not having violated prison rules in more than two decades, state prison
officials refuse to release him into the general prison population.

family and supporters claim that the Pennsylvania Department of
Corrections (PA DOC) has unlawfully altered the consequences of his
criminal conviction, sentencing him to die in solitary confinement - a
death imposed by decades of no-touch torture.

the state of Pennsylvania has remained unmoved in this matter so far,
some in the US government are finally catching on. Decades after rights
activists first began to refer to the practice of solitary confinement
as "torture", the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the constitution,
civil rights and human rights held a hearing on June 19 to "reassess"
the fiscal, security and human costs of locking prisoners into tiny,
windowless cells for 23 hours a day.

to say, the hearing echoed in a whisper what human rights defenders
have been shouting for nearly an entire generation: that sensory
deprivation, lack of social contact, a near total absence of
zeitgebers and restricted access to all intellectual and emotional
stimuli are an evil and unproductive combination.

thousands have spent years and, in some cases, decades in such
isolation, including more than 500 prisoners held in California's
Pelican Bay state prison for ten years or more.

observation is anything but surprising to those familiar with the
routine violations of prisoners' human rights within US jails and
prisons. The
prison discipline study, a mass
national survey assessing formal and informal punitive practices in US
prisons conducted in 1989, concluded that "solitary confinement, loss
of privileges, physical beatings" and other forms of deprivation and
harassment were "common disciplinary practices" that were "rendered
routinely, capriciously and brutally" in maximum-security US prisons.

from the gang-war-torn streets of West Philadelphia, Shoats escaped
twice from prison system, first from Huntingdon state prison in
September 1977 and then again in March 1980.

escapes - the first of which lasted a full 27 days, despite a massive
national search complete with helicopters, dogs and vigilante groups
from predominantly white communities surrounding the prison - earned
him the nickname "Maroon", in honour of slaves who broke away from
plantations in Surinam, Guyana and later Jamaica, Brazil and other
colonies and established sovereign communities on the outskirts of the
white settler zones.

it was not until Shoats was elected president of the prison-approved
Lifers' Organisation in 1982 - the closest thing to a union for
inmates, through which they demanded basic rights such as proper
visiting hours, access to legal documents and healthier food - that the
prison system decided he was a "threat" to administrative stability and
placed him in solitary confinement.

Grote is an investigator with the Human Rights Coalition, a
Pennsylvania-based prison abolitionist and prisoner rights organisation.