[Ppnews] US Prisons, Muslims and Human Rights Violations

[Political Prisoner News]

Original Content at 
http://www.opednews.com/articles/U-S-Prisons-Muslims-and-by-Bonnie-Kerness-100903-575.html

September 3, 2010

U.S. Prisons, Muslims and Human Rights Violations

By Bonnie Kerness

In 1986, I received a letter from Ojore Lutalo who had just been 
placed in the Management Control Unit at Trenton State Prison in New 
Jersey. He asked what a control unit was, why he was in there and how 
long he would have to stay. We knew little of control units then, 
except what we learned from the many prisoners who reached out to the 
AFSC to mentor those of us trying to give voice to what was - and is 
still - happening.

Today the continued use of these instruments of torture coupled with 
the persistent misunderstanding and mislabeling of prisoners as 
Muslim extremist threatens the security of Americans both inside and 
outside prison walls, and eats away the moral and spiritual compass 
that purports to drive American justice.

After Ojore's letter, we began hearing from people throughout the 
country saying that they were prisoners being held in extended 
isolation for political reasons. We heard from jailhouse lawyers, and 
prisoner activists, many of whom were Muslim who found themselves 
targeted and locked down in 24/7 solitary confinement. The AFSC began 
contacting people inside and outside the prisons to collect 
testimonies of what was going on in those isolation units which by 
definition are forms of torture. We had no idea how many people were 
experiencing this, the conditions in those units and how many control 
units there were.

One woman wrote "the guard sprayed me with pepper spray because I 
wouldn't take my clothes off in front of five male guards. They 
carried me to my isolation cell, laid me down on a steel bed and took 
my clothes off, leaving me with that pepper spray burning my face."

Some of the saddest letters are from prisoners writing on behalf of 
their mentally ill peers like the man who spread feces over his body. 
The guards' response to this was to put him in a bath so hot it 
boiled 30 percent of the skin off him.

"How do you describe desperation to someone who is not desperate?" 
began a letter to me from Ojore Lutalo. He described everyone in the 
Trenton Control Unit being awakened at 1 a.m. every other morning by 
guards dressed in riot gear and holding barking dogs. Then the 
prisoners were forced to strip, gather their belongings while the 
dogs strained at their leashes and snapped at their private parts. He 
described being terrorized, intimidated, and the humiliation of being 
naked and not knowing whether the masked guards were male or female.

If we think back to slavery and to images of the modern Civil Rights 
Movement, we understand that dogs have been used as a device of 
torture in the U.S. for hundreds of years.

These testimonies and more are from men, women and children being 
held in isolation and experiencing the use of devices of torture in 
human cages where there are few witnesses.

I have received thousands of descriptions and drawings of four- and 
five-point restraints, restraint hoods, restraint belts, restraint 
beds, stun grenades, stun guns, stun belts, spit hoods, chain gangs, 
black boxes, tethers, waist and leg chains.

Control units first surfaced during the 1960s and 70s, when many in 
my generation genuinely believed that each of us was free to dissent 
politically. In those years, people acted out this belief in a number 
of ways. Native peoples contributed to the formation of the American 
Indian Movement dedicated to self determination. Puerto Ricans joined 
the movement to free the island from US colonialism. Whites formed 
the Students for a Democratic Society and more anti-imperialist 
groups, while others worked in the southern Civil Rights movements. 
The Black Panther Party was formed. And there was a rise in the 
prisoner rights movement. Nightly television news had graphic 
pictures of State Troopers, Police, the FBI, and the National Guard 
killing our peers.

I saw on the evening news coverage of the murder of Black Panther 
Fred Hampton shot in his sleep by police, and coverage of the 
killings by National Guard members of young people protesting the 
Viet Nam War on the Jackson and Kent State Universities campuses. 
Other civil rights workers were killed with impunity, so many that we 
felt there was no opportunity to stop mourning because each day 
another activist was dead. These killings and other acts of 
oppression led to underground formations such as the Black Liberation Army.

In response to this massive outcry against social inequities and for 
national liberation, the federal government utilized "Counter 
Intelligence Programs" called COINTELPRO conducted by a dozen 
agencies, which aimed to cripple the Black Panther Party and other 
radical forces. Over the years that these directives were carried 
out, many of those targeted young people were put in prisons across 
the country. Some, now in their 60s and 70s, are still there.

While the U.S. denied that there were people being held for political 
reasons, there was no way to work with prisoners without hearing 
repeatedly of the existence of such people, and the particular 
treatment they endured once imprisoned. As early as 1978, Andrew 
Young, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was widely 
quoted saying, "there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of people I 
would describe as political prisoners" in U.S. prisons.

Across the nation, we saw an enhanced use of sensory deprivation 
units often called "control units" for such people in an attempt to 
instill behavior modification. It was this growing "special 
treatment" which we began monitoring. At the time, a former warden at 
Marion, Illinois, said at a congressional hearing, "The purpose of 
the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the 
prison system and in society at large."

People throughout the world are beginning to understand what the 
prisoners have been saying to us for decades about the oppressive, 
war-like tactics of the U.S. government toward criticism or 
resistance. People in prison have warned us that what happens inside 
finds its way out here.

