Denia remembers: “I was really scared. I would say: “Dear God, what am I going to do with a newborn here? He’ll die in this freezing cold. It was so cold, and the worst thing was that they wouldn’t give us enough blankets… And how could I get enough rest if resting is prohibited here? I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself properly the way one should after giving birth. I was really worried.” Given an $18,000 bond that they could not afford to pay, she despaired at the thought of giving birth in prison.

The rise of family detention

Unfortunately, Denia’s experiences are not unique. The U.S. has been detaining families since March 2001. In an effort to end what was labeled the ‘catch-and-release’ policy — wherein migrants with immigration violations were given a mandate to appear in court and then released back into the community — the Department of Homeland Security under Michael Chertoff began detaining all immigrants without documents — even those with small children. The first facility for families was an 84-bed converted nursing home in Berks County, PA. At Berks, families were separated by age and gender and slept in dorm-style rooms, 2–8 per room. (Children under 5 slept with their parent.) But even with Berks open, there was not enough room for all the families ICE was detaining. Some were still being released. Others were separated — adults sent to adult facilities while children as young as 6 months old were sent to children’s facilities or foster care. After 9/11, DHS announced it needed more room to expand, and turned to long-time partner Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) for solutions.

The largest for-profit corrections company in the country, CCA is best known for its infamous failed bid to take over the corrections operations of the entire state of Tennessee. However, by 2000 CCA had hit hard times and its stocks were at an all-time low. In July 2005, it had been forced to shutter the T. Don Hutto Detention Facility — a medium-security prison in Texas — due to lack of demand. CCA jumped at the government’s offer to pay $2.8 million a month to house immigrant families. In May 2006, it reopened the prison as the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility. Little had changed except the name and the population. Razor wire still laced the fencing, though now with wooden playgrounds in the yard and painted murals in the halls.

“I was shocked. It was like nothing I had ever seen,” said Barbara Hines, director of the University of Texas Immigration Clinic and one of the first to visit Hutto. Frances Valdez, a former UT Immigration Clinic student, adds: “It was surreal. It was everything I had already experienced in other jails, but here was this baby. I would go out [to Hutto] asking [the inmates] about their immigration issues and … they started telling me about the conditions… They were like, ‘Hey, I can’t be here, get me out of here.’ My kids are getting sick, and they can’t eat the food and I can’t eat the food, and they separate us at night and they yell at us and they only give us 15 minutes to eat and my children are really scared and crying and it’s horrible.” Other reports from initial visits describe children in prison garb, poor sanitation, limited education for the children, only one hour of access to fresh air and recreation, and armed guards threatening the families.

Denia’s 5-year-old daughter remembers: “For me it was terrible because I would always dream at night that they were yelling at my mother and they were going take her to another jail. And they had told us that mothers who misbehave and take extra cookies in their pockets [for their kids to eat] would be sent somewhere else and …that they would take the children away from their mothers.

Word spread about the facility and outrage grew. An early report of the rape of an inmate by a guard mobilized neighbors. Local activists from Williamson County and nearby Austin began staging candlelight vigils and protests. Representatives from the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children testified to Congress about its findings at Hutto, recommending the facility be closed immediately. Jorge Bustamante, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, attempted an investigation on conditions in Hutto and was denied access. Two documentaries were made, and screenings staged across the country. Articles appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, The Economist, salon.com, and local papers.

In March 2007, the ACLU and UT Law Clinic waged a lawsuit against ICE maintaining that children were being held in inhumane conditions. Several months later, ICE settled and pledged improvements to facility. Education and recreation times increased, pregnant women were allowed more food, and families permitted to close the door to their rooms as they slept. CCA officials maintain that reforms at Hutto had been underway already and were not due to the lawsuit.

Immigrant detention continued to expand throughout the Bush years. Plans were announced for three similar facilities to be built in other parts of the country, and rumors spread of families held in other unauthorized facilities.

With Obama’s election, hopes soared that the new administration would usher in comprehensive change in immigration policy. In August of this year, ICE Secretary John Morton announced a reworking of the nation’s immigration jail network into a “truly civil detention center.” In August 2009, ICE announced Hutto was to stop taking families, and that plans for three additional family detention facilities were to be scrapped. Obama’s call for progressive reform was, it seemed, coming to fruition. By September 17th, all families had left the facility.

Family Detention Under Obama

Today, Hutto looks pretty much the same as it always has: a drab building tucked just out of town, sandwiched between a train car storage yard and fields of Texas beef cattle. The razor wire is gone, and freshly painted murals inside the facility depict smiling cartoon animals, a reminder to visitors of its former occupants. Hutto is back at maximum occupancy, though this time with women. Even before the last of the families were out, CCA had worked a new contract with ICE to house women from its other immigrant detention facilities at Hutto.

“By more fully utilizing the facility’s capacity and consolidating the female populations from multiple facilities, this change will yield substantial savings each month, “ ICE spokeswoman Nina Pruneda said. And indeed, current reforms seem driven as much by the bottom line as by humanitarian concerns. By ending family detention at Hutto, ICE will save nearly $900,000 per month in contract costs.

The question remains, though: Where are arrested families going today? According to ICE, detained families will now be housed at Berks Family Residential Center in PA. Yet not a single family from Hutto made it to Berks; all were either deported or released. And at an 84-bed capacity, it is hardly sufficient for current needs, let alone for future expansion. Compounding this is an August announcement in the Reading Eagle that Berks County commissioners “are considering getting out of the alien-housing business.” New federal regulations prohibit governmental agencies from turning a profit on these types of services, and the county is just breaking even.

According to ICE spokesperson Carl Rusnok, today “each family… is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The Berks Residential Family Facility is the only facility ICE now uses to house families. Families that are encountered may be placed at Berks, placed on an ‘alternative to detention’ or issued a notice to appear before a federal immigration judge and released on their own recognizance.”

But Bob Libal of Grassroots Leadership worries: “I think it is still unclear what is happening to people apprehended at the border. ICE says it is sending people to Berks, but I think there is some concern ICE may facilitate a new family detention center. I think it is important to look critically at Berks… and see if conditions are adequate or if people are being held for long periods of time. Is Berks another 84 beds that ICE doesn’t have to use?” Libal adds: “The advocacy community is ready to fight for increased use of alternatives rather than increased family detention.”

Others worry that ICE has no intentions of limiting detention, only of avoiding the flashpoints that caused public outcry in the past. This spring, it released a request for comments on standards for a family residential facility, leading some to suggest that it will be building its own facilities. “ICE says they are in the process of developing a new assessment tool that will help them determine whether a family can be released, or placed into an alternatives program pending resolution of their status instead of being detained,” says Michelle Brane of the Women’s Refuge Commission.¹ “They have told us in the meantime that they are releasing families and using alternatives to detention.”

Alternatives to detention- such as supervised release and ankle-bracelet monitoring- allow a family to remain in the community while greatly improving the chances they’ll make their court hearing. It also saves the government a substantial sum of money: the most expensive alternatives to detention cost $14 per day, compared with detention rates that can exceed $100 per day.

“In general, ICE seems to be moving away from subcontracting its detention needs out to private companies and local jails,” said Lauren Martin, doctoral student at the University of Kentucky. This continued reliance on detention “indicates a lot of continuity between Bush and Obama. They’re going to build facilities for low-risk populations like asylum seekers, families, etc, and actually expand capacity.”

Though all sides agree that Hutto is better than it was when it initially opened, it’s hard to find such enthusiasm about the broader picture. “Even though Hutto no longer holds families, there’s still 512 women being held there. That’s not something that anyone would have advocated for. Beyond that, here they haven’t made any moves to shut down or improve the most egregious conditions in Texas detention centers… There’s a lot of skepticism,” contended Martin.

A recently report by Dr. Dora Schriro, former director of the ICE Office of Detention Policy, focuses federal priorities on detainee care and uniformity at detention centers. The report recommends that ICE establish standards and assessment tools for its detention facilities, improve medical care, and provide federal oversight of its detention operations — all goals lawyers and activists have been calling for.

But with nearly 380,000 immigrants detained in ICE custody a year — 30,000 on any given day in 300 facilities nationwide — it is clear that Obama has not brought a shift away from detention, only a repeal of some of the worse malpractices of the Bush administration. Where family detention will go from here, no one knows for sure. “ICE has made clear that they plan to issue [a Request For Proposals] and open a new facility, one that they say will be better suited to families with young children. It is still unclear what that means,” says Michelle Brane. “For the present, we are all still waiting for answers from ICE.”

1. The Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children has since changed its name to Women’s Refugee Commission.

Syed Hashmi’s trial will begin in New York City on December 1. The website freefahad explains that: “Syed Hashmi, known to his family and friends as Fahad, was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1980, the second child of Syed Anwar Hashmi and Arifa Hashmi. Fahad immigrated with his family to America when he was three years old. His father said ‘We knew there would be many opportunities for us here in the United States. We came here to find the American dream.’ The large Hashmi family settled in Flushing, New York and soon developed deep roots throughout the tri-state area. Fahad graduated from Robert F. Wagner High School in 1998 and attended SUNY Stony Brook University. He transferred to Brooklyn College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 2003. A devout Muslim, through the years Fahad established a reputation as an activist and advocate. In 2003, Fahad enrolled in London Metropolitan University in England to pursue a master’s degree in international relations, which he received in 2006. On June 6, 2006, Fahad was arrested in London Heathrow airport by British police based on an American indictment charging him with material support of Al Qaida. He was subsequently held in Belmarsh Prison, Britain’s most notorious jail.” For more information: the Hashmi case.

Angola 3 News: Can you please give us background on the arrest and prosecution of Syed Hashmi? For example, what are the charges against him? What is their evidence?

Jeanne Theoharis: In June 2006, Hashmi, who is a US citizen, was arrested by the British police at Heathrow Airport (he was about to travel to Pakistan, where he has family) on a warrant issued by the US government. In May 2007, he was extradited to the United States, the first US citizen to be extradited under terrorism laws passed after 9/11. Since then, he has since been held in solitary confinement at Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC).

The US government alleges that early in 2004, a man by the name of Junaid Babar, also a Pakistani-born US citizen, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. According to the government, Babar stored luggage containing raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in Hashmi’s apartment and then Babar delivered these materials to the third-ranking member of Al Qaida in South Waziristan, Pakistan. In addition, Hashmi allegedly allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call other conspirators in terrorist plots.

The government has claimed that Babar’s testimony is the “centerpiece” of its case. Babar, who has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for Al Qaida, faces up to seventy years in prison. While awaiting sentence, he has agreed to serve as a government witness in terrorism trials in Britain and Canada as well as in Hashmi’s trial. Under a plea agreement reported in the media, Babar will receive a reduced sentence in return for his cooperation.

A3N: What can you tell us about Hashmi as a person, especially your personal experience of knowing him when he was a student of yours?

JH: Fahad was a student of mine at Brooklyn College in 2002. An outspoken Muslim student activist, Fahad wrote his senior seminar paper with me on the treatment of Muslim groups within the United States and the violations of civil rights and liberties that many groups were facing. Needless to say, this feels particularly chilling—and no longer academic—as we have now witnessed his own rights being violated.

A3N: Since his arrest, what have the conditions of his incarceration been?

JH: Under special administrative measures (SAMs) imposed in October 2007 by the former Attorney General, Hashmi must be held in solitary confinement and may not communicate with anyone inside the prison other than prison officials. Family visits are limited to one person every other week for one and a half hours and cannot involve physical contact. While his correspondence to members of Congress and other government officials is not restricted, he may write only one letter (of no more than three pieces of paper) per week to one family member. He may not communicate, either directly or through his attorneys, with the news media. He may read only designated portions of newspapers – and not until thirty days after their publication – and his access to other reading material is restricted. He may not listen to or watch news-oriented radio stations and television channels. He may not participate in group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring inside and outside his cell – including when he showers or relieves himself – and 23-hour lockdown. He has no access to fresh air and must take his one hour of daily recreation – when it is given – inside a cage.

As the expert testimony supplied by Hashmi’s attorneys in a pre-trial motion of December 2008 attests, the conditions of Hashmi’s detention may have severe physical and mental consequences and impair his mental state and ability to testify on his own behalf.

While former Acting Attorney General Keisler claimed that these measures are necessary because “there is substantial risk that [Hashmi’s] communications or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons,” Hashmi was held with other prisoners in a British jail for eleven months without incident. The SAMs were renewed by Attorney General Mukasey in November 2008 and upheld by Judge Loretta Preska in January 2009, citing Hashmi’s “proclivity for violence.” There has been no change to the SAMs under the Obama Administration. They were renewed again by Attorney General Holder in early November 2009. Yet, Hashmi is not being charged and has never been charged with committing an actual act of violence.

Currently, according to research by the New York Times in February 2009, there are six people in the United States being held on pre-trial terrorism SAMs; three (including Hashmi) are under the jurisdiction of the Southern District of New York, which has long served as a stepping stone to national political office.

