By Christopher Moraff
FRACKVILLE, Pennsylvania — Arthur Johnson has spent the past 37 of his 64 years alive in solitary confinement.
Over a span of four decades, he’s been shuttled from one correctional institution to another—often without notice, like a protagonist in a Kafka novel. Until very recently, his home of three years was the Restricted Housing Unit at the State Correctional Institution at Frackville, Pennsylvania.
He’s now in restricted housing at neighboring SCI Coal Township, where he is forced to spend 23 hours a day in a 7-by-10-foot cell with a light that never turns off. He suffers from crippling insomnia and is permitted to take just three, 10-minute showers each week.
Every time he leaves his cell—including the five trips he makes each week for one hour of exercise in an enclosed yard—he is required to undergo a strip search before he can go back inside. He exercises alone, the same way he eats every one of his meals.
By Johnson’s telling, he hasn’t shaken another person’s hand since Jimmy Carter was president. His attorney calls this a blatant violation of his civil rights.
“No court is going to take away the right of prison officials to use solitary confinement for a period of days or even months,” Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center told The Daily Beast. “But how long is too long or too dangerous? Wherever that line may be drawn, we are way over it here.”
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Source: The Daily Beast
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