This animation captures a teen's harrowing experience in solitary confinement
YouTube

A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
Thank you for signing up to TheWeek. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
In this chilling black-and-white animated short, Ismael Nazario remembers the horrors he encountered as a teenager: When he was 16, Nazario was sent to Rikers Island, a New York City jail, where he went on to spend more than 300 days in solitary confinement before he was even convicted of his crime.
Nazario recounts the physical and psychological torment of being in "the box," a 6' x 8' cell where he lived for 23 hours a day:
"[In] the summertime, it's uncomfortably hot. In a couple of the letters that I had, from the moisture of it being so hot, the ink was running off the pages."
According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, about 100 teenagers are housed in solitary confinement at Rikers Island — an "abnormally high number compared with estimated rates of solitary confinement across the U.S."
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The video, directed by Michael I. Schiller, is part of the Center for Investigative Reporting's project Solitary Lives, which tells the stories of adults and minors in solitary confinement. Watch the moving clip below. --Kaitlin Roberts
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.