MIM NOTES No. 196        October 15, 1999	

End the Amerikkkan Lockdown month closes

by a MIM comrade

"Fruit for Thought: To fight the chaos of imperialism is to swim 
against the high tide of injustice, to surface after one has 
battled its dangers is to realize to be free is as important as 
one's next breath."

--A Tamms Prisoner 5 April, 1999 Letter to MIM

On September 13 of this year, MIM celebrated the 1971 struggle of 
the Attica (NY) prisoners for their basic rights and dignity. On 
this date we also mourned the brutal murder of 29 of the Attica 
brothers by New York State Troopers and prison Corrections 
Officers -- who also cut down ten of their own as they stormed the 
prison and ended the Attica Rebellion. On October 15, we rejoice 
in the formation of the Maoist Black Panther Party (BPP) in 1966. 
These two dates encompass MIM's first annual End the Amerikkkan 
Lockdown month. Throughout the month we have held educational 
events about the criminal injustice system and protests focusing 
on ending various aspects of the Amerikan Lockdown. We have been 
on the streets educating and organizing progressive people in the 
small and large tasks of assisting the struggle.

One of these tasks is drawing attention to the growing numbers of 
politically active prisoners who are being caged in Amerika's 
highest security gulags. One of the newest of the torture 
factories is Tamms. On March 8, 1998, the Illinois Department of 
Corrections (IDOC) opened a new Super Maximum security prison in 
the far-southern Illinois town of Tamms.(1) According to a 
bourgeois press report, optimal conditions at Tamms C-Max include 
four visits through a glass partition each month, five showers per 
week and one hour of solitary yard time per day. Prisoners report 
that under these conditions "You start to lose touch with reality. 
You become depressed. You become incoherent."(2) On January 7 of 
this year, four prisoners at Tamms filed a class-action lawsuit 
charging that the extreme isolation conditions there are driving 
prisoners insane. Three of these four plaintiffs are now facing 
new criminal prosecution from the State Attorney's office in 
retaliation for their lawsuit.(3)

Standard treatment for prisoners who speak out against the 
criminal INjustice system is for guards and wardens to take 
punitive measures against them in barely concealed retaliation for 
their activism. All manner of regulations govern punitive measures 
against prisoners by guards or wardens. But if a prisoner is moved 
to Tamms or placed in segregation at another facility for 
"administrative" reasons, no justification is required.(4,1) Many 
politically active prisoners find themselves under so-called 
administrative measures that restrict their most basic activities.

The state of Illinois' retaliatory lawsuit against these four 
Tamms prisoners and the existence of the Tamms facility itself are 
aspects of the Amerikan prison system's agenda of social control. 
The events at Tamms embody direct retribution for the efforts of 
the oppressed to make their own situation livable, and extra-legal 
sentencing that adds time and trouble to prisoners' sentences 
after they enter the gulags. MIM sees prisons in this country as 
part of imperialism's control over the oppressed nations confined 
within u.$. borders. As our first annual End the Amerikkkan 
Lockdown month comes to a close, we look forward to continuing our 
work against the u.$. injustice system throughout the year. We 
will continue to work with the MIM-led united front organizations 
RAIL and USW, and with other individuals and organizations that 
oppose the prison manifestations of u.$. imperialism.

Isolation, Supermax, Segregation

Bourgeois press reports have noticed that Tamms is about as far 
from Chicago as a prison could get while remaining in Illinois, 
even though the plurality of prisoners at the facility come from 
Cook County --the Chicago area. This placement is part of the 
formula for high maximum security prisons in the u.$. These 
prisons are built to subdue "non-conforming" captives through 
sensory and social deprivation. Many of these more rebellious 
prisoners are from urban centers like Chicago and part of their 
deprivation is being placed prohibitively far away from friends 
and family -- to make visiting difficult.

