He has not had human contact or a good night’s sleep in nearly three decades. Every single day, he wakes to the sound of metal doors clanging open and a pair of disembodied hands pushing a tray of food through a slot into his 64-square-foot cell.

L to R: Kimberly Richardson (of the Peoples Institute for Survival), Robert King (who spent 31 years in isolation), and Theresa Shoatz, whose father Russell Maroon Shoatz is also in long-term solitary confinement. Credit: Ann Harkness/cc by 2.0

For the next 23 hours, he will stare at the same four walls. If he is lucky, he’ll be escorted, shackled at his ankles and wrists, into a “yard” – an enclosure only slightly larger than his cell – for an hour of solitary exercise.

This is how Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, a prisoner in the restricted housing unit at the State Correctional Institute (SCI) Frackville in northern Pennsylvania, has spent the past 22 consecutive years.

On Thursday, Shoatz’s lawyers submitted a communication to Juan E. Mendez, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, urging him to inquire into why a “father, grandfather and great grandfather” is being held in extreme isolation despite having a near-perfect disciplinary record for over 20 years.

The appeal comes on the heels of a surge in public debate on the practice of solitary confinement in the United States, where on any given day an estimated 81,000 men, women and children are held in some form of “restricted housing” unit, according to Federal Bureau of Justice statistics.

Authorities in each state have a myriad of euphemisms for the practice: administrative segregation, secure housing units (SHUs), “supermax” facilities, protective custody. Whatever the language, critics say the basic conditions remain the same: extreme isolation and sensory deprivation for years at a time.

According to a 2012 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the restrictions imposed in “maximum security” facilities often “exceed the fathomable. In Pennsylvania’s most restrictive units, for example, prisoners have all the usual supermax deprivations plus some that seem gratuitously cruel: they are not permitted to have photographs of family members or newspapers and magazines.”

Mendez has already affirmed that holding a human being in isolation for a period exceeding 15 days constitutes a violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT).

Back in 2011, his office called for a complete global ban on the use of solitary confinement “except in the most extreme circumstances and for as short a time as possible”, citing numerous studies – some dating back decades, others as recent as Amnesty International’s 2012 report ‘The Edge of Endurance’ – that have documented the long-lasting psychological impacts resulting from even a few days of social separation.

This past August, a hunger strike involving over 30,000 prisoners protesting conditions in restricted housing units at the Pelican Bay State Prison in California prompted the rapporteur to make an urgent appeal to the U.S. government to “eliminate the use of prolonged or indefinite solitary confinement under all circumstances”, stressing that the average U.S. prisoners banished to the hole typically stays there roughly 7.5 years – “far beyond what is acceptable under international human rights law.”

Harold Engel, an attorney with over 43 years of experience and a retired partner of the global corporate law firm Reed Smith, said he co-signed the appeal Thursday in the hopes that an investigation undertaken by the office of the special rapporteur, housed at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, will bring an end to indefinite isolation.

“I first became involved in this case because my daughter told me about Shoatz’s situation and I found it abhorrent,” Engel told IPS.

“As I learned more I realised there wasn’t any clear law on the question of whether keeping someone in solitary confinement under conditions that Shoatz has been kept in violates the eighth amendment of the U.S. constitution [prohibiting the government from imposing cruel and unusual punishment] – which, in my opinion, it does.”

Speaking to IPS under condition of anonymity, an inmate who spent several years in solitary confinement in a Pennsylvania prison before being released back into the general population said his life was measured out in a series of arbitrary numbers: he was permitted one hour of exercise on five days out of the week; he was allowed three meals a day but zero contact visits with his family. His cell contained a single cot and one steel sink. Showers were taken thrice weekly, overseen by guards.

“Getting through each day felt like hewing a single stone from a mountain of despair,” he said.

Bret Grote, an activist who has worked for over six years with the Human Rights Coalition (HRC) – an advocacy group comprised predominantly of prisoners’ families, ex-prisoners and their supporters – says he and others have documented “hundreds upon hundreds of instances of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment inside the solitary confinement units of Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC).”

“The approximately 2,500 prisoners warehoused in solitary by the PA DOC are held in units where physical abuse, psychological deterioration, retaliation for exercising constitutionally-protected rights, food deprivation, extreme social isolation, severely reduced environmental stimulation, theft and destruction of property, obstruction of access to the courts, and racist abuse are normative features,” Grote told IPS.

As Shoatz’s lawyers await an official response from the U.N. rapporteur, they are holding out hope that a full investigation into his case could also bring some respite for the tens of thousands of others enduring such conditions.

