I Will Choose Death Over Life Behind Bars Unless New York Changes Its Parole Laws
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...