http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/ Discussion centered around abolishing, the death penalty and how multinational corps. profit off of incarcerating and murdering us. en Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:31:11 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/images/misc_2/rss.jpg http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/ http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40412-confronting-human-rights-abuses-us-prisons.html Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:15:30 GMT Confronting Human Rights Abuses in US Prisons --an interview with B
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Confronting Human Rights Abuses in US Prisons
--an interview with Bret Grote of HRC/Fed Up!

By Angola 3 News

Bret Grote is an investigator and organizer with Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up!, a prisoner rights/prison abolitionist organization based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Grote first became involved with the group after returning from the mobilization in Jena, Louisiana in Fall 2007. HRC sister chapters are in Philadelphia and Chester, PA. While covering a range of topics in this interview, Grote details how HRC/Fed Up! is documenting human rights abuses in Pennsylvania prisons, and using this documentation to fight back.

The website for the founding chapter of Human Rights Coalition (HRC) in Philadelphia says that HRC “was founded in 2001 based on the radical notion that there was a vital segment of the population missing from the organizing work against prisons: the families and loved ones of the over two million prisoners in this country. Not just as spokespeople or tokens, but in decision-making positions, deciding what campaigns to do and what issues to address. Incarcerated brothers took this idea, and asked their family members as well as some supporters to take the lead in building such an organization, and the HRC was born…There are many fronts to fight the prison system on, so many issues to address, but the voices of those most affected: prisoners' families, ex-prisoners and the prisoners themselves, have to be at the forefront of any movement to change and, sometime in the future, to abolish the prison system entirely, because we are the ones who know the intimate pain this system causes.”

Angola 3 News: Can you please explain the history of the Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up chapter?

Bret Grote: Our chapter of the Human Rights Coalition (HRC) was formed in late 2004-early 2005 and was originally known as Fed Up! The group began as a collaboration between etta, an anti-prison activist who lives in Pittsburgh, and Kevin Johnson, a prisoner confined in Red Onion State Prison, a Supermax facility situated in southwestern Virginia adjacent to the Tennessee border. The two were collaborating on an arts-based educational project.

Given the inherent brutality in Supermax facilities, the diametrically opposed racial demographics between prison personnel and prisoners, and the prevailing culture of violent dehumanization within the U.S. prison system at every level, it is no surprise that reports of severe human rights violations began emerging from Red Onion and its twin institution Wallens Ridge State Prison, which sits 30 miles down the road atop a decapitated mountain, immediately after each opened in 1998 and 1999 respectively.

Fed Up! was formed in an effort to expose conditions of confinement in Virginia’s high-security prisons and mobilize prisoners’ family members and support people against the racism, brutality, deprivation, medical neglect and abuse, and psychological torture that define these facilities.

Over the next couple of years Fed Up! built a contact list of hundreds of prisoners in Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, documented dozens of reports of human rights violations, informed various governmental representatives and agencies-including the governor of Virginia—of these conditions, and mobilized allies for letter and phone campaigns in an effort to penetrate the silence that enables the worst of the abuse, and thereby having a chilling effect on the most grievous brutality.

Sometime prior to or during 2007, Fed Up! became an official chapter of the Human Rights Coalition, a prisoner rights/prison abolitionist organization whose founding chapter was and still remains active in Philadelphia. HRC was the brainchild of prisoners as well. Around the fall of 2007 and early 2008 HRC/Fed Up!—as we were then known—began to focus more exclusively on PA prisons for reasons of capacity and strategy, because, obviously, we have more potential and actual power in this state since we are based here.

During these last two years we have documented hundreds upon hundreds of human rights violations (to view a small portion visit our website) from over 20 prisons in the state system (PA has 27 state prisons). These reports have been collated from thousands upon thousands of pages of prisoner letters and reports, criminal complaints, affidavits and declarations, civil litigation documents, prison records, along with countless hours of interviews and dialogue with current and former prisoners and their family and support people.

What our investigations demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt is that the state of Pennsylvania is operating a sophisticated program of torture under an utterly baseless pretext of “security”, wherein close to 3,000 people are held in conditions of solitary/control unit confinement each day.

Every single prison in the state has a control unit, and most of these consist of barren and often filthy cells that not only are the size of a bathroom, but are in fact bathrooms. Prisoners are confined for 23-24 hours per day in their cells. Reading materials are heavily restricted and censored. All incoming mail is subject to being read, except legal mail, although this policy is often violated while outgoing mail is subject to various forms of surveillance, tampering, and destruction. Restrictions on visitations are extreme and all visits with those in control units are conducted through thick glass with prisoners who are handcuffed throughout. Exercise “privileges” are granted 5-days per week when prisoners are taken to little cubicles of space enclosed by chain-link fencing and resembling dog kennels, presuming that the guards are willing to follow policy that day and that the prisoner in question feels secure being led from their cell to the “yard” by often flagrantly racist and sadistic guards.

While this capsule description of solitary confinement may appear inhumane and degrading enough to constitute torture—and it is—the concise litany of conditions above more or less corresponds to the aspects of solitary confinement that are mandated by policy, with the exception of some forms of mail tampering. The fact of the matter is that these control units are never operated in accordance with policy and instead serve as quite deliberate repositories for excessive and arbitrary violence, starvation and deprivation of water, psychological torment, etc.

Prisoners targeted most heavily by the regime of control unit torture are those who attempt to exercise constitutional rights to file grievances and lawsuits and expose conditions to the public. The other dominant filters that dictate an enhanced probability for placement in solitary confinement are race and mental health, as prisoners of color and those in need of psychological and psychiatric care constitute a higher concentration of prisoners in solitary than in the general prison population, which of course already has higher concentrations of both populations than the general population.

This focus on investigating, exposing, and fighting against state torture has emerged from a twinned set of obligations that need to accompany not only abolitionist movements, but struggles for social justice in general: the need to take immediate action in partnership and solidarity with those most heavily targeted by systems of oppression while simultaneously building a sustainable movement with a visionary, liberatory objective.

During the last year we have engaged in a number of other projects and community outreach and coalition-building efforts as well. Some of the more promising ones in terms of their necessity and importance for sustainable organizing are the recently launched project focusing on women’s incarceration, our Innocence Division which aims to support the wrongfully convicted, and perhaps most crucial, the recent formation along with a number of other local groups of the Human Rights Alliance Pittsburgh, which works to generate an integrated, multi-front human rights movement by means of organizing local communities to struggle for their rights and build political power.

A3N: What role do prisoners and the families of prisoners have in HRC’Fed Up! today?

BG: Prisoners and their family members have provided the inspiration, dedication, strategy, and educational perspective from the beginning of HRC’s work. Understanding the importance of documentation and securing affidavits, educating us on key aspects of the law and how to file criminal complaints, networking and bringing us into contact with other prisoners and activists: all of this has come from those on the inside.

Even more to the point, the resistance, humor, persistence, dignity, and unbreakable humanity of those subjected to conditions designed to humiliate, degrade, terrorize, break, and otherwise kill the human spirit is a constant wellspring of motivation that fortifies our collective commitment at HRC/Fed Up!

Family members’ involvement is central, as our planning meetings and letter-writing nights frequently, though not always, feature the participation of those with loved ones inside. We routinely ask people to step up and respond to our action alerts in defense of those being starved, beaten, denied medical care or otherwise targeted, and it has been the responses of family members that have led to our ability to amplify our voices and have some degree of a chilling effect in certain situations.

Still, we need to make a more dedicated effort in my view to community organizing, since most people in Pittsburgh do not know we exist, and those who do are not always able to make meetings for a variety of reasons, which primarily has to do with attending to familial and work responsibilities. We need to broaden our avenues for participation and create a diverse and steady stream of public forums in which the voices of current and former prisoners and their loved ones will be central and guiding. We need to consciously step up our efforts to build more leadership within targeted communities.

A3N: Can you please tell us about HRC/Fed Up!'s ongoing investigations into SCI Dallas?

BG: In early June of this year we sent a letter to more than 20 current and former prisoners at the State Correctional Institution (SCI) at Dallas, PA, soliciting reports of human rights violations. Since then we have received thousands of pages in reports from dozens of prisoners detailing a wide range of gross and deliberate human rights violations.

The highest concentration of reports come from the Restricted Housing Unit (RHU), which is PA’s own acronym for the solitary/control units, and these conform to the broad characteristics outlined above regarding solitary confinement, although certain depredations have been more prevalent at SCI Dallas. These include high incidence of sexual harassment by RHU staff and even reports of guards encouraging prisoners to sexually assault and rape other prisoners; frequent incitement to suicide, which was fatally successful in a case I’ll discuss below; guards arriving to work drunk—we have had a shocking number of reports regarding this, particularly concerning Correctional Officer Jimmy Wilkes; no effective ventilation, which was exacerbated by the plastic “spit shields” placed on prisoners’ doors in the RHU and a source of extreme misery in the stifling heat of summer; brown drinking and washing water from excessive amounts of iron, which was confirmed in a letter from the Department of Environmental Protection to a prisoner in the RHU that HRC/Fed Up! has obtained.

The assaults, racism, denial of adequate or even any medical care in solitary or general population, especially mental health treatment, denial of due process in internal grievance and misconduct procedures, obstruction of access to the courts via the destruction of legal documents and arbitrary restrictions on usage of the law library are commonplace at SCI Dallas as they are throughout the control units of PA with varying degrees of intensity.

During the course of our still ongoing investigation, on August 24, 2009, a prisoner in the RHU named Matthew Bullock committed suicide. The PA DOC issued a press release, as is their legal obligation, on 25 August 2009 announcing his death. Only two days later we received the first report that guards were involved in encouraging and enabling Mr. Bullock’s death. Since then we have learned through more than half-a-dozen eyewitness reports, several of which were submitted as affidavits, that Mr. Bullock was extremely mentally ill and according to his family had attempted suicide on at least six separate occasions while confined in the PA DOC. Guards repeatedly kicked on the door of his cell and taunted him, telling him to kill himself, and calling him a child molester and rapist, despite his having no record of any such crimes. Mr. Bullock told guards he was going to kill himself on the morning of August 24. Guards encouraged him to do so and subsequently moved him from cell #50, which was/is a psychiatric observation cell with a camera, to cell #48, which had no camera. Guards on the afternoon shift then reportedly failed to make rounds. Mr. Bullock was found hanging in his cell at 6:15 pm.

Because our investigations involve advocacy and are pursued with the explicit aim of abolishing control unit torture and other human rights violations in the prison system, we have earned the trust of many prisoners, and this is the reason that so many have come forward with reports of torture and human rights violations in SCI Dallas and elsewhere. As a result of their courage in speaking out we were able to break the story of the Bullock suicide in the local newspaper, the Wilkes Barre Times Leader. Mr. Bullock’s trial lawyer read the story and contacted our office. We have provided a lot of documentation and witness statements to them, and they have recently opened an estate on Mr. Bullock’s behalf, which is the first step in an eventual lawsuit.

Despite the negative publicity and small measure of exposure, conditions have not improved in the slightest, and acts of retaliation have in fact escalated recently. Reports of assault and instances of days long starvation continue to come into our offices multiple times each week.

HRC/Fed Up! has compiled the evidence we have accumulated and periodically notified those in positions of power with attendant requests for transparent investigations so as to ensure accountability and enforce the rule of law in the administration of the criminal legal system. In early July, over 70 state representatives and senators were put on notice of our preliminary findings, along with the PA DOC, the PA Attorney General and Governor Rendell (who it must be noted has a sordid history of criminal conspiracy and human rights violations himself, stemming from his role as the District Attorney of Philadelphia during the city’s war against the MOVE organization and the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal). Further notices were sent in September, with even more copious documentation. To date no action has been taken by the PA DOC, the Attorney General of PA, or the Governor. Nor has the District Attorney of Luzerne County—notorious site of the kids-for-cash judicial scandal—taken any action regarding criminal complaints regarding the Bullock incident or the acts of assault and starvation and intimidation against Andre Jacobs, a brilliant 27 year-old jailhouse lawyer who was recently awarded $115,000 in a case against the PA DOC.

Our strategy has been to grant PA state authorities the opportunity to do the right thing while simultaneously preparing for the predictable reality that they will not. Our next steps are the filing of formal criminal complaints with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the issuing of a major human rights report detailing our findings regarding SCI Dallas. The basic idea is to methodically link state authorities at every jurisdictional level into a chain of notice and liability and to reflect the failure of the government to enforce the rule of law and uphold basic human rights onto the public consciousness in order to create the degree of exposure necessary for enabling mass movements and coherent, collective action against the injustices of the police-security state.

In the process we seek to bring methodically incremental increases in the forms and effects of pressure so as to provide improvements in immediate conditions. Or, in other words, we seek to win small battles as a method for building power and strength for the larger ones. Success often appears distant.

I just saw on the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader website that another prisoner died at SCI Dallas on Saturday morning (read here). Autopsy results have not been determined and/or released, and the name has not been made public either. The article says the individual fell ill early Saturday morning and died at the hospital. My question is why is this one being reported? Deaths from "natural causes," i.e. medical conditions, are not required to be made public. Others have died at Dallas recently, or we've been informed, and the newspapers did not make mention of this. I've checked a half-dozen of our closer contacts and their names are still listed in the inmate locator. Nevertheless, I am concerned.

A3N: Does HRC see solitary confinement as a form of torture? Why do you think prison authorities use solitary confinement?

BG: What HRC or any members involve consider torture might be an interesting question, but it is of limited utility for effective political organizing. How do international law and the U.S. government define torture? The UN Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incident to lawful sanctions.” Sounds clear enough.

How does U.S. statutory code define torture? Section 2340 of Title 18 of the federal criminal code defines torture as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.”

Do the conditions of control unit confinement meet this standard? There is not space here to go over the evidence, which could fill several hundred pages on the basis of our two-year investigations in prisons in PA alone, but those familiar with the subject have an unequivocal grasp of the reality that solitary confinement deliberately inflicts “severe pain and suffering,” especially psychological, and cannot be justified on legitimate, i.e. “lawful,” grounds. The reasons for these conclusions are several but I will simply touch on two matters here: the psychological impact of solitary confinement and its failure to meet stated policy objectives.

The scientific consensus deduced from copious research on the psychological impact of solitary confinement is that the experience generates considerable and sometimes permanent mental suffering. One of the foremost experts on the subject, Dr. Stuart Grassian, reveals that “even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogra m (EEG) pattern toward an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium,” and outlines the following seven symptoms as being characteristic of an “organic brain delirium” associated with solitary confinement: a) hyperresponsivity to external stimuli; b) perceptual distortions, illusions, hallucinations; c) panic attacks; d) difficulties with thinking, concentration, and memory; e) intrusive obsessional thoughts: emergence of primitive aggressive ruminations; f) overt paranoia; g) problems with impulse control.

Questionnaires submitted by HRC/Fed Up! to over 75 prisoners in SCI Dallas and throughout the state confirm the presence of these same symptomatic patterns amongst a disturbingly large number of the solitary confinement population. Incidents of self-harm, including suicide attempts, occur regularly and are certainly under-reported. At SCI Fayette, between the months of July and September, HRC received reports from RHU prisoners that two men set their cells on fire, one of those same men cut himself and swallowed a razor, another man tried to hang himself, and another two cut their wrists and arms. These examples can be multiplied throughout the PA DOC and the entire country.

As for the pretext that solitary confinement reduces violence in prisons and ensures secure facilities, this is supported by literally zero credible evidence to my knowledge. All available testimony and reports would seem to indicate that solitary units create a psychological condition of such absolute repression that instances of violence and brutality proliferate. Not to mention the obvious fact that a stay in the hole exacerbates mental illness, rage, frustration, and other characteristics of anti-social behavioral traits.

