“Prison’s darkest place”, an interview with Sharon Shalev on solitary confinement by Luk Vervaet
25 January 2017 Sharon Shalev is one of the world’s most prominent voices on solitary confinement. Since the mid-1990s, she has been working on the theme of the use and abuse of solitary confinement in the US, publishing “ A sourcebook on Solitary Confinement ” (2008), and, subsequently in 2009, the book now considered a classic on the subject, “ Supermax : controlling risk trough solitary confinement ”. Sharon Shalev created the website www.solitaryconfinement.org and was part of a team of experts who considered different drafts of international resolutions to regulate and limit the growing (ab)use of solitary confinement, including the UN Mandela Rules and the Istanbul Statement. In recent years, she has turned her attention to the use of solitary confinement in Europe and elsewhere. If you tell someone about your country and where you live, the other person will probably react by saying that he or she visited this or that city long ago, how beautiful the landscape was and ho...
