Federal Prisons

Comrades, I know most of you are aware of the fact that we are a study specimen for experimental purposes but let me give you some details about one of these experiments that most of you are familiar with.

“Behavior Control & Human Experimentation”

These are two names with the same meaning: Behavior Modification & Special Holding Units.

SHU -> These are units that have been specifically designed to control behavior. Here is where human experimentation is legal. The purpose of these experiments is to control rebellious and revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in society at large. In several instances the control units have been used to “Silence Prison Movement Criticism”. In 1964 at a meeting in Washington between social scientists and prison wardens addressing the topics of “man against man”, brainwashing was said to produce marked changes of behavior in attitudes necessary to weaken, undermine & remove the supports of the old patterns of behavior and old ideologies attitudes. It’s often necessary to break these emotional ties. This can be done by either removing the individual physically, preventing communication with those whom the prisoner cares about, or by proving to him that those whom he respects aren’t worthy of it and should indeed be actively mistrusted.

I will share a few specific examples:

1. Physical removal of prisoners from those they respect to positively break and seriously weaken close emotional ties

2. Segregation of natural leaders

3. Use of cooperative prisoners as “leaders”

4. Prohibition of group activities not in line with brainwashing objectives

5. Spying on prisoners & reporting back private material

6. Tricking prisoners to write statements which are then shown to others

7. Exploitation of opportunists & informers

8. Convincing prisoners they can trust no one

9. Treating those who are willing to collaborate in more lenient ways than those who are not

10. Punishing those who show an uncooperative attitudes

11. Systemic withholding of mail

12. Preventing contact with anyone unsympathetic to the method of treatment & regimen of captive populace

13. Building a group conviction among the prisoners that they have been abandoned by and totally isolated from their social order

14. Undermining all emotional supports

15. Preventing prisoners from writing regarding the conditions of their confinement

16. Making available and permitting access to only those publications which are neutral or supportive of the desired attitudes

17. Placing individuals into new and ambiguous situations from which the standards are kept deliberately unclear and then pressuring them to conform to what is desired to win favor and some respite from the pressure

18. Placing individuals whose willpower has been severely weakened or eroded into a living situation with several others who are more advanced in their thought-reform, whose job it is to further undermine the individual’s emotional support

19. Using techniques of character invalidation; i.e. humiliations, revilement, and shouting to induce feelings of guilt, fear & suggestibility coupled with sleeplessness, an exacting prison regimen & periodic interrogation-interviews.

20. Meeting with renewed hostility all the insincere attempts to comply with prisoners’ pressures

21. Repeatedly pointing out to the prisoner and their cellmates where he has in the past not lived up to his own standards or values

22. Rewarding of submission and subservience by lifting of the pressures

23. Providing social & emotional support that reinforces new attitudes

Comrade, if any of these points were used on you then you have been part of the experiment.

U.$. Imperialists have tried to manipulate our environment and culture, in particular those who belong to oppressed minority groups. Reader, you might question “What they mean by Revolutionary attitudes??”

In this experiment it evidently refers to anyone who thinks and behaves as an individual, who they feel must be made to become part of their subservient system. The point is to make people less human and “subject entirely to their will!”

Comrades, we should be truly aware and on guard that the above techniques to condition people are now general practice in most if not all prisons, state and federal throughout the United $tates as well as in workplaces, schools, and other government organizations.

The author of this article has have been in the SHU-EM at a prison in Florida State and I’m a true witness that all this has been in effect for almost forty years, and what is worse is… its working!!

Don’t be part of the experiment, don’t let the system work on you – be strong minded and of impeccable heart as well as relentless spirit. Imperialism might be able to kill a Revolutionary but never the internal Revolution of the soul!

In the United $tates, prisons mean war against the oppressed nations. In occupied Palestine, war means prison for the Palestinians. Two sides of the same blood-stained coin which built the richest empire in hystory. Imperialism considers war to be a legal method of resolving issues, in deeds if not in words.

