Time-In-Cell: Isolation and Incarceration
Judith Resnik, Johanna Kalb, Sarah Baumgartel · 2025
What is solitary confinement, and what has been constitutional law's relationship to the practices of holding prisoners in isolation? One answer comes from Wilkinson v. Austin, a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case discussing Ohio's super-maximum security ("supermax") prison, which opened in 1998 to hold more than five hundred people. Writing for the unanimous Court in Wilkinson, Justice Kennedy detailed a painful litany of conditions.