Despite months of frustrated efforts to secure a full and impartial investigation into possible laws-of-war violations during the last phase of Sri Lanka’s civil war, which ended in 2009, leading human rights advocates in the U.S. launched a fresh charge on the island nation’s government this week, vowing that, “If the Sri Lankan government won’t provide justice for victims, the international community will.”

The push was sparked by a diplomatic spat at the 18th annual session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which opened in Geneva on Monday, when Navanethem Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, urged Sri Lankan authorities to conduct a full review of its security apparatus.

“The counter measures adopted by various countries to combat terrorism have frequently been designed with insufficient regard to human rights,” Pillay said in her opening remarks, stressing, “This has all too often led to an erosion of rights and fostered a culture of diffidence and discrimination, which in turn, perpetuates cycles of violence and retribution. Sri Lanka is one such case.”

Pillay’s comments added to the international call for post-conflict truth and justice in Sri Lanka, which has been growing since May 2009 when government forces finally crushed the armies of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a minority separatist group that had been fighting for the self-determination of Tamils in the Sinhala- Buddhist-governed country since 1983.

While much of the world, and indeed a majority of Sri Lankans themselves, hailed the end of the 30-year-long civil war as a great “victory against terrorism”, subsequent reports from aid workers, U.N. officials, war survivors and journalists about possible war crimes and immense human rights abuses by both the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) and the LTTE began to sketch a different, darker view of what the government had hitherto declared to be an almost bloodless humanitarian operation in the formerly rebel-controlled North East.

In May 2010, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon commissioned a three- member Panel of Experts to examine a possible accountability process in Sri Lanka after President Mahinda Rajapaksa failed to investigate the allegations himself.

After reviewing extensive documentation by U.N. organisations, satellite images, photographs, video materials and testimony from survivors, the panel’s report, published on Apr. 25, concluded that both armies conducted military operations “with flagrant disregard for the protection, rights, welfare and lives of civilians and failed to respect the norms of international law.”

The report also stressed that tens of thousands of civilians likely perished between January and May 2009, a large majority at the hands of government shelling, particularly in the declared “No Fire Zones”.

“When a U.N. Panel of Experts report concludes up to 40,000 civilians died amid war crimes, the Human Rights Council should feel compelled to act,” Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said Tuesday.

“The council should order a full international investigation – anything less would be a shameful abdication of responsibility,” he added.

Last year the Sri Lankan government rejected the U.N. panel’s findings, calling the report, “illegal, biased, baseless and unilateral”.

Responding to Pillay’s comments this week, Tamara Kunanayakam, ambassador and permanent representative of Sri Lanka, dismissed the allegations as “wholly misplaced” adding, “the community of nations was well aware that Sri Lanka was combating one of the most ruthless terrorist organisations in the world.”

Requests for comment from the Sri Lankan embassy in Washington were not answered before deadline.

But both Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued statements this week pushing strongly for the UNHRC to consider the report and implement its recommendations.

“That means the majority of members of the council will need to support this effort, so civil society needs to lobby strategic countries to stand up for accountability and justice, just as they have done recently in Libya, Syria and other places,” Elaine Pearson, deputy director of the Asia division at HRW, told IPS.

“Given that the international community did not act to prevent [countless] deaths in [Sri Lanka during the war], it’s the least that they can do now to order an international inquiry,” she said.

“The failure to hold abusers accountable has an effect on lasting peace – it just reinforces a culture of impunity that encourages future abuses. We’ve seen this happen in many places – Afghanistan and Congo are some examples,” Pearson told IPS. “So the ‘fragile peace’ in Sri Lanka may be short-lived, if the legitimate grievances of Tamils are not addressed and there is no accountability for the litany of alleged war crimes committed during the final stages of the war.”

Sharon Singh, the media relations director for AIUSA, told IPS, “Sri Lanka has a long history of establishing national commissions of inquiry aimed at justice and reconciliation which have all, in practice, failed to deliver justice, truth and full reparations to victims of human rights violations.”

“Instead, Amnesty International has documented persistent patterns of abuse and a history of impunity that has persisted for decades. Even today, new reports of abductions, enforced disappearances and killings in northern Sri Lanka keep emerging – crimes which are evidently condoned by Sri Lanka’s refusal to investigate past crimes,” she said.

“The government is handling [this situation] by silencing the media and civil society,” Pearson told IPS.

“The courts and opposition political parties are all under increasing pressure. Dissent has been so effectively silenced that people now whisper their complaints. In the long term, the lack of accountability can create an atmosphere of distrust and revenge that can later be manipulated by leaders seeking to foment violence for their own political ends,” she added.

