Reviews for 23/7

"A chilling portrait of America's 'securest and most punitive' prisons... [Reiter's] stories of the psychological impact of isolation—and the experiences of released Supermax prisoners—are both disturbing and moving. Essential reading in the ongoing national re-examination of mass incarceration.'
— Kirkus Review (starred review)

"23/7 tells a compelling story of the banality of evil in correctional planning and penal confinement."
— Franklin E. Zimring, University of California, Berkeley

"Engaging, meticulously researched, and deeply disturbing, 23/7 is more than a history of Pelican Bay Prison. Keramet Reiter opens a window onto the secretive decisions that produced the contemporary supermax and sensitively explores the harmful results. This remarkable book is essential reading for anyone concerned about prisons in the United States."
— Lorna A. Rhodes, author of Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison

"Keramet Reiter uncovers the history and consequences of California's unfortunate modern experiment with solitary confinement—a tale of public policy gone awry through ignorance, callousness, cruelty and self interest, inflicting untold psychological pain and emotional misery on thousands."
— Jamie Fellner, Human Rights Watch

"23/7 is a convincing, heartbreaking, enraging explanation of how prison bureaucrats, empowered by a fearful electorate, gained the power to entomb human beings for five, ten, twenty years and more in small boxes without windows where the lights are never turned off. I have not read a book in recent years that has made me angrier than this or explained more about how, when it comes to prisons, Americans have dug ourselves such a very deep hole."
— Ted Conover, author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing