Oprah Winfrey Goes Inside America's Most Notorious Prisons on 60 MINUTES

Oprah Winfrey visits California's Pelican Bay Prison and the infamous Security Housing Unit (SHU), which has been controversial for years and once earned the "supermax" prison the nickname "Skeleton Bay." She reports on conditions in the SHU isolation unit that critics say constitutes torture. Winfrey's report will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, Oct. 22 (7:30-8:30 PM ET/7:00-8:00 PM PT) on the CBS Television Network.

California, which long sent thousands of inmates to solitary confinement, is now on the leading edge of a reform movement aimed at curtailing the practice of limiting prisoners' human contact - which many say can cause mental illness.

60 MINUTES has reported on the prison's SHU before. Mike Wallace went there in 1993 to report on conditions at a time when the state touted Pelican Bay as "the wave of the future" in corrections. In another report in 2005, Lesley Stahl examined how gang members in the SHU still managed to communicate and run their murderous enterprises on the streets.

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