"They have no evidence against her—no fingerprints, no DNA.  My client was not on the scene.  She has an alibi which will be revealed at trial.”

--Eric Larsen, Forde’s Defense Attorney, to Armelle Vincent, French Journalist

When a prisoner is "stripped out" in jail, it means that they are deprived of their clothing, bedding, mattress, soap, shampoo, lotion, radio, reading material, reading glasses (necessary for Shawna to read), mail, any "privileges" (usually meaning contact with the outside world), paper, pens and pencils, legal documents...pretty much everything they would usually have in their cell.  In place of any kind of clothing, Shawna is given a skimpy "smock" which barely covers her torso.

So on top of being held in solitary confinement, where she can only talk to the guards and her lawyer, Shawna has spent 35% of that time "stripped out," now going on 10 months.

Why has she been "stripped out?"  Because she hasn't been EATING ENOUGH.  Shawna has had bouts of anorexia while in solitary which she cannot control, so the jail chooses to punish her for having an eating disorder, rather than trying to get her some counseling.  Any time she appears to not be eating enough, they "strip her out" as a motivation!  Imagine what the average person would do in12 months of solitary confinement, and then add the barbarity and humiliation of being "stripped out" to it.


TORTURE

“I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one’s mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything.”

–Nelson Mandela, from his 1994 autobiography The Long Walk to Freedom

After a visit to an American prison where total solitary confinement was practiced Charles Dickens wrote:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Senator John McCain said about his 5 years as a POW.  “[Solitary] crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.”