Censorship of MIM Notes is a classic example of this harassing 
activity -- MIM Notes is harassed for organizing prisoners in 
their own interests, and prisoners are harassed for reading and 
writing for a newspaper that exposes the pigs' activities. Our own 
experience with revolutionary comrades behind the walls 
demonstrates that even the harshest of lockdown conditions will 
not "stop the grass [of revolutionary activity] from growing."(5) 
In April of this year, an Illinois prisoner filed a law suit 
against the IDOC, arguing that the prison censors were denying him 
his MIM Notes subscription because of its political content -- 
although they claimed the newspapers were a security threat. 
Knowing that this is true, the state has agreed that the 
publications are a not a threat to the institutions and have 
turned them over to the prisoner. "Now brothers in Illinois can 
receive all the MIM-related publications which you offer. They 
have returned all the Theory Journals that they had confiscated. 
My MIM Notes, my Maoist Sojourners, Notas Rojas, and the pamphlet 
'What is the Maoist Internationalist Movement?'"(6)

When MIM talks about revolutionary politics among prisoners, we 
are talking about the idea that prisoners are people who are being 
oppressed by the imperialist system. Prisons in Amerika are 
designed to repress those who would rebel against u.$. imperialism 
from within. Not by accident are oppressed nationalities more than 
50 percent of the prisoner population in this country. And it is 
no coincidence that a Wisconsin prisoner finds that "right now in 
the hole where I am, it is about 85 to 90% Blacks and Hispanics. 
When the white prisoners come to the hole, they are released 
within 2 to 3 months."(7) Former prison employees in other states 
have reported identical statistics to RAIL and MIM, and the 
Committee to End the Marion Lockdown (CEML) publishes the fact 
that most control units are 85% Black.(4)

The united snakes has always held substantial minorities of the 
oppressed forcibly within its borders. Settlers conducted a 
barbaric genocidal campaign against Indigenous peoples and 
confined those small groups that remained to "reservations" while 
stealing their land. In the case of the Black nation, kidnap 
victims were brought and forced to remain here so the white nation 
could live off their labor. Different Latino nations have been 
brutalized by a combination of these methods, and conscripted as 
sacrificial ground troops in Amerika's wars. The exploding prisons 
of today are a response to these nationalities' righteous 
movements toward rebellion against the u.$. empire. CEML quotes 
the Tamms warden as saying "Tamms is not about rehabilitation, 
it's about punishment ... some people may never leave."(1)

Former prison staff and prisoner advocates with whom MIM has 
spoken about the prisons in this country report that those 
prisoners with a revolutionary political consciousness often take 
the most productive approach to the conditions of their 
confinement. These prisoners understand deeply why they are in 
prison, and many spend time educating other prisoners, and 
organizing among other prisoners to educate people on the outside 
about the conditions that all Amerikans are guilty of perpetuating 
within the prison system. Prison officials agree with this 
assessment of the rebellious prisoners, as a former Marion (home 
of the Marion Lockdown) warden said: "the purpose of the Marion 
Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison 
system and the society at large."(4)

One Illinois control unit prisoner of nearly nine years has told 
MIM of his own organizing work among "paralegals, law clerks, and 
comrades confined in control units for challenging the status quo. 
MACS comrades engage and instigate the filing of S1983 civil 
complaints, mandamus actions, post conviction grievances, and 
civil and criminal appeals. We also write articles to expose the 
racist system and its docile servants. MACS fights to put an end 
to the methods of intense repression, kidnapping, torture and 
prison censorship. Recently MACS members have all been moved to 
the new 'Super-Gulag' in Illinois as a means to break their 
resistance and spirit. This new place is called Tamms, or for 
better words, Scams. This is another horror story that by design 
other comrades are living nationwide."(8)

Retribution not rehabilitation: What they build, and what they 
call it

"Every day in prison is but a bureaucratic routine of beatings, 
continuous harassment and sensory deprivation. These are 
techniques being used to control prison populations throughout 
Illinois' correctional warehouses. The key word here is 'control,' 
for it is now painfully clear that Illinois prison officials have 
forsaken all attempts at fostering a positive, potentially 
rehabilitative prison environment in favor of the brutal policies 
they claim are necessary to maintain 'control' over the prison 
population. Comrades ... it is not just about bad food, visits, or 
brutal treatment, it's more fundamental."(9)

Illinois' only Supermaximum security prison, Tamms, is part of a 
$73 million complex. Part of the complex is a 200-bed minimum 
security work camp. The beauty of locating minimum and 
supermaximum security facilities in the same place? The 445 IDOC 
employees at Tamms will not have to do any dirty work as the "work 
camp inmates will handle maintenance, laundry service, 
groundskeeping and food preparation for the supermax prison as 
well as public service work for area communities." "The 23-acre 
supermax prison compound is protected by double rows of 12-foot 
high cyclone fencing topped with razor ribbon. A courtroom with 
video conferencing equipment is located inside the prison. ... An 
execution chamber has also been constructed at the facility 
although condemned inmates will not routinely be housed at the 
supermax. It was designed especially for executions by lethal 
injection." 312 of the Tamms employees are guards, the facility's 
total payroll is $17 million; its total budget is $23.9 million 
per annum.(10)