As a budget battle rages on in the U.S. Congress and President Barack Obama’s military budget comes under increasingly harsh scrutiny, a report released here Thursday by the Institute for Policy Studies suggests that reallocating defence spending towards tackling climate change might be the only solution to the administration’s woes.

“[The] president speaks beautifully on the need to change our relationship with the rest of the world but the budget itself hasn’t fulfilled the promise of that rhetoric,” Miriam Pemberton, co-author of “The United Security Budget for the United States, FY 2012” report and research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS.

“The bottom line is that the current [desire] for deficit reduction provides a strong opening to really get serious about making military cuts. Moving money into non-military foreign engagement will do a lot to underwrite and make real the administration’s promises,” Pemberton added.

The report, released annually since 2004 and supported by a task force of prominent military and civilian experts, claims that “The Defense Department has begun to recognize climate change as a major security threat even as federal government funding to address the issue has begun to be cut in FY 2012.”

Though Obama threw his weight behind climate efforts in 2009 under the stimulus American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), that support has now slowed to a trickle at a time when even mainstream observers are taking seriously the impacts of mega-floods, severe droughts and rapidly melting icecaps.

In his recent article “Climate Denial: can science and the truth withstand the merchants of poison?”, former vice president Al Gore blasted Obama for failing to speak out vehemently against ongoing and impending climate catastrophes, referring to the dumping of 90 million tonnes of heat-trapping emissions into the earth’s atmosphere every 24 hours as potentially destructive to “human civilisation” as we know it.

Citing statistics from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Gore wrote that “2010 was tied with 2005 as the hottest year measured since…the 1880s.” As a result of such over- heating, the Arctic ice cap lost a full 40 percent of its area over the last three decades, he added.

Adding fodder to the argument that action is needed, the Global Governance Project estimates that by the year 2050, the world will have 200 million climate-displaced refugees on its hands, the majority of them from low-lying coastal areas, as a result of rising water levels.

“All of these interconnected threats, especially climate-induced destabilisation of certain parts of the world, pose a threat to U.S. national security – particularly in the long term,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told IPS.

However, says Pemberton, the U.S. government’s budget scarcely does justice to the urgency of the situation.

The overall budget dedicated to tackling climate change dropped from 33.2 billion dollars for FY 2011 to 27.6 billion dollars in FY 2012 – a nearly 17 percent decline in federal support, at a time when “substantially more support is needed”, the report said.

The authors went on to recommend that the federal government invest at least 50 billion dollars a year in energy efficiency and renewable energy, leveraged to encourage a further 100 billion dollars worth of investments from the private sector.

With total public and private expenditures of 150 billion dollars annually – accounting for one percent of GDP and eight percent of total private investment – the report’s authors believe that the U.S. economy has a “reasonable chance” of attaining Obama’s vision of reducing carbon emissions in the country to 4,200 metric tonnes by 2030.

“Such a reallocation of resources from ‘offensive’ to ‘preventative’ measures really does double duty,” Pemberton told IPS.

“It reduces our dependence on foreign oil and thus on the whims of dictators who sit atop those oil reserves, while at the same time paying dividends in the form of job creation in the domestic economy,” she added.

Last year, Pemberton authored the Institute for Policy Studies’ annual “Military Vs. Climate Security” report, which found that the ratio of military spending to climate spending dropped from 94:1 to 41:1.

“This is progress, obviously,” Pemberton wrote. “But a shift of one percent of the military budget does not come close to bringing climate security investment in line with the magnitude of the threat.”

“Climate change is…only going to get worse,” Pemberton told IPS, “And the military forces are going to be strained to the breaking point in their efforts to deal with it.”

“We need a budget process that looks at our security challenges as a whole, and allocates resources in a way that matches the lip service everyone in government pays to the co-equal importance of military and non-military tools,” she added.

Former U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates himself identified imbalances in military spending back in 2008, going so far as to claim that “America’s civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long… relative to what we spend on the military.”

But far from being scaled down, the military continues to operate on a 700-billion-dollar annual budget, the report shows.

“There is plenty [here] that can be trimmed,” said Lawrence Korb, co- author of the report and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “The report details 77 billion dollars of the lowest hanging fruit.”

Some of the suggested “trade-offs” between what the report terms “offensive” and “preventative” expenditures include the 2.41-billion- dollar allotment for a second Virginia Class Submarine versus meeting the State Department’s request for 2.14 billion dollars for Contributions to International Peacekeeping Activities account; or continuing the 1.3 billion dollars of annual aid to Egypt’s military at the expense of investing in the country’s burgeoning post- revolution economy.

“These are the kind of trade-offs our lawmakers should be considering – decisions about what kind of spending will really make us and the rest of the world safer,” Pemberton argued.

*With additional reporting by Lily Hough.

Two days ahead of a formal vote scheduled for Jun. 30, former French finance minister Christine Lagarde became the first woman to be appointed managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), headquartered in Washington, Tuesday.

Replacing former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who vacated the post in disgrace last month following sexual assault charges, Lagarde today surpassed her lone competitor – Mexico’s central bank governor Agustin Carstens – to take control of the Fund’s executive board, which oversees operation of the 187-member institution.

Though Lagarde’s appointment has been a fiercely contested foregone conclusion for several weeks, Tuesday’s 24-member board meeting opened with ostensible uncertainty about the allegiances of key players like the United States, which is responsible for 17 percent of the Fund’s 320-billion-dollar resource pool and has thus far remained silent for fear of backlash in a thorny debate of European dominance versus emerging market economies.

The curtain of largely symbolic suspense was lifted earlier today when U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner threw his weight behind Lagarde, who had also secured assurances from the governor of the People’s Bank of China on Monday.

Even before the meeting convened, Lagarde had clinched support from states representing a full 40 percent of the Fund’s voting power.

“At the same time, I hope that under Lagarde’s direction, the IMF will make meaningful progress in strengthening the governance of the institution, so as to assure its legitimacy, cohesiveness, and ultimately, its effectiveness,” he added.

Carstens’ mild statement of support belies the storm of debate, critique and, at times, open hostility that has surrounded the selection process over the last few weeks, during which economists and organisations from across the ideological spectrum united in their objection to continued European leadership.

“The Obama administration could have stepped up and welcomed emerging powers taking a leadership role in the IMF [but] it chose instead to be quiet about the disenfranchisement of emerging markets and developing countries in this process and jump on the European bandwagon at the very last minute,” Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, said in a statement following Lagarde’s appointment.

Caroline Hooper-Box,acting head of Office and Essential Services Media Lead at Oxfam International, added in a press release Tuesday, “This farcical appointment process has damaged the IMF’s credibility.”

“The IMF is badly in need of reform. To protect the institution’s credibility, Lagarde will have to act to loosen Europe’s stranglehold of the IMF Board, and give others more of a voice.”

“She’ll also have to decide what to do with the three billion dollars the IMF got from selling its gold reserves last year,” Hooper-Box added. “This money must be directed to poor and vulnerable citizens in developing countries – the same people who are excluded from IMF decision making.”

Lagarde’s appointment coincides with a 48-hour general strike in Greece that today led to riots and clashes with the police as protestors raged against the government’s proposed ‘austerity measures’, which will be voted on in Parliament Wednesday.

In order for Greece to secure a 17-billion-dollar loan from the IMF – which it desperately needs to pay off a chunk of last year’s 142- billion-dollar bailout debt – the government is under pressure to increase taxes and cut state spending, moves that will hit hardest on minimum-wage and low-income families’ pocketbooks.

However, the fighting on the streets of Athens encapsulates some critics’ claims that a European in the driver’s seat of the world’s most powerful financial institution is the last thing a shattered global economy needs.

Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard University, last week referred to the IMF as the “commander on the frontlines of the crisis” in Greece, adding to the growing public outcry against Lagarde stepping in as saviour of a crisis that he said her own country helped orchestrate.

According to Howard Schneider, an economics correspondent for the Washington Post, the Greek rescue has ‘unraveled’ in the past months, leading to a deeper-than-expected recession and possibly necessitating billions more than the 150 billion dollars already provided under the three-year emergency plan last year.

“Did anyone think to themselves that the head of the IMF should be an Asian during the Asian financial crisis of 1991-1998, or a Latin American during the crisis in the 1980s and 1990s?” Martine Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, wrote last week.

“The Eurozone is a very special and, in my view, very dangerous construction,” he said, adding that according to the IMF’s most recent data, the EU’s share of global output at purchasing power parity will shrink from 25 percent in 2000 to 18 percent in 2015, an “astonishingly rapid” rate of decline.

Meanwhile, World Bank estimates for China’s growth in 2011 have shot up from 8.5 to nine percent – leading experts to speculate that Europe can no longer afford its patronizing dismissal of the rest of the world.

Offenheiser added, “If the U.S. and E.U. continue to hold on to power through structures that reflect an obsolete economic and political world order of years past, the rising powers will inevitably turn away from the organisation and toward institutions where they do have a voice.”

Exactly 40 years after former United States President Richard Nixon labelled his administration’s drug policy a “war” in 1971, a huge coalition of civil rights leaders, advocates and educators converged in Washington D.C. to expose an on-going conflict that they believe is less ‘a war on drugs’ and more an assault on the rights of African Americans in the 21st century.

