Prisoner's rights are those rights that individuals retain after they are found guilty of a crime and sentenced to a term of confinement in a prison or jail. In the United States, prisoner's rights include both positive rights, such as the right to challenge a criminal sentence and the right to challenge conditions of confinement within prison, and negative rights, such as the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment and the right to be free from discrimination.

Most prisoner's rights are civil rights, meaning that a prisoner must file a lawsuit against a specific individual or agency and seek a particular remedy, such as a change in policy or a payment for damages suffered. In such cases, prisoners often represent themselves (pro se), initiating and pursuing their own legal challenges. The development of prisoner's rights in the United States can be divided chronologically into roughly three different eras of progress: limited rights in the early republic and 19th century; an expansion of rights in the mid-20th century, especially during the Warren Court, when courts broadened civil rights in general; and a contraction of rights in the late 20th century, especially after 1996.

Supermaxes are prisons designed to impose long-term solitary confinement. Supermax prisoners spend 23 h or more per day in windowless cells. Technology, like centrally controlled automated cell doors and fluorescent lights that are never turned off, allows prisoners to be under constant surveillance, while minimizing all human contact. California built two of the first and largest supermaxes in 1988 and 1989. Corcoran State Prison and Pelican Bay State Prison, which together house more than 3000 prisoners in supermax conditions, were two of 23 new prisons built in California during the late twentieth century era of rapidly increasing incarceration rates and prison capacities. This article will address three stages of supermax operation in California: (1) the early, tumultuous years of total administrative discretion and egregious abuses; (2) the middle years of controlled expansion and entrenchment of supermax use; and (3) the recent events and reforms initiated following a hunger strike in California’s segregation units in the summer of 2011. The history of California’s use of supermax prisons reveals both the role of administrative discretion in shaping the initial design and day-to-day operation of the institutions, as well as the perverse  ncentives that made these institutions increasingly invisible and decreasingly governable.

Supermaxes, then, serve as an important piece of the story of mass incarceration in California, a microcosm of the larger trends in administration, law, and politics, which have created the social and economic behemoth of a state prison system facing Californians today.

Solitary confinement has existed since the first U.S. prison was built in Pennsylvania, in the late 18th century. But the scale and duration of solitary confinement in the United States in the 21st century is unprecedented. On any given day, roughly 80,000 adult U.S. prisoners are held in solitary confinement. They spend 23 or more hours per day in cells that usually measure six feet by nine feet—smaller than a wheelchair-accessible bathroom stall. They have extremely limited contact with other human beings—phone calls are limited; family visits take place (if at all) behind thick, bulletproof glass; and doctors' appointments happen through cell doors, or with prisoners locked into telephone-booth sized cages. Prisoners spend not days or weeks, but months and years in these conditions. In California, for instance, the average length of stay in solitary confinement is between two and three years. In states like California and Louisiana, however, some prisoners have spent not years, but decades in solitary confinement. Herman Wallace, who has spent more than 40 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana, is one such prisoner. Director Angad Singh Bhalla's feature film, Herman's House, humanizes this world of solitary confinement, attaches a story and a face to the thousands of U.S. prisoners serving long sentences in solitary confinement and raises questions about the justice of the individual and collateral experiences of this world.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/hermanshouse/watching-hermans-house-reiter.php