Tamms' budget works out to well over $34,000 per year to control 
each prisoner, not including the $73 million the state reports 
spending on building the dungeon.(10) Tamms' cost per prisoner is 
more than three times the $11,006 estimated cost of living for a 
University of Illinois student at the Urbana-Champaign campus.(11) 
A year at Tamms even costs more than a year at the elite 
Northwestern University and University of Chicago.(12)

Sentencing on top of sentencing for anti-prisons activists

"So cruel is the Tamms Correctional Center that a prisoner who 
tried to hang himself with a makeshift rope was charged the cost 
of the bedsheet he ruined to make it, according to the action to 
be filed this morning in federal court in Chicago."(3)

MIM has argued for years that many prison regulations amount to an 
additional sentence -- meted out by guards, wardens or the state 
legislature instead of a judge. At Tamms, prisoners are 'home' in 
"8' x 10' concrete cement cells, which contain concrete beds, and 
stainless steel sinks, toilets, and mirrors."(1) The cells are 
building blocks of a sensory deprivation experience designed to 
abort a humyn being's normal thought processes. For this reason, 
prisoners argue that the prison is making them crazy; also for 
this reason, they are correct.

Sensory deprivation at Tamms includes: regulation against 
prisoners placing phone calls, limited contact with each other and 
staff, and no physical contact with visitors. Prisoners at Tamms 
may not smoke, and are "handcuffed and shackled whenever they are 
out of their cellblock, and recreation will be allowed only 
individually with recreation equipment."(10) A prisoner reports 
new restrictions on reading material: "Tamms has issued a 
malicious book policy that limits a resident here to having only 
25 books and/or magazines combined together as their own personal 
property. Tamms will not store or exchange personal books or 
magazines in their personal property storage. ... This book policy 
is a cruel and unjustifiable punishment; reading is one of the few 
positive activities we have here at Tamms."(13) 

Michigan prisoners have recently been subjected to a new property 
policy that places similar restrictions on reading materials. 
Prisoners in the highest security facilities in the state are 
allowed no more than ten books or magazines -- many aspects of 
this policy are under legal fire from prisoners and their 
advocates. This is one of many situations in which we do well to 
compare prison policies and prisoner responses across state lines. 
See article in the next issue of MIM Notes for more on the 
conditions of SuperMax confinement in different prison 
systems.(14)

These conditions of legalized brutality directed at prisoners' 
minds and bodies in tandem are designed to break down resistance, 
to gain submission from the oppressed through terror. But as Mao 
said of the marauding Japanese army that overran much of China in 
the 1920s and 1930s, such systematic disruption of the people's 
lives "educated the people and quickened their political 
consciousness." Through rapid development of a disciplined 
proletarian party in opposition to the Japanese invaders, China 
became powerful enough that the Japanese came and apologized for 
their barbarity. Mao thanked them for doing so much to help the 
development of the revolution.(15) In the united snakes, the 
situation is the same -- it is an historical fact that repression 
breeds resistance. Amerikkkan prisons are a school of national 
oppression for the nearly two million people caged behind their 
barbed wire. Such education serves only to foment national 
liberation struggles and socialist revolution.

MC12 contributed research to this report.

Notes:
1. Walkin' Steel. "Illinois opens "SuperMax" Control Unit prison 
in Tamms." Fall 1998.
2. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 27 December 1998. 
3. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 7 January 1999.
4. MIM Notes  no. 83, December 1993.
5. See poem, www.etext.org/Politics/ 
MIM/aa/articles/controlunits.txt
6. MIM Notes no. 186 15 May, 1999.
7. MIM Notes no. 194.
8. A Tamms Prisoner 5 April 1999.
9. A second Tamms Prisoner 6 November, 1998.
10. IDOC description of Tamms 
www.idoc.state.il.us/institutions/adult/tam/ 
11. www.oar.uiuc.edu/current/tuit.html
12. The schools' web sites, www.nwu.edu www.uchicago.edu
13. A third Tamms prisoner 8 June, 1999.
14. MIM Notes no. 160, MIM Notes no. 167, MIM Notes no. 168
15. Paraphrased from a 9 January, 1965 interview. Edgar Snow, The 
Long Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 198-9.