“The War on Drugs has not failed to achieve its purpose,” Reverend Jesse Jackson, founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, told a crowded room at the National Press Club here Friday. “It has certainly failed to stop the trade and abuse of drugs, but it has succeeded in its original design: to ensure profit for some, political disenfranchisement of minorities, and the structural exclusion of a people based on their race.”

A 2010 report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the U.S. Department of Justice claims that a drug arrest is made every 19 seconds, making the U.S. home to 25 percent of the world’s inmates – most of them detained on non-violent charges of drug possession.

With one out of every hundred American adults behind bars, the U.S.’s bulging jails easily exceed even the prison population in China. These jails, experts say, have become the most racially biased institutions in the country.

In its 2011 annual report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented that, though African Americans comprise a mere 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for a stunningly disproportionate 35 percent of incarcerated drug offenders in the country.

The New Jim Crow?

Today, there are more African American men in jails, correctional facilities, prisons and detention centres in the U.S. than there were slaves in 1850 – a decade before the civil war began.

In fact, more black men are behind bars in the U.S. in 2011 than in South Africa in the 1990s during the height of apartheid.

According to Michelle Alexander, author of the ‘The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in an age of colorblindness’, the War on Drugs has effectively robbed people of colour in the U.S. of their hard-won civil rights by legalising discrimination against ‘criminals’ in much the same way that the notorious Jim Crow laws legalised discrimination against blacks.

“The War on Drugs has put in place a set of policies and practices that operate to collectively lock people into a permanent second class status for the rest of their lives,” Alexander told IPS. “African American men in particular are targeted by the police, stopped, searched, arrested on minor charges of possession – the very sorts of offenses that go unnoticed on wealthy college campuses across town – imprisoned and then ushered into a parallel social universe where they are stripped of their most basic civil and human rights.”

“Suddenly being denied access to public housing, stripped of equal education and employment opportunities, refused the right serve on a jury – all the old forms of discrimination – are legal again once you’ve been branded a felon,” Alexander added. “The drug war has been the primary vehicle of mass incarceration and this new form of racial and social control – it has been responsible for the quintupling of our prison population since the 1980s.”

The report by HRW makes clear that although blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at equal rates, African Americans make up 44 percent of state convictions of drug felonies and black males are incarcerated at a rate more than six times that of whites. In fact, in 2009, one in ten young black men between the ages of 25 and 29 were imprisoned – compared to one in 64 white males.

Numbers Belie Rhetoric in On-going Conflict

“The drug war has arguably been the single most devastating, dysfunctional policy since slavery,” Norm Stamper, retired chief of police for Seattle, told a press conference in D.C. last week.

Speaking on behalf of the advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) – who handed over their new report ‘Ending the Drug War: a Dream Deferred’ to Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske Tuesday – Stamper laid bare the details of a strategy that President Barack Obama’s administration claims to have abandoned, but is in fact still deeply rooted in the budgets and practices of virtually every law enforcement agency in the U.S.

“I was optimistic when [Kerlikowske] said, early in his tenure, that we cannot arrest ourselves out of this problem,” Stamper said. “But that statement has been made and repeated on numerous occasions to no practical effect.”

LEAP’s report crunched the numbers of Obama’s 2010 National Drug Control Strategy budget and found that – compared to the expenditures of Republican President George W. Bush – the Obama administration approved a 13 percent increase in the Department of Defence’s anti-drug spending, an 18 percent increase in drug control funds allocated to the Bureau of Prisons, and a 34 percent decrease in support for Department of Education-sponsored awareness programmes in fiscal year 2011.

Even after adjusting for inflation, Nixon’s 100 million dollar annual drug-war budget has multiplied 50 times since 1971. Despite the government’s National Drug Assessment’s finding that narcotics are cheaper and more easily accessible than ever before, the current administration has requested 26.2 billion dollars to continue fighting the war.

Contrary to claims by government officials, the Drug War is far from over – leading experts and advocates to call for urgent mobilisation.

“Nothing short of a major social movement has any hope of ending mass incarceration in America,” Alexander told IPS. “In order to go back to pre-Drug War incarceration rates we would have to release four out of five prisoners; a million people employed by the criminal justice system would lose their jobs; private prison companies would be forced to watch their profits vanish; but it can be done,” she added.

“Many people argued that Jim Crow was so deeply rooted in our political, economic and social structure that it would never die and the same is being said today, but the reality is that when people awaken to the injustice of a system and discover their own voice it is possible to end it,” Alexander told IPS. “Just like advocates were able to bring Jim Crow to its knees in a remarkably short period of time, I believe it is possible to end the drug war and this system of mass incarceration as well.”