher and Andrew Gersh, and filmed by Marco Villalobos. The senior producer was Stephen Talbot. The executive producer was Susanne Reber.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Republish Our Content
Thanks for your interest in republishing a story from Reveal. As a nonprofit newsroom, we want to share our work with as many people as possible. You are free to embed our audio and video content and republish any written story for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license and will indemnify our content as long as you strictly follow these guidelines:
-
Do not change the story. Do not edit our material, except only to reflect changes in time and location. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
-
Please credit us early in the coverage. Our reporter(s) must be bylined. We prefer the following format: By Will Evans, Reveal.
-
If republishing our stories, please also include this language at the end of the story: “This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.”
-
Include all links from the story, and please link to us at https://www.revealnews.org.
PHOTOS
-
You can republish Reveal photos only if you run them in or alongside the stories with which they originally appeared and do not change them.
-
If you want to run a photo apart from that story, please request specific permission to license by contacting Digital Engagement Producer Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org. Reveal often uses photos we purchase from Getty and The Associated Press; those are not available for republication.
DATA
-
If you want to republish Reveal graphics or data, please contact Data Editor Soo Oh, soh@revealnews.org.
IN GENERAL
-
We do not compensate anyone who republishes our work. You also cannot sell our material separately or syndicate it.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, please contact Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If you plan to republish our content, you must notify us republish@revealnews.org or email Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If we send you a request to remove our content from your website, you must agree to do so immediately.
-
Please note, we will not provide indemnification if you are located or publishing outside the United States, but you may contact us to obtain a license and indemnification on a case-by-case basis.
If you have any other questions, please contact us at republish@revealnews.org.