The Disease That Now Threatens My Existence May Be the Only Thing That Can Set Me Free.
By WILLIAM BLAKE / SOLITARY WATCH
In 2013, when I had been locked up in solitary confinement for 25 years, I wrote an essay entitled “A Sentence Worse Than Death,” which I’m told has been read by upwards of a million people to date. It describes what life was like in “the box” (the special housing unit, or SHU for short) in New York’s state prisons, and posited that if given the choice, I would have opted for a sentence of death over more than two decades of incarceration in abject isolation. But when the phone rang, it was not Theresa’s husband on the line. Instead, it was the superintendent from the Eastern Correctional Facility informing her that Morris Edward Grady, also known as Eddie, had died….
At the time, I didn’t have that choice. Now, it appears, I do…