In a May 5th 2009 article in The Trentonian, Afsheen Shamsi of the 
Council on American-Islamic Relations says that their coalition "is 
upset over what it says is increasing surveillance in mosques." The 
group reflects the concerns of Muslims who have grown tired of being 
stopped at airports, constant questioning and relentless security 
years after the attacks of 9/11.

The department of corrections system is more than a set of 
institutions; it is a state of mind. It is that state of mind which 
expanded the use of isolation, the use of devices of torture, the 
Counter Intelligence Programs, and the Department of Homeland 
Security, against activists, both inside and outside the walls.

Ojore, who first contacted us in 1986, exemplifies the history of 
control units and the misperceptions of all Islam as a threat. He was 
released from the control unit via litigation in 2002, after 16 years 
in isolation. In 2004, he was placed back into isolation with no 
explanation. When I called the N.J. Department of Corrections, I was 
told that this was upon the request of Homeland Security. In a 2008 
Classification decision, this was confirmed in writing which said the 
Department "continues to show concern regarding your admitted 
affiliation with the Black Liberation Army. Your radical views and 
ability to influence others poses a threat to the orderly operation 
of this Institution."

After a total of 22 years in isolation, Ojore was released from 
prison in August of 2009 via court order. On January 26th 2010, he 
was disappeared from an Amtrak train, accused of "endangering public 
transportation" and arrested in La Junta, Colorado. Because of his 
unusual name, newspaper articles had him being Muslim and talking 
about Al Qaeda neither of which were true. A judge dismissed all 
charges one week later.

Control units' latest mutations are as "security threat group 
management units." This egregious designation is beyond offensive 
because it is the government which gets to define "security threat group."

According to a national survey done by the U.S.Department of Justice, 
the Departments of Corrections of Minnesota and Oregon named all 
Asians as gangs, which Minnesota further compounds by adding all 
Native Americans. New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania go on to 
list various Islamic groups as gangs.

The "Communications Management Units" in federal prisons use 
isolation to restrict the communication of imprisoned Muslims with 
their families, the media and the outside world.

In 2004, four Islamic prisoners in California were indicted on 
charges which included conspiracy to levy war against the U.S. 
government. One result of this was a 2006 report called "Out of The 
Shadows: Getting Ahead of Prisoner Radicalization" by George 
Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute. The 
report states that the "potential for radicalization of prison 
inmates poses a threat of unknown magnitude to the national security 
of the United States," noting that "every radicalized prisoner 
becomes a potential terrorist threat." The report states that it 
focuses, "in particular on religious radicalization in conjunction 
with the practice of Islam."

Also in 2006, USAToday reported that the FBI and Homeland Security 
were "urging prison administrators to set up more intelligence units 
in state prisons, with an emphasis on background checks to ensure 
that extremist Muslim clerics don't have access with prisoners."

For those of us who've monitored U.S. prisons over decades, the 
targeting of radicalization, the targeting of specific groups, the 
surveillance and infiltration of those groups feels very familiar. 
There can be no doubt that Islam is being targeted. In one recent 
case concerning four Islamic men, known as the Newburgh 4, the judge 
herself noted that " 'Equal Justice Under the Law' are words that can 
be found on many courthouses, but far too often, where it applies to 
the socially and or politically marginalized, these are words devoid 
of meaning."

The U.S. government continues to lock down people for their beliefs, 
and is still seeking to identify those who have the potential to 
politically radicalize others. After each Homeland Security Code 
change, Prison Watch is flooded with calls from people reporting 
Islamic loved ones being removed from general prison population and 
placed in isolation.

I have no doubt that Islam itself is suspect to the U.S. government, 
and that any Muslim, no matter how law abiding, is suspect. Our work 
today needs to be embedded in struggle against this system and its 
continued use of isolation and torture as a tool of behavior 
modification, religious and political repression.

How U.S. prisons function violates the United Nations Convention 
Against Torture, and a host of other international treaties.

The AFSC recognizes the existence and continued expansion of the 
penal system as a profound spiritual crisis. It is a crisis that 
allows children to be demonized. It is a crisis which legitimizes 
torture, isolation and the abuse of power. It is a crisis which 
extends beyond prisons into school and judicial systems. I know each 
time we send a child to bed hungry that is violence. That wealth 
concentrated in the hands of a few at the expense of many is 
violence; that the denial of dignity based on race, class or religion 
is violence. And that poverty and prisons are a form of 
state-manifested violence created by public policy.

I've been part of the struggle for civil and human rights in this 
country for over 45 years. We need to alter the very core of every 
system that slavery, white supremacy and poverty has given birth to, 
particularly the criminal justice system. The United States must stop 
violating the human rights of men, women and children. US policies 
including solitary confinement, and use of devices or torture have 
nothing to do with safe and orderly operation of prisons or society 
and everything to do with the spread of a culture of retribution, 
dehumanization. The restriction of civil rights is something we can 
and should debate regularly as a society. The violation of human 
rights, and fundamental human decency, simply is not negotiable.


Bonnie Kerness

Coordinator Prison Watch Project

Healing and Transformative Justice Program

New York Metropolitan Region

American Friends Service Committee




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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