Re-Lease on Life is a Serve the People Program to provide support for our comrades who have been recently released from the prison system, to help them maintain their revolutionary organizing on the outside.
This program needs resources in the form of money, capital, ideas, job sources and housing arrangements. Please contact us to help out. Also check out this informational flier or print out other related fliers from RAIL's flier archive to help get the word out.
Join the All People's Coalition, the Maoist Internationalist Movement, the Uhuru Movement, The Barrio Defense Committee and other organizations in a campaign to abolish the Control Units in California Prisons known as Security Housing Units (SHU).
Needed: Volunteers to staff the mock-SHU during upcoming demonstrations. Tasks include handing out flyers, answering questions, and collecting petition signatures.
Sponsors to join us in this on-going campaign to abolish the SHU or to endorse upcoming protests.
What is the SHU?
SHU is an acronym for "Security Housing Unit" but it really stands for torture and terrorism. Many prisoners have been confined to the SHU for 5, 10, 15 years or more. Prisoners confined in the SHU, which is based on a sensory deprivation model that CDC knew would have significant psychological consequences on prisoners, receive all their meals in their cells, they are not allowed to participate in training or educational activities, they are not allowed contact visits and they have no phone access. SHU prisoners spend 22 hours a day in a windowless, 6x9 cell and they're shackled and strip searched every time they leave their cell. The exercise "yard" (which is just another concrete cell, only larger) has no exercise equipment and no view of the outside world.
For over 15 years the California Department of Corrections (CDC) has had a practice of placing prisoners in the SHU under the guise that the prisoners are prison gang affiliates or a threat to the safety of others or institutional security. The five California SHU's - Pelican Bay State Prison SHU, Valley State Prison for Women SHU, California State Prison at Corcoran SHU, California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi SHU and Corcoran SATF - are the lynchpin for the CDC's prison system. They are the most brutal prisons in the system and principally target those prisoners who show the most resistance. They are designed to break inmates' spirit. The SHU is a threat which hangs over the head of all CA prisoners.
At Pelican Bay prisoners are kept in windowless cells for a minimum of 22 1/2 hours a day. There is no education, no job training, no work, no religious services, and no hobby materials. Prisoners are subject to strip searches upon departure from and return to their cell when they have not come in contact with any other individual.
Conditions at Pelican Bay were found unconstitutional in 1995 by a federal court, which ruled that prisoners were subjected to gratuitous and racist beatings and that medical facilities were inadequate. Prisoners report that little has changed since this ruling. Corcoran prison is infamous for its daily "gladiator fights," staged between 1988 and 1996. Guards would manipulate exercise schedules so that known enemies would be in the handball-court-sized recreation area at the same time. Fights were basically certain, and guards bet on the outcome. After a fight had gone on for a while, guards would break it up by firing wooden bullets at the prisoners. Hundreds of prisoners were injured in these fights - including seven murdered by guards. These are only a few of the tortures and terrors implemented by the CDC.
Transfer to and from a SHU depends on the whims of a classification committee. Prisoners are not allowed legal counsel before this kangaroo court. The CDC claims that the SHUs house "the worst of the worst," who are kept in lockdown because they pose a danger to other prisoners. However - as is the case in other control units throughout the u.$. - many of the prisoners in California's SHUs are there because they are jailhouse lawyers, or have filed too many grievances.
The CDC also uses the policy of "snitch, parole, or die" to justify further repression and turn prisoners against each other. Prisoners can be transferred to the SHU - regardless of good behavior or their sentence - if "confidential informants" label them gang members. Prisoners are not allowed to confront their accusers or defend against the allegation of gang membership, so many of those sent to the SHU under this policy may indeed be innocent of the so- called crime of gang membership. Once in the SHU, these prisoners can only leave if they inform on another "gang member," are paroled, or die. This is clearly a policy aimed at creating a need for SHU space and fanning the flames of the anti-gang (read: anti-oppressed nation youth) hysteria. This CDC policy violates the international bourgeoisie's own standards for fair treatment of prisoners.
UPDATE(7/30/02)Family restrictions dropped BUT legal visitations to be limited instead.
Click here to protest and to find out more.
In May 2002 MIM sent several petitions filled with signatures to the
California DOC as a part of our campaign against the new repressive
visitation regulations that the DOC is trying to implement. After vocal
protests against these new rules, both at the public hearing on March 8 and
though a fax, phone and mail campaign, the CA DOC postponed implementation
of the policies indefinitely. We need to keep the pressure on and let them
know that we won't sit by and allow this regulation to pass unnoticed. MIM
sent the following letter with the petitions.
The recently proposed changes in the Department of Corrections visiting rules in California will make it very difficult for people to visit their relatives and friends in prison, cutting off visitation entirely for inmates with more severe sentences. Already there have been demonstrations and fax and phone calling campaigns expressing strong disagreement with these new rules. We are enclosing petition signatures to add more names to the voices of those who see clearly that the new California DOC visitation rules will do nothing more than expand the oppression of prisoners while actually increasing recidivism.
Among the changes being proposed which we are opposing include requirements that:
These restrictions are counter to any notion of rehabilitation as studies have shown that regular visits reduce recidivism among prisoners. These rules will only help expand what is already a huge growth industry across the country: the criminal injustice system. In fact the changes to the regulation make clear the new position towards visitation. While the old regulation opens with the sentence: "The value of visiting as a means to establish and maintain meaningful family and community relationship is recognized and encouraged." The new regulation starts with: "Visiting is a privilege." This is a dangerous shift to a focus on using visitation rights for punishment. The rules for prisoners in restrictive custody will specifically punish the politically active behind bars because they are the ones who get locked up in SHU and segregation as punishment for demanding their legal rights.
Prisons in this country are used as a tool of social control. MIM and RAIL fight for reforms to the conditions in prisons while working to dismantle the criminal injustice system and replace it with a system of real justice run by and for the people.
Protest these changes to the visitation rules, Write, fax, or e-mail the Department of Corrections: