Some call it RES (Reduced Environmental Stimulus), sensory deprivation, psychiatric seclusion, solitary confinement, or mosaic of despair; no matter what the title, Security Housing Units (SHU) are, at best, torture chambers. Cell blocks are marked throughout by a dull sameness in design and color.
Cells are often windowless and when you do have a window, it's painted over. Your bed mattress is so thin that it barely serves a purpose. Toilets are of stainless steel and upon using them for sit downs, you subject your buttocks to hemorrhoids. Toilets have a loud flush that often wakes others up at night.
For recreation, you're taken to a small exercise pen with cement floors and now recently introduced gated kennels. They are of cell-like design and toilets flush every five minutes only. These cage pens are more suggestive of satellite cells than areas for exercise and recreation. The effect it has on a person is stark and unremitting monotony.
Who among MIM readers can imagine years without ever seeing any aspect of the world outside except for a small patch of sky? Going months, years without the opportunity for normal social contact with other people.
Confined 22 1/2 hours a day. Food delivered through a narrow port in the cell door, all meals eaten in social isolation. Some inmates spend time pacing around the edges of the cell and cape pen. This is similar to caged felines pacing in a zoo.
Then there are the cagings that guards subject inmates to, often in the outside pens with no clothes. Here is a credible account of one such incident: one day in late January, a counselor was walking from her office toward another facility. It was very cold (she was wearing gloves and a heavy jacket) and it was pouring rain. She observed two African American inmates being held naked in two cages. When she passed by again, an hour later, one inmate was still there. She observed that he was covered in goose bumps, shivering, teeth chattering. He said he was freezing and asked her to request a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. She then saw an officer coming in her direction. When she looked at him and made reference to the caged inmates, he continued walking, looked back, and shrugged his shoulders, saying it was the lieutenant's orders. From experience she knew of this lieutenant's attitude and proneness for retaliation upon those who cross him. With that, she continued on and let the matter drop from her mind. Although the incident bothered her, she feared group reprisals if she spoke out. This left the inmates in the cages. Its certain that they became sick from the experience and psychologically damaged from the encounter.
These types of acts go on all the time with even more horrific tales. There is a sick sadistic fascist mentality behind the walls of America's kamps and dungeons. Join MIM in the struggle to close the SHU torture chambers.
It's disturbing also to see indigenous people, African, Mexican, Asian, Indian, etc. being willing participants in what MIM has defined as social, political, economic, and genetic control. I see no reason why California as a state clings to the hypocritical title of Department of Corrections. Those indigenous people I spoke of are slaves to pay, psychologically indoctrinated lap dogs whose natural dispositions have caved in. It's mental retardation to watch those who look like you, have similar or same origins as you, slowly wallow away and die or be continually oppressed. This system wasn't designed with people in color to be the jailers, counselors, sergeants, lieutenants, wardens, etc. It was for the white class to carve out their existence off the oppressed semi-colonies and to erode them to extinction. But you have so many who appear to be "happy to be part of the team." What they don't know or won't consciously admit is that they are serving someone else's goal and facilitating their means to an end. Certainly, those who have always built these dungeons statewide have a plan. The elite has always thought or drawn plans with foresight. But for those who are non-white, I say to you: the signs of mental starvation are not as obvious as physical malnutrition.
As America's internal colonies, we've been set up by a hegelian dialectic of creating an alleged problem, increasing to the point of outcry or mass hysteria, then providing what the people will welcome as a solution: prison kamps and torture chambers.
Suffering Attributable in Significant Part to Conditions in the SHUs: irrational anger, ruminations, over sensitivity to stimuli, confused thought processes, social withdrawal, chronic depression, emotional flatness, mood/emotional swings, overall deterioration, talking to self violent fantasies, perceptual distortions, hallucinations, suicidal thoughts.
-- A California Prisoner, February 13, 2004