A3N: Looking particularly at the harsh solitary confinement imposed on Hashmi, how is this officially justified? Do you think the stated reason is the actual motivation, or do you think there are other reasons for the solitary confinement and other harsh restrictions?

JH: My colleagues and I have begun to come to the conclusion that the use of prolonged solitary confinement is a tactic to ensure convictions. Such conditions weaken people mentally and the toll of sensory deprivation and isolation simultaneously makes people more eager to take a plea or not able to fully assist their counsel. Most experts agree it is torture (see Atul Gawande’s “Hellhole” in The New Yorker). While our public discussions have tended to see torture as a tactic to get information, in cases like Hashmi’s, torture is being used to help secure convictions.

A3N: How are the prion conditions for Hashmi in NYC different from those in Guantanamo?

JH: There are key similarities of prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation between Hashmi’s treatment at MCC in lower Manhattan and what we have heard of the conditions at Guantanamo. However, there has been much less attention to these inhumane conditions within the United States.

The focus on prisons like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Baghram stems, in part, from a larger post-civil rights paradigm that assumes the judicial process is now fair in the United States and relatively incorruptible and thus it was necessary to go outside of the US courts to do the extreme bad things.

Rather, what made Guantanamo possible stemmed from domestic legal practices, many already in place and many others expanded after 9/11, which have continued almost unabated under the Obama Administration.

A3N: With Hashmi’s trial beginning on December 1, what are activists currently doing to support him?

JH: Theaters Against War began holding weekly vigils in October to draw attention to the inhumane conditions of confinement and the due process violations Hashmi and others are facing within the federal courts. Artists and actors such as Wallace Shawn, Kathleen Chalfant, Bill Irwin, Jan Maxwell, Betty Shamieh, and Christine Moore have performed at the vigils.

A3N: Any closing thoughts?

JH: Three central Constitutional issues have become clear in the treatment of Hashmi and others within the federal system: the inhumane conditions of confinement, the abridgement of due process rights , and the lack of 1st Amendment protections.

If these are not addressed, then moving the Guantanamo detainees into the federal system does little to return America to the rule of law, of which we are rightfully proud. I am reminded of that quote by former Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1967, “It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of… those liberties… which [make] the defense of the nation worthwhile.”

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 electroencephalogram (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.

In this interview, Law talks specifically about how women are affected by solitary confinement and other forms of torture in US prisons, and what women are doing to fight back. Exposing solitary confinement as torture has been the focus of recent campaigns in Maine, Pennsylvania, and around the US. This is also a central issue in the campaign to free the Angola 3, who are a trio of Black Panther political prisoners: Robert King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace. King was released in 2001 after 29 years in continuous solitary confinement. Woodfox and Wallace remain imprisoned and have spent over 36 years in solitary confinement, where they remain today.

Angola 3 News: What do you think of the case of the Angola 3?

Victoria Law: The case of the Angola 3 is one of the most visible (and damning) indictments of the U.S. prison system.

As broadcast by NBC Nightly News, the widow of slain prison guard Brent Miller has even stated that she wants justice and that, if Woodfox and Wallace did not kill her husband (and there is so much evidence that they did not), they should be freed. It’s interesting to note how the voices of victims and their family are used to whip up pro-imprisonment hysteria, but when they speak out against railroading people, they are ignored. For example, the widow of Daniel Faulkner publicly condemns Mumia and urges people not to let out her husband’s alleged killer. The media loves this and uses her to play on public opinion against freeing Mumia. However, when Brent Miller’s widow Leontine Verrett says, “If these two men did not do this, I think they need to be out,” her words are ignored.

Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace should be released. The fact that they have not been released clearly demonstrates the racism that is rife in the prison system and how “justice” isn’t really a factor in who goes to prison and why.

A3N: Do you consider the use of solitary confinement in US prisons to be torture?

VL: I most definitely consider solitary confinement a form of torture. Solitary confinement is used not only to break the woman (or person) who is resisting, but also to scare others around them into not only complying but ostracizing the person who is challenging prison rules or conditions. And, unfortunately, it often does.

A3N: What other practices in US prisons would you consider to be torture?

VL: I consider the whole prison system to be torture. But to narrow it down to actual practices: I would consider the use of strip status, in which all of a person’s clothes and belongings are removed from the cell, as a form of torture. You have to remember that over half of incarcerated women have suffered past abuse and trauma. To strip them of all of their clothing and place them in a bare cell with guards watching them retraumatizes them. I recently reread an account from Lisa Savage, a woman who was placed on strip status for talking to the other women on her unit about the psychological reprogramming of the Close Management unit (a unit where women are held in their separate cells 23 ½ hours a day). Being on strip status meant that everything was taken from her—clothes, toothbrush, bedding, and sanitary napkins. She wrote, “As bad luck would have it, I just started my monthly. Now, I must beg for a pad for hours before receiving it.”

Other practices that I would consider to be torture are:

• The use of male guards in female prisons
• The shackling of pregnant women while they are in labor
• Loss of access and custody to their children simply because they are incarcerated
• The denial of health care and the life-threatening slow health care in prisons

A3N: How is solitary confinement used against women prisoners? How does it effect women in ways that are different from male prisoners?

VL: Solitary confinement makes women more vulnerable to staff sexual assault since no one can see what is happening. In my book, I write about the experience of Christina Madrazo, a transsexual immigrant who was placed in INS detention. Originally, the INS (now called ICE) did not know what to do with her since her assigned gender at birth was male, but she identified (and was seeking asylum status) as a transgendered female. Madrazo was placed in solitary confinement where she was raped twice by a prison guard.

Even when they are not being physically assaulted, the women have no privacy—toilets are in full view of the cell door windows, guards can look through those windows at any time and, in many prisons, male guards can watch the women in the showers, on the toilet or when they are trying to dress or undress.

In addition, solitary confinement is used to punish women who have either reported being sexually assaulted by staff, or who have been discovered to have “consensual relationships” with staff members. I put “consensual” in quotation marks because, given the power dynamics in prison, especially the ability of guards and staff members to withhold services and/or provide small amenities, the relationship can never truly be consensual. I recently received a letter from a woman incarcerated in Colorado whose cellmate was accused of having a “consensual” relationship with a staff member. While the accusation was being investigated, the staff member was allowed to continue working in the prison. The woman was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the investigation and only released once the charge was found to be unwarranted.

Also, with women, there’s the prevailing notion that women need to be “good girls” and “to behave.” Thus, women are punished for behaviors that violate gender norms, behaviors such as spitting or cursing or not following orders, behaviors that men are not punished for. This is also why women are sent to segregation when they report sexual misconduct or engage in sexual activity; they’re violating what we, as a society, see as “good girl behavior.”

A3N: Do you believe activist prisoners are disproportionately targeted with solitary confinement?

VL: Yes! This is obvious in the case of the Angola 3. This has also been true among women who have been challenging prison conditions. Most female facilities have some form of solitary confinement. At California’s Valley State Prison for Women, the Special Housing Unit consists of eight-foot by six-foot cells with blacked-out windows where women are confined for 23 hours a day. Even in their cells, the women have no privacy — toilets are in full view of the cell door windows, guards can look through those windows at any time and male guards often watch the women in the showers. If the women complain, the guards turn off the water.

In 1986, the Bureau of Prisons opened a control unit specifically for women political prisoners in the federal prison at Lexington, Kentucky. It was built underground and entirely white. Women were prohibited from hanging anything on the white walls, causng them to begin hallucinating black spots and strings on the walls and floors. Their sole contact with prison staff came in the form of voices addressing them over loudspeakers. The unit was shut down in 1988 following an outside campaign and a court decision that determined their placement unconstitutional, but the solitary confinement is still used to punish and silence jailhouse lawyers and other incarcerated activists (of all genders, I should add).

A3N: How have women prisoners resisted the use of solitary confinement?

VL: In 1974, a woman incarcerated in Bedford Hills (the maximum-security prison for women in New York) filed a lawsuit challenging the practice of placing women in solitary confinement without 24 hours notice and a hearing (basically any sort of due process). She won a court injunction prohibiting this practice. In response, she was beaten by male guards and placed in solitary confinement (again with no due process). Other women in the prison protested by rioting.

More recent ways in which women have resisted solitary confinement aren’t as visible. While she was in the Close Management unit in Florida, Lisa Savage joined the StopMax campaign and became part of the Steering Committee. Her participation added gender to the way that people were viewing (and organizing around) the use of solitary confinement. She also wrote a long (16 pages!) piece about the Close Management unit for Tenacious, the zine that I publish of women prisoners’ art and writings. Writing about that reality is, in and of itself, a form of resistance, but she also included ways in which she, as an individual woman being held in the Close Management unit, was resisting:

I’ve finally gained a firm sense of self by holding fast to my beliefs in equality, liberty and life without threats or coercion. Each accomplishment, may it be emotional, psychological, or mental “growth,” is a form of resistance.

Every time I teach someone geometry or basic reading or tell them of their own intrinsic ability to be autonomous and secure with themselves, I resist the mentacide, and hopefully arm the women with ways to combat their own mental slow death sentence here in CM SHU…

Every time I get mail from you or Anthony of the South Chicago ABC Zine Distro or Abigail of Burning River or the meeting notes from StopMax (I am on the Steering Committee for the National Campaign to End Solitary Confinement and Torture in U.S. prisons), it confirms that I am part of this resistance movement.

As I conclude this piece, I have been informed of an increase in my custody to CM Level I. I know this is only a label, not who I truly am. DOC may have condemned me for my actions, but I know in my heart that for the past 7 months, I have taken the measures necessary to ensure my beliefs and integrity remain intact within a corrupt system. I have done my best to stand up for my CM sisters and myself. Yes, I have been DR’ed [issued disciplinary reports”] and “gave up” my privileges to take up for women who would spit on me if given a chance. I’ve asked nothing from them, I’ve only tried to show them that they must fight for their beliefs and happiness. I’ve wanted to show them that they do not have to be the label placed upon them—dumb ho, loser, etc—that they can achieve positive healthy goals even while locked in a cell 24/7. I wanted them to have a piece of my courage until they could find their own. Yes, I shouted about the unjustifiable psychological abuse they suffer—I shouted so that they could at least whisper of their own hurts in their own hearts… For this I have no regrets, and I will not apologize.

These aren’t ways that are clearly visible to those on the outside looking for instances of prisoner resistance. Still, her actions are forms of resistance to solitary confinement.

1. Recently reviewed at Alternet.

In part one, Berger discusses his new research into US prison movements of the 1970s, which Berger is researching and writing about for his PhD dissertation at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

In part two, Berger discusses prisoner movements today, particularly in light of the recent ten-year anniversaries of both Critical Resistance and The Jericho Movement.

Dan Berger is a writer and activist living in Philadelphia. He is the author of Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006) and co-editor of Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books, 2005). Presently, along with his dissertation about 1970s prison movements, he is editing a book about 1970s-era radicalism, titled Hidden Histories of 1970s Radicalism (forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in Fall, 2010). His writings have also been published in the International Journal of Communication, The Nation, Punishment & Society, WireTap, Z Magazine, and elsewhere.

The grandson of Holocaust survivors, Berger has long been involved in struggles for social justice. From 2000 to 2003, he served as founding co-editor of ONWARD, a now-defunct internationally distributed quarterly anarchist newspaper based in Gainesville, Florida, that emerged out of the global justice movement. Berger has also been involved in an array of organizing efforts against war, racism, and the prison industrial complex. A longtime activist in support of U.S. political prisoners, Berger has published and presented scholarly essays on news images and prison abuse, alternative media and globalization, and race and social movements.

This new video-interview is made by Angola 3 News, which is an official project of The International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Over 37 years ago in Louisiana, 3 young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation called Angola. In 1972 and 1973 prison officials charged Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King (who then became known as the Angola 3) with murders they did not commit and threw them into 6×9 ft. cells in solitary confinement, for over 36 years. Robert was freed in 2001 after 29 years of continuous solitary confinement, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.

Through our work supporting the Angola 3, we seeks to spotlight the broader issues that are central to their story, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, political prisoners, the legacy of the Black Panther Party, and more.

Notably, the story of the Angola 3 has recently been spotlighted by NBC Nightly News, Huffington Post, Alternet, Mother Jones, and a Peabody Award-winning series by National Public Radio.

Several new art projects and exhibits focusing on the Angola 3 have also been in the news. The New York Times, Newsweek, and others have reported on The House That Herman Built. The new exhibit The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes is currently featured at The New Museum in New York City. The new play titled Angola 3 will premier at Loyola University on September 18. A few days later, Sept. 23-25, Robert King will be touring Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC with his new autobiography From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Robert Hillary King.

The Case of the Angola 3

37 years ago, deep in rural Louisiana, three young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation called Angola.