Countless prisoners report being forced to max out their sentences because of alleged disciplinary infractions that land them in solitary. The conditions of confinement in the PA DOC are a major contributing factor to recidivism rates that hover around 50% in the first three years after release, helping to feed a chronic crisis of overcrowding. This refutes the notion that the PA DOC has any legitimate security, penological, correctional or other rationale behind the program.

In other words, there is nothing lawful in the sanctioning of one to solitary confinement, as it clearly contributes to social destabilization by engendering even more criminality on the part of prison personnel and prisoners in an endless cycle that diverts funding from desperately needed social programs in order to disappear and warehouse members of the underclass. These conditions are a flagrant violation of article 6 of the U.S. Constitution as well, which affirms that treaty law (i.e. international law) is the “supreme law of the land.” Thus, article 10 (3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stipulates that “The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.”

A3N: What role does solitary confinement have in the overall prison system? Since 1970, the prison population has increased from 300,000 to over 2.3 million today. The US now has more total prisoners and the highest incarceration rate than any other country in the world. What do you attribute this increase to?

BG: I’ll be concise here. Solitary confinement is the innermost core of the US-led imperial architecture of terror. A succinct overview of this architecture can be formulated as follows:
1) The solitary confinement population is used to terrorize the prisoner population;
2) The prison population is used to terrorize poor communities in general and communities of color in particular;
3) Social and economic conditions in these communities are used to terrorize the middle classes;
4) The middle classes are used to carry out the social, economic, and political agenda of the ruling/owning class;
5) The ruling class uses this domestic base of power to organize empire abroad;
6) Empire generates a trajectory of apocalypse;
7) We have to stop this.

This sketch can be developed with varying degrees of nuance, focus, and elaboration, but seems durable enough for me.

In this respect the proliferation of solitary confinement/ supermax conditions in the U.S. has corresponded closely with the rise of policies of mass incarceration and the global regime of neoliberal capitalism and its economic ideology of corporate supremacy, which I won’t describe here except to say that the deindustrialization of U.S. society has generated an ever-escalating number of people who are useless to the accumulation of wealth. When these populations become fodder for the prison industry they obtain economic capital while the systematic removal of massive numbers of poor people, especially people of color, from anything but marginal or token participation in the economic, social, and political domains serves the political function of neutralizing potential bases for movements against the unjust status quo.

A3N: Concerning strategies of resistance, how do you think human rights and international law framework can be applied to prison conditions as a method/strategy/ philosophy for investigations, exposure, and organizing? How does this relate to other struggles against the PIC and for human rights generally?

BG: Human rights, which are rooted in international law and designed to ensure the self-determination of peoples and thus a humane, sustainable, and legitimate social order, have a number of immediate advantages as framing instruments for the widest array of political struggle possible.

First of all, this frame turns reality right side up and exposes with grim clarity the criminality of the corporate-state. No matter the severity of crimes committed by those languishing anywhere in the U.S. prison system—and nobody disputes that some of those in prison are dangerous, violent, and pathologically anti-social—these crimes pale in comparison to wars of aggression, radical and ceaseless violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention against Torture, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Genocide Convetnion, etc. ad nauseam.

In fact, the systemic criminality of the political-economic order generates the oppressive power relations and attendant conditions of poverty, addiction, illicit economic activity, and normalized violence—especially against women and children—that fosters officially defined and punished crime. For those who are serious about ending violence and poverty in our collective communities it is imperative that a core objective of such a project is to mobilize a coherent mass movement from below to put constraints on and eventually eliminate altogether the ability of those in positions of power to engage in serial violations of the rights of others.

This framework has everything to do with accountability and necessitates that we work tirelessly to generate understanding and action around the reality that those who design and operate systems of power in this society are guilty of perpetrating crimes against humanity and must be stopped.

Specifically, in the context of day to day organizing around the prison system, it means that individuals and organizations concerned with the rights and lives of prisoners need to familiarize themselves with the basic principles of international human rights law as it pertains to the criminal legal system (I refuse to call it a justice system) and collect evidence regarding the state’s failure to implement basic human rights and constitutional safeguards for prisoners. The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, the Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners, amongst other human rights documents, are appropriate for orienting a host of campaigns toward dismantling the worst practices of the present system while simultaneously implementing alternative structures and practices.

Widespread dissemination of human rights documents and literature and the creation of community and movement curriculums toward this end are other means to build, and in part reconstruct, a rights-based culture of political dissent. Rights-based cultures naturally create movements that make demands and mobilize to enforce those demands, without asking for permission from repressive authorities or the ideal historical circumstances for organizing from below. A rights-based culture is a culture of struggle, cooperation, collective accountability, historical consciousness, and dedicated to creating a better world for those generations that will follow. Rights-based cultures are constituted by unbreakable bonds of solidarity, trust, and responsibility.

As anybody familiar with even a fraction of the history of popular struggles for social justice knows, these movements—while they rise and fall, wax and wane—never disappear so long as injustice exists; they are built to last. In fact, the human rights framework corresponds to the liberation movements of the 60 and 70s embodied in the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement amongst others.

Ultimately, human rights discourse and organizing revolves around the question of power: what forces in society hold power, how is it defined, who makes decisions and who suffers the consequences. For this end it is essential that we work to proliferate human rights alliances so as to build the necessary capacity and solidarity to confront the question of power. That is why the Human Rights Alliance of Pittsburgh, young as it is, strikes me as one of our most promising projects.

More practically, a method of documentation, intervention, and movement-building is effective for 1) tracking and exposing human rights violations in prisons, and other areas of society as well; 2) accumulating evidence to strengthen arguments in support of mass action for social reconstruction; 3) building trust with prisoners and their families by taking advocacy actions to the greatest degree possible; 4) building an organizational network with communication infrastructure that will serve to inform, foster dialogue, and mobilize increasing numbers of prisoners and their families and communities.

A3N: What link can we make between the work of HRC/Fed-Up! and the movement to free the Angola Three and all political prisoners?

BG: The relationship between the work of HRC/Fed Up! and the struggles of the Angola 3 are inseparable. Solitary confinement and the prison system as a whole have the primary function of silencing and/or liquidating precisely those radical movements embodied in the case and lives of Robert King, Herman Wallace, and Albert Woodfox.

Solitary confinement is a mechanism to isolate and neutralize leadership elements, people with the ability to articulate a common vision, support their principles with action, and build trust, solidarity, self-empowerment, and unbreakable determination within oppressed populations inside the prison and out. As Angola’s Warden Burl Cain clarified the matter, albeit while speaking against the release of Albert Woodfox, “He wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant. . . . A hunger strike is really, really bad, because you could see he admitted that he was organizing a peaceful demonstration. There is no such thing as a peaceful demonstration in prison.” Any act of dissent or protest is unacceptable to the totalitarian mindset.

As Cain further stated about Woodfox, “I still know he has a propensity for violence...he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates.” For those familiar with the actual program and ideology of the Black Panther Party, Cain’s statement contains a key insight: the struggle for human rights amongst oppressed peoples is an unacceptable threat to a system built and sustained upon the denial of those rights.

Our task in this context is clear: to carry forward in our work with renewed intensity and dedication, honoring those who struggled before us, acting on our responsibilities toward those who will follow, and building the movements of today that will confront and ultimately defeat this unspeakably cruel and inhuman system.

A3N: How can readers best support HRC/Fed Up! with its work?

BG: We have no staff and even less money, so financial contributions are extremely helpful. We have a lot of printing and mailing needs, as we send dozens of letters to prisoners each month, not to mention criminal complaints, letters to state officials and legislators, and other operational costs, including transportation costs for a possible speaking tour and visits to prisons. Checks can be made to HRC/Fed Up! and sent to us at 5125 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15224.

Most importantly, however, get in contact with us so we can learn from each other’s work and practice mutual aid and solidarity in whatever ways appropriate and possible. Send an email to hrcfedup@gmail. com or call 412-361-3022.

And finally, please do send an email and join our Emergency Response Network to help us spread information and take collective action in urgent situations involving starvation, assaults, medical neglect, and other human rights violations in PA prisons. Set up your own ERN for your city, state, and/or region, and lets network to help shatter the silence that enables the torture to continue.

--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news. com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. Like this interview with Bret Grote, we are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. Our online video series has now released interviews with Black Panther artist Emory Douglas titled “The Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Art,” author J. Patrick O’Connor titled “Kevin Cooper: Will California Execute An Innocent Man,” author Dan Berger titled “Political Prisoners in the United States,” and Colonel Nyati Bolt titled “The Assassination of George Jackson.”

Windows 7: I wanted simpler, now it's simpler. I'm a rock star. = ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40412-confronting-human-rights-abuses-us-prisons.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40353-torture-isolation-americas-supermax-dungeon.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:12:48 GMT You’re supposedly alive... but you’re trapped in a tiny, bare, silent tomb-like cell for 23 hours a day, robbed of sensory stimulation that human beings thrive on. No window to the outside world, no way to see if it’s day or night, winter or summer. Bland, barely edible meals get passed... You’re supposedly alive... but you’re trapped in a tiny, bare, silent tomb-like cell for 23 hours a day, robbed of sensory stimulation that human beings thrive on.

No window to the outside world, no way to see if it’s day or night, winter or summer.

Bland, barely edible meals get passed through a slot in the door.

No contact with anyone... except when the guards, wearing gloves, shackle and cuff you and cavity-search you before you can take a shower or "exercise" in a bare concrete space—by yourself, every move under close watch.

A heavy glass barrier cuts you off from family members during the few visits allowed.

This goes on for months... years... even decades.

They haven’t killed you... but even if you somehow manage to hang on to your sanity, they have assaulted the very core of your humanity.

This is torture by long-term isolation—torture officially sanctioned and carried out by the state and federal authorities all around the U.S., against tens of thousands of prisoners. It is happening in "Supermax" prisons—using the latest in high-tech surveillance and prisoner-control methods—that go under various names: secure housing units (SHUs), special management units (SMUs), closed maximum security (C-Max), and so on.

As a 2007 report from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) on Arizona’s prisons describes it, "Solitary confinement in supermax units is characterized by holding prisoners alone at least 23 hours per day for months or years. The cells are generally the size of a small bathroom and are outfitted only with a toilet, a sink, and a slab of metal protruding from the wall as a bed. Many such cells have no windows and no way to tell if it is daytime or nighttime. Prisoners describe either an eerie silence or a deafening wall of constant noise 24 hours each day. Prisoners eat alone and most human ‘interaction’ occurs through a small slot in a steel door. Shakedowns, or cell searches, by guards and strip searches are common. These prisoners have extremely limited access to prison programs. They are forbidden from holding jobs or attending most rehabilitative or educational programs."

Long before the U.S. began to use near-total isolation as a deadly form of torture against detainees in Guantánamo and other CIA and military prisons after 9/11, isolation torture was carried out in U.S. prisons. In the early 1970s, three young Black men at the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana were the target of vengeful retaliation by the authorities for organizing protests against the conditions there. Known as the Angola 3, they spent over 30 years in solitary confinement.

The first Supermax was built in 1972 at the Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois. The Marion "management control unit" held about 60 prisoners, and through the 1970s and mid-1980s, there were a handful of such Supermaxes.

Then came a dramatic increase in the use of isolation in the late 1990s, at a time when the overall number of people incarcerated in the U.S. was spiking up. According to the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, during those years "the growth rate of the number of prisoners housed in segregation far outpaced the growth rate of the overall prison population: 40 percent compared to 28 percent."

These units have grown even more since—exact numbers are difficult to come by, but according to a recent article in the New Yorker, there are now over 25,000 inmates in Supermax prisons. Mississippi alone has 1,800 prisoners in Supermaxes—12% of the state’s total prison population. An additional 50,000 to 80,000 prisoners in the U.S. are held in restrictive segregation units, and many of them are also in isolation—but the government does not release those figures. Most U.S. prisoners held in solitary confinement today have been there for more than five years.
Devastating Effects of Isolation

Straight-up physical forms of brutality and torture against prisoners are rampant in American prisons. A British film, Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons, includes horrifying surveillance camera clips from Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California of prisoners being severely beaten—and several being killed—by guards who also use tasers, stun guns, attack dogs, chemical sprays, and dangerous restraining devices. At the Pelican Bay SHU in California, "extraction teams"—each with five guards and a sergeant—disable the prisoner, helpless in the isolation cell, with batons and mace, and then forcibly "extract" him as punishment, often for minor infractions like not returning a meal tray. In 2003, the world saw horrifying photos of American guards brutalizing and sexually assaulting prisoners at the U.S. prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq. Many of the torturers at Abu Ghraib used to be guards at U.S. prisons—including Charles Graner, who was known for brutalizing prisoners at the SCI Greene maximum security prison in Pennsylvania.

But what is so devastating about prolonged solitary confinement is that the mental abuse of prisoners has profoundly disturbing effects. Many prisoners are driven insane (if they were not mentally ill to begin with) or into committing suicide by this inhumane punishment. In California, about 5% of the total prison population is locked down in isolation—but close to 70% of inmate suicides occurred in those units in 2005.

Craig Haney, a professor of psychology, reported that "there is not a single published study of solitary or Supermax-like confinement in which non-voluntary confinement lasting for longer than 10 days where participants were unable to terminate their isolation at will that failed to result in negative psychological effects. The damaging effects ranged in severity and included such clinically significant symptoms as hypertension, uncontrollable anger, hallucinations, emotional breakdowns, chronic depression, and suicidal thoughts and behavior."

Tyrone Dorn, an isolation prisoner at the Tamms Supermax in Illinois, said, "This place takes a toll on your entire body from a physical and mental standpoint." Dorn, who was originally sent to prison for a car-jacking, said, "The hardest part is the isolation. It’s like being buried alive."

Makini Iyapo, whose husband Leonard Alexander was sent to California’s Pelican Bay SHU, said, "There are people who had psychological trouble before they went there. Sometimes they wheel them out of there in straightjackets. Imagine being in with guys who are banging their heads and screaming. It’s mental torture."

Long-term isolation and sensory deprivation violate international anti-torture laws. In its May 2006 report on the United States, the UN Committee Against Torture wrote, "The Committee remains concerned about the extremely harsh regime imposed on detainees in ‘supermaximum prisons’. The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to, the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
Targeted for Punishment

How do prisoners end up in a Supermax? In the California system, for example, prisoners are sent to a SHU for alleged violence against guards or other inmates, for drug or weapons violations—and for something called "gang validation." This is not based on anything a prisoner may have actually done but on the say-so of the authorities that the prisoner is a gang member or has associated with gangs. According to Charles Carbone, a lawyer with California Prison Focus, "You can do something as simple as talking to an alleged gang member in the law library about the ordinary incidents of prison life, nothing to do with gang activity whatsoever. You can talk about the weather. That association alone is enough to use as a source document [for a validation]."

About half of the 3,000 prisoners in California’s SHUs are so-called "validated" gang members. And they are primarily young people and/or people of color. Being thrown into a SHU because of alleged gang association can result in a prisoner being held in solitary indefinitely. According to prisoners, once "validated," the only way a prisoner can get out is to "renounce [that is, snitch on others], parole, or die."

The AFSC points out that many prisoners are sent to the SHU for explicitly political reasons: "As the term ‘terrorist’ is applied very broadly today, particularly to people of Arab descent, prisoners labeled ‘threatening,’ ‘dangerous,’ or simply ‘disruptive’ can find themselves in long-term isolation. An argument can be made that the first security housing units in the federal prison in Marion, and later in Florence, were created to punish political activists caught up in COINTELPRO, organizing for Puerto Rican liberation, sovereignty for First Nations peoples, and other forms of self determination. Though political prisoners make up a small portion of the 2.3 million people currently imprisoned in the U.S., in AFSC’s experience over the years, they make up a disturbingly large percentage of the control unit population."

****

Given the incredible horrors of America’s isolation torture chambers, it is deeply inspiring to see prisoners who have not only survived but are resisting the system responsible for these crimes.

In a letter to the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund, a Latino prisoner wrote that when he was thrown behind bars, he was one of "millions of youth across this country who turn to petty crime as they don’t understand why their circumstances are so bleak, or any other alternative to changing these conditions." Then his eyes were opened up as he began to read and study about the world and get into communism. "My awakening to Revolution," he wrote, "has led me to challenge the state on numerous lawsuits, protests and other actions while in prison. This has unleashed the state to take me out of general population and be housed indefinitely in a control unit (SHU). This has only strengthened my understanding of this society’s repressive nature and my belief that another world is necessary!"



Sources:

"Brave Resistance at Pelican Bay SHU: Prison Hunger Strike Against Supermax Torture." Revolutionary Worker (now Revolution). Issue 1176, November 24, 2002. Accessed at revcom.us/a/v24/1171-1180/1176/pelican.htm

Gawande, Atul. "Hellhole. The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?" The New Yorker. March 30, 2009.

Grassian, Stuart, MD. "Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement." Statement submitted September 1993 in Madrid v. Gomez. Accessed at prisoncommission.org/statements/grassian_stuart_long.pdf

Haney, Craig. "Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and 'Supermax' Confinement." Crime and Delinquency, 2003.

Isaacs, Carolyn and Matthew Lowen. "Buried Alive: Solitary Confinement in Arizona's Prisons and Jails." American Friends Service Committee-Arizona (May 2007).

Johnson, Kevin. "Inmate Suicides Linked to Solitary." USA Today. January 11, 2007

Magnani, Laura. "Buried Alive: Long-term Isolation in California's Youth and Adult Prisons." American Friends Service Committee-Oakland (May 2008)

Marx, Gary. "Tamms: Illinois' Highest-Security Prison a Study in Isolation." Los Angeles Times. February 28, 2009.

Torture: America's Brutal Prisons. BBC Channel 4 program originally aired March 2, 2005. Accessed at youtube.com/watch?v=7tJ9V_7mO-E ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40353-torture-isolation-americas-supermax-dungeon.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40352-some-thoughts-revolution-we-need-leadership-we-have.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:02:15 GMT Dear RCP

Revolutionary greetings! I just received issue number 170 and so I wanted to express some of my thoughts of this issue, "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have."

First what was powerful was when I opened up the paper and seen the vivid uncut portrayals in the pictures of America's dirty work. To see the collage of horror all together was a powerful message. And I could relate to many of the pictures, the picture of the police smashing a Black youth's back with his knee. I have been in that exact position more than once, out in society and here in American gulags. In the barrios or ghetto projects, police brutality is a fact of life and begins as a right of passage to youth of color, police brutality is used as a mechanism of control to the potentially rebellious youth of color and it is taught at an early age, it becomes an unwritten rule that the lumpen know all too well, like the rule that if you run from the police if caught you will get beat.

The picture of the Iraqis being rounded up and arrested by blatant military force is a perfect example of a "police state," we experience the same thing here in the U.S. However instead of outright military uniform, the captors dress in police uniform, but most have witnessed groups of youth being thrown against the wall or told to sit on curbs while police rummage through their belongings or gather intelligence on them to put on "field cards" for later harassment. These are the constant harassments that you see on TV/Internet going on in Iraq with U.S. military "patrolling" and engaged in a harassment offensive. This is what Latinos and Blacks go through in their neighborhoods! The only difference is the uniform the oppressor wears. Latinos and Blacks get their doors kicked down and their house "cleared" just as in Iraq, Latinos and Blacks get sprayed with bullets, shot dead by the same security forces, with the same excuses—"he was reaching for his waistband."

The picture of the L.A. Rebellion always puts a smile on my face, pride for the people rising up on that day. When the '92 riots kicked off over the Rodney King verdicts I was in California's "C.Y.A." (reformatory school) and I remember when the riots began the guards put us on lockdown with no movement in the whole institution for fear of all of us rebellious youth at that time raising shit to our captors. I was already in the hole at this time for other mischief but I remember being in this dungeon and talking about the riots in L.A. As we had heard about it and even though at that time none of us had studied revolutionary struggles or theory, we didn't know the root cause of why the ruling class cast us off—we didn't even know what the ruling class was! But we did know we were happy and excited, we knew instinctively that what was taking place in L.A. was not only right it was a beautiful thing and we wanted in! I always look back to that situation and it solidifies the position that should a revolution reach these shores the millions of youth such as we were in that dungeon would rush to partake in the struggle, even without being fully immersed in political science they would instinctively know that the people were correct.

But getting to the main article of issue 170, "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have"... well first of all, being not only held in one of America's gulags, but also held in the California supermax known as Pelican Bay. I really appreciate all the literature I am able to receive particularly from PRLF as I have used this time in the dungeon to really develop my revolutionary line and see the U.S. for what it really is and identify all the horror that's wrapped up within the inner workings of this capitalist system that is basically machinery of death. But this article sounded much like a conversation I had with one of the people here in which we were just discussing this whole sham of land of the free! And having cookouts on July 4th and all that Americana mumbo jumbo but in reality there is not a damn thing to celebrate about this racist country or its genocidal birth! The so called "Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo" that called for the theft of half of Mexican land, as well as all Native land they call America validates this country not as "land of the free," rather the land of the thieves! Not to mention the slavery instituted to create an economy on this stolen land. This system is rotten to its core; "democracy" is but a cheap coat of shellac, it looks glossy and nice but when you flip it over you see its underbelly is mere rancid innards. Those of us in prisons across the U.S. understand the dialectics with this country's so-called democracy very well, we learn of its mechanics through our painful introduction to its injustice system. The flooding of drugs into our communities, little to no jobs or training and a capitalist culture that everywhere we look we see luxury items on billboards, movies, T.V., magazines, newspapers, on clothing, in art form and in our music. We are born and raised in the economically depressed neighborhoods where even walking to the corner store is a cat and mouse game with police, not knowing if today is the day we go to jail or worse. I have felt the boot, the stick and the mace more than a few times but the blow from the nightstick was my painful birth into a revolutionary! For I no longer continued to see this society we live in through cozy blinders but I seen the uncut reality that millions of people live under here and the horrors inflicted around the world by this country.

And those who can fight their way through this madness out in society as well as the 2+ million held in concentration camp like dungeons supermax gulags and endure the psychological torture and not only "stay strong," but go past that and learn the history of this country's vileness as well as the theoretical sciences that can change the political landscape and the relations we have today. Our revolutionary spirit can flourish in even the most draconian deprivation tanks—this is dialectical materialism! Marxism in action. Those of us in prisons need to manipulate our confinement to build revolutionary minds! We cannot sit around waiting for the state to help us understand how to struggle for liberation, we must find ways to teach ourselves and then teach others!

As the article says, "Fight the power, and transform the people, for revolution." What this means is the power is the ruling class, the imperialists, and transforming the people is changing this bling bling society, the slave mentality, the heavy chain of religion, the self destruction that is planted in our minds as youth, the defeatism. All this needs to be shown to the people and not only telling them "that's wrong" but showing them why that's wrong thinking, and then showing them what a better, more revolutionary way of going about it is needed. Where does this culture come from? And who benefits more out of it? These questions need to be grappled with so the people can see the truth, the righteousness of where you're coming from and in this way you will transform the people so that revolution is possible.

In the article it speaks of, "For a revolution, there must be a revolutionary people among all sections of society but with its deepest base among those who catch hell every day under this system. " We have nothing to lose but our chains. But even here it takes transformation to grasp the true nature of our conditions. I have come to see over the years that this newspaper is an excellent educational, people building organizational tool within the prison system, with it dialogue has opened, seeds have been planted and lines have been sharpened on many fronts.

The thing about what I have been able to study of Bob Avakian is I not only see the chairman of the RCP in his writings but I see a genuine revolutionary. I remember reading his memoir From Ike to Mao and Beyond and I seen of all the people he struggled with over the years and many setbacks and targeting by the police as well as the feds, where many have fell off out of exhaustion, police harassment or incorrect political line, Avakian has remained firm in his struggle for the people, and this article that came out in issue 170, it said how Avakian has given his heart for these struggles and how he's studied and developed scientific theory for making revolution. But something this article does not say is that Avakian did not have to take the revolutionary road, the strenuous trek to struggle with the oppressed. Avakian grew up with a father who was a judge, he was going to premed school and could have easily stayed in school got the plush doctor job, the Corvette, the model wife and lived high up in the suburbs tucked away safely free from the "crime ridden" areas, street people and "criminal elements," basically the downtrodden and castoffs. But he chose to struggle with the people, those who grew up in dramatically different living conditions and so he was in turn harassed with the people, jailed with the people, and he continues with the people. So there are lots of contributions Avakian has made to the International movement—but this is what stood out to me as someone I should and have looked into more deeply.

A prisoner ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40352-some-thoughts-revolution-we-need-leadership-we-have.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40351-years-police-terror-finally-gave-painful-birth-revolutionary.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:58:29 GMT Dear RCP:

Greetings and a clenched fist comrade salute to all you brothers and sisters. I write you from a dungeon known as California’s supermax prison "Pelican Bay." This country is undergoing a dramatic "facelift" in its political arena, the blatant disregard for humanity that Bush II displayed forced the ruling class to dig deep in its trump chest so that once more the people can be corralled into their Bourgeois politics with all the false hopes and empty promises that come with it. Thus the need to bring to light the cold truth is needed now more than ever.

First, I speak from the inner core of the nation of prison, from deep within the Beast’s Rancid innards known as the Security Housing Unit (S.H.U.). I know first hand the bottom end of oppressive U.S. Imperialism, I have been state raised since age 11. Juveniles, Boys Camps, Reformatory schools, then Prison and now control unit. The streets of the Barrio were everything to me, and the broken home-life would be the fuel for the anger I always feel for growing up with empty hands and constant harassment from the police, because I was Latino in a poor neighborhood, dressed a certain way, hanging out with other poor kids my age, no direction and hungry as ever. These are the conditions of millions of youth across this country who turn to petty crime as they don’t understand why their circumstances are so bleak, or any other alternative to changing these conditions.

As I began to become caught in the prison trap, time spent in the "hole" began to be time to read, learn and study. I began to read my own history of Latin America and the many Revolutions and struggles; this led me to take up Revolutions worldwide and realize that every Liberation struggle for the most part was fought against U.S. backed Regimes. This was eye opening! as I thought, "I never read about this in Jr. High or elementary classes." I began to want more because I realized this history had been kept from me all my life as Bob Avakian says I had "been locked out of politics" and so naturally wanted to learn more! It was at this point that I realized that my lumpen lifestyle was time lost with misdirected anger and it was at this point that the years of police terror of night sticks, mace and the heel of the boot finally gave painful birth to a Revolutionary! And as I began to study the works of Marx, Lenin, and Mao and develop my understanding of dialectical materialism, I realized my situation of being raised in gulags and solitary confinements enduring the degradation and humiliation of being left in bare concrete cells at times with nothing but toilet paper, shackled every time I left my cell like a wild animal, strip searched and left in phone-booth-like mesh cages for hours on end, it was through living a tortured life in U.S. Gulags that rather than allow my treatment to crush my spirit and any concept of why this occurs or of a better world that I chose rather than lay down and become the self hating criminal "worst of the worst" I began to develop consciously! I began to study and do all I could to obtain reading materials, papers, books, literature from my concrete cage for intense study, a Revolutionary classroom that was open 24 hrs a day! This is when I realized what I was seeing develop in myself and others held in repressed holes, solitary, control units (supermax) was Marxism, It was Dialectical Materialism in practice! I was using the very tools of repression from the state to psychologically and ideologically beam me down to strengthen my resistance and sharpen my political line! I then see the beauty of Dialectical Materialism and it was then that I knew that the ideas posed by Marx were indeed applicable to all levels of society, even to prisoners.

My awakening to Revolution has led me to challenge the state on numerous lawsuits, protests and other actions while in prison. This has unleashed the state to take me out of general population and be housed indefinitely in a control unit (S.H.U.). This has only strengthened my understanding of this society’s repressive nature and my belief that another world is necessary!

Today Obama is used on the one hand to corral Black People into bourgeois politics while on the other hand Latinos are now being brought into bourgeois politics by the appointing of Sotomayor to the supreme court, the truth is Sotomayor will continue upholding the laws of the ruling class and burying Latinos, Blacks, and others in the vast network of their prison palooza. If Sotomayor or Obama were true "representatives of their ethnicities" or even had a smidgen of concern for people of color, why have they not spoken about the disproportionate amount of Latinos and Blacks in the prison system? Why has the racist three strikes laws not been an issue worth addressing? Because they support and uphold this rotten system! These are the "representatives" that the people have to choose from in Capitalist America, these "representatives" that say nothing when fascist militia groups kick down the door of proletarian families and gun them down in cold blood as minutemen did on May 30, 2009 in Arivaca, Arizona, murdering Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia Flores. Yet these "representatives" don’t utter a word! When Oscar Grant is executed in Oakland, California, by the Gestapo like police again no word uttered! These are not "representatives" of the people they are Imperialist running dogs as Mao liked to say! The truth is that the facets that compose the Capitalist American society such as repression on Latinos and BLACKS will never truly be challenged by members of the U.S. Government. It is solely up to the people to build and strengthen these contradictions. The capitalist culture fuels the prison boom and Incarceration of vast multitudes of Latinos and Blacks; they work hand in hand to compliment and feed off one another. On the one hand Government complains of prison overcrowding while at the same time increasing penalty and stiffer repressive laws like the three strikes. But isn’t increasing longer prison time for petty crimes (i.e. life in prison for stealing a candy bar) increasing prison overcrowding??! The Prison Phenomenon we are witnessing is doing far more to Latinos and Blacks that will not be felt fully for generations to come.

The incarceration of large numbers of people of color is not simply a matter of taking people’s freedom, but this also affects whole communities in general and families in particular. This ripping parents away from their family smacks of the days of slavery when families were split up and households broken, the family unit was destroyed then and is being destroyed again! This weapon of chronic incarceration being unleashed on the people, this low intensity warfare being waged on the masses is worse than flooding the neighborhoods, barrios and ghetto projects with vast amounts of drugs as not everyone in these economically depressed areas do drugs or sell drugs, many commit petty crimes to eat and support their family when no other resource is available so these repressive racist laws work to target these other elements in the poor communities. The children left behind, being nothing more than residue in the mind of the capitalist ruling class, will serve to be the future reserve army of incarcerated, this does the same job as flooding poor neighborhoods did in the 1980s only this is "legal," and there will be no Iran Contra Scandal. It will all be supported by the courts. This Mass incarceration wreaks havoc on the oppressed communities and the millions of potentially revolutionary people are warehoused in prisons and broken down further resulting in suicide, drug addiction, religion or political coma.

The struggle for a better world should not be exclusive to a struggle of poor people. I write from the vantage point of the oppressed as this is the condition I was born and raised from, but there is also a need from those with very opposite lives who have never felt the pain of having a childhood friend gunned down in the street or the pain of being a child and watching as your home is raided by police and your family members dragged off to jail; there are those who have lived different or even sheltered lives yet through circumstances in life have come to identify with the people’s struggles and have seen the racism that has plagued America since the first settler arrived, these are the people that we also need who stand by the people for what is morally correct.

In building public opinion there is a need to create a new culture outside the spheres of capitalist society. We need to enculturate or rather re-enculturate in some cases people to experience the world in a revolutionary viewpoint in all levels of society, from art, music, literature, poetry, media, etc. This will take people from all backgrounds to engage and radically alter culture and thinking in this society. Newspapers such as Revolution is one such vehicle to teach the people truth. I have been receiving Revolution/Revolutionary Worker for about 8 years now, this has been possible through the PRLF and people’s donations—power to the people! Thus the people themselves have made it possible to send me Revolutionary nutrients. I in turn have shared my papers over the years with all I’ve come in contact with in all the prison general populations, holes and control units and planted hundreds if not thousands of revolutionary seeds, so please do not feel as if your efforts/donations are a waste in any way as Revolutionary shoots are sprouting, though sporadic, they are consistent! I am living example of this development!

La Lucha Continua ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40351-years-police-terror-finally-gave-painful-birth-revolutionary.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40350-hellholes-incarceration-future-emancipation.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:56:05 GMT From the Hellholes of Incarceration to a Future of Emancipation The United States—the richest and most powerful nation in the world—has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners. 2.3 million people languish in prison in the country that brags of being the “leader of the free world.”... From the Hellholes of Incarceration to a Future of Emancipation

The United States—the richest and most powerful nation in the world—has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners. 2.3 million people languish in prison in the country that brags of being the “leader of the free world.”

The Criminalization of a Generation and the Oppression of African-American and Latino People

For many Americans, the astronomical rates of incarceration are statistics. But millions of Black and Latino youth grow up in an environment where they see many of their older friends going into, and coming out of, prison. For whole communities, the prospect of prison looms ominously over people’s lives.

If you live in a poor Black urban neighborhood, whether New York or Los Angeles, Chicago or Atlanta or some other city... ten percent of the children you know have a father in prison or jail. One out of every five adults you know can’t vote because at one point in their life they got a felony conviction. These same people are banned from having a government job and can’t get many types of assistance—including financial aid for college. You feel it and see it all around you—from the politicians, the TV news, the police waiting to jack you up on the corner. Young Black men are degraded and treated like criminals, with no future other than prison, some shit job or the military. In the first six months of 2009, the NYPD stopped and frisked 163,118 Black people in New York City. Almost none were charged with crimes—91 percent were neither arrested nor given a summons, but they were criminalized and entered into NYPD databases.

African-Americans are 13 percent of the general population, but over 50 percent of the prison population. Nearly 60 percent of all young Black men born between 1965 and 1969 who dropped out of high school went to prison at least once on a felony conviction before they turned thirty-five. The incarceration rate of Black male high school dropouts is nearly fifty times the national average. (“Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?” by David Cole, The New York Review of Books, November 19, 2009)

Black people in particular have always filled the prisons in greatly disproportionate numbers compared to whites. But as the forms under which Black people have been subjugated in this country have evolved, the forms of the enforcement of their subjugation have evolved as well. And the massive numbers of African-Americans in jail concentrate that—in terrible ways with ominous implications. In the 1950s, when segregation was still legal, African-Americans comprised 30 percent of the prison population. Sixty years later, African-Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population—at a time when that population has skyrocketed. (Cole)

In earlier eras, the slavemaster’s whip and the lynch mob enforced the super-exploited, and all-around subjugated state of Black people. Today, those forms of violent oppression have been replaced by policeman’s taser and gun, and the prison cell. Poor Black people and Latinos in the inner cities are at ground zero for police terror and the threat of prison. But Black people of all classes are enveloped by the brush of demonization, humiliation, and repression—witness the recent arrest of the prominent Harvard professor and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, arrested for refusing to scrape and bow when accused of “breaking into” his own home.

From within this nightmare, a prisoner wrote to Revolution: “I am no stranger to struggle and hardship. I grew up in just one of the many, many slums in Chicago. I ended up in prison by the age of 13. I am 30 now. I have been raised by cold steel and concrete which I do not wear as a Scar of Honor but as an indictment against a system that has been built on genocide and slavery, and has continued to insist on throwing away its “undesirables” generation after generation. However, let me be clear, I am in search of the truth and not pity. My struggle is linked with the struggle of millions across the globe.”

These prisons are hellholes. Prisoners are subjected to maddening, mind-crushing torture in the form of isolation chambers. This kind of mental torture is considered a war crime when carried out against prisoners of war, but the U.S. inflicts this on tens of thousands of ordinary prisoners within its penal system. Prisoners are manacled, maced, tasered, and chained. They are set against each other, gladiator-style, in gang wars for the amusement of the authorities. Rape is used as a means of social control on prisoners, both women and men.

All this is intended to break the spirits of millions for whom this system offers no future.

It’s not getting any better, either. On the contrary. The rate of imprisonment has skyrocketed over the past several decades—in 1980 about a half million people were in jail in the United States; by 2006, that number was 2.3 million—an increase of over 450%. This explosion has cut a particularly devastating, defining swath through African-American and Latino communities, especially among poor young Black men. African-Americans are 13 percent of the general population, but over 50 percent of the prison population. They are incarcerated at a rate eight times higher than that of whites.

And this has had a devastating impact on Black people overall, with whole generations in the inner cities growing up expecting to end up in prison. While African-Americans have always been the victims of discrimination in the justice system, this has gotten far worse in the past 50 years—yes, far worse than the days of Jim Crow and open segregation. At the same time, the numbers of Latinos being incarcerated is also growing dramatically and is likewise out of proportion to their share of the general population.

Meanwhile, the authorities foment widespread gang and racial clashes in prisons as a means to divide and conquer, and then use what they have incited as a rationale for further brutality and torture. “Association” with a gang, which can mean almost anything, is invoked to lock prisoners down in special isolation units that quickly create such extreme psychological trauma that over and over again prisoners lose their minds. In many prisons, inmates are required to declare allegiance with a gang by the prison authorities under the pretext of segregating gangs.

And increasingly, within the prisons—as throughout society—the so-called “alternative” to the dog-eat-dog mentality fostered by the prison system is reactionary Christian fundamentalism. In this way, shock troops are recruited from among the ranks of the oppressed—to reinforce the very system that oppresses them. (See “Recruiting for Christian Fascism—Inside the Prisons.”)

So let us say here to the people who rule this society: if you can do no better than to assign millions of Black and Latino youth to a future of crime and punishment in conditions of high-tech barbarism... then get the hell out of the way! Because this wholesale destruction of human lives and potential is not only terrible and tragic but totally unnecessary as well. With revolutionary state power, we could build a society where the energy and creativity of these youth—whose spirit today is suppressed and mutilated and channeled into self-destruction and self-hatred—could be part of a vibrant new revolutionary society aiming to eliminate every last vestige of exploitation and oppression.

And let us also say to those who are ruled by this system: if there were no other crime of this system than this—and there are of course many other horrific crimes carried out by the powers-that-be—that would be reason enough to make revolution. And reason enough to get with the revolutionary movement today, to begin actively hastening the day when such a revolution could be made.

But it is important to dig more deeply into how we got into this situation, in order to see why this is so, for real.
Behind the “Population Explosion” in the Prisons

Rape in Prison: A Concentration of Patriarchal Mentality & A Tool of Social Control

One particularly horrific abuse of prisoners is rape. Rape is done by prison guards—particularly in women’s prisons—and it is also carried out by inmates against other inmates.

At the age of 18, Dorothy (her last name has not been publicized by her supporters), a Native American woman from upstate New York, left the reservation where she grew up, and married a much older man. Her husband beat her for years, even when she was in advanced stages of pregnancy. When she tried to run away, he broke her ribs and put a pistol to her head threatening to shoot her. At the age of 22, Dorothy began a life sentence for killing her abusive husband. Shortly after her arrival in prison, a guard began demanding sex. She refused, and he began to withhold about half of her ration of food, and her soap and toilet paper. One day, the guard found Dorothy alone in the laundry room. He locked the door from the inside, and although Dorothy fought back, he raped her. When she tried to gain access to the prison’s mental health services for counseling, she was turned away, eventually offered Thorazine, a dangerous and mind-numbing drug. Defying threats if she spoke out, she reported the rape to the prison superintendent and a counselor in the mental health unit, and to the state’s investigative office, to no response. After over a year, she joined a lawsuit filed against the guard and the prison. The suit was dismissed without even addressing the merits of the case, based on laws that make it almost impossible for inmates to sue prison guards. (“Words From Prison: Sexual Abuse in Prison,” ACLU)

Among men, rape is widespread. In one sense, this is a concentrated expression of the predatory and patriarchal mentality inculcated in males by this society, in a situation in which there are no women to dominate. At the same time, it is a tool of social control manipulated by the authorities. The widespread rape in U.S. prisons inflicts severe physical and emotional pain and trauma on the vulnerable young men who are its victims, as it does to women. It carries great risk of infecting victims with HIV/AIDS. In sensationalist “news” programming about prison life, and TV dramas, prison rape is depicted as a product of a prison population of predators and psychopaths, carried out despite the best efforts of authorities to stop it. But, if prison authorities are trying to prevent prison rape, under conditions where they monitor and control prisoners’ every move, then why is it that, according to a 2003 Congressional study, over a million inmates had been raped over the previous 20 years. A million inmates.

An ABC News report in April of 2009 quoted a former prison guard, Johnny Vasquez, as saying that when prisoners came to guards with complaints of being raped, they were told, “You need to grow some and defend yourself. Quit coming in here crying. Get out of my office. Don’t bring this to me.” That, in essence, is an expression of the depraved kill-or-be-killed (and relatedly, macho male supremacist) values and morality of the system that runs the prisons and uses rape as a tool to promote and enforce those values.

Harvard University criminologist Dr. James Gilligan told ABC that authorities use rape as a “bribe or a reward” to powerful inmates “to cooperate with the prison authorities.” “As long as they cooperate, the prison authorities will permit them to have their victims.” The ABC report summed up: “Experts say some prison officials quietly permit rape as a way to control the population.”

The prison population in the U.S. mushroomed in the early 1970s. Before that, the United States sent people to jail at about the rate of industrialized countries in Europe—around one in every one thousand Americans were in jail. Starting in 1975, the incarceration rate in the U.S. increased dramatically. Today 7 out of every 1,000 Americans are in prison, a ratio greater than any other country.

This explosion in the prison population was not due to an increase in crime in the U.S. In immediate terms, it seemed to be a result of the so-called “war on drugs.” And it is true that from 1980 to 1997, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by 1,100 percent (Race, Incarceration, and American Values, by Glenn C. Loury, with Pamela S. Karlan, Tommie Shelby, and Loïc Wacquant). Now these were not the fabled “drug kingpins” of TV fantasy, or even the street corner sales force. By 2008, four of five drug arrests were for possession, and only one in five was for distribution; fully half of all drug arrests were for marijuana offenses. (FBI, Crime in the United States, 2008, Arrest Table, available at fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/arrests/index.html)

Yet while official propaganda whipped up the vast use of drugs as the most serious threat to society, this “war on drugs” actually had a deeper source than some supposed concern over the widespread desire of people living under this system to numb themselves. Indeed, this “war on drugs” was engineered from the highest offices, at a time when the system was facing great challenges around the world and on the home front.

This was put succinctly and bluntly by Richard Nixon, who was president in 1969. At that time, Nixon’s top assistant wrote in his diary: “[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” (The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House, p. 53, by H.R. Haldeman, cited in Smoke and Mirrors: the War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, by Dan Baum)

Indeed, the struggle of Black people in that era, and the revolutionary forces and sentiments within that, resonated throughout society, and intersected with a wide range of grievances and struggles, from the oppression of women to the war in Vietnam. It literally shook the system to its foundations, calling its very legitimacy into question among millions and millions of people.

So the system lashed back with a vengeance at revolutionary forces and the masses of people who were rising up. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed by police and national guard during the uprisings of the mid to late 1960s. Hundreds of Black Panther Party members were jailed. A number of key Panther leaders like “Bunchy” Carter and George Jackson were assassinated; the most horrific example was the murder of Fred Hampton, while he slept, by a heavily armed tactical unit of the Cook County, Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office (SAO), in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. No one was ever convicted for any of these crimes; though scores of Panthers and sympathizers were sent to prison for decades, as a result of blatant frame-ups and trumped up charges.

At the same time, in the face of massive rebellion, the rulers of the U.S. opened some doors to some sections of Black people, lowering some barriers to employment and education. The rulers intended through doing this to develop a “buffer section” among Black people—a section of people that, even as they continued to suffer discrimination and bitter forms of oppression, would also begin to feel more of a material stake in the status quo.

Recruiting for Christian Fascism—Inside the Prisons

Prison authorities push the Bible and in particular virulently fascist fundamentalist Christian cults inside the prisons. Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest private prison operator, is currently in the process of placing Christian fascist programming from Pat Robertson’s Trinity Broadcast Network into all 65 of its state, federal and juvenile facilities in nineteen states and the District of Columbia. Beyond that, there are now special prisons, or prison wings, for Christian fundamentalists. Former Nixon crony Chuck Colson did time after pleading guilty to felony obstruction of justice for his attempts to smear Pentagon Papers defendant and anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg. Today Colson is a reactionary Christian fundamentalist who sets up “faith-based prisons.” And Christian fundamentalist groups run some of the few programs for re-integrating prisoners into society on their release. Through the widespread promotion of Christian fundamentalism (in blatant contradiction to the supposed separation of church and state), prison systems program captives to blame themselves (and other prisoners) for their conditions, and enlist as “Christian soldiers”—both in prison and when they get out in service of a Christian fascist movement being unleashed in society as a whole.

Coinciding with these developments were major changes having to do with globalization. Factories producing goods were moved first from the inner cities to the suburbs and then to other countries—while the masses of Black people remained locked in those urban cores due to continued housing segregation and deprivation. Simultaneously, the inner cities were deprived of funds and allowed to become economic and cultural dead-zones. The drug trade and the gangs involved in that trade to a certain degree arose spontaneously—but they were also systematically manipulated and in some cases promoted to fill the economic and political void left in the ghettos and barrios by economic abandonment and counter-revolutionary suppression of the movement. That escalated in the 1980s, as the CIA orchestrated the funding of pro-U.S. Central American terrorists (the “Contras”) through the sale and distribution of drugs through gangs in the inner cities of the U.S. (See “The CIA/Crack Connection: RW Interview with Gary Webb,” at revcom.us, and Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, by Gary Webb).

The rulers used all this, along with other attacks, to create a “pariah class”1 in the inner cities—that is, social outsiders for whom normal considerations and rights did not apply. And they in turn used the presence of that pariah class as an outlet and target for the resentments building up among a large section of white people, many of whom were also facing economic setback and instability, re-fitting and reinforcing the “tool” of white racism for these times.

This whole horrible situation today that we document in this special issue—the massive explosion of incarceration and the criminalization of two generations, now, of African-American and Latino2 youth—did not come about because these youth stopped wearing belts in their pants. It came as a result of how those who run this system responded to the revolutionary challenge of the 1960s, along with the ongoing economic and political changes in society overall.
The System’s Answer—and Ours

Divide and Conquer vs. Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution

One prisoner wrote to Revolution: “Today California prisons in particular have passed a regulation where as the state is now housing prisoners of all social groups & races together in cells, this new regulation is creating conflict between prisoners, it is basically pitting prisoners against one another in gladiator style fights as before only now confined to a cell.”

And, that prisoner poses: “[T]here is a remedy to situations like this and it will take the vanguard in each prison to find this remedy & bring it to fruition, we will not be used as roosters at a cockfight! This is a classic case of the state trying to take heat off themselves and direct prisoners rage upon one another rather than the proper direction.”

This has been a continuation, in new and extremely twisted terms, of the centuries of oppression and white supremacy developed by, and built into, this system. (See “The Oppression of Black People, the Crimes of This System and the Revolution We Need,” Revolution #144, for a detailed analysis of this history, its legacy, and the ongoing systematic oppression of Black people in this society.) This system, as Bob Avakian has pointed out, had two chances to “make it right” in regard to its historic criminal oppression of the African-American people: after the Civil War, and after the titanic struggles of the 1960s. After the Civil War, following the brief period of Reconstruction, instead of bringing justice, the system answered by re-enslaving, in new forms, the masses of Black people on plantations in the South, in a cruel and dehumanizing system of sharecropping and segregation, enforced by the lynch mob. (See “How This System Has Betrayed Black People: Crucial Turning Points,” by Bob Avakian.)

And after the struggles of the 1960s, faced again with the demand for justice, the system again responded viciously—with the counter-revolutionary suppression we have detailed here, and the ongoing discrimination, inequality and oppression—concentrated in the mass incarceration of Black youth in hellholes.

A Supermax Death Sentence

A 2001 Amnesty International report detailed the death in prison of David Tracy, sent to jail for minor drug charges at age 18. After five suicide attempts, and with just a few months remaining on his sentence, he finally killed himself at age 20 in a supermax isolation cell at Wallens Ridge State Prison (WRSP) in Virginia. Amnesty described conditions in that unit: Prisoners “are routinely abused with electro-shock stun guns, subjected to racial verbal abuse by guards, fired on with painful pellet guns, and placed unnecessarily in five point restraints [strapping a prisoner down to keep him from moving his arms and legs].” Conditions in this typical supermax are “contrary to international standards prohibiting torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including those set out under the International Covenant on Civil or Political Rights and the Convention against Torture—treaties ratified by the USA.” In other words, in addition to being inhumane and immoral, the conditions in U.S. prisons are illegal by U.S. and international law. (“United States of America: Abuses continue unabated? Cruel and inhumane treatment at Virginia supermaximum security prisons.”)

In other words, each time the answer to the quest for justice came back from the system: a resounding NO. (The existence of a Black president at the head of this system—one who studiously avoids taking on any manifestation of the particular oppression faced by Black and other minority people and who indeed lectures the masses of Black people on their supposed bad habits—does not change this in any fundamental way.)

Now is time, and past time, for the people to respond to this answer given by the system. It is time, now, to get with the real revolution—a revolution that aims to do away with all oppression. To fight the power, and transform the people, for revolution. To get with the revolution we need—and to get with, and promote, the leadership we have, Chairman Bob Avakian.

In doing this, we can all draw inspiration from those prisoners who have responded to the call of the revolutionary movement, some of whose letters appear in this issue: those who have defied the locked-down conditions imposed by the authorities and ruptured with the dog-eat-dog “gangsta” values that pervade prison and who instead aspire to be emancipators of humanity.

There is another way. Time to get with it.

1. The concept of the targeting of Black people and Native Americans as a “pariah class,” dating back to the early days of the U.S., and the overall way in which white supremacy has served to blunt class-consciousness in the U.S. since then, has been drawn on and further developed by Bob Avakian in the important work, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy. (Available in print [2008, RCP Publications] and online at revcom.us) [back]

2. The concept of the targeting of Black people and Native Americans as a “pariah class,” dating back to the early days of the U.S., and the overall way in which white supremacy has served to blunt class-consciousness in the U.S. since then, has been drawn on and further developed by Bob Avakian in the important work, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy. (Available in print [2008, RCP Publications] and online at revcom.us) [back]

Send us your comments. ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40350-hellholes-incarceration-future-emancipation.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40304-abuse-juveniles-boot-camps.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:42:07 GMT Abuse and Inefficiency in Juvenile Offender Boot Camps: Is Regulation the Answer? by Ashlee Richman

Background

Over the last 20 years, many states have embraced "boot camps" as an alternative to traditional detention facilities to deal with juvenile offenders. However, the boot camp method has become highly controversial, with some offering praise of the strict habits the facilities instill in delinquents, and others criticizing the ineffectiveness and abuses that transpire with the lack of oversight and regulation.1

Boot camp techniques vary across the country; however, methods are mostly structured to parallel military training facilities, in which staff members act as drill sergeants, inmates are referred to as recruits, and intense physical challenges are routine. Two-to-four month stays in residential programs filled with military drills, counseling, and education are viewed generally as "intermediate sanction" in the juvenile justice system.2 Stemming from the "tough on crime" wave of the late 80's and early 90's, the intent of boot camps for juvenile offenders has been to discipline and "curb criminal tendencies." 3 However, the popularity of boot camps has suffered due to a series of scandals in the last two decades, including eyewitness reports and evidence of physical and psychological abuse sometimes resulting in death from alleged maltreatment. 4

In the wake of these scandals, some states have reformed boot camp systems or abandoned them entirely.5 Though many politicians and voters like the romanticized idea of boot camps (shaping up troubled kids into disciplined adults), there have been several attempts in recent years to begin federally regulating juvenile boot camps in the U.S.6

Criticisms of Boot Camps for Juvenile Offenders

The Government Accountability Office conducted an investigation of juvenile boot camps and identified 1,619 incidents of child abuse in 33 states in 2005.7 The investigation uncovered youths forced to eat their own vomit, denied adequate food, beaten and thrown to the ground, and forced to endure the humiliation of lying in their own urine or feces.8 To place the concerns of critics into context, many of the following practices commonly employed in juvenile boot camps are not legally allowed as treatment of U.S. detainees in Guantanamo Bay. For example, private residential facilities for juveniles often use stress-inducing phobias and fears, physical training, exposure to cold weather, sleep deprivation, nutritional deprivation, stress positions, extended isolation, forced labor, and denial of use of the bathroom to "modify the behavior" of adolescents. 9

Critics argue that staff members are ill-equipped to deal with juveniles, often resorting to psychological and physical cruelty to maintain the captor/captive dynamic.10 Critics also question whether boot camps can ultimately change the behavior of inmates, citing statistics and government reports that indicate camps fail to reform the overwhelming majority of juvenile inmates, with recidivism rates as high as 80%.11 Furthermore, abuse is "almost inevitable" as long as staff members maintain absolute authority with little to no regulation or legal restrictions. 12

Alternatives and Potential Developments

Despite the abuses that occur, both proponents and critics have agreed that some of these private facilities have the potential to produce substantial gains for participants, especially academically. 13 Though recidivism rates are high, and the majority of juveniles do re-offend within the first year after leaving the boot camps, many participants enter with below-grade- level skills and advance academically and even progress up to several grade levels.14 Furthermore, a 2003 National Institute of Justice report found that juveniles in boot camps "reported decreased anxiety and depression, better impulse control, and better social attitudes than their counterparts in other types of juvenile facilities." 15

However, aftercare is an important element of rehabilitation, and the period after boot camp is a weak point for most programs. The real risk factors like peer situations, drug issues, and unhealthy cognitive patterns, are just as likely to be encountered after boot camp.16 Furthermore, without regulations for these private boot camps, the abuses taint any progress the facilities may make.

In light of the rampant criticisms of juvenile offender boot camps, Congressman George Miller (D-CA) has been spearheading a campaign to create government oversight of private facilities. After Attorney General John Ashcroft refused Congressman Miller's demands to open a federal investigation into the quality of the schools, Miller continued his efforts by introducing a bill to the House last June.17 The bill, which would have supplied states with funding to regulate and license residential treatment institutions, passed the House by a bipartisan vote of 318 to 103, with support from the American Association of Children's Residential Centers, the American Bar Association, the American Psychological Association, the Child Welfare League of America, the Children's Defense Fund, the National Child Abuse Coalition and many other organizations. 18

Congressman Miller, along with Representative Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), reintroduced legislation to stop abuse in juvenile boot camps February 9, 2009.19 This bill was also aimed at protecting teenagers against physical, mental, and sexual abuse, and preventing deceptive marketing practices by operators of these private detention centers.20 At legislators' request, the Government Accountability Office conducted investigations during the 110th Congress, revealing thousands of allegations of child abuse and neglect since the 1990s related to teen residential programs and boot camps.21 With very little in the way of state and federal standards to regulate these programs, major gaps in licensing and oversight have been found.

The Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act of 2009, would "establish, for the first time, minimum federal standards for preventing child abuse and neglect at teen residential programs."22 All programs around the country would be inspected every two years by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to the bill. Civil penalties against programs would be issued for violating the new standards.23 Furthermore, the bill calls for states to set and enforce standards for both private and public youth residential programs within three years of the bill's passage. Lastly, protecting children in the programs and ensuring transparency would be welcome new changes under the bill. Currently, there is opposition among groups that would be affected by the House bill's licensing and oversight provisions. Senate action is likely to be delayed for some time, and will require compromise before the bill's passage.

While legislative attempts to properly address boot camp abuses and inadequacies linger in limbo, there are several promising alternatives to these private military style facilities. Multi-systemic therapy, which aims to keep offenders and their families together and works on problems in a practical home setting, avoids the problems that come with returning juveniles from restricted settings to the real world.24 A report done by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families revealed that programs that mirror or foster a supportive family environment in the community are most effective at reducing recidivism and encouraging positive adolescent brain maturation.25 The courts have other sentencing options for juvenile offenders, as well. Young offenders can receive incarceration, treatment, and probation.

Since courts began using boot camps in the U.S. as an alternative means of addressing delinquency, no study has found this type of program to reduce recidivism.26 Though there are some arguments to be made in favor of boot camps over incarceration in juvenile facilities, the savings are dependent on length of sentencing, and the academic gains often evaporate at the end of required stays. With no mandated standards and program design left entirely up to the administrators of a given camp, electing to send juvenile offenders to boot camps is largely ineffective and dangerous in many cases.27 Until steps are taken to regulate and improve the current state of juvenile offender boot camps, these private facilities will continue to be an unreliable and potentially risky sentencing choice.

------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -

Ashlee Richman is a 2L at American University Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. She is originally from South Florida and graduated from Northwestern University with a B.S. in Human Development and Psychological Services. Ashlee hopes to pursue a career in criminal law and policy.

1 Erin Hanusa, Are Boot Camps Obsolete?, Nov. 30, 2006, http://www.connectf orkids.org/ node/5030.

2> Press Release, House Education and Labor Committee, Miller, McCarthy Reintroduce Legislation to Stop Child Abuse in Teen Residential Programs (Feb. 9, 2009) (on file with author).
3> Testimony Before the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Residential Treatment Programs: Concerns Regarding Abuse and Death in Certain Programs for Troubled Youth, 110th Cong. (2007) (statement of Gregory D. Kutz, Managing Director of Forensic Audits and Special Investigations) .
4> http://www.caica. org/GAO.htm
5> Testimony Before the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Residential Treatment Programs: Concerns Regarding Abuse and Death in Certain Programs for Troubled Youth, 110th Cong. (2007) (statement of Gregory D. Kutz, Managing Director of Forensic Audits and Special Investigations) .

6> Allison Pinto, Ph.D., Monica Epstein, Ph.D., Paul Lewis, B.B.A., Kathryn Whitehead, B.A., Exploitation of Youth & Families: Perspectives on Unregulated Residential Treatment, Presented to APA Convention, (Aug. 12, 2006) (on file with http://www.nospank. net/pinto2. htm)
7> Rebecca Blue, Boot Camp's Life Lessons Lost on Some, Knight-Ridder Tribune Business News, Apr. 3, 2006, at 1.
8> Erin Hanusa, Are Boot Camps Obsolete?, Nov. 30, 2006, http://www.connectf orkids.org/ node/5030.
.
9> Josh Chiappelli, Breaking Down Our Kids; Child Abuse for Profit is Occurring in America, Apr. 20, 2006, www.dissidentvoice. org.
10> Press Release, House Education and Labor Committee, Miller, McCarthy Reintroduce Legislation to Stop Child Abuse in Teen Residential Programs (Feb. 9, 2009) (on file with author).

11 Erin Hanusa, Are Boot Camps Obsolete?, Nov. 30, 2006, http://www.connectf orkids.org/ node/5030.

12 Allison Pinto, Ph.D., Monica Epstein, Ph.D., Paul Lewis, B.B.A., Kathryn Whitehead, B.A., Exploitation of Youth & Families: Perspectives on Unregulated Residential Treatment, Presented to APA Convention, (Aug. 12, 2006) (on file with http://www.nospank. net/pinto2. htm) ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40304-abuse-juveniles-boot-camps.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40303-prison-statistics.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:26:37 GMT In 2008, 37 inmates were executed, 5 fewer than in 2007. In 2008, 37 persons in nine states were executed -- 18 in Texas; 4 in Virginia; 3 each in Georgia and South Carolina; 2 each in Florida, Mississippi, Ohio, and Oklahoma, and 1 in Kentucky. Of persons executed in 2008: -- 20 were white... In 2008, 37 inmates were executed, 5 fewer than in 2007.

In 2008, 37 persons in nine states were executed -- 18 in Texas; 4 in Virginia; 3 each in Georgia and South Carolina; 2 each in Florida, Mississippi, Ohio, and Oklahoma, and 1 in Kentucky.

Of persons executed in 2008:
-- 20 were white
-- 17 were black

All 37 inmates executed in 2008 were men.

Lethal injection was used in 36 executions in 2008; 1 execution was by electrocution.

Prisoners under sentence of death

At yearend 2007, 35 states and the federal prison system held 3,220 prisoners under sentence of death, 13 fewer than at yearend 2006.

Since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976, white inmates have made up more than half of the number under sentence of death.

Prisoners on death row by race, 1968-2007

Of persons under sentence of death in 2007:
-- 1,804 were white
-- 1,345 were black
-- 26 were American Indian
-- 35 were Asian
-- 10 were of unknown race.

Fifty-six women were under a sentence of death at yearend 2007.

The 362 Hispanic inmates under sentence of death at yearend 2007 accounted for 13% of inmates with a known ethnicity.

Among persons for whom arrest information was available, the average age at time of arrest was 29; nearly 1 in 9 inmates were age 19 or younger at the time of arrest.

At yearend 2007, the youngest inmate under sentence of death was 19; the oldest was 92.
____________ _________ _________ __
Summary findings
On June 30, 2008 —

– 2,310,984 prisoners were held in federal or state prisons or in local jails – an increase of 0.8% from yearend 2007, less than the average annual growth of 2.4% from 2000-2007.
– 1,540,805 sentenced prisoners were under state or federal jurisdiction.
– there were an estimated 509 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents – up from 506 at yearend 2007.
– the number of women under the jurisdiction of state or federal prison authorities increased 1.2% from yearend 2007, reaching 115,779, and the number of men rose 0.7%, totaling 1,494,805.
http://www.ojp. usdoj.gov/ bjs/prisons. htm ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40303-prison-statistics.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40237-angela-davis-frederick-douglass-political-literacy.html Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:01:21 GMT i'm not posting this just to promote this book, but because there's so much good info within it!
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Angela Y. Davis & Frederick Douglass: Political Literacy

By Greg Ruggiero

Van Jones wasn't the first outspoken black American to get derailed by fearful right-wingers. Forty years ago this month, a young, African-American woman scholar was fired from her teaching job at UCLA before classes even began. She wasn't an internationally recognized black leader, author, or public speaker yet, but she soon would be—Angela Y. Davis. Defying her termination, she lectured anyway, and the texts of her talks are being published in book form for the first time in Narrative of a Life of Frederick Douglass, and American Slave, a New Critical Edition by Angela Y. Davis by City Lights Books. This essay is adapted from the book’s editor’s note.

“The challenge of the twenty-first century,” writes Angela Y. Davis, “is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression. Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded. This is the only way the promise of freedom can be extended to the masses of people.” Identifying and dismantling structures of institutional racism has been at the heart of Angela Davis’s activism, writing, and public speaking for over forty years, and her ceaseless analysis and advocacy to build networks of resistance is as timely, provocative, and inspired today as it was when she was writing insurgent essays from the Marin County jail. Her radical vision continues to inspire debate wherever and whenever she speaks—as when she spoke at Cornell last week, an event covered in the Oct. 21, 2009 edition of the Cornell Daily Sun.

In her talks and writings, Angela has frequently referred to the spirit of resistance in the work of Frederick Douglass, and while researching a forthcoming book of her speeches I discovered a reference to a rare, out-of-print pamphlet by her about Douglass published in 1971 by the NY Committee to Free Angela Davis. Titled Lectures on Liberation, the pamphlet was originally sold for fifty cents a copy to raise funds for Angela’s legal defense; I purchased it online for forty dollars. When the slim, red staple-bound pamphlet arrived, I was riveted from the first lines:

The idea of freedom has justifiably been a dominating theme in the history of Western ideas. Man has been repeatedly defined in terms of his inalienable freedom. One of the most acute paradoxes present in the history of Western society is that while on a philosophical plane freedom has been delineated in the most lofty and sublime fashion, concrete reality has always been permeated with the most brutal forms of unfreedom, of enslavement. In ancient Greece where, so we are taught, democracy had its source, it cannot be overlooked that in spite of all the philosophical assertions of man’s freedom, in spite of the demand that man realize himself through exercising his freedom as a citizen of the polis, the majority of the people in Athens were not free. Women were not citizens and slavery was an accepted institution. Moreover, there was definitely a form of racism present in Greek society, for only Greeks were suited for the benefits of freedom: all non-Greeks were called barbarians and by their very nature could not be deserving or even capable of freedom.

In this context, one cannot fail to conjure up the image of Thomas Jefferson and the other so-called Founding Fathers formulating the noble concepts of the Constitution of the United States while their slaves were living in misery. In order not to mar the beauty of the Constitution and at the same time to protect the institution of slavery, they wrote about “persons held to service or labor,” a euphemism for the word slavery, as being exceptional types of human beings, persons who do not merit the guarantees and rights of the Constitution.

Is man free or is he not? Ought he be free or ought not he be free? The history of Black Literature provides, in my opinion, a much more illuminating account of the nature of freedom, its extent and limits, than all the philosophical discourses on this theme in the history of Western society. Why? For a number of reasons. First of all, because Black literature in this country and throughout the world projects the consciousness of a people who have been denied entrance into the real world of freedom. [1]
As an editor, I became inspired by the possibility of publishing Lectures on Liberation alongside Frederick Douglass. What better political moment could there be to publish Angela Davis and Frederick Douglass together—two of the most important abolitionist intellectuals in U.S. history—to a new generation of activists and educators? I called Angela to share my excitement at having read the pamphlet and during conversation the idea clicked to publish her Lectures on Liberation together with Narrative of a Life of a Life of Frederick Douglass, and American Slave.

The original Lectures on Liberation pamphlet contains three texts—two lectures on Frederick Douglass that Davis delivered 40 years ago this semester, and a letter of support signed by over two dozen of her fellow faculty at UCLA one year later when Angela was in jail and fighting not for her job but for her life. Her colleagues’ inspired introduction describes the political context in which the lectures were delivered and their broader significance: “It was,” they write, “a vindication of academic freedom and democratic education. For the lectures are a part of an attempt to bring to light the forbidden history of the enslavement and oppression of black people, and to place that history in an illuminating philosophical context. At the same time, they are sensitive, original and incisive; the work of an excellent teacher and a truly fine scholar.” [2]

At the time Richard Nixon was president of the United States and Ronald Reagan was governor of California. Angela Davis was in her twenties. She was a young, multi-lingual scholar who had graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University, and while studying under Herbert Marcuse to earn her doctorate she had accepted a two-year teaching gig in the philosophy department at the University of California in Los Angeles. On July 1, 1969, William T. Divale, an undercover agent of the F.B.I., published a statement in the Daily Bruin that the UCLA philosophy department has just hired an assistant professor who was a Communist, and on July 9, 1969 the San Francisco Examiner identified the professor to be Angela Y. Davis. [3] When the news reached Ronald Reagan and the Board of Regents, they fired Davis before the semester had begun. Her termination sparked considerable controversy and protest. Historic television coverage from that time can be seen on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI4U-q2o2cg
As can be seen in the YouTube clip, Davis publicly resisted, and in an act of defiance showed up to teach her course “Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature” despite the fact that her termination had not been overturned. [4] What we can’t see in the clip is that although 166 students had enrolled for her class, when Angela arrived at Royce Hall she found it packed with 2,000 members of the UCLA student body and faculty assembled to support her. The lecture she delivered that day is one of two talks on Frederick Douglass in her Lectures on Liberation pamphlet and is presented in book form for the first time in her new edition of Douglass’s Narrative published in the Open Media Series by City Lights Books.

As soon as the idea for this book was born, one of the first people with whom I discussed it was Mumia Abu-Jamal. At the time I was working with him on his book, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners vs. The USA (City Lights, 2009), for which Davis had written an introduction. Mumia would call me collect from Death Row, and we’d just as often spend most our fifteen-minute conversations [5] discussing politics, race, and Obama as we would talk about the book. Could Obama win? What would it mean for liberation struggle?

In a written interview I conducted with Mumia that was posted on Z-net after the election, he wrote:

Social movements open up the eyes of the people, and present them with new ways of looking at the world, and hopefully moving in the world. Think about this. Everybody (esp. in the so-called left) is hyped about Obama’s election. As I wrote in a commentary last year, Mexico had a Black president over a century ago. If the abolition movement didn’t fold their tents after the Civil War, and instead fought for broader, deeper social change, why couldn’t Frederick Douglass have been elected president in 1870? To be sure, he was among the most brilliant men in the country; with eloquence, and erudition far beyond most men. He was financially and socially stable, and was one of the most respected men in the English world. As an ex-slave, his election would’ve set the lock and death-knell to slavery (instead of the hidden legalization of it thru the prison-industrial-complex), and made the Reconstruction Amendments real. Social movements have to have the ability to see beyond today’s horizon, and have to have the stamina to work for social change. With social movements, everything is possible; without them, nothing is possible. [6].


Angela Davis, like Mumia Abu-Jamal, is more concerned with the people whose work drives social movements than the elected leaders and the legal system. In a public talk she delivered in Denver on February 15, 2008 she said:

I’m always very cautious when it comes to electoral politics. I think that particularly here in this country we have a tendency to invest our own collective power in individuals. We have what I sometimes call a messiah complex. This is why, when we think of the Civil Rights movement, we think of Martin Luther King. We can’t imagine that that movement could have been created by huge numbers of people whose names we do not even know. We can’t imagine that.

I often emphasize that the Montgomery bus boycott, which for many people is a defining moment of the Civil Rights movement, would not have been possible had it not been for black women domestic workers. These are the people we never think about. They are totally invisible, invisible in history, but those are the women who refused to ride the bus. Those are the black people who were riding the bus because they were riding from black communities to white communities because they were cleaning up white people’s houses and cooking white people’s food and doing their laundry. But we can’t imagine that they were the agents of history that gave us this amazing civil rights movement.

All of which is to say this enthusiasm, this incredible enthusiasm that’s been generated over the last period that has been called a movement, and Obama has specifically referred to what’s happening around his campaign as a movement. If it is to be a movement, it has to demand much more than the election of a single individual, no matter what that individual may represent. [7]
It is in that spirit that the new edition of Narrative of a Life is being published—to increase our political literacy as a step toward demanding more of our current political moment. I use the word literacy intentionally because of the primary role that learning to read played in Frederick Douglass’s learning to resist. In his passage on the subject in Narrative we see that it is through the defiant act of teaching himself to read that Douglass underwent an inner shift that empowered him to think independently of—and ultimately break free from—his white enslavers:

Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. [8]

Throughout her more than forty years as an activist, author and educator, Angela Davis has worked ceaselessly to further understand and clear the pathways from slavery to freedom. She has written about Douglass both as a way of better understanding the impact and limitations of his work and as a way of analyzing how institutional racism enforced by legal slavery continued after the passage of Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

In her pioneering and critically acclaimed study published in 1981, Women, Race & Class, Davis discusses the historic role Douglass played in the nineteenth-century movement for women’s liberation and his achievement of “officially introducing the issue of women’s rights to the Black Liberation movement, where it was enthusiastically welcomed.” “Frederick Douglass,” she writes, “the country’s leading Black abolitionist, was also the most prominent male advocate of women’s emancipation in his time.” [9] She describes the impact he had at the first women’s rights convention, the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848:

Among the approximately three hundred women and men attending the Seneca Falls Convention, the issue of electoral power for women was the only major point of contention: the suffrage resolution alone was not unanimously endorsed. That the controversial proposal was presented at all, however, was due to Frederick Douglass’s willingness to second [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton’s motion and to employ his oratorical abilities in defense of women’s right to vote.

During those early days when women’s rights was not yet a legitimate cause, when woman suffrage was unfamiliar and unpopular as a demand, Frederick Douglass publicly agitated for the political equality of women. In the immediate aftermath of the Seneca Falls Convention, he published an editorial in his newspaper, the North Star. Entitled “The Rights of Women,” its content was quite radical for the times:

In respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for men. We go farther, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for woman. All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman, and if that government only is just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land. [7]

In her studies of the prison-industrial-complex and her advocacy for the abolition of prisons, Davis closely analyzes the unbroken continuum between the slavery Douglass experienced in the nineteenth century, the racist terrorism she survived growing up in segregated Alabama, [11] and today’s interconnected problems of economic and political subjugation, prisons, capital punishment, police brutality, and the women, immigrants, and communities of color most impacted by them. One hundred and fifty years after Frederick Douglass fearlessly organized social movements and personally lobbied a reluctant President Abraham Lincoln to abolish slavery, [12] Angela Y. Davis continues the tradition and describes her work today as “forging a twenty–first century abolitionist movement.” In constructing her model of abolitionism, Davis draws deeply from W.E.B. DuBois and his concept of “abolition democracy”—the idea that U.S. democracy is inauthentic and compromised, and will continue to be until all institutions that perpetrate injustice and domination are replaced because “democracy for blacks had been withheld at the very moment it had been promised: upon the abolition of slavery.” [13] In her book with Eduardo Mendieta, Abolition Democracy, she writes:

DuBois pointed out that in order to fully abolish the oppressive conditions produced by slavery, new democratic institutions would have to be created. Because this did not occur; black people encountered new forms of slavery—from debt peonage and the convict lease system [14] to segregated and second-class education. The prison system continues to carry out this terrible legacy. It has become a receptacle for all of those human beings who bear the inheritance of the failure to create abolition democracy in the aftermath of slavery. And this inheritance is not only born by black prisoners, but by poor Latino, Native American, Asians, and white prisoners. Moreover, its use as such a receptacle for people who are deemed the detritus of society is on the rise throughout the world. [15]

Angela Davis continues to write, to agitate, to educate and to speak out in solidarity with global movements against racism, sexism, and political repression. As forms of oppression dating back to slavery still manifest today, so too do networks of resistance. She urges us to join them. She urges us—with Douglass as a metaphor—to continue the work of the oppressed women and men whose struggles precede us. She urges us to increase our own levels of political literacy and critical engagement as defiant steps toward demanding—and winning—that “the promise of freedom be extended to the masses of people.”

Greg Ruggiero is editor for City Lights Books and founder and director of the Open Media Series, a movement-oriented publishing project that has been producing critically acclaimed pamphlets and books since 1991.

Notes

1. Angela Y. Davis and Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself; A New Critical Edition, (Open Media Series/ City Lights Books, 2009), page 45.

2. Ibid, p. 12.

3. See UCLA Web page here: Watkins2

4. It wasn’t until October 20, 1969 that the Superior Court of Los Angeles issued a decision that Regents' anti-communist policy is unconstitutional. However, the Regents again formally fired Angela on June 20, 1970 claiming that she was indoctrinating students, that her political activities were interfering with her teaching, and that her off-campus speeches were “irresponsible.” See: Watkins2

5. Mumia Abu-Jamal’s collect calls from Death Row are always fifteen minutes in length. The conversations are repeatedly interrupted by recorded messages from the prison and at the fifteenth minute the state automatically disconnects the call.

6. Written exchange between Mumia Abu-Jamal and Greg Ruggiero dated February 25, 2009. Full text posted to Znet here: ZNet Top

7. Transcript of a talk by Angela Y. Davis given on February 15, 2008, at Metropolitan State College, Denver, CO. An audio recording of the talk is available from Alternative Radio, Alternative Radio. Text of the talk will appear in the book by Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom, forthcoming from City Lights Books.

8. Angela Y. Davis and Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself; A New Critical Edition, (Open Media Series/ City Lights Books, 2009), page 142.

9. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class, (Random House: New York, 1981) p. 30.

10. Ibid, p. 51.

11. Davis grew up in a neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama called “Dynamite Hill” so named because of the frequency of bombings there by white terrorists against the neighborhood’s black residents. She also personally knew Carol Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and the two other girls who were murdered by the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, September 15, 1963.

12. Lincoln believed that the primary directive of the North was to preserve the Union and not to end slavery. During the heat of the Civil War he wrote a letter to the New York Tribune saying, “If I could save the Union, without freeing the slaves, I would do it. If I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that. What I do about slavery and the coloured race, I do because I believe it would help to save the Union.”

13. Angela Y. Davis and Eduardo Mendieta, Abolition Democracy, Beyond Empire Prisons, and Torture (Open Media Series/ Seven Stories Press, 2005). Quotation is from the introduction by Eduardo Mendieta, page 12.

14. For her in-depth critique of Douglass and the absence of protest and references to the convict lease system in his writings and speeches, see “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison; Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, edited by Joy James, (Blackwell publishers: Malden, Mass., 1998).

15. Abolition Democracy, Beyond Empire Prisons, and Torture, pp. 73–74.


###

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself

A New Critical Edition by Angela Y. Davis

Open Media Series / City Lights Books

ISBN: 9780872865273

City Lights Books


Educators interested in ordering desk or exam copies please fax City Lights Books at (415) 362-4921; for inquiries email stacey@citylights.com ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex nattyreb http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40237-angela-davis-frederick-douglass-political-literacy.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40142-dean-cage-innocent-man-story.html Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:59:22 GMT Dean Cage, An Innocent Man - Crimesider - CBS News



NEW YORK (CBS/AP) Dean Cage once said "if you believe in something, fight for it."

Those hard-earned words rang out hours after the 41-year-old was released from prison more than a year ago after serving more than 12 years for a rape he didn't commit.

He was convicted in 1996 and sentenced to 40 years in prison for the rape of a 15-year-old girl, who, at the time, identified him as her attacker. But Cage always maintained his innocence and asked for DNA tests to prove it. He said his family had even tried to pay for it themselves.

Those efforts fell on deaf ears until he wrote to the Innocence Project, which took his case in 2004.

The New York-based Innocence Project specializes in using DNA to exonerate the falsely convicted.

"The single greatest cause of wrongful convictions is victim misidentification," said attorney Peter Neufeld, a co-founder of the organization.

Cage, who worked at a Chicago supermarket, said he was home at the time the teenager said she was attacked while walking to school in November 1994.

The teenager gave a composite drawing description to authorities and after it was circulated police brought Cage in as a suspect. The girl identified him as her attacker. Cage was also accused in the rape of a 29-year-old woman, but acquitted of those charges. Evidence at the time discounted Cage as the attacker, Neufeld said.

Finally after years of legal work and a long sought after DNA test, Cage's conviction was overturned.

The Innocence Project said nationally Cage is now the 217th person exonerated by post-conviction DNA evidence. He is the 29th Illinoisan to be exonerated by DNA evidence. Only Texas, with 31, has more DNA exoneration cases than Illinois.

The conviction was dismissed at the request of the Cook County state's attorney's office.

Cage was released from Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton and went straight to his mother's home on Chicago's South Side for an all-night celebration with family.

"It didn't seem like it was real," he said of life on the outside. "It was really scary. At the same time, it was a blessing."


(Innocence Project)
Photo: Dean Cage, with fiancé, Jewel Mitchel.

Dressed in baggy jeans and a white T-shirt, Cage told reporters in 2008 that he got through the toughest times in prison with the support of his family, reading novels, playing basketball and faith.

"There's a God up there. He blessed me," Cage said. "I couldn't have done this without him."

While in prison, Cage missed his three young boys growing up, both his grandparents' funerals and the 12 surgeries his mother underwent for thyroid and heart conditions.

"They stole my son's life. They stole mine too," Cage's 63-year-old mother Jerley said through tears.

Cage appeared overwhelmed after his released, saying he was amazed by advances in technology, especially all "the little phones." Cage said he wasn't angry or bitter and renewed his faith by reading the Bible.

"We can never know how he got through those years," said Alba Morales, an attorney who worked on Cage's case.

Innocence Project officials made an appeal to Gov. Rod Blagojevich on May 28th, 2008, to pardon Cage and others in his same situation, so that they can receive compensation due to them under state law.

Cage, who said he has no money or material possessions, said he will try to look for work.

"I guess I gotta try to take one day at a time," he said.


http://www.youtube.com/v/eOsJsPxD_ag ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Im The Truth http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40142-dean-cage-innocent-man-story.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40118-federal-bureau-intimidation.html Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:10:07 GMT Federal Bureau of Intimidation

by
Howard Zinn

From: FBI

I thought it would be good to talk about the FBI because they talk about us. They don't like to be talked about. They don't even like the fact that you're listening to them being talked about. They are very sensitive people. If you look into the history of the FBI and Martin Luther King-which now has become notorious in that totally notorious history of the FBI- the FBI attempted to neutralize, perhaps kill him, perhaps get him to commit suicide, certainly to destroy him as a leader of black people in the United States. And if you follow the progression of that treatment of King, it starts, not even with the Montgomery Bus Boycott; it starts when King begins to criticize the FBI. You see, then suddenly Hoover's ears, all four of them, perk up. And he says, okay, we have to start working on King.

I was interested in this especially because I was reading the Church Committee report. In 1975, the Senate Select Committee investigated the CIA and the FBI and issued voluminous reports and pointed out at what point the FBI became interested in King. In 1961-62 after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, after the sit-ins, after the Freedom Rides of '61, there was an outbreak of mass demonstrations in a very little, very Southern, almost slave town of southern Georgia called Albany. There had been nothing like this in that town. A quiet, apparently passive town, everybody happy, of course. And then suddenly the black people rose up and a good part of the black population of Albany ended up in jail. There were not enough jails for all who demonstrated.

A report was made for the Southern Regional Council of Atlanta on the events in Albany. The report, which was very critical of the FBI, came out in the New York Times. And King was asked what he thought of the role of the FBI. He said he agreed with the report that the FBI was not doing its job, that the FBI was racist, etcetera, etcetera.

At that point, the FBI also inquired who the author of that report was, and asked that an investigation begin on the author. Since I had written it, I was interested in the FBI's interest in the author. In fact, I sent away for whatever information the FBI had on me, through the Freedom of Information Act. I became curious, I guess. I wanted to test myself because if I found that the FBI did not have any dossier on me, it would have been tremendously embarrassing and I wouldn't have been able to face my friends. But, fortunately, there were several hundred pages of absolutely inconsequential material. Very consequential for the FBI, I suppose, but inconsequential for any intelligent person.

I'm talking about the FBI and U.S. democracy because here we have this peculiar situation that we live in a democratic country-everybody knows that, everybody says it, it's repeated, it's dinned into our ears a thousand times, you grow up, you pledge allegiance, you salute the flag, you hail democracy, you look at the totalitarian states, you read the history of tyrannies, and here is the beacon light of democracy. And, of course, there's some truth to that. There are things you can do in the United States that you can't do many other places without being put in jail.

But the United States is a very complex system. It's very hard to describe because, yes, there are elements of democracy; there are things that you're grateful for, that you're not in front of the death squads in El Salvador. On the other hand, it's not quite a democracy. And one of the things that makes it not quite a democracy is the existence of outfits like the FBI and the CIA. Democracy is based on openness, and the existence of a secret policy, secret lists of dissident citizens, violates the spirit of democracy. There are a lot of other things that make the U.S. less than a democracy. For instance, what happens in police stations, and in the encounters between police and citizens on the street. Or what happens in the military, which is a kind of fascist enclave inside this democracy. Or what happens in courtrooms which are supposedly little repositories of democracy, yet the courtroom is presided over by an emperor who decides everything that happens in a courtroom -what evidence is given, what evidence is withheld, what instructions are given to the jury, what sentences are ultimately meted out to the guilty and so on.

So it's a peculiar kind of democracy. Yes, you vote. You have a choice. Clinton, Bush and Perot! It's fantastic. Time and Newsweek. CBS and NBC. It's called a pluralist society. But in so many of the little places of everyday life in which life is lived out, somehow democracy doesn't exist. And one of the creeping hands of totalitarianism running through the democracy is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

I think it was seeing the film Mississippi Burning that led me to want to talk about the FBI. I had sort of reached a point where I said, "Who wants to hear anymore about the FBI?" But then I saw Mississippi Burning. It relates a very, very important incident in the history of the civil rights movement in the U.S. In the summer of 1964, these three young men in the movement, two white, one black, had traveled to investigate the burning of a church in a place called Philadelphia, Mississippi-city of brotherly love. They were arrested, held in jail, released in the night, followed by cars, stalked, taken off and beaten very, very badly with chains and clubs and shot to death- executed-June 21, 1964. The bodies were found in August. It's a great theme for an important film. Mississippi Burning, I suppose, does something useful in capturing the terror of Mississippi, the violence, the ugliness.

But after it does that, it does something which I think is very harmful: In the apprehension of the murderers, it portrays two FBI operatives and a whole flotilla-if FBI men float-of FBI people as the heroes of this episode. Anybody who knows anything about the history of the civil rights movement, or certainly people who were in the movement at that time in the South, would have to be horrified by that portrayal. I was just one of many people who was involved in the movement. I was teaching in Atlanta, Georgia, in a black college for about seven years from 1956 to 1963, and I became involved in the movement, in Albany, Georgia, and Selma, Alabama, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Greenville and Jackson, Mississippi in the summer of '64. I was involved with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Anybody who was involved in the Southern movement at that time knew with absolute certainty: The FBI could not be counted on and it was not the friend of the civil rights movement. The FBI stood by with their suits and ties-I'm sorry I'm dressed this way today, but I was just trying to throw them off the track-and took notes while people were being beaten in front of them. This happened again, and again, and again. The Justice Department, to which the FBI is presumably accountable, was called again and again, in times of stress by people of the civil rights movement saying, hey, somebody's in danger here. Somebody's about to be beaten, somebody's about to be arrested, somebody's about to be killed. We need help from the federal government. We do have a Constitution, don't we? We do have rights. We do have the constitutional right to just live, or to walk, or to speak, or to pray, or to demonstrate. We have a Bill of Rights. It's America. It's a democracy. You're the Justice Department, your job is to enforce the Constitution of the United States. That's what you took an oath to do, so where are you? The Justice Department wasn't responding. They wouldn't return phone calls, they wouldn't show up, or when they did show up, they did nothing.

The civil rights movement was very, very clear about the role of the FBI. And it wasn't just the FBI; it goes back to the Justice Department; back to Washington; back to politics; back to Kennedy appointing racist judges in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia to do favors for his Southern Democratic political cronies, only becoming concerned about black people when things appeared on television that embarrassed the administration and the nation before the world.

Only then did things happen. Oh, we'll send troops to Little Rock, we'll send troops to Oxford, Mississippi, and so on. Do something big and dramatic and so on. But in all the days and all the hours in between, before and after, if there's no international attention, forget it. Leave these black folk at the mercy of the law enforcement officers down there. Just as after the Civil War, blacks were left at the mercy of Southern power and Southern plantation owners by Northern politicians who made their deal with the white South in 1877.

If you want to read the hour-by-hour description of this, you could read a wonderful book by Mary King, Freedom Song. She was a SNCC staffperson in the Atlanta office whose job was to get on the phone and call the newspapers, the government, the Justice Department and say: Hey, three young men have not come back from Philadelphia, Mississippi. She called and called and called and it took several days before she got a response. Deaf ears. They were dead. Probably none of those calls would have saved them.

It was too late, but there was something that could have saved them. And it's something I haven't seen reported in the press. If there had been federal agents accompanying the three on their trip, if there had been federal agents in the police station in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that might not have happened. If there had been somebody determined to enforce law, enforce constitutional rights, to protect the rights of people who were just going around, driving, talking, working, then those three murders might have been averted.

In fact, 12 days before the three disappeared, there was a gathering in Washington, D.C., on June 9, 1964. A busload of black Mississippians came all the way up-it was a long bus ride to Washington-to the National Theater.

There was a jury of fairly well known Americans- college presidents, writers, other people-assembled to hear the testimony. The black people's testimony before the press and an audience was recorded and transcribed. They testified that what was going to happen in Mississippi that summer with all these volunteers coming down was very, very dangerous. They testified about their experiences, about their history of being beaten, about the bodies of black people found floating in the rivers of Mississippi and they said, people are going to get killed; we need the protection of the federal government.

Also appearing at this hearing were specialists in constitutional law who made the proper legal points that the federal government had absolute power to protect people going down into Mississippi. Section 333, Title 10 of the U.S. Code (some numbers burn themselves into you because you have to use them again and again) gives the federal government the power to do anything to enforce constitutional rights when local authorities either refused or failed to protect those rights.

So they take all this testimony at the National Theater and put it into a transcript and deliver it to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, hand deliver it to the White House, and ask the federal government to send marshals down to Mississippi. Not an army, a few hundred marshals, that's all. Plainclothes people for protection. This is 1964; by now you've sent 40,000 soldiers to Vietnam, so you can send 200 plainclothes people to Mississippi. No response from the Attorney General, none from the President. Twelve days later those three men disappear.

Well, why didn't they put that in the film? Why didn't anybody say anything about that? So the FBI are the heroes of this film.

Well, that's only part, as you know, of the history of the FBI. Going back, the FBI was formed first as the Bureau of Investigation under Theodore Roosevelt-don't worry, I'm not going to take you year by year through this history. It's a very depressing history.

But, it just interested me. In 1908, under Theodore Roosevelt, his Attorney General, a man named Bonaparte, a grand nephew of Napoleon-set up the Bureau of Investigation which later became the FBI. One of its first acts was to enforce a new federal law- the Mann Act. This law made it illegal to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes. Yes, one of their first acts was to prosecute the black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, because he was living with a white woman and they actually crossed a state line. One of the first heroic acts of the FBI. They go way back. Racism goes way back in the FBI and comes way forward, comes right up to now. By the way-in the film they show a black FBI man. But there was no black person in the FBI in 1964. A chauffeur, maybe. A maid, maybe. No black FBI agents in 1964. But there was this black FBI agent in the film.

Yes, the racism comes right up to yesterday when a black FBI man-in Detroit, I think-is harassed by his fellow white FBI agents who do all sorts of funny things to him to make life miserable for him. You think, where is the solidarity among FBI people? FBI people, black and white together, we shall overcome. Well, apparently the FBI doesn't believe in that.

There's too much to say about the FBI and racism. It's not just J. Edgar Hoover. Everybody says, oh, J. Edgar Hoover, he really hated black people. He hated the civil rights movement, but it's not just him, of course. It's too easy to pin all this on J. Edgar Hoover, to pin it just on the FBI as if they're wildcards. The president says, oh sorry, we didn't know what they were doing. Well, it's just like Oliver North. A wildcard North was doing these crazy things and his defense was absolutely right: I did it for them. He did. He did it for them and now they have turned on him. He doesn't have to worry, they'll take good care of him. They take care of their own.

When people in the CIA and FBI commit crimes, how do they get handled? They don't. They're forgotten about. Do you know how many crimes have been committed by the FBI and the CIA? How many black bag jobs? Breaking and entering? Try breaking and entering. Really. Try breaking and entering in the daytime, or nighttime, and see what happens to you. Different punishments depending on what hour of the day. The FBI broke and entered again and again and again and again, hundreds and hundreds of times.

There were hundreds of FBI men involved in these breaks. Two men were actually prosecuted. This happens every once in a while. When huge public attention finally gets focused, they pick out two from the pack and prosecute them and they find them guilty and they sentence them. To what? To nothing. Fine, $5,000 for one person. That's FBI petty cash. $3,500 for the other. And then they say that justice has been done and the system works.

Remember when Richard Helms of the CIA was found guilty of perjury in 1976? Hiss went to jail for four years for perjury, Helms didn't go to jail for two hours. And Helms's perjury, if you examine it, was far, far more serious than Alger Hiss's, if Hiss was indeed guilty. But if you're CIA, if you're FBI, you get off.

But North is right; he did it for them. He did what they expected him, wanted him, to do. They use this phrase, plausible denial, a very neat device. You have to be able to do things that the President wants you to do but that he can deny he wanted you to do, or deny he ordered you to do if push comes to shove.

It's not just the FBI. It's the government. It's part of the system, not just a few people here and there. The FBI has names of millions of people. The FBI has a security index of tens of thousands of people- they won't tell us the exact numbers. Security index. That's people who in the event of national emergency will be picked up without trial and held. Just like that. The FBI's been preparing for a long time, waiting for an emergency.You get horrified at South Africa, or Israel, or Haiti where they detain people without trial, just pick them up and hold them incommunicado. You never hear from them, don't know where they are. The FBI's been preparing to do this for a long time. Just waiting for an emergency. These are all countries in emergency; South Africa's in an emergency, Chile was in an emergency, all emergencies.

James Madison made the point way back. One of the founding fathers. They were not dumb. They may have been rich and white and reactionary and slave holders but they weren't dumb. Madison said the best way to infringe on liberty is to create an external menace.

What can a citizen do in a situation like this? Well, one thing is simply to expose the FBI. They hate to be exposed, they're a secret outfit. Everything they do is secret. Their threat rests on secrecy. Don't know where they are. Not everybody in a trench coat is an FBI agent. We don't know where they are, who they are, or what they're doing. Are they tapping? Right. And what are you going to do about it?

The one thing you shouldn't think will do anything is to pass a law against the FBI. There are always people who come up with that. That's the biggest laugh in the world. These are people who pay absolutely no attention to the law, again and again. They've violated the law thousands of times. Pass another law; that's funny.

No, the only thing you can do with the FBI is expose them to public understanding-education, ridicule. They deserve it. They have "garbologists" ransacking garbage pails. A lot of interesting stuff in garbage pails. They have to be exposed, brought down from that hallowed point where they once were. And, by the way, they have been brought down. That's one of the comforting things about what has happened in the United States in the last 30 years. The FBI at one point was absolutely untouchable. Everybody had great respect for the FBI. In 1965 when they took a poll of Americans; do you have a strong admiration for the FBI? Eight-five percent of people said, "Yes." When they asked again in '75, 35 percent said, "Yes." That's a big comedown. That's education -education by events, education by exposure. They know they've come down in the public mind and so now they're trying to look kinder and gentler. But they're not likely to merge with the American Civil Liberties Union. They're more likely, whatever their soothing words, to keep doing what they're in the habit of doing, assaulting the rights of citizens.

The most important thing you can do is simply to continue exposing them. Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of people. Were they doing this because of a Soviet invasion threat or because they thought the Socialist Workers Party was about to take over the country? Are they going after whoever their current target is because the country is in imminent danger, internal or external? No. They are doing it because they don't like these organizations. They don't like the civil rights organizations, they don't like the women's organizations, they don't like the anti-war organizations, they don't like the Central American organizations. They don't like social movements. They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things. So the best defense against them and resistance against them is simply to keep on fighting back, to keep on exposing them. That's all I have to say. ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40118-federal-bureau-intimidation.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40107-daily-beast-doctors-death-chamber.html Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:05:53 GMT http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-a...hp:justposted1
October 23, 2009

Doctors in the Death Chamber?
by Ben Crair

A badly botched lethal injection has put a slew of capital punishment
cases on hold. The Daily Beast's Ben Crair reports on how physicians
could help make executions more humane.

On September 15, for only the second known time in American history, a
death-row inmate exited from an execution chamber alive. Prisoner 187
343, a convicted murderer and rapist named Romell Broom, had his
sentence temporarily reprieved by Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, but
only after enduring what Fordham Law Professor Deborah Denno, a death-
penalty historian, calls “the worst botched execution that has
happened in the history of this country.” Over two-and-a-half hours,
executioners jabbed Broom with a needle 18 times, trying to establish
an IV while he cried. At one point, Broom screamed as a nurse inserted
a needle into the bone in his ankle; at another juncture, Broom helped
to tie his own arm. Unable to establish access to a vein, officials
offered Broom coffee and a cigarette while his arms bruised and
swelled. Half an hour later, his execution was postponed.

It was not Ohio’s first trouble with lethal injection. In May 2006,
Joseph Clark lifted his head during an 86-minute execution to cry, “It
don’t work.” A year later, in 2007, Christopher Newton’s execution
took so long that he was permitted a bathroom break in the middle of
the ordeal. When Newton eventually died, witnesses said his hands and
forehead turned blue—a sign that he died from suffocation induced by
the second of the three drugs instead of cardiac arrest from the third
drug, as he was supposed to. In all three cases, the executions were
administered by EMTs—professionals who lack the experience doctors
have in hooking up IVs. Broom’s case is headed to court—his execution,
originally rescheduled for one week later, is now on hold—and Ohio has
begun delaying others in its wake; the fourth postponement since the
Broom episode was announced Monday. In this climate, death-row
activists and lawyers are hoping to draw attention to the undertrained
staff tasked with carrying out inmates’ sentences. Undoubtedly, Broom
and dozens of other death-row inmates across the country would suffer
less if doctors aided in their executions. Does that mean they should?

“I’m sure I could have gotten an IV into Broom, Clark, or Newton,”
says Jonathan Groner, professor of clinical surgery at the Ohio State
College of Medicine. “That’s not particularly special. Vascular access
is what we do for a living.” Groner, however, refuses to participate
in executions; as a doctor, he is morally opposed. The American
Medical Association claims that physician participation in executions
“violates their oath to protect lives and erodes public confidence in
the medical profession;” the group prohibits its members from even
“consulting with … lethal-injection personnel.”

Groner calls the problem the Hippocratic Paradox. “The problem with
lethal injection is that if medically underqualified people do it,
it’s immoral because of the risk of torture,” he says, “and if
medically well-qualified people do it, it causes doctors to violate
their ethics”—an outcome Groner says could damage the entire medical
profession by putting doctors at the service of the state, instead of
the individual.

The Supreme Court cited the AMA’s opposition in its 2008 ruling
upholding lethal injection’s constitutionality, arguing that a
requirement for physician participation would lead to a de facto
moratorium on executions. Their ruling ignored the fact that, contrary
to popular belief, not only can doctors participate in executions, but
that some already do participate in executions. The AMA’s ethical
guidelines are not legally binding, and only about 20 percent of
doctors are members. State medical boards can punish doctors who
participate, but to this day, no doctor has ever lost his license for
taking part in a lethal injection. (If the AMA found one of its
members to be participating in lethal injections, that member would
face revocation of his membership and could be referred to his state’s
medical licensing board or another legal authority.)

The extent and nature of doctor participation is unclear in part
because of the lengths states go to in order to protect their
execution protocols. Only two states—Illinois and Kentucky—prohibit
doctors from taking part in executions, while 15 actually require it.
A 2001 survey of physicians found that 41 percent were willing to
perform at least one of the AMA’s eight discouraged lethal-injection
actions. Twenty-five percent were willing to perform at least five,
and 19 percent were willing to administer the lethal drugs.

These willing executioners are not necessarily wannabe Mengeles. In
2006, Atul Gawande tracked down four physicians who had assisted in
executions. One doctor originally signed up for cardiac monitoring,
but soon found himself inserting IVs when the technicians were unable
to do so. Another doctor, Carlo Musso of Georgia, described his
participation thusly, “The way I saw it, this is an end-of-life issue,
just as with any other terminal disease. … When we have a patient who
can no longer survive his illness, we as physicians must ensure he has
comfort.”

Beyond the difficulties of intravenous insertion, the main risk of
physical discomfort is in the actual administering of the injections,
which come in three waves: The first drug renders the patient
unconscious; the second paralyzes him, so as to prevent twitching or
other movements that might upset the execution’s witnesses; and the
third drug causes cardiac arrest. If the first drug fails to knock the
inmate out and the second drug successfully paralyzes him, then he
could be aware but helpless as the third drug—the incredibly painful
potassium chloride—burns its way up his arm toward his heart.

This danger is not merely hypothetical. In 2006, a federal court found
that six of California’s last eight executed inmates had not stopped
breathing before the paralytic drug was injected, raising the
possibility that they were aware but immobile during the injection of
the potassium chloride. In 1995, in Missouri, executioners noticed
that an inmate was still alive after all three drugs had been
injected. Investigating, they found that the arm strap was tied too
tightly, blocking the drugs from traveling up his arm. After the arm
band was loosened, all three drugs hit him at once, likely causing
great pain.

“What I would want a doctor doing if I was laying on the table being
executed is monitoring the level of anesthesia I’m getting throughout
the execution and making sure I can’t feel anything that’s happening
to me,” says Ty Alper, the associate director of the Death Penalty
Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley. “That’s not
happening in any state that I’m aware of. So you may have a doctor
helping to mix the drug or helping to set the IV or overseeing the
whole process, but you don’t have a doctor monitoring the anesthetic
development or the maintenance of anesthesia throughout the execution.
Instead you have someone like the warden conducting something like a
consciousness check. … The warden goes in and shakes the inmates and
that’s supposed to determine whether he’s under a sufficient level of
anesthesia.”

“If we are going to have the death penalty, it should be as humane as
possible,” says David Waisel, an anesthesiologist at Harvard
Children’s Hospital who has written in favor of physician
participation in executions. An inmate who requests physician
assistance during execution should be given it, Waisel argues. “In
this case,” he wrote in 2007, “a physician is not acting as a tool of
the government; he is acting as a physician whose goals temporarily
align with the goals of the government.”

Dr. Groner argues the best solution is one that does not require
doctor involvement in the first place. “Why not go to a firing squad?”
Groner suggests. “Prison guards are actually trained to shoot guns.
They practice shooting guns. The problem is a lot of prison guards
pretend they’re anesthesiologists.”

But the states are incredibly reluctant to change their protocols,
whether it's switching to a less risky method of execution, like a
single-drug formula (to say nothing of the firing squad), or adding a
requirement for physician participation with the three-drug formula.
States insist in court that the opposition of groups like the AMA
would make physician participation practically impossible, despite the
fact that doctors already are participating. Death-penalty
abolitionists are similarly unwilling to argue on behalf of physician
participation, because their opposition could be compromised if they
acknowledge even the possibility of a "humane" execution.

Advocacy on behalf of a safer death penalty therefore falls to the
lawyers who represent the death-row inmates themselves. “[T]hough
willing to use any legal means to stop their clients’ executions,
these lawyers nevertheless have an additional obligation to seek a
humane execution for their clients should that become an
inevitability,” Alper wrote in his extensive look at the role of
physicians in lethal injections.

There seems to be some hope among these lawyers that the Broom case
will lead to a revisiting of the issue. Broom's execution will
presumably be tied up in court for some time. The only other time an
inmate survived the death chamber, in 1946, he was finally executed a
year later after a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision. "I think it would go
differently today," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the
Death Penalty Information Center.

“It’s 2009,” says Denno, the lawyer and historian. “Lethal injection
was first enacted in 1977. Since then, we’ve had botch after botch
after botch. They’ve only gotten worse and worse. … It’s because of
the setting and who’s doing it.”
- - - - -
Ben Crair is an associate editor at The Daily Beast. ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40107-daily-beast-doctors-death-chamber.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40071-prison-industry-playing-con-game.html Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:42:55 GMT Con Game The prison industry has a perverse incentive to keep the inmate population growing. Make it compete. Forbes April 24, 2006 by Van Jones For too long, the incarceration industry has gotten away with high costs and low performance. It is time to introduce accountability,... Con Game
The prison industry has a perverse incentive to keep the inmate population growing. Make it compete.

Forbes
April 24, 2006

by Van Jones

For too long, the incarceration industry has gotten away with high costs and low performance. It is time to introduce accountability, competition and rational incentives into the nation's prison systems—both public and private.

Federal and state governments spend more than $35 billion a year to lock up a greater portion of the population—one out of 138 Americans—than any other country on earth. The prison population keeps growing, mainly because our recidivism rates are sky-high. Half of former inmates return to prison. It is time to ask: What are we getting for the dollars spent on this growing revolving-door system?

Certainly prisoners must take personal responsibility for their own actions and their own rehabilitation. But with smart programs, many more should be finishing their sentences and coming home to be tax-paying citizens, not lifelong drains on the state's coffers.

Why are so many failing to rehabilitate themselves? One way to ask that question is this: Where are the financial incentives for prisons to properly perform their rehabilitative function? If anything, the captains of the incarceration industry have a perverse incentive to rehabilitate as few people as possible and keep business booming.

I am not saying that jailers do this consciously or purposefully. But the system is so broken that the very people we entrust to rehabilitate prisoners actually profit from prolonged prisoner stays and quick prisoner returns.

Take, for instance, the correctional officers union in California. This union has become one of the state's top political contributors. It has pushed not just for higher wages but for tougher laws and longer sentences.

The more people in jail, the more prisons (and prison guards) we need. And the longer the sentences of those convicted, the more secure the jobs in the prison. We now have a system that is divorced from its original purpose, which is to ensure neighborhood security, not job security.

Some states have turned to for-profit firms to run their prisons. But these private firms quickly get addicted to the government cash. They, too, have poor rehabilitation rates and spend their time lobbying state legislatures for tougher laws and longer sentences.

If you want to take on a big, failing, self-dealing bureaucracy that succeeds (and grows) by betraying the public interest, don't focus on the welfare system. Deal with the prison system. California spends $7.4 billion a year on prisons, more than on all its four-year colleges and universities combined. Nearly a dime out of every state dollar goes into California prisons, which house 170,000 inmates. What return do Californians get on their investment? An alarming 57% recidivism rate.

How can we justify continuing to spend $40,000 to $100,000 annually per inmate in neighborhoods where we spend less than $9,000 per pupil?

We should offer financial rewards for wardens who have the lowest recidivism rates over a period of years. Hold prisons accountable for the billions of dollars they spend each year. Increase funding for that send people home who stay out of trouble. Decrease funding for those that send people home who then get into trouble. And close altogether those prisons that are notorious for being virtual crime universities.

Rather than blindly and endlessly funding prisons, why shouldn't states instead create what I call community safety super-funds, which would force the incarcerators (public and private) to compete with entrepreneurs, community programs and even other branches of government for those dollars?

If a community-based program can do a better job at keeping people out of prison with dimes than incarcerators have been doing with dollars, let's reallocate those funds. YouthBuild USA, for instance, works with unemployed 16- to 24-year-olds toprepare them for a high school diploma while learning job skills. Let's send more money their way. ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40071-prison-industry-playing-con-game.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40064-governor-rick-perry-his-texas-death-machine-big-trouble.html Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:43:32 GMT Governor Rick Perry and His Texas Death Machine Are In Big Trouble When criminals are about to be caught, they try to hide their wrongdoing. When drug dealers hear the police sirens, they dump the stash in the alley or flush it down the toilet. When the Nazi officers in the concentration camps... Governor Rick Perry and His Texas Death Machine Are In Big Trouble

When criminals are about to be caught, they try to hide their wrongdoing. When drug dealers hear the police sirens, they dump the stash in the alley or flush it down the toilet. When the Nazi officers in the concentration camps heard the allied forces approaching, they destroyed—and in many cases murdered—the evidence. There’s something about the light of day when it shines its truth upon you.

And when a Texas state commission started looking into a report that a faulty arson investigation apparently put an innocent man to death, Gov. Rick Perry replaced the commission and called the dead man a monster.

Because that’s what Southern hick town justice is all about.

Cameron Todd Willingham is now a free man, but unfortunately it took death to release him from the confines of his prison bars. He was executed on February 17, 2004 for the 1991 arson deaths of his three children. Gov. Perry refused to grant him a 30-day stay, despite questions about his guilt. According to a bogus forensics report, Willingham’s house was intentionally burned down.

In 2005, Texas instituted a forensic science commission to investigate mistakes and wrongdoing by forensic scientists. Baltimore fire expert Craig Beyler, who was hired by this commission to look into the Willingham case, concluded that there were no scientific grounds to characterize the fire as an act of arson. As The New Yorker reported, Beyler said the approach of the arson investigator in the case denied rational reasoning, was based on “folklore and mysticism rather than science,” and violated “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” This, in a state whose fire investigators typically had a high school diploma, and unlike other states, no requisite experience and no specialized training or qualifications.

So, the Texas commission was reviewing Beyler’s report, and Gov. Perry, running for reelection, eliminated the members of the commission before they could issue their findings. Pure politics. After all, we don’t want people going around and talking about the execution of innocent people.

Meanwhile, Judge Sharon Keller, presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, that state’s highest criminal court, could find herself in deep trouble. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct initiated impeachment proceedings against Keller for incompetence, violating her duties as a judge and casting public discredit on the court. For a state such as Texas— with such abysmal standards of integrity in its criminal “justice” system—you must wonder what she did to stand out among the crowd.

Keller refused to keep the court open after 5pm when she knew Michael Richard, a death row inmate, sought a last-minute appeal challenging the constitutionality of his punishment of lethal injection. The inmate was unable to file an appeal and was executed. Also, Keller rejected a new trial for Roy Criner, a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder, even though DNA evidence showed that he did not rape the victim. “We can't give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,” Judge Keller said. “We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important. When witnesses testify, and when jurors return a verdict, they need to know that they can't come back later and change their minds.”

Keller was unrepentant, and Perry said the execution of Willingham was appropriate based on the "totality of the issues”. Ex-governor Mark White suggests that Texas might have to do away with the death penalty altogether, given that it does not deter crime and is unfairly administered, with a risk of executing the innocent. Bad habits are hard to break, and with 423 executions since 1974, including 152 under Gov. George W. Bush, Texas has the most voracious appetite for capital punishment. But perhaps the Willingham case is what is needed to end the barbaric practice.

My take on this subject is that the death penalty never was intended to be fair, as it is a holdover from Jim Crow lynching. Capital punishment was an effort to transplant lynchmob justice into the courtroom and make lynching official, if not respectable. A broken system that was designed to be broken—just clean it up and no one will notice, they thought. Guilt or innocence is of little concern here, as finality reigns supreme. And Judge Keller essentially said as much. It is no accident that the states of the former Confederacy— the states with the most violent racial history, a deep legacy of extrajudicial terror and killings— have been among the most enthusiastic executioners. Interestingly, those states also seem to have the lowest educational and health standards. Typically, the inmates on death row are people of color, and poor white folk like Mr. Willingham, those who lack resources and are unable to afford the best justice money can buy. We will never know how many people have been wrongfully executed. But Cameron Todd Willingham certainly would not have been the first. And perhaps we will never know how many opportunistic individuals have built their political careers on the corpses of the executed, whether guilty or innocent.

Rick Perry and Sharon Keller now have ethical clouds hanging over their heads. They utilized death as a political tool, but now, ironically, the death machine that helped bolster their careers could be their undoing. Yet, both are appropriate spokespersons for the death penalty. They have helped perpetuate an inherently unjust, incompetent and capricious system that legalized the lynchmob.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to The Huffington Post, theGrio, The Progressive Media Project, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, In These Times and Philadelphia Independent Media Center. He also blogs at davidalove.com, NewsOne, Daily Kos, and Open Salon ]]> Prison / Police Industrial Complex Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/prison-police-industrial-complex/40064-governor-rick-perry-his-texas-death-machine-big-trouble.html