July 15 -- The United Front to Shut Down the Security Housing Units (SHU) held its first of a series of educational forums on Amerikan prison torture in San Francisco. An engaged and participating audience learned about the similarities between prisoner abuse in Amerikan prisons in Iraq and the abuse that takes place daily in prisons across the U.$. The forum focused on the torture that is the Security Housing Units in California's prisons.
The event opened with a letter from a California prisoner, written in May of this year, shortly after the news of the Iraqi prisoner abuse came out.
"Amerika's modern-day dungeons, such as Security Housing Units (SHUs), Intensive Management Units (IMUs) and Maximum Custody Control Units ... were designed with sensory deprivation in mind," he wrote. "[Control units are synonymous with] isolation, control of movement, interrogation, mental and physical tortures, excessive force and criminal abuse.
"These penitentiary test labs have been a breeding ground for prison guards to practice their sadistic murderous behavior unchecked with impunity. So it should be of no surprise that the military uses these techniques and tactics on prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay." A previous edition of MIM Notes (#302) reported in detail how guards charged with torture at Abu Ghraib had served in Amerikan prisons, where they developed a reputation for brutality.
A presentation on the Amerikan prison system from one of the participating organizations in the United Front, the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM), followed the prisoner's words. The MIM speaker underscored the reality that what took place at Abu Ghraib is happening daily in prisons across the country which are used as a tool of social control. We exposed the former prison guards who learned to torture prisoners in Amerika before taking their skills to Iraq. This includes staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick learned how to torture prisoners at Buckingham Correctional Center in Dillwyn Virginia, after working there six years. And Charles Graner, who worked in the infamous SCI-Greene Prison in Pennsylvania holding Mumia Abu Jamal.
In California recent reports on the prisons have exposed conditions very similar to what was found at Abu Ghraib. These reports have even reached the mainstream media, with frequent stories appearing in the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle describing the cover-up at the top of the California Department of Corrections that stopped investigators from looking in to brutal prison guards at Pelican Bay State Prison among others. This brutality has resulted in severe physical and mental injuries to many prisoners and even some deaths. And this guard brutality is on top of the standard conditions in Amerikan prisons which include control units where prisoners are locked in solitary confinement for years at a time in conditions that have been condemned by the United Nations as torture.
For President Bush to claim that Amerika doesn't tolerate the kind of abuses that happened at Abu Ghraib is a boldfaced lie. The criminal injustice system in this country is built on a solid foundation of torture. It is used as a system of social control. Whether trying to extract confessions or information, or just trying to degrade and break the will of prisoners, the tools used by the system include torture, humiliation, and degradation.
The presentation included information about imprisonment rates in Amerika and the national oppression and social control that is the prison system. This country has the highest imprisonment rate in world with more than 2 million people in prison. As of December 2002 the imprisonment rate was 701 per 100,000 people. The numbers become even more frightening when broken down by race:
U.S. incarceration rates by race, June 30, 2002: * Whites: 353 per 100,000 * Latinos: 895 per 100,000 * Blacks: 2,470 per 100,000
South Africa under Apartheid was internationally condemned as a racist society. Compare the imprisonment rate of Black adult men in South Africa under apartheid in 1993: 851 per 100,000 with the imprisonment rate of Black adult men in the U.$. under George Bush in 2002: 7,150 per 100,000.
But with all this imprisonment, statistics show clearly that prisons don't stop crime. As imprisonment has increased since the 1970s, government defined criminal activity has remained relatively stable. So we have to ask why all the prisoners? The clear answer is social control. Prisons are a tool of social control. The government uses it's tools, including prisons, to maintain it's position of power. Several speakers expanded on this theme explaining the history of revolutionary movements of the oppressed nations in the 1960s and 70s leading to skyrocketing imprisonment as a tool of repression.
But even locking up so many people is not enough. Within the prisons they are building more and more control units. Control units are a generic name for long term solitary confinement cells. Control units may vary from prison to prison but they can be generally characterized as: Permanently designated prisons or cells in prisons that lock prisoners up in solitary or small group confinement for 22 or more hours a day with no congregate dining, exercise or other services, and virtually no programs for prisoners. Prisoners are placed in control units for extended periods of time. Prisoners are usually placed in control units as an administrative measure, with no clear rules governing the moves. This makes it virtually impossible for prisoners to challenge their placement.
Control units have various names such as Adjustment Center, Security Housing Unit (SHU), Maximum Control Complex (MCC), administrative maximum (ad-max), Intensive Management Unit (IMU) and administrative segregation (ad-seg). Prisoners spend years of isolation in tiny cells, usually 6 by 8 feet for 22 - 23.5 hours a day. In some cases the long term isolation is complete, in others it is small group isolation; both conditions are tremendously damaging to humans. The short time that they do spend outside their cell is within a cement or chain link "dog pen" that lacks any kind of equipment and proper space for physical exercise.