Peaceful, non-violent protest in the form of hunger and work strikes organized by inmates, caught the attention of Louisiana’s first black elected legislators and local media in the early 1970s. State legislative leaders, along with the administration of a newly-elected, reform-minded governor, called for investigations into a host of unconstitutional practices and the extraordinarily cruel and unusual treatment commonplace in the prison. In 1972 and 1973 prison officials, determined to put an end to outside scrutiny, charged Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King with murders they did not commit and threw them into 6×9 foot cells in solitary confinement, for over 36 years. Robert was freed in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.

In July 2008, a Federal Judge overturned Albert Woodfox’s conviction after a Federal Judicial Magistrate found his trial was unfair due to inadequate representation, prosecutorial misconduct, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and racial discrimination in the grand jury selection process. Sadly, despite this powerful recommendation, Louisiana prosecutors maintain that Albert should remain in Angola for the rest of his life . Attorney General Buddy Caldwell responded by appealing to the US Fifth Circuit. In December, the Fifth Circuit granted Caldwell’s request to deny Woodfox bail, but indicated sympathy for the overturning of the conviction, writing: “We are not now convinced that the State has established a likelihood of success on the merits.” On March 3, 2009, oral arguments were heard by appellate Judges Carolyn Dineen King, Carl E. Steart and Leslie H. Southwick, and a decision from them is now expected any month. If the three judge panel affirms the overturning of Woodfox’s conviction, the state will have 120 days to either accept the ruling or to retry Woodfox. The state has already vowed to retry him if necessary. If the Fifth Circuit rules for the state, Woodfox’s conviction will be reinstated.

Similarly, in November 2006, a State Judicial Commissioner took the rare step of issuing a 27-page report recommending the reversal of Herman Wallace’s conviction because of new, compelling evidence exposing prosecutorial misconduct. After stalling for nearly a year, the local District Court issued a curt, two-sentence ruling rejecting the Commissioner’s recommendation. In May 2008 the appellate court continued to ignore justice by refusing to hear the case in a 2-1 decision without any explanation. The one judge who dissented found the verdict should be overturned because Herman’s constitutional rights were violated. The case is currently on appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court and a ruling is expected in coming months. If the appellate court agrees with the Commissioner’s findings and reverses the conviction, and if the District Attorney of Baton Rouge can be convinced not to file new charges, Herman will, at long last, be a free man.

Despite a number of reforms achieved in the mid 70s in response to condemnations of the State of Louisiana’s criminal justice system from all three branches of state government, many court officials have repeatedly refused to take a serious look at these cases, stubbornly sided with local prosecutors despite evidence of misconduct, and ignored constitutional safeguards requiring prison officials to hold meaningful, mandatory 90-day reviews to justify keeping inmates in solitary confinement for any extended period of time. Any month, a federal civil rights lawsuit goes to trial, detailing the decades of unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment endured by these innocent men.

Angola 3 in the News

During the last few years there have been many important stories about the Angola 3, and our new network of websites will be working to publicize these stories.

In March, 2008, NBC Nightly News interviewed Robert King about his time spent in continuous solitary confinement, and also featured an interview with the widow of slain prison guard, who now questions the convictions of Woodfox and Wallace, and told NBC that she supports a new investigation into the case: “What I want is justice. If these two men did not do this, I think they need to be out.”

In October, 2008, a Peabody Award-wining National Public Radio (NPR) series on the case reported directly from Angola. NPR reporter Laura Sullivan observed that “a hundred black men are in the field, bent over picking tomatoes. A single white officer on a horse sits above them, a shotgun in his lap…It’s the same as it looked 40 years ago, and 100 years ago.” NPR documents how there is no physical evidence linking Woodfox or Wallace to the murder. A bloody fingerprint was found at the scene but it matches neither prisoner’s prints. Prison officials have always refused to test that fingerprint against their own inmate fingerprint database. Caldwell vows to continue this policy, telling NPR: “A fingerprint can come from anywhere…We’re not going to be fooled by that.”

In December, 2008, the Huffington Post featured two articles about the Angola 3. One was by James Rucker, whose organization ColorOfChange.org initiated a 25,000 signature petition calling for an investigation into Woodfox and Wallace’s convictions and solitary confinement. Earlier in 2008, the petition was hand-delivered to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s office by the head of the State Legislature’s Judiciary Committee, Cedric Richmond (watch video here).

The second Huffington Post article was written by Ira Glasser, who is the former Executive Director of the ACLU. Glasser criticized the behavior of Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, writing that following the October 2008 announcement that Woodfox’s niece had agreed to take him in if granted bail, Caldwell “embarked upon a public scare campaign reminiscent of the kind of inflammatory hysteria that once was used to provoke lynch mobs. He called Woodfox a violent rapist, even though he had never been charged, let alone convicted, of rape; he sent emails to [Woodfox’s niece’s] neighbors calling Woodfox a convicted murderer and violent rapist; and neighbors were urged to sign petitions opposing his release. In the end, his niece and family were sufficiently frightened and threatened that Woodfox rejected the plan to live with them while on bail.”

In March, 2009, Mother Jones published a long article by James Ridgeway, which was part of an entire Mother Jones series about the Angola 3. Ridgeway writes about Warden Burl Cain’s courtroom testimony advocating continued solitary confinement for Albert Woodfox and opposing his release on bail. Cain testified that even if Woodfox was not guilty of killing Miller, he should still be kept in solitary confinement. “I would still keep him in CCR [solitary confinement],” he said. “I still know that 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. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them [Woodfox and Wallace]…He has to stay in a cell while he is at Angola.”

In early May, 2009, Alternet released an article titled “The Angola Three: Torture in Our Own Backyard” (translated into Spanish here), providing an overview of the case, as well as reviews of the new book From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Robert Hillary King, and the new DVD The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation. Later that month, a new interview with Robert King was also featured.

This month, the Why Am I Not Surprised? blog published an essay titled “Black August and the Angola 3.” One excerpt reads, “I’ve been talking with some VERY bright and VERY committed individuals connected to the campaign to free the last two members of the Angola 3, Albert ‘Shaka’ ‘Cinque’ Woodfox and Herman ‘Hooks’ Wallace, who have now been held in solitary confinement here in Louisiana for more than 37 years — for being Black Panthers. And I’ve begun to have phone conversations with Woodfox himself on a regular basis, as well.”

Please Help Spread The Word!

Three court cases are now pending: the federal civil rights lawsuit at the US Middle District Court, Albert Woodfox’s appeal at the US Fifth Circuit, and Herman Wallace’s appeal at the State Supreme Court. At this pivotal time, the National Coalition to Free the Angola 3 needs your help in publicizing our new project at www.angola3news.com.

We are utilizing the resources of the internet to publicize the case of the Angola 3 and the broader issues of prisoners’ human rights, solitary confinement as torture, political repression, racism, and more. Through the www.angola3news.com network of websites, we want to link up with other individuals and groups that are organizing around these same issues.

The prisoners come from all walks of life, from children and the elderly to members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, the democratically elected government.

Prisoners of Gaza features family members of prisoners, government representatives, and street protests, all of it shot from May-June in Gaza.

Producers: Jordan Flaherty and Lily Keber
Translation: Maher Salem and Shereen Naser

“the growing missile threat from North Korea and Iran” — article in the Washington Post and other major newspapers, May 26

“Iran’s threat transcends religion. Regardless of sectarian bent, Muslim communities need to oppose the attempts by Iran … to extend Shia extremism and influence throughout the world.” — op-ed article in Boston Globe, May 27

“A Festering Evil. Doing nothing is not an option in handling the threat from Iran” — headline in Investor’s Business Daily, May 27, 2009

This is a very small sample from American newspapers covering but two days.

“Fifty-one percent of Israelis support an immediate Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites” — BBC, May 24

After taking office, on Holocaust Memorial Day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We will not allow Holocaust-deniers [Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] to carry out another holocaust.” — Haaretz (Israel), May 14, 2009

Like clinical paranoia, “the threat from Iran” is impervious to correction by rational argument.

Two new novels have just appeared, from major American publishers, thrillers based on Iran having a nuclear weapon and the dangers one can imagine that that portends — Banquo’s Ghosts by Rich Lowry & Keith Korman, and The Increment by David Ignatius. “Bomb, bomb, bomb. Let’s bomb Iran,” declares a CIA official in the latter book. The other book derides the very idea of “dialogue” with Iran while implicitly viewing torture as acceptable.¹

On May 12, in New York City, a debate was held on the proposition that “Diplomacy With Iran Is Going Nowhere” (English translation: “Should we bomb Iran?”). Arguing in the affirmative, were Liz Cheney, former State Department official (and daughter of a certain unindicted war criminal) and Dan Senor, formerly the top spokesman for Washington’s Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Their “opponents” were R. Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state, and Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Council official and CIA analyst and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, a book that, unsurprisingly, did not have too long a shelf life.²

This is what “debate” on US foreign policy looks like in America in the first decade of the 21st century AD — four quintessential establishment figures. If such a “debate” had been held in the Soviet Union during the Cold War (”Detente With The United States Is Going Nowhere”), the American mainstream media would unanimously have had a jolly time making fun of it. The sponsor of the New York debate was the conservative Rosenkranz Foundation, but if a liberal (as opposed to a progressive or radical leftist) organization had been the sponsor, while there probably would have been a bit more of an ideological gap between the chosen pairs of speakers, it’s unlikely that any of the present-day myths concerning Iran would have been seriously challenged by either side. These myths include the following, all of which I’ve dealt with before in this report but inasmuch as they are repeated on a regular basis in the media and by administration representatives, I think that readers need to be reminded of the counter arguments.

• Iran has no right to nuclear weapons: Yet, there is no international law that says that the US, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. In any event, the US intelligence community’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of December 2007, “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities”, makes a point of saying in bold type and italics: “This NIE does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons.” The report goes on to state: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program .”
• Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier: I have yet to read of Ahmadinejad saying simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we know as the Holocaust never happened. He has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many other people of all political stripes.
• Ahmadinejad has called for violence against Israel: His 2005 remark re “wiping Israel off the map”, besides being a very questionable translation, has been seriously misinterpreted, as evidenced by the fact that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.”³ Obviously, he was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place peacefully.
• Iran has no right to provide arms to Hamas and Hezbollah: However, the United States, we are assured, has every right to do the same for Israel and Egypt.
• The fact that Obama says he’s willing to “talk” to some of the “enemies” like Iran more than the Bush administration did sounds good: But one doesn’t have to be too cynical to believe that it will not amount to more than a public relations gimmick. It’s only change of policy that counts. Why doesn’t Obama just state that he would not attack Iran unless Iran first attacked the US or Israel or anyone else? Besides, the Bush administration met with Iran on several occasions.

The following should also be kept in mind: The Washington Post, March 5, 2009, reported: “A senior Israeli official in Washington” has asserted that “Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.” This was the very last sentence in the article and, according to an extensive Nexis search, did not appear in any other English-language media in the world.

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion “Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.” She “also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.” This appeared in Haaretz.com, October 25, 2007 (print edition October 26), but not in any US media or in any other English-language world media except the BBC citing the Iranian Mehr English-language news agency, October 27.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Changeman!

In January 2006 I was invited to attend a book fair in Cuba, where one of my books, newly translated into Spanish, was being presented. All my expenses were to be paid by the Cuban government, and I was very much looking forward to the visit. Only one problem — the government of the United States would not give me permission to go. My application to travel to Cuba had also been rejected in 1998 by the Clinton administration. (On that occasion I went anyhow and was extremely lucky to avoid being caught by the American Travel Police on the way back and being fined thousands of dollars.) I mention this because Obama supporters would have us believe — as they themselves believe — that their Changeman has been busy making lots of important changes, Cuba being only one example. But I still don’t have the legal right to travel to Cuba.

The only real change made by the Obama administration in regard to Cuba is that Cuban-Americans with family on the island can travel there and send remittances without restrictions. The April 13 White House announcement listed several other provisions concerning telecommunications companies, but what this will actually mean in practice, if anything, is unknown, particularly as it affects Cuba’s access to the Internet. American anti-Castroites have long blamed Cuban’s deficient Internet access on the proverbial “communist suppression,” when the technical availability and prohibitive cost were to a large extent in the hands of American corporations. Microsoft, for example, bars Cuba from using its Messenger instant messaging service.⁴ And Google has long blocked Cuban access to many of its features.⁵ Venezuela and Cuba have been working on an underwater cable system that they hope will make them less reliant on the gringos.

The multifarious US economic embargo, which causes unending hardship and expense for the Cuban people, remains in place. Here is Changeman in a recent press conference:

Reporter: Thank you, Mr. President. You’ve heard from a lot of Latin America leaders here who want the U.S. to lift the embargo against Cuba. You’ve said that you think it’s an important leverage to not lift it. But in 2004, you did support lifting the embargo. You said, it’s failed to provide the source of raising standards of living, it’s squeezed the innocent, and it’s time for us to acknowledge that this particular policy has failed. I’m wondering, what made you change your mind about the embargo?

The President: Well, 2004, that seems just eons ago. What was I doing in 2004?

Reporter: Running for Senate.

The President: Is it while — I was running for Senate. There you go.⁶

Yes, there you go; you shouldn’t confuse campaign rhetoric with the real world and the real Changeman.

The case of the Cuban Five is another chance for Changeman to come to the rescue. This outrageous perversion of justice whereby Cubans were sent to the United States to try to learn of further terrorist attacks in Cuba planned by anti-Castroites in Florida and were themselves arrested by the FBI on information partly supplied to the US by the Cuban government as their contribution to the War On Terrorism.⁷

The Cuban Five have been in US prisons for more than 10 years. Around June 15 the Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision on whether or not they will hear the appeal of the Five. The Clinton administration arrested them. The Bush administration continued the awful, mindless, crimeless persecution for eight more years. But now comes the Changeman administration. Hooray! Oh, in late May, the Changeman administration filed a brief urging the Court to deny the Five a hearing, and on June 2, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an Organization of American States meeting: “I want to emphasize the United States under President Obama is taking a completely new approach to our policy toward Cuba.”⁸

Another opportunity for Changeman to come to the rescue also involves Cuba — closing the Guantanamo prison. But our hero is once again displaying a woeful lack of political courage and imagination. If there’s good evidence that certain detainees are a danger to anyone, then try them in US civilian courts with full rights, a decent defense team, and excluding secret evidence and coerced confessions. If they’re found guilty — and with an American jury sitting in judgment of “terrorists”, this, in almost all cases, would be the verdict — then imprison them in one of America’s maximum security prisons, which already houses about 355 men labeled as “terrorists.”⁹ The new ones will not be any more of a danger in prison than the ones already there.

However, if they’re found innocent, then declare them free men. It would be much easier then to find a country to accept them, including the United States. Until now, the world has been told repeatedly by Washington that these men are “the worst of the worst.” Small wonder that no country or community wants them near. But if they’ve been tried and acquitted, this situation should change markedly.

So Mr. Obama, we’re waiting for you to step into a phone booth.

It’s part of America’s ideology to pretend that it doesn’t have any ideology.

Oh, a woman nominated to be a Supreme Court justice. A woman whose parents are from Puerto Rico. A Latina! A Latina Supreme Court justice! Oh, hooray for America!

Who cares? Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court justice. He’s black. He’s as hopelessly reactionary as they come. No one should give a damn that Sonia Sotomayor is a woman with a Latin American background. All that counts is her politics. Her ideology. Her positions on important social and political issues. Yes, I know, we’re talking about the Law, the Majesty of the Law, judges who are scholars, impartial scholars, who study the fine points and the history of a law, experts on the Constitution of the United States, not swayed by today’s partisan squabbles but take the long view, looking at precedent, considering what precedent may be set for the future.

Don’t believe it. That may be true in the infrequent Supreme Court case where no ideological question at all is raised. Otherwise the judges are all biased human beings, appointed by a biased president, confirmed by biased members of the Senate.

Patrick Martin recently observed on the World Socialist Web Site: “For the past 12 years … under two Democratic presidents and one Republican, the post of US Secretary of State has been occupied by, in succession, a white woman, a black man, a black woman, and a white woman.”¹⁰ And they all loved the empire. When the empire called for it, they bombed, invaded, and killed; they overthrew, occupied, tortured, and lied; and swore allegiance to Israel and the corporations.

And now we have a black president. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Stokely Carmichael he’s not. His policies and his appointments have all fallen in that area that runs from ever so slightly to the left of center to clear conservative and imperialist on the right. He’s more loath to being identified as, or collaborating with, progressives than with right-wingers. Team Obama sees the left as an eccentric old aunt who keeps showing up at family functions, making everyone uncomfortable and wishing she’d just go away.

America, and the world, have to grow up. Forget color. Forget ethnicity. Forget gender. Forget sexual orientation. Forget even the class the person comes from. Look at the class they serve. And understand that the person wouldn’t be in the position they are, or be nominated for the position, if there was any serious question about their loyalty to the capitalist ethic or American world domination.

It also matters not whether the president is comically inarticulate or whether he speaks in complete grammatical sentences. Keep your eye on the policies.

Obama

To the numerous fans of Barack Obama, on the left, in the middle, on the right, and to the apolitical Obamaniacs, my advice is to read Being There by Jerzy Kosinski, or see the film version of the same name starring Peter Sellers.

Also read The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen.

“Men go mad in herds, but only come to their senses one by one.” — Charles Mackay, 19th century Scottish journalist

1. Washington Post, May 26, 2009 book review
2. Washington Post, May 15, 2009
3. Associated Press, December 12, 2006
4. Associated Press, June 2, 2009
5. ”Does Google Censor Cuba?“
6. White House Press Office, April 19, 2009
7. ”Cuban Political Prisoners … in the United States“
8. Washington Post, June 3, 2009
9. ”There Are Already 355 Terrorists in American Prisons,” Slate Magazine, May 29, 2009
10. ”The fundamental social division is class, not race or gender,” World Socialist Web Site, May 28, 2009

While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

– Eugene V. Debs¹

Two hundred forty souls reside now inside the American prison at Guantanamo. Most were kidnapped and taken there by U.S. government employees. None has been charged with any crime. None has enjoyed anything resembling due process of law. Some of these 240 men were boys when they arrived – four, five, six or seven years ago. Most of them have been tortured by “trained professionals,” trained and paid by the U.S. government, by us, you and me.

These prisoners sit – abused and untried – in defiance of many rules and values on which American society prides itself. Our Constitution celebrates and protects the rights of individuals. Millions have fought and died in the past two centuries or so to preserve those precious values. But as long as the Guantanamo prisoners are denied the rights and protections enshrined in our Constitution, America is not and cannot be a free society. As Debs knew, we cannot predicate our own freedom on the oppression of others, whoever they may be. That is not true liberty.

The former vice president, Dick Cheney, argues that without the ability to kidnap people at will, to torture them without restraint and to jail them indefinitely, our country will be at greater risk of terrorist attack. He is wrong about that, as even he must know. His daughter has said that Cheney is now speaking out – after hiding out during much of his tenure in office – because he is afraid he may be prosecuted for war crimes. Cheney should be, both afraid and prosecuted. No one knows better than he does, after his many decades in power in Washington, how far outside the laws and values of our country his policies deviated.

As president, George W. Bush allowed these abuses of American values. But it was the bullyboys he set up in power – Cheney and Rumsfeld and their legal hired guns – who pushed far beyond the limits of law and decency. They did so out of fear. Bullies are cowards who hide their fears with bluster and meanness. Cheney and Rumsfeld, full of bluster, talked tough while quaking in their boots. Remember when Cheney threw out a baseball at a major league game wearing a bullet-proof vest? Who was he afraid of? Better to ask, of whom is he not afraid?

Tough-guy, sadistic cowards are familiar characters in our history and our culture. They represent one part – shameful but all too real – of human nature. It is easy in times of stress and uncertainty to give way to their shameful impulses. But acting out of fear – as bullies do – is no way to live or to run a country. Better to heed the words of the brave men, like Debs, who had the courage to go to jail for his beliefs. Or the real warriors who fight for our country, the top generals who have testified that America will be safer with Guantanamo closed and torture stopped once and for all.

In the anger, fear and panic that followed the attacks on the United States in September 2001, we allowed these bullies to command the vacuum of grief and disbelief with their long-mulled plans for U.S. military supremacy in the Middle East. They told whatever lies they thought would procure backing from the U.S. Congress and the United Nations. They ran roughshod over American values, in the name of upholding them. It is time to disavow these violations and clean up the mess they left to us. Of what are we afraid?

We voted for Barack Obama to break with this lawless regime and restore the values our Constitution honors. Mr. President, you must hold firm to your commitment to close Guantanamo. There is no prisoner there so “dangerous for America” that he does not deserve the due process of law that our society holds dear. If we cannot offer these protections, even to our avowed enemies, then there is little to choose between their values and our own. You have already articulated these beliefs. Please do not be swayed by the menacing cowardice of Cheney and his ilk, or the NIMBY legislators of your own party who would rather pander to their poll standings than do the right thing, which is to bring Guantanamo prisoners into our own prison system and try them, or to let them go. We must not be hostage to our own paranoia, our own weakest nature.

We voted for you, Mr. President, because you promised to act out of conscience, not fear. We are trusting you to abjure the brutal, fearful policies of the recent past, and restore the Constitutional values which made our country great. In you reside our hopes for the American promise that brought you to this office, that you may restore our faith in our own destiny, and the faith of our brothers and sisters around the world.

1. Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), American labor leader and five-time presidential candidate, was the only person to run for the presidency while in prison.

President Obama inherited the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp as just one among the many follies of the Bush Administration. Not only is “Gitmo” terrible for Public Relations, it is also illegal according to international law and symbolic of the failure of the Bush Administration’s policies as a whole. Indeed, although this prison supposedly holds what former VP Dick Cheney refers to as “really bad men,” the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden are still unknown and America’s farcical “War on Terror” has only succeeded in creating more terrorists. That propagandistic argument that is used to justify torture is void for this reason too, for even if torturing one person could help save the lives of many people, how useful is that when you are simultaneously enraging thousands more into becoming your enemy?

Even though the Bush Administration has been added to the pages of America’s dark past of foreign policy, Obama’s failure to gain leverage on his celebrated move to begin the process of shutting down the illegal detention centre continues to baffle even his most ardent supporters. Besides facing stark opposition from Republicans, even his fellow Senate Democrats have resisted his attempts.

It has been reported that prisoners were hopeful when news spread about Obama’s move to shut down the facility, not because they believed that they were going to be freed entirely from prison walls, but because they were going to be moved to a different prison which was infinitely better than being where they were. Some counter that it doesn’t matter whether Gitmo is closed since the inhabitants will just be moved to another prison, but it matters to the prisoners. It matters if these men are given a fair trial within a reasonable amount of time. Their treatment must also be in line with the Geneva Convention and military justice law.

We have all seen reports on the horrors of Gitmo. In addition to articles, films and documentaries about events in Abu Ghraib and Bagram, so too have images and testimonies surfaced about America’s dungeon on Cuban land. But when pictures of naked Middle Eastern men hanging upside down surface, many either look away or shake their heads disapprovingly. Regardless of which group we may fall into, the end result is the same in both cases – people move on.

Canadian citizen Omar Khadr was apprehended by US forces when he was 15 years old. He was initially taken to Bagram, but has been in Guantánamo Bay since 2002. He is now 22 year old. Culpability and responsibility is not only limited to America. Canadians have yet to convince Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper to bring home child soldier Omar Khadr, who has been detained in both Bagram and Gitmo since he was 15 years old. Harper remains immobile (besides moves to actually appeal the decision) even despite Federal Judge James O’Reilly’s 43-page report urging him to demand that the US return Khadr to Canada:

The ongoing refusal of Canada to request Mr. Khadr’s repatriation to Canada offends a principle of fundamental justice and violates Mr. Khadr’s rights.

In response most Canadians have also looked away or shaken their heads disapprovingly. They have moved on as well.

One of Jeremy Scahill’s recent investigative reports exposes Gitmo’s “Immediate Reaction Force” or what the prisoners and their lawyers call the “Extreme Repression Force.” Scahill was also recently interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now where he describes some of the techniques these men use to punish misbehaving prisoners. (Note that misbehaviour includes having 2 styrofoam cups in your cell instead of just 1):

They come in with their Darth Vader outfits, and they literally gang-beat prisoners. There are five men, generally, that are sent in. Each of them is assigned to one body part of the prisoner: the head, the left arm, the right arm, the left leg, the right leg. They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner, sometimes leaving them hogtied for hours on end. They douse them with chemical agents. They have put their heads in toilets and flushed the toilets repeatedly. They have urinated on the heads of prisoners. They’ve squeezed their testicles in the course of restraining them. They’ve taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner.

These horrifying events continue to occur while some people continue to defend them. In the words of Dick Cheney:

Guantanamo is a great facility. It’s very well run. These people are very well treated. It’s open to inspection by the International Red Cross and the press and so forth. It’s a good facility, it’s an important program, and we ought to continue it.

And just last month Miss Universe Dayana Mendoza had a great time during her guided tour of the facility, describing it as a:

…a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful.

Scahill did another piece called “Obama’s Iraq: The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In Oscar Wilde’s story Dorian Gray is a man who stays young and beautiful on the outside while a portrait of him ages and recedes into the increasingly repulsive image of what he is really like on the inside. Scahill asserts that the reality of Obama’s inheritance of the White House’s picture can be seen if we look at the tragic state of Iraq, and this also includes Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Gharib and much more. Within those cell walls located in various different countries, men, women, children and teenagers are tortured or force fed because they are willingly trying to starve themselves to death. They may be “bad people,” but what do we make of their American tormentors?

