This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

KS prisoner weighs in on SHUs

The practice of using solitary confinement was condemned by the United States Supreme Court in 1890 on psychiatric grounds. The Court called solitary confinement cruel and unusual punishment and noted that prisoners so confined were prone to becoming "violently insane." In 1913 the use of confined housing units was officially abolished. Today, the law gives prison officials discretion as to whether to place prisoners in SHU, SuperMax or administrative segregation facilities, in conditions similar to those the Supreme Court declared inhumane more than 100 years ago.

Prisoners in these conditions are held in a cell alone a minimum of 23 hours a day, and are allowed to shower only three times per week. Doctors and humyn rights activists point out that solitary conditions in prison can cause problems as mild as memory loss and as severe as hallucinations, delusions and mental illness.(1) Because of this danger, prison officials are supposed to meet certain standards when placing a prisoner in solitary. They must:

* establish in writing the reason for placing a prisoner in the SHU or administrative segregation and provide the prisoner with a segregation report; * initiate an administrative investigation into the alleged rule violation used as justification for placing the prisoner in confinement; and * allow the prisoner a chance to defend his/herself against the accusations against him/her.

If this process reveals that the prisoner has done nothing wrong, s/he must be released back into the prison population or transferred to general population in another facility.

In the state of Kansas, many prisoners are subject to a policy of institutional lynching. KAR 44-14-306 prohibits the use of administrative segregation as punishment. Prisoners are placed on administrative segregation without the due process of the disciplinary procedure. KAR 44-13- 201(4)(c) specifically dictates that any violations of prison rules are to be handled within the inmate disciplinary procedure. When prison officials bypass the administrative procedures, accuse prisoners of wrongdoing and place them in an SHU on administrative segregation, they make the SHU into a house of punishment. In doing so, the prison administrators are violating state and federal law.

Because of the prison administration's failure to comply with administrative regulations, prisoners are daily being placed in SHU/supermax conditions on administrative segregation for months or years at a time. The majority of prisoners being held on administrative segregation here in Kansas have not been afforded the due process of disciplinary procedure. These prisoners are living in the harshest conditions without having had the chance to respond to the charges that form the rationale for putting them in this brutal level of confinement. This is having a profound psychological effect on prisoners in Kansas.

Dr. Stuart Grassian is a Harvard professor and a national expert on the psychopathological effects of the SHU and solitary confinement. In 1979, Dr. Grassian did a study on prisoners confined to special supermax units and coined the term "SHU Syndrome." Its symptoms are depression, increased paranoia, agitation, manic activity, delusions, florid psychotic illness and suicide. Because the prison administrators across the country are so loosely using the SHUs to place inmates on administrative segregation, they have created psychopathological problems in many prisoners. For those who already had mental illness before being placed in the SHU, the sickness deepens and makes the prisoners profoundly dangerous during long months or years in the isolation of the SHU on administrative segregation.

These prisoners will be released back into our communities. Dr. Grassian put it best when he stated: "these people are time bombs waiting to explode in a community." The Kansas Department of Corrections has sworn to do the job of helping to make the communities of Kansas safer places to live.

The actions of the Kansas prison administrators are deliberately malicious, and it is up to us and the rest of society to hold the KDOC and the rest of the prison systems responsible for their injustices. We have to force them to fulfill their duty to care for prisoners by at least following their own laws and regulations and ceasing the institutional lynching.

Notes: http://www.cnn.com/US/9801/09/solitary.confinement/

MIM responds: The conditions of the SHU are abhorrent because they torture humyn beings to the point of psychological breakdown. If a society can be judged by how it treats its prisoners, then Amerikan society can look proudly in the mirror and acknowledge its barbarity. Any hardships that prisoners visit on the outside world after and as a result of their time in the SHU are merely chickens coming home to roost. The tragedy of former SHU prisoners being released back into society is that prisoners so treated have little chance of coping successfully with the world outside prison. The imperialist politicians do not much care about prisoners being released from the brutality of SHU conditions onto the streets, because as is so often true, the brunt of the SHU's damage will fall on the oppressed communities, already suffering from semi-colonialism.

To get involved in MIM's campaign to shut down control unit prisons contact us or check out our web site: http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/prisons