I was recently placed in segregation for an alleged assault. I can't really say much, but it was some stupid shit, the result of the imperialists failing to provide health care to people with mental problems. Instead of giving them the help they need, in a proper setting, they instead send them into the prison system to punish them for their condition. Under their own "laws" these practices should be seen as "cruel and unusual" punishment because the integration of should-be mental patients with average prisoners such as myself is not only a conflict of interest in terms of so-called rehabilitation, but also creates a dangerous environment. For example, how can the paranoid delusions of a known schizophrenic inmate be considered reliable information to place another prisoner in segregation?
But as always, the imperialists will get what they pay for. They probably believe that by the use of integration of mental patients with the general population, they can maintain control by methods of divide and conquer. But as we've seen in the past, every time they try to stop the problem they only create a disease.
People outside this state would probably be surprised to see the extreme absurdity they call the Oregon DOC. For a state that until recently only had one area code, they got so many prisons it was impossible to fill them up with mostly minorities, so they started locking up their own people. Now the prison population up here is over sixty to seventy percent white. They got this mandatory minimum law up here called Measure 11 that gives mandatory seventy-month sentences to first time offenders for shit like fist fights and targets kids as young as 15. There's not enough minority kids in this state to fill up their unnecessary large prison system, so they started locking up their own kids; little Harry Potters are coming in here who never really broke a crime in their life and just fell victim to a cop that took a creative writing course, are now doing seventy months with no chance for parole and to fit in they're getting tattoos on their neck. But like I said, the imperialists will get what they pay for cause these former Harry Potters will be returning to their suburbs and gated communities.
They also have a couple pretty sizable IMU Control Unites up here that are really unneeded considering in ten years there has been only about three alleged homicides in the ENTIRE DOC. There isn't any real dangerous inmates in their Special Housing Units, so instead, they got people in there mostly for one-on-one fist fights where no one even got hurt. And unlike the SHU in California up here you don't get shit: no TV's, no commissary, no phones, nothing. In IMU, just like the DSU where I'm at right now, where most of the minorities reside in this state, gente are doing bad. Ventilation is poor and they fail to properly sanitize the cells after mental patients decide to throw their feces, so we are often forced to attempt to sanitize whatever cell we're placed in.
Reading material is also slim to nothing really of value, mostly romance novels, westerns and mysteries, which can pass the time for some inmates but for Spanish-speaking prisoners, they have absolutely nothing available to them in their language. And since there's no education programs available to learn English or really to learn anything, Latinos end up sitting in the hole for years with nothing to read, no way available to better themselves, and no way to help them pass the time. There is also no multicultural books or anything written by Latino or African authors.
There is a way for us to stock the book carts up with more titles though. If any of us individually orders, or is sent any soft cover books we can then donate them to the book cart for the entire segregation population to read. Maybe you can help us in this matter, especially in regards to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist(MLM) literature. As I said before, the minority population in this state is mostly concentrated in the segregation and Special Housing Units. A large amount of these lumpen-proletariats are Latino, mostly of Mexican and Chicano decent (the Chicanos mostly those that have moved up here from southern California in the last ten years or so, such as myself).
--an Oregon Prisoner, June 2004
RAIL responds: This is just another example of the prison system using people against each other, as this comrade points out. The CO's will believe what they want to hear no matter who says it and in what context. However, the issue of inadequate treatment for the mentally ill can not be dealt with thru isolation, but through a healthy integration into society that this system cannot provide. At a recent rally we spoke to a man who had spent years in a mental institution. During that time, friends working with MIM visited him regularly, greatly helping him deal with the problems he was facing until he was able to be released. What he realized and says today is that there is no such thing as mental illness as an internal/psychological problem, but only as a social problem. We may not be able to say for sure that there is no one who would need drugs for mental illness in a communist society, but we do know enough at this point to say that mental illness is much higher in advanced imperialist countries than in previous societies and contemporary societies with different economic and social structures. We can also point to the elimination of suicide and eating disorders in socialist China as examples of how to revolutionize society in such a way that combats mental illness.
The prison system in the u$ doesn't just handle mental illness poorly, but it promotes it through such things as isolation, taking away prisoners' sense of control over their lives, using scare tactics and thru physical and mental abuse. We know the imperialists have no interest in reform and that is why we have seen prison populations sky-rocketing for decades. We expose the nature of this beast to show that while we can rally around reforms, the ultimate goal must be to overthrow of this system if we ever want to improve the lives of the majority of the world's people.
We sent this comrade the only Mao books we had in Spanish. There is an endless demand for MLM books, and works in Spanish are in even shorter supply. Supporters can help in facilities like this by donating to MIM's Free Books for Prisoners Program.