Wilde’s story ends when Gray finally faces the portrait which he had kept hidden away for years from everyone including himself. When he finally lays eyes on it he dies and the portrait is restored to its original image. Gitmo is one among many elements of the notoriety of the American empire’s true image. Obama began taking the first steps towards facing this image, but how far will he go and can he follow through? Keep in mind that even though Dorian died, he took his ugliness with him, while the original state of the portrait remained, immortalizing him at his best.

Joe Biden prophesied that Obama would be faced with an important test early on in his presidency. Many speculated that this test might show itself in the prospect of a new war or a terror attack, but facing America’s true image is Obama’s real test and the most difficult task that he will ever face or choose to shy away from.

Obama’s presidential campaign was full of promises of change and hope, to which much of the world including many elements of the Left willingly embraced, but now the slightest hint of optimism regarding his decisions are promptly shut down by an increasing number of people, often with bitter contempt. But as Howard Zinn notes, if Obama doesn’t follow through with his promises or fails to listen, then it is up to the American people to force him to:

That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons…” It’s time to put aside Samuel Huntington’s self-serving analysis and act accordingly – we are all part of the same civilization.

[E]ducation, a linchpin in the climb to the top, is a function of wealth, not the other way around.
– Christopher Robbins

On 5 November 2003, 107 mainly Black students arriving in the early morning at Goose Creek High School in Stratford, South Carolina were in for a surprise. Seventeen police officers with guns in hand and an unleashed search-and-sniff dog descended upon the students The officers slammed and locked doors, and — aided by school personnel — blocked the hallways. The officers forced students to the ground, cuffed others, “and performed dubious search and seizure for 40 minutes.” Nothing was found — “not even cigarettes.” A school spokesperson said it was just “coincidence” that later arriving mainly White students watched the events.

This scene described in Christopher Robbins’s book, Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling, exemplifies the policy of zero tolerance that pervades much of American public schooling.

Eastern Michigan University professor Robbins tells the reader that zero tolerance grew out of Navy punishment of substance abuse by its members. In public schools it punishes violent and non-violent behaviors similarly. The professor points out that zero tolerance seeks to weed out and publicly punish trouble-making students and “instill fear in the rest of the group while maintaining a fragile institutional consensus by hiding the social and structural conditions of the behavior.”

Robbins argues that zero tolerance scathes all youth both academically and socially. But the obvious targets are non-White youth. One way zero tolerance does this, writes Robbins, is “shift[ing] the concerns from structural issues to those of behaviors allegedly endemic to poor, urban African American and Latino youth, legitimating the general loss of educational opportunity that results from iniquitous funding schemes.”

Racism, charges Robbins, undergirds zero tolerance, which creates a link between public schools and the juvenile and criminal justice system. Although Black youth represent a significantly higher proportion of the incarcerated population, statistics indicate that they do not account for a significantly higher rate of reported violence.

Robbins states that zero tolerance ignores the conditions that plague many youth, such as poverty. This is not surprising since right-wing ideologies underlie zero tolerance: neoliberalism with its appeal to the market and neoconservatism with its appeal to patriotism and militarism.

Writes Robbins,

Zero tolerance is not simply the effect of possibly ignorant adults who misunderstand the data on youth violence; it is not simply the social policy of ill-spirited adults who carelessly toe the line of pejorative media representations of youth; it is not simply another devastating practice of top-down corporate models of school governance. When democracy and the threat of neoliberalism—the authority of the economic and its cultural politics—are used in analyzing zero tolerance, the policy is seen as all of these things, together, as a symptom of the whole way of life in the United States at this point in history.

Eliminating violence from schools is, purportedly, a zero tolerance objective. However, Robbins questions what is violence. He cites Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire who held that violence, at its core, was the prevention of a person or group’s learning experience and hindrance of social interaction: a denial of humanity. Zero tolerance is violence charges Robbins because it dehumanizes the Other.

Robbins also delineates two curricula at play in zero tolerance: the hidden curriculum and the not-so-hidden curriculum. Educator Henry Giroux defined the hidden curriculum as implicit codes of conduct understood by students through the rules of the structure of education and its system. Writes Robbins, “In its most extreme forms, the hidden curriculum works as a push-out mechanism for unwanted students.”

The not-so-hidden curriculum operates to suspend or eliminate citizenship, and it threatens the destruction of the preconditions for all students to learn.

To effect this change a shift has taken place emphasizing the hiring of security officers in schools, the purchase of invasive monitoring devices, and implementation of invasive procedures — such as locker and body searches.

The upshot, says Robbins, is “that schools have become more effective at eliminating the prospects of citizenship rather than enhancing the conditions fundamental to the construction and process of democratization.”

Schools have also undergone a militarization through such programs as the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and the Troops-to-Teachers. Poor schools, in particular, are targeted by military recruiters.

Another concept that Robbins challenges is that of color blindness, that inequality among races can exist in the absence of racism. Through such postulation, color blindness neglects the conditions that led to race-based inequalities. It ignores slavery, loss of language and culture, crimes inflicted on people of color, ghettoization, incarceration, etc. Robbins holds that “color blindness attempts to erase, from public discourse and decision-making, the social relationships and economic conditions that make individual acts of racism possible in the first place.”

Neoconservatism and neoliberalism lead to increasing militarization, incarceration, widening income and wealth disparity. For neoliberalism, “zero tolerance is a primary weapon in the low-intensity warfare of social exclusion inflicted on students and youth of color.” Robbins connects zero tolerance to a democratic deficiency, social isolation, and even to the War of Terror.

Robbins calls for people to exert their democratic rights, a reprioritization of public funding. He also calls for “hope, a critical, educated hope, must be the guiding force and binding element between the related projects of reconstituting the democratic legacy of public schooling and the promise of a democratic future.”

Youth represent the future. Zero tolerance, however, calls to mind George Orwell’s dystopic future of “a boot stomping on a human face forever.” Just as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four warned of an ugly future, Robbins’s Expelling Hope warns that zero tolerance is here now.

Robbins appeals to the reader’s intelligence. An important and informative book, Expelling Hope is backed by plentiful statistics and references to relevant literature. Moreover, Expelling Hope has an important message; it calls upon conscience: to struggle for all members of society because we all lose when any one among us is harmed.

Senator Jim Webb of Virginia looks at these numbers and in a speech on the Senate floor wondered out loud: “Either we have the most evil people on Earth living in the United States, or we are doing something dramatically wrong.” He has introduced a bill, which already has 19 co-sponsors including Republicans and Democrats (including the top three Republicans on the Judiciary Committee), that will answer that question. It sets up a national commission, the National Criminal Justice Commission, which will look at ways to reduce the prison population including rethinking drug policy. The chairman will be appointed by President Barack Obama who reportedly has called Webb twice to commend this effort.

When Webb ran for the U.S. senate he raised the need for criminal justice reform during the campaign. Many told him it was a third rail of politics that would make his already improbable election impossible. But, Webb surprised the country and turned red state Virginia blue. At a meeting this week in Washington, DC attended by 70 advocates for criminal justice and drug policy reform his staff told us that this issue is a “passion for Senator Webb” that is of “deep importance” and that he has been concerned about “for decades.” Webb’s goal, they told us, was to see this bill “enacted this year.”

Webb sees the hypocrisy of U.S. drug laws. He notes that more than half of Americans aged 12 and over have used an illegal drug and wonders “In talking of legality and illegality, what does that do to the fiber of our society?” He goes on to note that “I saw more drug use at Georgetown Law School than anywhere else I’ve been. A lot of those people went on to be judges.”

Indeed, the last three U.S. presidents have a history of drug use – Clinton admitted putting a marijuana joint to his lips, but to the nation’s snickering claimed he did not inhale; Bush reportedly was a cocaine user during his alcohol abuse days but refused to discuss it; and now Barack Obama has acknowledged his past use of marijuana and cocaine. Three presidents who join most of America in having used an illegal drug but who all escaped the clutches of the drug war. Would America have wanted each imprisoned? Their lives ruined?

And, Senator Webb is well aware of the racially disproportionate impact of the drug laws. This March 26th, in a Senate speech when he introduced his bill he emphasized: “African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all elements in our society about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison.” What does that do to the African American family? What does it do to employment, income and wealth creation? Is it possible to become a post-racial society without facing the issue of racial unfairness in the justice system?

Webb’s commission would not tinker at the edges of the drug war, a quagmire America has been trapped in since President Nixon declared it, he is seeking fundamental paradigm shifting change, not incremental change. As Webb says “America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace” and “we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail.”

And, Webb is not shy about discussing what happens in America’s prisons. Webb said in his Senate speech: “We have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve.” Indeed, 60,500 prison inmates reported sexual assaults and that are estimated to under-reported by approximately ten fold.

He talks about “warehousing” the mentally ill, 350,000 people incarcerated with mental illness with no professional treatment, and notes there are four times as many mentally ill people in prison than in mental hospitals. The Marion Correctional Treatment Center reports the cost of housing each mentally ill inmate at $77,561.

Many Americans might remember that some of the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal had worked in the U.S. prison system before joining the military. At the meeting with Webb staffers some families of prisoners described how they are charged $20 for a $15 telephone call with their loved one because the prison makes a commission on the calls. Another woman from Louisiana described how her son was sexually assaulted in prison by a guard and then put in solitary confinement until he agreed to withdraw the charges. Every day in America prisoners are being abused and with 2.4 million behind bars there are millions of family members hearing the stories and telling their friends. The American prison scandal is more widely understood than politicians and prison guards realize.

For too long Americans have thought nothing can be done about ending the drug war – even though most see its obvious failure. We are trained to believe that things can’t change. But this has always been the case: Slavery can’t end, women can’t vote, child labor is essential, the forty hour work week is unrealistic, gays can’t marry, Jim Crow will always be the law, alcohol prohibition can’t end. History is proof that even the most seemingly unchangeable can in fact change radically. The drug war’s failure is hard to dispute with a straight face it is so evident, and finally there seems to be a senator who takes drugs seriously.

But, Senator Webb has a long way to go and he will not get there without a lot of people speaking up and demanding change. Senator Webb needs individuals and organizations to write his office and express support. He needs people to write their elected officials and tell them to support Webb’s commission. We need to bring in mainstream American organizations like churches, temples and mosques, civic clubs, fraternities and sororities, business clubs … the fact is all of us are adversely affected by the expensive horror of mass incarceration. Indeed, the basic American ideal of being the “land of the free” is undermined by over-incarceration in America’s abusive prisons.

Now is the time. The economic collapse is forcing city, state and federal governments to look at their expenditures. The prison budget deserves special focus. States spend $44 billion annually on prisons. In almost all states after education and health care, prisons are the biggest budget line item. Forty states have cut vital services during this economic collapse.

If the U.S. put in place a sensible prison policy – where those who we fear are the only ones locked up, not the addicted, the drug users, the mentally ill or non-violent – the prison population would be closer to 500,000 people rather than 2.4 million. Immediately states would see a significant fiscal savings at a time when they are desperate for reducing expenditures. Across the country reforms are being seen at the state level, a boost from a national commission could create the momentum needed for the paradigm shift that is needed.

Senator Webb may have a president in the White House who will take reform of prison and drug policy seriously. During the presidential campaign President Obama told Rolling Stone:

Anybody who sees the devastating impact of the drug trade in the inner cities, or the methamphetamine trade in rural communities, knows that this is a huge problem. I believe in shifting the paradigm, shifting the model, so that we focus more on a public-health approach. I can say this as an ex-smoker: We’ve made enormous progress in making smoking socially unacceptable. You think about auto safety and the huge success we’ve had in getting people to fasten their seat belts.

The point is that if we’re putting more money into education, into treatment, into prevention and reducing the demand side, then the ways that we operate on the criminal side can shift. I would start with nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. The notion that we are imposing felonies on them or sending them to prison, where they are getting advanced degrees in criminality, instead of thinking about ways like drug courts that can get them back on track in their lives — it’s expensive, it’s counterproductive, and it doesn’t make sense.

Obama was right – it just doesn’t make sense. Now is the time for all who see these realities to get educated, organized and active.

For more information: Drug War Facts

And, to take action.

Although it is difficult to separate the RAF’s theory from their actions–actions which included murder–if one does so they find an application of left theory that perceived the anti-imperialist resistance in the advanced industrial nations (First World, if you will) as just another part of the worldwide anti-imperialist movement. It was this conclusion that the RAF used to rationalize their attacks on US military installations in 1972 during their anti-imperialist offensive.. They did not believe the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to be in a revolutionary situation, but justified their attacks via the argument that the US and other imperial forces (German and British) should be attacked wherever they were, not just in Vietnam or another country where they were engaged in overt warfare. This approach echoed the slogan popularized by the Weatherman organization in the US-Bring the War Home.