The struggle for Palestine is a national liberation struggle. The only consistently revolutionary class that may overthrow the bourgeoisie is the proletariat, but imperial domination can unite a whole nation against their occupiers for the establishment of independence. If independence is a precondition for the dictatorship of the proletariat, then Palestine’s struggle is revolutionary and progressive. If I$rael is an arm of imperialism, then the Palestinian struggle against them is revolutionary and progressive. Leadership of the proletariat in that struggle would intensify its revolutionary character, but it is revolutionary even without the proletariat in the vanguard. When Palestinian communists align themselves with all revolutionary forces against I$rael in a united front, that is a correct policy. We have a clear hystory on this subject, and this practice is what led to the victory of the Chinese people in creating the most advanced socialism yet.

We in the United $tates face the strongest enemy in humyn hystory, and I$rael is an arm of the United $tates in the Middle East. Everything which weakens I$rael weakens the United $tates, which puts us in a stronger position. Our comrades fighting in Gaza today are putting us in a position of advantage for the final victory of the oppressed in Occupied Turtle Island. To oppose the struggle in Palestine is to oppose that which objectively weakens our enemy, to leave behind real friends who are fighting real enemies.

“Leftist” support for I$rael in this war is often concealed by a position against Hamas. This anti-Hamas, but allegedly pro-Palestine, sentiment is often based on the supposedly inhuman crimes that have been committed. On top of this being a complete deflection from the primary question of imperialism, the claims surrounding such crimes as the decapitation of infants have zero evidence behind them. Even bourgeois press has shown that the claims are based on videos which show no beheadings, only IDF soldiers claiming that the events occurred.(1) Media campaigns in support of imperialist interventions can go much further and be many times more difficult to uncover than what we are dealing with here. This is a particularly obvious example of an imperialist lie, and the propaganda will not always be so easy to see through. Therefore, in addition to exposing blatant falsehoods, we also need to be able to separate what makes a movement an ally or enemy and what doesn’t, and be able to understand what line the media is attempting to push when they tell a particular story.

The media will tell us that Hamas is committing heinous crimes, killing babies and civilians. We need to ask why they are deflecting from the principal contradiction in the world today. We need to ask who weakens empire, and critically support those who do. We need to ask who strengthens empire, and make ourselves their enemy. That is what it means to understand what is principal and what is secondary. Contrary to popular belief, the moral position of communists is not to do with concepts like eternal justice and true liberty. Communists have one moral position: we are for those actions which strengthen the international proletariat. We understand that the work of Hamas as a whole strengthens the international proletariat. Therefore we understand that they are the allies of the oppressed and we align ourselves alongside them.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free

1. https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/10/12/40-israeli-babies-beheaded-by-hamas/

[The following statement was circulated by email from spiritofmandela.org]

Sekou Odinga is celebrated & admired by freedom & justice movements worldwide for his persistence, courage, & principled adherence to freedom struggle.

Baba Sekou Transitioned on January 12, 2024.

Sekou Odinga was a globally recognized Black liberation activist, member of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, founding member of both the New York City chapter and the International Section of the Black Panther Party, and former US political prisoner who survived 33 years of state captivity before his release in 2014.

Prosecuted as one of the “Panther 21” in New York City, Odinga was a prominent historical figure, having been featured on Democracy Now! and in numerous documentaries, concerts, mass public events, and major news outlets.

In addition to being featured in the widely circulated social movement texts Can’t Jail the Spirit (2002) and Hauling Up the Morning: Writings & Art by Political Prisoners & Prisoners of War in the U.S. (1990), Odinga published his writing in Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions (PM Press, 2017) and Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (Haymarket Books, 2020).

A survivor of state torture and the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), Sekou Odinga is both celebrated and admired by freedom and justice movements worldwide, exemplifying persistence, courage, and principled adherence to freedom struggle under the most repressive circumstances imaginable.

The Taliban retook power in Afghanistan after the U.$. retreat in August 2021.(1) In April 2022, the Taliban once again instituted a ban on poppy cultivation, and by December 2023 they had reduced production by 95%. Most global poppy cultivation now takes place in unstable regions of Myanmar.(2) The Taliban banned opium production with similar results in 2000, but when the United $tates invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they saw to it that opium production was restored and there were continued increases up until last year. As a very poor country, poppy production is a significant cash crop for Afghan farmers. Still the Taliban has been able to enforce the ban, while working with farmers to grow alternative crops. The United $tates says they spent $8 billion trying to eradicate poppy during their rule over the country from 2001 to 2018.(2)

