Youth to End Solitary SD
We Push to end solitary confinement across San Diego County.
We are a high school student-led organization which aims to abolish solitary confinement use in San Diego County Jails. We build the community infrastructure and support needed to push this agenda and lobby our County officials for meaningful reform. All of our work is student-designed and student-led, emphasizing our core belief that youth have the responsibility and power to achieve significant political change in their communities.
What do we do?
Lobbying
We actively lobby the Board of Supervisors, our district attorney, and our County Sheriff to enact legislation and reforms to end solitary confinement in our County Jails.
Community Mobilization
Through door knocking, events, social media campaigns, working with local news stations, and our newsletter, we inform the San Diegan community about issues in solitary confinement and recruit community activists to our body of volunteers.
Youth Involvement
We are a completely youth-led organization. Through our school chapter program, we have youth inform youth on issues pertaining to solitary confinement use and mobilize youth to participate in our advocacy process.
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IS TORTURE.
Torture is defined as any act “by which severe pain or suffering whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” by the United Nations Convention against Torture.
Medical experts, civil rights attorneys, human rights officials, and the United Nations consider solitary confinement to be a form of torture.
120,000 Americans are held in isolation. A man in San Diego County has been put in isolation for 4 years.
Why we care:
“It’s like being buried Alive”
What its Like Inside “The Box”
The dimensions of a solitary confinement cell, 6 x 9 feet, are smaller than a parking space
Kept in isolation 23+ hours a day, with lights on 24/7
Plumbing backs up, leaving feces and urine on the floors of cells and filling restrictive housing units with the smell of sewage
Constant sounds of banging and screaming
Lack of proper heating or cooling systems
In Texas, prisoners were subjected to conditions of 115 degrees, being cooked alive
Constant sounds of banging and screaming
THE EPITOME OF CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT
Impacts on Physical Health
Inmates in solitary confinement have a higher risk of hypertension and have a shorter life expectancy. The hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex of an inmate visibly shrink after they are placed in isolation.
Psychological Harm
Inmates in solitary confinement are 5x more likely to commit suicide and oftentimes develop cutting disorders. Inmates suffering from long term isolation are known to have schizophrenic visions of people, experience sensory decompensation, and smear feces on themselves.
Sexual Intimidation
Women who experience solitary confinement are subject to strip searches and showering naked with male guards present. There are also several accounts of sexual harassment in solitary confinement wings by male guards, with women performing sexual acts to receive water and other necessary supplies. They are threatened with being placed in solitary confinement when they refuse to perform sexual acts for guards.
Our guiding principles
“the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
At Youth to End Solitary SD, we believe that the human rights of prisoners must be protected by our criminal justice system, regardless of the crime they have committed or have been charged with. We believe that solitary confinement is the embodiment of a larger broken incarceral system which traumatizes prisoners for the sake of keeping them in cycles of poverty and recidivism.
We believe that the conditions of our prisons - and the conditions of solitary confinement in particular - serve to demonstrate how society has divorced itself from humanity and the respect for universal dignity through its medieval treatment of the most vulnerable in society.
Over half of those in solitary confinement suffer from a mental illness, and upwards of 75% of these prisoners also have suffered from adverse childhood experiences (ACE’s).
YesSD further believes that youth have the power and capacity to initiate real and innovative change in their communities, and that youth have a seat at the decision-making table. We actively recruit fellow youth in the advocacy process and are also entirely run by high schoolers.
YesSD needs the support of the San Diego community to continue our work.
Join our community of critically engaged advocates. Sign up for our newsletter, sign up to volunteer with the #SolitaryHurtsCommunityWorks campaign, or follow us on Instagram and TikTok.