In the midst of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency routinely collected information about the methods of control employed by the Soviet Union to capture, incarcerate, and punish those opposed to the state. While the CIA used this information to denounce the USSR in reports such as this one available in the CREST archives, a modern reader will note how several of the criticized policies resemble those of the criminal justice system in modern day America.

Private prisons face many of the same obstacles as their public counterparts: drugs, violence, rowdy inmates or rowdy correctional officers. But their operations and how they manage these ubiquitous issues remain a black spot on the corrections ecosystem.

Changes to North Carolina’s Department of Public Safety segregation policies in the past year have highlighted another common issue nationwide in the prison reform discussion: without adequate funding, naming the problem isn’t enough.

For a term as familiar as “solitary confinement,” the official record is impressively adept at calling the practice just about anything else. In Texas, though, the phrase is used and the practice utilized - a lot.

There are many reasons incarcerated individuals are segregated from the general population, and Departments of Correction across the country have multiple ways of describing them. MuckRock takes a look at New England as we begin to tease out the “who, why, when, and for how long” of solitary confinement.