I lived in Frankfurt am Main, Germany during the period described in this book. I attended protests against the Vietnam War, in support of the burgeoning squatters movement (and against property speculation) in Frankfurt, against the Shah of Iran, in support of Gastarbeiter rights and against the repressive regimes in Turkey and Greece. I also attended concerts and street festivals where the German counterculture mingled flamboyantly with the US servicemen and adolescents that abounded in the country then. When the IG Farben building and Officer’s Club in Frankfurt am Main were attacked by the RAF, a serious security effort became part of our daily lives. School buses taking us to the American High School in Frankfurt were boarded by military police who checked our bags while other GIs used long-handled mirrors to check underneath the buses for explosive devices. German police and military set up shop at airports and train stations, holding automatic weapons. Autobahn exits were the site of roadblocks. Wanted posters featuring the faces of the RAF members appeared everywhere. The Goethe University in Frankfurt came under increased police surveillance, especially after the playing of a tape-recorded message from RAF member Ulrike Meinhof at a national conference there. A protest held against the US mining of northern Vietnamese harbors and intensified bombing of the Vietnamese people was patrolled by police armed with automatic weapons. Nonetheless, many of the protesters chanted “Für den Sieg des VietCong, Bomben auf das Pentagon!” (For the victory of the NLF, bomb the Pentagon). The following day, the Pentagon was bombed by the Weather Underground.

Recently, PM Press in California published the book The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles For The People. This voluminous work includes virtually all of the communiques and theoretical pamphlets published by the RAF from 1970 to 1977. This period is considered the first period of the RAF–an organization that saw its original leadership imprisoned after the aforementioned bombing offensive against US military installations in Germany. These members were followed by another set of individuals drawn to the RAF mostly through support organizations that developed to protest the conditions of the RAF’s imprisonment and their eventual deaths that many still believe were state-sanctioned murders. Over the next two decades , hundreds of others would join the organization to replace those imprisoned and killed. Besides the text written by the RAF, the editors have written an accompanying text that provides a take on the history of post World War Two West Germany that has been mostly unavailable to English readers.

The RAF was an intensely sectarian organization. They saw most of the rest of the German Left as revisionist or opportunist, unwilling to make the commitment armed struggle required. Besides invalidating the gains won by the autonomist squatters’ movement and other independent groupings, this analysis ignored the fact that other approaches might have been more effective in the long term. By positioning itself to the left of all other leftist groups in Germany, the RAF insured its limited effectiveness. Once the State was able to capture its primary membership and literally isolate them in prisons, the RAF’s purpose moved away from challenging the imperialists to one of staying alive inside a draconian and psychologically debilitating prison environment.

Indeed, as this book clearly demarcates, the bulk of the work of the RAF in the 1970s centered around the nature of their existence in prison. In what would become a harbinger of the future we live in, the German prison authority and its departmental ally the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) developed an architecture and series of mechanisms designed to destroy the minds of the RAF prisoners. Isolation cells painted completely in white where the neon light never went off. No contact with any human for months at a time. The use of informers and ultimately a trial held in a specially designed prison courthouse that took place without the defendants or their attorneys. In addition, laws were passed that criminalized not only the act taken by the attorneys to defend their clients but also the acts of any individuals who opposed the actions taken by the State against the RAF prisoners. Of course, this enabled the RAF to point out the unity of purpose between the right wing CDU-CSU West German government and the SPD (with obvious comparisons to the role played by the German Social Democrats after World War I when they used the right-wing militia known as the Freikorps to kill members of the revolutionary Spartacists). The special laws enacted against the RAF and its supporters contained many elements of laws now in existence in the US, realized most fully in the Patriot Act.

While the RAF was certainly successful in exposing the fundamental authoritarianism of the modern capitalist state through their hunger strikes and other actions, they did nothing towards rebuilding the anti-imperialist movement that the 1972 actions were conceived in. This created a situation where their developing analysis of imperialism and the struggle against it became essentially moribund. In other words, the repression by the German government and its allies was successful.

The editors of this work, J. Smith and André Moncourt, have created an intelligently political work that honestly discusses the politics of the Red Army Fraktion during its early years. Their commentary explains the theoretical writings of the RAF from a left perspective and puts their politics and actions in the context of the situation present in Germany and the world at the time. It is an extended work that is worth the commitment required to read and digest it. More than a historical document, The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles For The People provides us with the ability to comprehend the phenomenon that was the RAF in ways not possible thirty years ago.

Diana Block’s recently published book Arm the Spirit: A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back is the personal tale of one such supporter. A white North American women involved in the feminist, lesbian and gay rights and new left movements in the United States of the 1970s primarily as a member of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC), Ms. Block joined forces with other white North Americans to support the endeavors of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN ) in its endeavor to free Puerto Rico. Her support resulted in several years underground as the result of her partner’s entrapment in an FBI sting operation. The tale she tells in these pages is the story of those years and the decisions and circumstances that brought her to them. It is also the story of her family’s lives underground. For those who were involved in or at least paid attention to the left in the 1970s and 1980s there will be descriptions of moments that jog the memory. For those that didn’t, this will open their eyes to the reality that existed within Ronald Reagan’s morning in America.

This is a very political book. It is also a very personal book. It is about lives determined as much by one’s political beliefs as they are by personal emotions and about the juncture between the two. It is about very political people in an apolitical time. Many of those who had been involved in the antiwar and antiracist moments of the 1960s and 1970s were moving their lives into more conventional arenas that involved making money and buying things. Others, meanwhile, had drifted deeper into the life of the street and poverty, leaving their political personas behind in the daily struggle to survive. Meanwhile, the men and women involved in leftist groups like Prairie Fire Organizing Committee were existing on the fringes of US society trying to figure out how to maintain a political relevance. It may have been that existence on the outside that colored the decisions they made: going underground when they maybe should have involved themselves in a more public type of organizing; adopting immovable positions that alienated them from other groups with similar agendas, to name a couple such decisions.

Block’s memories of that period are consistently evocative and occasionally emotionally wrenching, compelling the reader to stay glued to the text. Her reflections on the thoughts about how the decisions made by her and her partner Claude Marks affected the lives of their children and families reveal caring and thoughtful parents whose politics are motivated by a love as deep as the love they have for those closest to them. They also provide an insight into the difficulties involved in living a life of resistance inside the belly of the imperial beast that is the United States. To put it succinctly, it is safe to say that Arm the Spirit is about the multitude of forms love takes: familial, romantic, comradely and revolutionary. It is also about the difficulties we face trying to meet the ideals these loves represent, especially when they come into conflict with one another.

Besides the aforementioned political and emotional realities revealed in this book, there are the descriptions of daily life on the run. Periods of normalcy when you and your family are as normal as the neighbors next door interrupted by days and weeks of uncertainty tinged with fear after your picture makes the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted. Joy and tears as you wrestle with how much information you should share with your maturing child.

Genuine friendships made under assumed names that must be broken when the presence of the law gets too near. The frustrations felt because your political self can not speak out when the Empire attacks for fear you will be recognized and taken away in chains. The decision to finally give up your underground status and face the courts. The period of adjustment to once again using your family name and living as the person you couldn’t be while underground.

Politically, Block’s experiences as a revolutionary and a woman lead her to a conclusion perhaps best expressed by the writer and revolutionary Margaret Randall: that the inability of almost all twentieth-century revolutionary movements to develop a feminist agenda contributed to their failure to evolve new and equitable forms of power sharing that might have helped keep them alive. The period of adjustment mentioned in the previous paragraph provokes some other interesting observations by Block. Foremost among them are her observations regarding the changes in the progressive movement in the 1970s and the movement today, especially her remarks that much of the work formerly done by organizations with no financial portfolio now being done by what she calls the nonprofit industrial complex.

The shortcomings of this movement are even more apparent today as funding for these nonprofits dries up in the wake of the economic shocks throughout the capitalist world. This factor doesn’t even touch the political timidity of many of today’s organizations–a timidity certainly influenced by their need to gather money from beneficiaries of the very system whose excesses and wrongs they hope to remedy.

One other insightful observation is that, despite the multitude of single issue movements and organizations, many of the groups and individuals involved have no underlying philosophy to bind these issues together and present a systemic analysis that would propel the struggle for economic and social justice forward. Although Block does not examine this much further, it is clear that she sees the need to develop and provide that analysis as part of the role of her and others involved in the struggles of the latter half of the twentieth century. After all, the fundamentals of that analysis are the same as those the left has always referred to. The economic crisis of capitalism and the wars of Washington make that clear.

Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan sent children to jail for offenses so trivial that some of them weren’t even crimes. A 15-year-old called Hillary Transue got three months for creating a spoof web page ridiculing her school’s assistant principal. Mr. Ciavarella sent Shane Bly, then 13, to boot camp for trespassing in a vacant building. He gave 14- year-old, Jamie Quinn, 11 months in prison for slapping a friend during an argument, after the friend slapped her. The judges were paid $2.6 million by companies belonging to the Mid Atlantic Youth Services Corp for helping to fill its jails.¹ This is what happens when public services are run for profit.

It’s an extreme example, but it hints at the wider consequences of the trade in human lives created by private prisons. In the US and the UK they have a powerful incentive to ensure that the number of prisoners keeps rising.

The United States is more corrupt than the UK, but it is also more transparent. There the lobbyists demanding and receiving changes to judicial policy might be exposed, and corrupt officials identified and prosecuted. The UK, with a strong tradition of official secrecy and a weak tradition of scrutiny and investigative journalism, has no such safeguards.

The corrupt judges were paid by the private prisons not only to increase the number of child convicts but also to shut down a competing prison run by the public sector. Taking bribes to bang up kids might be novel; shutting public facilities to help private companies happens — on both sides of the water — all the time.

The Wall Street Journal has shown how, as a result of lobbying by the operators, private jails in Mississippi and California are being paid for non-existent prisoners.² The prison corporations have been guaranteed a certain number of inmates. If the courts fail to produce enough convicts, they get their money anyway. This outrages taxpayers in both states, which have cut essential public services to raise these funds. But there is a simple means of resolving this problem: you replace ghost inmates with real ones. As the Journal, seldom associated with raging anti-capitalism, observes, “prison expansion [has] spawned a new set of vested interests with stakes in keeping prisons full and in building more. . . . The result has been a financial and political bazaar, with convicts in stripes as the prize.”³

Even as crime declines, lawmakers are pressed by their sponsors to increase the rate of imprisonment. The US has, by a very long way, the world’s highest proportion of people behind bars: 756 prisoners per 100,000 people, or just over 1% of the adult population.⁴ Similarly wealthy countries have around one-tenth of this rate of imprisonment.

Like most of its really bad ideas, the last Conservative government imported private jails from the US. As Stephen Nathan, author of a forthcoming book about prison privatization in the UK, has shown, the notion was promoted by the Select Committee on Home Affairs, which in 1986 visited prisons run by the Corrections Corporation of America. When the corporation told them that private provision in the US improved prison standards and delivered good value for money, the committee members failed to check its claims. They recommended that the government should put the construction and management of prisons out to tender “as an experiment.”⁵

Encouraged by the committee’s report, the Corrections Corporation of America set up a consortium in Britain with two Conservative party donors, Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd and John Mowlem & Co, to promote privately financed prisons over here. The first privately-run prison in the UK, Wolds, was opened by the Danish security company Group 4 in 1992. In 1993, before it had had a chance to evaluate this experiment, the government announced that all new prisons would be built and run by private companies.

The Labour party, then in opposition, was outraged. John Prescott promised that, “Labour will take back private prisons into public ownership — it is the only safe way forward.”⁶ Jack Straw stated that, “it is not appropriate for people to profit out of incarceration. This is surely one area where a free market certainly does not exist.” He too promised to “bring these prisons into proper public control and run them directly as public services.”⁷

But during his first seven weeks in office, Jack Straw renewed one private prison contract and launched two new ones. A year later he announced that all new prisons in England and Wales would be built and run by private companies, under the private finance initiative (PFI). Today the UK has a higher proportion of prisoners in private institutions than the US.⁸ This is the only country in Europe whose jails are run on this model.

So has prison privatization here influenced judicial policy? As we discovered during the recent lobbying scandal in the House of Lords, there’s no way of knowing. Unlike civilized nations, the UK has no register of lobbyists; we are not even entitled to know which lobbyists ministers have met.⁹ But there are some clues. The former home secretary, John Reid, previously in charge of prison provision, has become a consultant to the private prison operator G4S.¹⁰ The government is intending to commission a series of massive Titan jails under PFI. Most experts on prisons expect them to be disastrous, taking inmates further away from their families (which reduces the chances of rehabilitation) and creating vast warrens in which all the social diseases of imprisonment will fester. Only two groups want them built: ministers and the prison companies: they offer excellent opportunities to rack up profits. And the very nature of PFI, which commits the government to paying for services for 25 or 30 years whether or not they are still required creates a major incentive to ensure that prison numbers don’t fall. The beast must be fed.