Afghanistan has been negotiating agricultural deals with China since the Taliban regained power in 2021, and are scheduled to begin shipping large exports of produce to China this month [December 2023]. Afghanistan has attended China’s recent Belt and Road Forum, with China becoming Afghanistan’s second biggest trade partner after neighboring Pakistan.(3) This growing export of raw materials has come with far greater imports of products from social-imperialist China, that will feed a relationship of unequal exchange leading to wealth transfer out of Afghanistan. But in the short-term it is helping provide economic options other than exporting opium to Europe, where Afghanistan had provided 95% of the black market supply.(4)

While the United $tates invaded Afghanistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks, by 2003 they had begun a full-scale invasion of Iraq using 9/11 as a cover once again. Iraq had also had a culture and tradition that made drug use relatively uncommon. This began to change since the overthrow of the Ba’ath Party in 2003, with sharp increases in crystal meth and the stimulant Captagon documented since 2017.(5) It’s also interesting to note that besides U.$. oil interests, Amerikans were concerned with the ruling Ba’ath Party’s support of certain militant groups in Palestine.

Of course a better example of eliminating opium is China, where the masses were the victims of British Opium War. The Taliban isn’t fighting addiction so much as they are trying to shift agricultural production in a way that is challenging the incomes of poor farmers. The Chinese Communist Party (CPC) gives us a better model than the Taliban of how to fight addiction by empowering the masses through socialism from 1949-1976. We wrote about this in Issue 59 on drugs:

“Richard Fortmann did a direct comparison of the United $tates in 1952 (which had 60,000 opioid addicts) and revolutionary China (which started with millions in 1949).(9) Despite being the richest country in the world, unscathed by the war, with an unparalleled health-care system, addicts in the United $tates increased over the following two decades. Whereas China, a horribly poor country coming out of decades of civil war, with 100s of years of opium abuse plaguing its people, had eliminated the problem by 1953.(9) Fortmann pointed to the politics behind the Chinese success:

“If the average drug addiction expert in the United States were shown a description of the treatment modalities used by the Chinese after 1949 in their anti-opium campaign, his/her probable response would be to say that we are already doing these things in the United States, plus much more. And s/he would be right.”(9)

“About one third of addicts went cold turkey after the revolution, with the more standard detox treatment taking 12 days to complete. How could they be so successful so fast? What the above comparison is missing is what happened in China in the greater social context. The Chinese were a people in the process of liberating themselves, and becoming a new, socialist people. The struggle to give up opium was just one aspect of a nationwide movement to destroy remnants of the oppressive past. Meanwhile the people were being called on and challenged in all sorts of new ways to engage in building the new society.”(6)

Here we see the United $tates failing where socialist China succeeded, using the exact same tools! These historical examples demonstrate that the principal contradiction behind the drug epidemic is found within the structure of society and not with specific treatment techniques. China was also a divided, drug-ravaged population coming into the war of liberation, proving how a new culture can be built and a people can rise above addiction.

But wait, the Taliban and the CPC both had state power when they eliminated drugs. True. And the people in state power in the United $tates are not interested in empowering the people. Instead, they continue to allow the free flow of drugs into even the most controlled environments. On the road to state power, the CPC built dual power, by developing liberated zones in China where they could begin to experiment with the policies and practices of building socialism, including the elimination of drug use.

U.$. prisons are very different conditions than the Chinese countryside. And communists are far from state power in this country. But comrades must use the materialist method to develop strategies for building forms of dual power and transforming the culture of the oppressed to fight drug addiction. The Revolutionary 12 Steps that we published last year is one tool for that, but the real challenge is putting programs into practice. We must build independent institutions of the oppressed that combat addiction by empowering people in a greater liberation struggle. It is the plague of hopelessness that is truly killing us.

<sup>NOTES:
1. Plastick, October 2021, Whither Afghanistan?, Under Lock & Key Issue 75.
2. CBS News, 12 December 2023, Myanmar overtakes Afghanistan as the world’s biggest opium producer, U.N. says.
3. Ralph Jennings and Mandy Zuo, 7 November 2023, CIIE: China, Afghanistan cultivate deeper ties with agriculture deals, South China Morning Post.
4. BBC News, 25 August 2021, Afghanistan: How much opium is produced and what’s the Taliban’s record?
5. Jamal Muzil, May 2023, Substance abuse in Iraq, Quantifying the Picture, Journal of Population Therapeutics and Clinical Pharmacology 30(12):302-313.
6. Wiawimawo, November 2017, Opioids on the Rise Again Under Imperialism, Under Lock & Key Issue 59.</sup>

[Hook]
My way might not be your way
But it’s okay
It’s alright, your way might not be my way
But it’s okay
It’s alright


[Stic.man]
Yea, I used to go to church
But the church didn’t quench my thirst
Mama taught me to put god first
But she never tried to block my search
I was curious, young but serious
Why's religion so mysterious
Why is black life so hard?
They say you’re not supposed to question God
Well is it okay to question the pastor?
Was it passed down from the slave-master?
It was only the truth I was after
But I never could get a straight answer
So I couldn’t relate to the sermon
Put down the bible, then I start learning
About life, didn’t know where the path would lead
But I had to get off my knees


[Hook]


[Stic.man]
I build with the Five Percenters
On the God within us, it’s no limits
Study the Metu Neter from Kemet
All saw, I remembered
Smoke herb with the Rastafarians
Grew my locks became a vegetarian
Following the Tao, building with the Baba Laos
Jewels being handed to a innocent child
My mind is a Buddhist temple, the truth is simple
I try to be principled
Walking with a warrior spirit
Ain’t nothing like learning from first hand life experience
I’m a realist, that’s all I deal with
Respect the truth, that’s all I build with
A child of the universe
My religion is life and it’s just as valid
I strive for balance


[Hook]


[M-1]
I gotta admit, I don’t know
In the end which way it’s gonna go
Why we sit by the project window,
Instead of living off the land with my kin folk?
Is there even a master plan?
An unseen hand? Is God a man?
Some say that’s sacrilegious
Same folks selling us lies about Christmas
Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny
Just so the capitalists can make money
They say God will take care of it
But you a terrorist if you say the same thing in Arabic
It’s so hypocritical
It’s a miracle, listen to the message in the spirituals
Wade in the water, I’m following Ms. Tubman and Nat Turner
I'm praying for my freedom
and heading for the border


[Hook: x3]

What is the revolutionary response to addiction? I am an alcoholic who has been in recovery for two years. I sobered up in an anti-suicide cell after committing the crime that would send me to federal prison on a five-year bid. I have a complicated relationship with my crime. If my bomb had successfully blown up that natural gas pipeline, I would be dead. It was as much a suicide attempt as a strike against capitalism, both desperate and hopeful.

I consider the fact that I am still alive to be a responsibility to make reparations and amends to who I have harmed, to make a positive impact on the world, and to forgive myself for my mistakes.

Honesty is paramount to an alcoholic and addict. I tentatively practiced honesty, at first with a few, and then with wider and wider groups of people. I began to take a position of self-criticism and humility, yet also self-love and self-care. I was controlled by my shame and failures and giving into defeatism. No longer. I lied to my family and closest friends. No longer. I neglected myself and wished to kill myself. No longer.

My sobriety date is 26 January 2022. Shame has left me. I am free inside my head. I am an honest, motivated persyn who is trusted by my community on the basis of my vulnerability and actions. I have not yet had the opportunity to learn about the revolutionary 12 step program, but I know that my work is never finished and I would love to work those steps. I write this in the hope that it inspires a comrade in addiction to have the courage to stay sober for 24 hours. Just for today.

It will please your readers to know that approximately two weeks ago four Virginia prisons were ordered shut down for good! Augusta, Sussex 2, Haynesville, and Stafford Correctional Center. Augusta continues its industry and small cadre to support it. Nottoway and a sixth prison, so far unnamed, are also on the chopping block as the VA DOC is now, quietly, downsizing due to its lack of sustainability ($1.1 billion/year, approximately 26% of the entire state budget).

As is always the case, we’ll see how things develop.

MIM(Prisons) adds: The closures are scheduled to complete by 30 June 2024 according to the VADOC. It is notable that Augusta Correctional Facility is one of the prisons comrades were campaigning to shut down for lack of air conditioning. At this time we have no reason to believe the decision was connected to that campaign. However Nottoway was also targeted by the campaign, along with a third prison Buckingham.