When Karen Murtagh started her internship at Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York in the summer of 1983, she was struck by the number of inquiries from state prisoners regarding time spent in solitary confinement while behind bars.
“We regularly saw people placed in solitary for years at a time,” said Murtagh. “It was given out like candy, and nobody on the outside was questioning it. You don’t know what you don’t know.”
After graduating from law school, Murtagh was hired as a staff attorney for the Albany office of PLS, a nonprofit organization which protects the civil and human rights of incarcerated New Yorkers. Throughout the 1980s, Murtagh and her team engaged in a concerted effort to educate judges and the general public about the long-term effects of solitary confinement and represented dozens of incarcerated individuals in cases to reverse this punishment…