And there’s another line of possible evidence. In the two countries whose economies most resemble the UK’s — Germany and France — the prison population has risen quite slowly. France has 96 inmates per 100,000 people, an increase of 14% since 1992. Germany has 89 prisoners per 100,000: 25% more than in 1992 but 9% less than in 2001. But the UK now locks up 151 out of every 100,000 inhabitants: 73% more than in 1992 and 20% more than in 2001. Yes our politicians have barely come down from the trees, yes we are still governed out of the offices of the Daily Mail, but it would be foolish to dismiss the likely influence of the private prison industry.

This revolting trade in human lives creates a permanent incentive to lock people up; not because prison works; not because it makes us safer, but because it makes money. Privatization appears to have locked this country into mass imprisonment.

1. Amy Goodman, “How Two Former PA Judges Got Millions in Kickbacks to Send Juveniles to Private Prisons,” Democracy Now!, 17th February 2009; “Bad judges: the lowest of the low,” The Economist, 26th February 2009; Stephanie Chen, “Pennsylvania rocked by ‘jailing kids for cash’ scandal,” CNN, February 24, 2009.
2. Bryan Gruley, “Prison Building Spree Creates Glut of Lockups,” Wall Street Journal, September 6, 2001; Joseph T. Hallinan, “Going Backwards,” Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2001.
3. Bryan Gruley, ibid.
4. The total prison population at the end of 2007 (see above) was 2,293,157. The most recent figure for the adult population I can find — 217.8 million — was produced by the US Census Bureau in 2004.
5. Stephen Nathan, 2003. Prison Privatization in the United Kingdom. Published in Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization & Human Rights. Clarity Press, Inc., Atlanta.
6. John Prescott, 1994, quoted by Stephen Nathan, ibid.
7. Jack Straw, 8th March 1995, quoted by Stephen Nathan, ibid.
8. 7.2% in the US, 11% in the UK.
9. The Committee on Standards in Public Life, cited by the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, 5th January 2009. Lobbying: Access and influence in Whitehall. Volume I, para 187.
10. ”G4S Appoints John Reid As Group Consultant,” Security Oracle, 18th December 2008.

In a column titled, “Perversion of Justice: Gulag America,” Rudy Amanda, an investigative journalist, states that “female incarceration rates jumped 64% from 1995 to 2006.” Stunning! This only makes one imagine the percentages of wrongful convictions within this population. My years of research with the wrongful conviction of The Scott Sisters, led to reviewing transcripts of their trial and has been a life-changing event for me, as well as, others.

In 1994, Jamie and Gladys Scott were wrongfully convicted in the state of Mississippi. A corrupt sheriff used coercion, threats, and harassment to convict the Scott Sisters of armed robbery. This case is an intriguing one, with transcripts stating that perhaps 9, 10, or 11 dollars was stolen. It’s important to note that no one was murdered or injured, in the alleged robbery. One of the state’s witnesses, a 14 year old, testified that he did not have an attorney present when signing a statement prepared by the sheriff; he also testified that he did not read the statement.

The prosecution argued that on the night of December 24, 1993, Gladys and Jamie Scott, along with two minors and one young adult male planned and conducted the armed robbery. The prosecution also argued that the sisters were the masterminds behind this robbery. These facts were argued and substantiated with conflicting witness testimony and continuous leading questions – all allowed by the Trial Court. On direct examination it became apparent that the alleged victims failed to link the Scott Sisters to the commission of the robbery.

Jamie and Gladys Scott have served 14 years of double-life sentences, thus far, for a robbery they did not commit. That’s Double Life Each! The Scott sisters, with no prior convictions before their sentencing, now wallow in the belly of the Prison Industrial Complex.

The emotional strain this burden has placed upon their family is immeasurable. Their children, grandchildren, and mother have been forced to wade in the waters of financial-hardship. Their father, though a strong man, passed away, following the illegal incarceration of his two beautiful daughters.

From The Diary of Jamie Scott

My name is Jamie Scott and I do understand there are many people out there that don’t understand a lot about prison and what someone goes through in a situation such as this. Please don’t get me wrong; IF you commit a crime, then you should be punished.

In the state of Mississippi, the crime chart is just crazy. I have met so many women here, whose husbands were beating the living mess out of them and these ladies had legal action against their husbands, but as soon as she tries to stop him from killing her and she takes his life, she comes to prison. But keep in mind: they still do not receive two life sentences. Men are here for brutal raping of children and women, but yet they don’t have double life.

When I entered prison at the tender age of 22, I felt like my world was coming apart and life was not worth living. There were no more secrets and I had to strip naked in front of everyone, including men, because they thought it was funny. I was made to spread my buttocks and the officer looked. If I had a gun, I would have ended my life right then. In October of 1994, I was placed in a 12 x 12 cell to be under solitary confinement. I was let out of solitary in April 1995 and went to a unit filled with 100 females.

One bad part about this entire situation is the women I have encountered. I met this woman who told me she was driving down the highway and her baby would not stop crying, so she stopped and threw her child over the bridge. Guess what, she left me here. She has gone home. So many have killed their own children, but none have received the amount of time my sister and I have received. I have never been one to judge someone and that is why so many come to me and share their thoughts. I must admit, sometimes I get so angry when it involves a child. I get angry with the Mississippi judicial system because here my sister and I sit with double life and this person took an innocent child’s life.

In the midst of all the hurt I have endured, nothing could prepare me for the times I went on funeral detail. My sister and I had to go to the funerals of our grandfather, grandmother, father and sister, who died on my birthday, shackled like dogs.

When I think of the word “strongest,” I think of my mother. She is 4 feet 9 inches tall, and has the strength of Job in the Bible. I know it is only God keeping her alive. She had to bury her long time friend and soul mate of 30 years, and then she buried her oldest daughter… Yet, at times, Gladys and I feel dead to her because we are not there. Our mother has raised our children and is now raising our grandchildren.

One thing I do not have is hate in my heart concerning anyone who played a roll in Gladys and me being here. After reading our transcript over and over, I have come to realize that the Patrick men were really trying to help us, but to also save themselves during trial. That is why they said they never wrote the statements and that the statements were written out for them. They were trying to tell the jury that these statements were written out before we were arrested. Then, they tried to tell them how they were threatened, but it did not work. I am not bitter or angry with them. If I were to see them now, I would hug them and tell them I love them. They were just young victims, as well. They got played by the system, just as we did.

For all that don’t know, slavery in Mississippi has changed names. It is still very much active and alive in Mississippi. Its’ new name is called, the LAW! So, if there is anyone out there that thinks this cannot happen to their child or family, think about Gladys and Jamie Scott. We were not criminals nor were we drug addicts. I worked everyday. I have a right to be bitter, angry, mad as hell at the United States of America, but I choose not to because I know a higher power and Gladys and I WILL walk the streets again.

For more on the case of Jamie and Gladys Scott, please visit:

Free the Scott Sisters

Free Jamie-Gladys petition

They are trying to silence the voices that criticize the [Egyptian] government’s performance and send a message by assaulting and kidnapping, to say that criticism will not be tolerated.

– Gamal Eid, executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information on the recent spate of blogger arrests in Egypt.

Philip Rizk wasn’t “unlucky” or at “the wrong place at the wrong time.” Instead, he found himself quite the deliberate target of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

On Feb. 6, the 26-year-old German-Egyptian blogger and filmmaker took part in a march with fellow activists belonging to the group “To Gaza,” an organization under the umbrella of the Gaza Popular Committee in Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Rizk and 14 others held the six-mile march in Qalyubiya governate, a rural area north of Cairo. Their purpose was to draw attention to, and raise awareness of, the terrible humanitarian situation in Gaza under the Israeli embargo and subsequent attack. They also protested Mubarak’s order to keep the vital Rafah border crossing with Gaza closed and demanded an immediate end to the blockade of the territory.

A graduate student at the American University of Cairo, Rizk had previously spent two years living in Gaza and made a documentary film of life there. He also ran the Tabula Gaza blog, where he was critical of both Egyptian and Israeli policies toward Palestinians.

On their way back to Cairo from Qalyubiya, all 15 activists were stopped and detained by Egyptian State Security officers. They were arrested and then released. Except Philip Rizk. He was taken out the back door of the police station and whisked away in an unmarked van.

Like so many others in Egypt who dare to speak out, Rizk simply disappeared.

An intense campaign by family, friends, colleagues and human rights groups ensued. A website and Facebook group set up in his name rallied support in calling for his immediate release. Five days later, Rizk was unceremoniously dropped off at his apartment. No criminal charges were ever filed.

Rizk told reporters he had been held in solitary confinement, blindfolded and handcuffed. During interrogation, he was alternately accused of being an Israeli spy and a gun-runner for Hamas and was subjected to psychological abuse, but not physically harmed. While in custody, his apartment was broken into and his computer, hard drives, digital and video cameras, film, phones, and documents confiscated. His blog was also taken down.

Rizk spent little time talking about himself though. He preferred the media’s attention be focused on the fate of other Egyptian bloggers imprisoned or who had simply disappeared, mentioning Diaa Eddin Gad in particular.

Gad is a 23-year-old blogger who also had taken part in a peaceful demonstration in support of Palestinians in Gaza, and ran the Sout Gadeb or An Angry Voice blog (in it, he described Mubarak as a “Zionist agent”). The same day Rizk was arrested in Qalyubiya, four security men jumped Gad outside his family’s apartment and arrested him. Today, his whereabouts are unknown and he has not been heard from since.

In addition, Egyptian military tribunals this month sentenced Ahmed Douma and Ahmed Kamal to one year in prison for “illegally” crossing into Gaza during the Israeli invasion and blogging from there.

As one might surmise, Egypt still operates under Emergency Law, which it has been under since 1981. For 27 years, these laws have afforded Mubarak and his State Security officers the ability to arrest and detain any citizen without warrant or charge for an indefinite period of time. They restrict both freedom of speech and assembly. Amnesty International estimates that there are approximately 18,000 political prisoners being held in Egypt under the provisions of Emergency Law.

If the Gaza war accomplished anything, it was to bring many longstanding Middle East realities to full light. These include the savage extent to which the Israeli government will go to crush resistance to occupation and Palestinian aspirations to form a state independent of their dictates; the successful fracture and dissolution of the Palestinian leadership; Mahmoud Abbas’ utter lack of credibility and integrity; the marked political divisions between the Arab states opposed to, and those that tacitly approved of (or were complicit in) the Israeli invasion of Gaza; and the complete failure of the Arab League as an effective institution.

Even more evident was the disconnect between rulers and the ruled. Specifically, the hypersensitivity of the Mubarak government to not just criticism of its policy keeping the Rafah border closed, but to any public expression of sympathy or support for Gaza.

While Israel has ended its war (for now), Mubarak’s is ongoing. As is true for all dictators, it is one constantly waged against the people.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is already notorious for a range of offenses, including keeping former Black Panthers Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, in solitary for over 36 years. Now a death penalty trial in St. Francisville, Louisiana has exposed widespread and systemic abuse at the prison. Even in the context of eight years of the Bush administration, the behavior documented at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola stands out both for its brutality and for the significant evidence that it was condoned and encouraged from the very top of the chain of command.

In a remarkable hearing that explored torture practices at Angola, twenty-five inmates testified last summer to facing overwhelming violence in the aftermath of an escape attempt at the prison nearly a decade ago. These twenty-five inmates — who were not involved in the escape attempt — testified to being kicked, punched, beaten with batons and with fists, stepped on, left naked in a freezing cell, and threatened that they would be killed. They were threatened by guards that they would be sexually assaulted with batons. They were forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. They were bloodied, had teeth knocked out, were beaten until they lost control of bodily functions, and beaten until they signed statements or confessions presented to them by prison officials. One inmate had a broken jaw, and another was placed in solitary confinement for eight years.

While prison officials deny the policy of abuse, the range of prisoners who gave statements, in addition to medical records and other evidence introduced at the trial, present a powerful argument that abuse is a standard policy at the prison. Several of the prisoners received $7,000 when the state agreed to settle, without admitting liability, two civil rights lawsuits filed by 13 inmates. The inmates will have to spend that money behind bars — more than 90% of Angola’s prisoners are expected to die behind its walls.

Systemic Violence

During the attempted escape at Angola, in which one guard was killed and two were taken hostage, a team of officers — including Angola warden Burl Cain — rushed in and began shooting, killing one inmate, Joel Durham, and wounding another, David Mathis.

The prison has no official guidelines for what should happen during escape attempts or other crises, a policy that seems designed to encourage the violent treatment documented in this case. Richard Stalder, at that time the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, was also at the prison at the time. Yet despite — or because of — the presence of the prison warden and head of corrections for the state, guards were given free hand to engage in violent retribution. Cain later told a reporter after the shooting that Angola’s policy was not to negotiate, saying, ”That’s a message all the inmates know. They just forgot it. And now they know it again.”