Better defined as a prison within a prison, control units are used to defeat prisoners' revolutionary attitudes, organization, militancy, legal and administrative challenges, and anything else the prison administrators deem objectionable. The problem with prisons as a tool of social control in general is that they have also become a breeding ground for resistance of the very system they were meant to enforce. Within prison even those completely uneducated and politically unaware people are put in a position that encourages them to think about the system that locked them up. Extreme repression, overt racism, slave labor, mail censorship, and in many cases imprisonment of innocent people. In general population (where prisoners interact with one another on a daily basis) there is the opportunity to discuss this system with others and to organize resistance.
The uprising in Attica prison in 1971 was a good example of this organized resistance that prisoners were able to pull off because of their interactions with one another. The system fears this kind of organizing and needs a tool within the prisons to stop prisoner activists from educating and organizing others.
A past warden of Marion IL, one of the first Control Unit prisons, stated: "The purpose of the Marion control unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in society at large."
There are five California Security Housing Units (SHUs) in California: Pelican Bay State Prison SHU, Valley State Prison for Women SHU, California State Prison at Corcoran SHU, California Correctional Institution at Tehapchapi SHU and Corcoran SATF. Currently housing about 2700 people. Reflecting the situation across the country, the California SHU disproportionately targets oppressed nation prisoners, even more than the prison system in general: In 1998 (most recent statistics available) the CDC reported that 34% of the population in all CDC institutions was Latino, and 52% of those in SHUs were Latino. The SHU classification system based on supposed evidence of gang membership. This means signing a get well card, talking to another prisoner in the yard, or even just speaking Spanish can get you classified as a gang member. They also use confidential informants who have a strong incentive to make up evidence to get themselves released from the SHU. Prisoners can not challenge this information.
In a recent issue of MIM Notes one prisoner in California wrote: "My ethnicity is Hispanic. When I arrived in the DOC I was asked by a C.O. if I was 'a Northern Hispanic or Southern Hispanic,' I said 'I don't know what you mean.' Then I was asked what city I was from. I stated Salinas, CA. It was then that I was classified as a Northern Hispanic. Now I'm labeled as a northerner, which is a gang member from the prison/street gang Nortenos. At that particular point in time I had no idea what that was or what I was about to experience behind these walls. The Southern Hispanics are classified/labeled Surenos, another prison/street gang. The DOC currently has the Northern and Southern Hispanics on a 24 hour, 7 day a week lockdown. We are getting no visits from our families, no exercise outside our cells, and no state issued hygiene."
At the event other letters from prisoners were read and a short excerpt from the California Prison Focus video on Corcoran SHU gladiator fights was shown to underscore the conditions behind bars.
A speaker from the Barrio Defense Committee (BDC) described her son's battle with the California prison system. Jose Luis was placed in the SHU at Corcoran prison after leading a hunger strike for basic humyn rights at New Folsom prison. While in the SHU he has lost sight in one eye and is experiencing other physical and mental problems.
Another speaker described her recent visit to Pelican Bay State Prison where Hugo Pinell is locked in the SHU. Hugo is one of the many Prisoners of War kept behind bars as punishment for their political activism. She described his isolation from the outside world and spoke movingly about Hugo's strong spirit despite this torture.
The final speaker touched on her experience in the women's prison in California and being punished for political activism. She noted that the 40 women locked in the SHU in the women's prison need to be contacted so that activists on the outside can work with them to organize the growing women's prison population.
The United Front to Shut Down the SHU includes wide range of political organizations and individuals such as the Barrio Defense Committee (BDC), the African People's Socialist Party (APSP), African People's Solidarity Committee (APSC), the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM), Justice for Palestinians, California Prison Focus, the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL), Proyecto Common Touch and RASCALS. We are working to expand participation from likeminded organizations across the state. We are united in fighting to shut down control units in California prisons.
Current activities include of the United Front include holding events like this one across the state, protests the first Saturday of every month in cities across California, and a petition drive to shut down the SHU (we have collected thousands of signatures already!). Our next state-wide organizing meeting is scheduled for September 12th in Oxnard California. The United Front is also planning a protest in front of the CDC office in Sacramento for August 20th.
Among those attending this event were a number of former prisoners, well aware of the conditions behind the bars and eager to get more information about the system as a whole and how to fight it. We gained several new allies committed to attending the upcoming events and protests.
This forum will be held again in the following locations:
San Jose
July 22nd, 7pm
Centro Aztlan Chicomoztoc, 520 So. 2nd St San Jose
Santa Cruz
August 5, 7pm
Loudlen Nelson Center, 301 Center St
Los Angeles
August 12, 6pm
Casa de Pueblo Co-Op, Sunset Blvd.