AN IMPORTANT STORY UNFOLDED for three weeks recently, in at least eleven American states – but it gained little mainstream press coverage.

Admittedly, it wasn’t too easy for journalists to learn checkable facts about it.     

Prisoners incarcerated across the country went on strike … expressing their demands for improved living and working conditions.

America’s prisons are almost always places of simmering discontent – but the immediate trigger for organizing this year’s protest was an outbreak of violence in April at South Carolina’s maximum security Lee County Correctional Institution, which left seven inmates dead and 22 injured.

Coordinated largely surreptitiously, by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, strike participants conducted work stoppages, sit-ins, hunger-strikes and commissary boycotts. These took place between two significantly commemorative dates. They began on August 21^st, the anniversary of 1971’s prison killing of Black Panthers’ member George Jackson (author of the Soledad Brother prison letters). And they ended September 9^th – the anniversary of Attica prison’s notoriously bloody uprising in upstate New York, also in 1971. Among the states I can verify as affected to a substantial degree have been … Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Washington.

Prison authorities publicly downplayed the action, predictably enough. But from the inside, prisoners have reported there’s been stiff retaliation by guards and governors – with at least one inmate being moved to a cell on Death Row. Innumerable others have been consigned to various other forms of solitary confinement in response to their participation in the strike.

NO-ONE SHOULD BE SURPRISED that the punishment for protest would be ‘Solitary’ (sometimes called ‘Administrative Segregation’, sometimes less formally ‘The Hole’). There are already an estimated 80,000 prisoners ordinarily being kept in solitary nationwide, even without this recent mass action to provoke it. (Prisoners are as a matter of course put there for infringement of rules or ‘behavior management’, and sometimes for their own protection.)

This widespread use of Solitary throughout the state and federal systems has led to a broad citizens’ movement to get the practice banned or minimized. One specific group of citizens – and perhaps unexpectedly it is architects – have their own specific proposal to push.

But perhaps it’s not so unexpected. Somebody, after all, has to design prison buildings, and of course that somebody will almost invariably be an architect. The reform-minded group Architects, Designers, Planners for Social Responsibility, led by northern California architect Raphael Sperry (right), is campaigning for a change to their profession’s Code of Ethics. They want their professional body, the American Institute of Architects, to in essence outlaw members who take part in designing solitary confinement units.

MY LATEST TV REPORT (on air this Sunday evening) highlights this ethical sidelight on America’s endless epidemic of mass incarceration.

Watch  my report on PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND – as broadcast Sunday, September 23rd.

In the course of my reporting, Sperry told me:

“Architects should not design spaces for solitary confinement. It’s a form of torture recognized by the entire international human rights community, and we’re enabling and frankly participating in human rights abuse.”

By way of contrast, a now-retired veteran of designing prisons in the US and overseas, Jim Mueller (right), told me that solitary confinement units “are a necessary component” of prison-construction and that his firm “decided we could pursue that, and we would not have an ethical problem with doing that.

Moreover, he said, if his company “turned it [the work of designing a Solitary unit] down … it would be very unlikely that we would be selected” for any overall contract to design a prison. “It’s better that we do it than not do it, because I’m worrisome about who would do it in the absence of architects doing it.”

A short essay I penned on the issues involved also appears this weekend at the PBS/WNET ethics-oriented page “Chapter and Verse”.

As in the TV report, I explore in the essay some of America’s history of solitary confinement, starting in 1829 with a British architect John Havilland’s design for Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania – a prison where initially every single inmate was in Solitary. (Click here to read the essay)