Five prisoners — including Mathis — were charged with murder, and currently are on trial, facing the death penalty — partially based on testimony from other inmates that was obtained through beatings and torture. Mathis is represented by civil rights attorneys Jim Boren (who also represented one of the Jena Six youths) and Rachel Connor, with assistance from Nola Investigates, an investigative firm in New Orleans that specializes in defense for capital cases.

The St. Francisville hearing was requested by Mathis’ defense counsel to demonstrate that, in the climate of violence and abuse, inmates were forced to sign statements through torture, and therefore those statements should be inadmissible. 20th Judicial District Judge George H. Ware Jr. ruled that the documented torture and abuse was not relevant. However, the behavior documented in the hearing not only raises strong doubts about the cases against the Angola Five, but it also shows that violence against inmates has become standard procedure at the prison.

The hearing shows a pattern of systemic abuse so open and regular, it defies the traditional excuse of bad apples. Inmate Doyle Billiot testified to being threatened with death by the guards, “What’s not to be afraid of? Got all these security guards coming around you everyday looking at you sideways, crazy and stuff. Don’t know what’s on their mind, especially when they threaten to kill you.” Another inmate, Robert Carley testified that a false confession was beaten out of him. “I was afraid,” he said. “I felt that if I didn’t go in there and tell them something, I would die.”

Inmate Kenneth “Geronimo” Edwards testified that the guards “beat us half to death.” He also testified that guards threatened to sexually assault him with a baton, saying, “that’s a big black . . . say you want it.” Later, Edwards says, the guards, “put me in my cell. They took all my clothes. Took my jumpsuit. Took all the sheets, everything out the cell, and put me in the cell buck-naked . . . It was cold in the cell. They opened the windows and turned the blowers on.” At least a dozen other inmates also testified to receiving the same beatings, assault, threats of sexual violence, and “freezing treatment.”

Some guards at the prison treated the abuse as a game. Inmate Brian Johns testified at the hearing that, “one of the guards was hitting us all in the head. Said he liked the sound of the drums — the drumming sound that — from hitting us in the head with the stick.”

Solitary Confinement

Two of Angola’s most famous residents, political prisoners Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, have become the primary example of another form of abuse common at Angola — the use of solitary confinement as punishment for political views. The two have now each spent more than 36 years in solitary, despite the fact that a judge recently overturned Woodfox’s conviction (prison authorities continue to hold Woodfox and have announced plans to retry him). Woodfox and Wallace — who together with former prisoner King Wilkerson are known as the Angola Three — have filed a civil suit against Angola, arguing that their confinement has violated both their 8th amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment and 4th amendment right to due process.

Recent statements by Angola warden Burl Cain makes clear that Woodfox and Wallace are being punished for their political views. At a recent deposition, attorneys for Woodfox asked Cain, “Lets just for the sake of argument assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent Miller.” Cain responded, “Okay. I would still keep him in (solitary) . . . I still know that 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. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them . . . He has to stay in a cell while he’s at Angola.”

In addition to Cain’s comments, Louisiana Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell has said the case against the Angola Three is personal to him. Statements like this indicate that this vigilante attitude not only pervades New Orleans’ criminal justice system, but that the problem comes from the very top.

The problem is not limited to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola — similar stories can be found in prisons across the US. But from the abandonment of prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison during Katrina to the case of the Jena Six, Louisiana’s criminal justice system, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, often seems to be functioning under plantation-style justice. Most recently, journalist A.C. Thompson, in an investigation of post-Katrina killings, found evidence that the New Orleans police department supported vigilante attacks against Black residents of New Orleans after Katrina.

Torture and abuse is illegal under both US law — including the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment — and international treaties that the US is signatory to, from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified in 1992). Despite the laws and treaties, US prison guards have rarely been held accountable to these standards.

Once we say that abuse or torture is ok against prisoners, the next step is for it to be used in the wider population. A recent petition for administrative remedies filed by Herman Wallace states, “If Guantanamo Bay has been a national embarrassment and symbol of the U.S. government’s relation to charges, trials and torture, then what is being done to the Angola 3 . . . is what we are to expect if we fail to act quickly . . . The government tries out it’s torture techniques on prisoners in the U.S. — just far enough to see how society will react. It doesn’t take long before they unleash their techniques on society as a whole.” If we don’t stand up against this abuse now, it will only spread.

Despite the hearings, civil suits, and other documentation, the guards who performed the acts documented in the hearing on torture at Angola remain unpunished, and the system that designed it remains in place. In fact, many of the guards have been promoted, and remain in supervisory capacity over the same inmates they were documented to have beaten mercilessly. Warden Burl Cain still oversees Angola. Meanwhile, the trial of the Angola Five is moving forward, and those with the power to change the pattern of abuse at Angola remain silent.

* Research assistance for this article by Emily Ratner.

So, the Pope of Hope announced his (purported) objective of closing the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (“Gitmo”) within one year and we’re expected to herald this announcement as a drastic break from the past. But—as some of the regulars on my blog instantly declared—if President Obama were serious about hope and change, he’d close the prison tomorrow, apologize to the detainees, and offer them financial reparations. That could be promptly followed up with the immediate indictment of all government officials (including those in Obama’s administration) responsible for supporting torture, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial punishment, etc. And why not toss in the immediate closing of the US military base at Guantánamo Bay and the return of that land to Cuba? That, I submit, would be a minuscule first step upon which we could build.

Waiting a year to close a single prison is nothing to celebrate. Transferring those illegally detained humans is not change anyone can believe in. Public promises about not torturing have been heard before and even if we could trust such dubious assurances, why are we so goddamned appreciative when a US president merely declares his theoretical intention to think about adhering to fundamental international law?

The Chairman of Change has made no secret of how he wholeheartedly adores the bogus war on terror. Closing Gitmo (an act which still falls squarely into the believe-it-when-you-see-it category) is at best a strategic sidestep by a cautious and calculating new president.

A related New York Times piece began oh-so-cleverly: “Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed coming to a prison near you?” In the Jan. 24, 2009 article—“Guantánamo Detainees? Not in My State,”—journalists (sic) Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane wrung their hands over the 245 remaining inmates being “released into quiet neighborhoods across the United States.” It’s illustrative of the utter depravity we tolerate as normal in the home of the brave that war criminals like Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Dick Cheney, Wesley Clark, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton, etc. etc. walk freely among us while the newspaper of record preys on gullible readers with sensationalism and xenophobic fear mongering.

In that same Times article, Mazzetti and Shane inadvertently offered another manifestation of America’s cultural rot when they mentioned a discussion of reopening San Francisco’s Alcatraz Prison specifically for the assumed terrorists detained (illegally) at Gitmo. But a spokesman for California Senator Diane Feinstein was quick to clarify that Alcatraz was a “national park and tourist attraction, not a functioning prison,” and that the senator “does not consider it a suitable place to house detainees.”

I suggest you take a few seconds to contemplate the depth of moral vacuity it requires for a society to accept a former prison as a national park and tourist attraction. Alcatraz is not an ancient artifact that curious humans are lining up to explore but rather, it’s merely a inactive part of still fully active injustice system. More than one out of every 100 American adults is imprisoned in the land of the free while others plunk down cash to tour a prison?

As of December 31, 2007: 2,193,157 prisoners were held in Federal or State prisons or in local jails. That’s an estimated 506 prison inmates per 100,000 US residents. Breaking it down more specifically, there are…

• 481 white male prison inmates per 100,000 white males in the US
• 1,259 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males
• 3,138 black male inmates per 100,000 black males

(Of course, this doesn’t include all the dis-labeled folks locked in nursing homes against their will and the innumerable animals in laboratories, zoos, etc.)

As Angela Davis sez: “There’s always a tendency to push prisons to the fringes of our awareness [so] we don’t have to deal with what happens inside of these horrifying institutions.”

Take-home message: Gitmo is a symptom. Barack Obama is a symptom. Obama promising to close Gitmo is like placing a band-aid over a cancerous tumor.

The editor of CovenantNews.com wrote:

The White House policies published on its new website confirms that Barack H. Obama intends to use his office to promote and maintain the sexual deviant criminal behavior of homosexuality (with malice aforethought).

… Civil officials who approve of homosexuality, make the civil government a vile cesspool from which the abominations vomit out across the land. By displaying such a contempt for the administration of Justice by promoting this criminal behavior, “such civil officials are not only the source of the defilement, they are the criminals, and a hostile enemy authorizing the destruction of the society in which we live.

In an American Family Association Action Alert, the Rev. Wildmon stated that “This is only the beginning of Obama’s plans to reshape society. His view is that unborn babies aren’t worth protecting and that homosexuals deserve special rights.”

Wildmon urges his followers to “Take Action!” and “Send an e-mail to President Obama. It will go directly to the White House.”

Big ups to Obama. Covenant News and the Rev. Wildmon? Not so much!

Civil Rights

The teenagers and college students who left their homes to march in the streets of Birmingham and Montgomery; the mothers who walked instead of taking the bus after a long day of doing somebody else’s laundry and cleaning somebody else’s kitchen — they didn’t brave fire hoses and Billy clubs so that their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would still wonder at the beginning of the 21st century whether their vote would be counted; whether their civil rights would be protected by their government; whether justice would be equal and opportunity would be theirs…. We have more work to do.

– Barack Obama, Speech at Howard University, September 28, 2007

President Barack Obama has spent much of his career fighting to strengthen civil rights as a civil rights attorney, community organizer, Illinois State Senator, U.S. Senator, and now as President. Whether promoting economic opportunity, working to improve our nation’s education and health system, or protecting the right to vote, President Obama has been a powerful advocate for our civil rights.

Combat Employment Discrimination: President Obama and Vice President Biden will work to overturn the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that curtails racial minorities’ and women’s ability to challenge pay discrimination. They will also pass the Fair Pay Act, to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.

Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: President Obama and Vice President Biden will strengthen federal hate crimes legislation, expand hate crimes protection by passing the Matthew Shepard Act, and reinvigorate enforcement at the Department of Justice’s Criminal Section.

End Deceptive Voting Practices: President Obama will sign into law his legislation that establishes harsh penalties for those who have engaged in voter fraud and provides voters who have been misinformed with accurate and full information so they can vote.

End Racial Profiling: President Obama and Vice President Biden will ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.

Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Support: President Obama and Vice President Biden will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society. Obama and Biden will also create a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates.

Eliminate Sentencing Disparities: President Obama and Vice President Biden believe the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine is wrong and should be completely eliminated.

Expand Use of Drug Courts: President Obama and Vice President Biden will give first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior.

Support for the LGBT Community

While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do. Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It’s about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect.

– Barack Obama, June 1, 2007

Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: In 2004, crimes against LGBT Americans constituted the third-highest category of hate crime reported and made up more than 15 percent of such crimes. President Obama cosponsored legislation that would expand federal jurisdiction to include violent hate crimes perpetrated because of race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical disability. As a state senator, President Obama passed tough legislation that made hate crimes and conspiracy to commit them against the law.

Fight Workplace Discrimination: President Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and believes that our anti-discrimination employment laws should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity. While an increasing number of employers have extended benefits to their employees’ domestic partners, discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace occurs with no federal legal remedy. The President also sponsored legislation in the Illinois State Senate that would ban employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Support Full Civil Unions and Federal Rights for LGBT Couples: President Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples. Obama also believes we need to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions. These rights and benefits include the right to assist a loved one in times of emergency, the right to equal health insurance and other employment benefits, and property rights.

Oppose a Constitutional Ban on Same-Sex Marriage: President Obama voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2006 which would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman and prevented judicial extension of marriage-like rights to same-sex or other unmarried couples.

Repeal Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell: President Obama agrees with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili and other military experts that we need to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The key test for military service should be patriotism, a sense of duty, and a willingness to serve. Discrimination should be prohibited. The U.S. government has spent millions of dollars replacing troops kicked out of the military because of their sexual orientation. Additionally, more than 300 language experts have been fired under this policy, including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. The President will work with military leaders to repeal the current policy and ensure it helps accomplish our national defense goals.

Expand Adoption Rights: President Obama believes that we must ensure adoption rights for all couples and individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation. He thinks that a child will benefit from a healthy and loving home, whether the parents are gay or not.

Promote AIDS Prevention: In the first year of his presidency, President Obama will develop and begin to implement a comprehensive national HIV/AIDS strategy that includes all federal agencies. The strategy will be designed to reduce HIV infections, increase access to care and reduce HIV-related health disparities. The President will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma — too often tied to homophobia — that continues to surround HIV/AIDS.

Empower Women to Prevent HIV/AIDS: In the United States, the percentage of women diagnosed with AIDS has quadrupled over the last 20 years. Today, women account for more than one quarter of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses. President Obama introduced the Microbicide Development Act, which will accelerate the development of products that empower women in the battle against AIDS. Microbicides are a class of products currently under development that women apply topically to prevent transmission of HIV and other infections.