[Ppnews] Solitary confinement: Torture chambers for black revolutionaries

[Political Prisoner News]

    *Solitary confinement: Torture chambers for black revolutionaries *

An estimated 80,000 men, women and even children are being held in 
solitary confinement on any given day in US prisons.
Last Modified: 10 Aug 2012 18:04

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/20128694647587767.html

    //

    /"The torture technicians who developed the paradigm used in
    (prisons') 'control units' realised that they not only had to
    separate those with leadership qualities, but also break those
    individuals' minds and bodies and keep them separated until they are
    dead."  - /Russell "Maroon" Shoats

**Russell "Maroon" Shoats has been kept in solitary confinement in the 
state of Pennsylvania for 30 years after being elected president of the 
prison-approved Lifers' Association. He was initially convicted for his 
alleged role in an attack authorities claim was carried out by militant 
black activists on the Fairmont Park Police Station in Philadelphia that 
left a park sergeant dead.

Despite not having violated prison rules in more than two decades, state 
prison officials refuse to release him into the general prison population.

Russell's family and supporters claim that the Pennsylvania Department 
of Corrections (PA DOC) has unlawfully altered the consequences of his 
criminal conviction, sentencing him to die in solitary confinement - a 
death imposed by decades of no-touch torture.

The severity of the conditions he is subjected to and the extraordinary 
length of time they have been imposed for has sparked an international 
campaign 
<http://russellmaroonshoats.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/launch-event-for-campaign-to-free-russell-maroon-shoats/> 
to release him from solitary confinement - a campaign that has quickly 
attracted the support of leading human rights legal organisations, such 
as the Centre for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild.

Less than two months after the campaign was formally launched with 
events in New York City and London, Juan Mendez, the United Nations 
Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading 
Treatment or Punishment, agreed to make an official inquiry 
<http://russellmaroonshoats.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/united-nations-special-rapporteur-inquires-into-prolonged-solitary-confinement-of-russell-maroon-shoats/> 
into Shoats' 21 years of solitary confinement, sending a communication 
to the US State Department representative in Geneva, Switzerland.

*What the liberals won't tell you*

While the state of Pennsylvania has remained unmoved in this matter so 
far, some in the US government are finally catching on. Decades after 
rights activists first began to refer to the practice of solitary 
confinement as "torture", the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the 
constitution, civil rights and human rights held a hearing on June 19 to 
"reassess" the fiscal, security and human costs of locking prisoners 
into tiny, windowless cells for 23 hours a day.

Needless to say, the hearing echoed in a whisper what human rights 
defenders have been shouting for nearly an entire generation: that 
sensory deprivation, lack of social contact, a near total absence of/ 
zeitgebers/ and restricted access to all intellectual and emotional 
stimuli are an evil and unproductive combination.

The hearing opened a spate of debate: with newspapers in Los Angeles, 
New York, Washington DC, Tennessee, Pittsburgh, Ohio and elsewhere 
seizing the occasion to denounce the practice as "torture" and call for 
a reversal of a 30-year trend that has shattered - at a minimum - tens 
of thousands of people's lives inside the vast US prison archipelago.

But as happens with virtually all prison-related stories in the US 
mainstream media, the two most important words were left unprinted, 
unuttered: race and revolution.

Any discussion on solitary confinement begins and ends with a number: a 
prisoner is kept in his or her cell 23 or 24 hours per day, allowed 
three showers every week and served three meals a day. According to a 
report by UN torture rapporteur Mendez, prisoners should not be held in 
isolation for more than 15 days at a stretch. But in the US, it is 
typical for hundreds of thousands of prisoners to pass in and out of 
solitary confinement for 30 or 60 days at a time each year.

Human Rights Watch 
<http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/supermax/Sprmx002.htm#P40_391> 
estimated that there were approximately 20,000 prisoners being held in 
Supermax prisons, which are entire facilities dedicated to solitary 
confinement or near-solitary. It is estimated 
<http://solitarywatch.com/2012/02/01/how-many-prisoners-are-in-solitary-confinement-in-the-united-states/> 
that at least 80,000 men, women and even children are being held in 
solitary confinement on any given day in US jails and prisons.

Unknown thousands have spent years and, in some cases, decades in such 
isolation, including more than 500 prisoners held in California's 
Pelican Bay state prison for ten years or more.

Perhaps the most notorious case of all is that of the Angola 3 
<http://blog.amnestyusa.org/iar/louisianas-angola-3-100-years-of-solitude/>, 
three Black Panthers who have been held in solitary confinement in 
Louisiana for more than 100 years between the three of them. While 
Robert King was released after 29 years in solitary, his comrades - 
Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace - recently began their 40th years in 
solitary confinement, despite an ongoing lawsuit challenging their 
isolation and a growing international movement for their freedom that 
has been supported by Amnesty International.

But all these numbers fail to mention what Robert Saleem Holbrook, who 
was sentenced to life without parole as a 16-year-old juvenile 
<http://freesalim.net/crushed_against_the_law> and has now spent the 
majority of his life behind bars, pointed out: "Given the control units' 
track record in driving men crazy, it is not surprising that the 
majority of prisoners sent into it are either politically conscious 
prisoners, prison lawyers, or rebellious young prisoners. It is this 
class of prisoners that occupies the control units in prison systems 
across the United States."

Holbrook's observation is anything but surprising to those familiar with 
the routine violations of prisoners' human rights within US jails and 
prisons. The prison discipline study 
<http://people.umass.edu/%7Ekastor/ceml_articles/cu_in_us.html>, a mass 
national survey assessing formal and informal punitive practices in US 
prisons conducted in 1989, concluded that "solitary confinement, loss of 
privileges, physical beatings" and other forms of deprivation and 
harassment were "common disciplinary practices" that were "rendered 
routinely, capriciously and brutally" in maximum-security US prisons.

The study also noted receiving "hundreds of comments from prisoners" 
explaining that jailhouse lawyers who file grievances and lawsuits about 
abuse and poor conditions were the most frequently targeted. Black 
prisoners and the mentally ill were also targeted for especially harsh 
treatment. This "pattern of guard brutality" was "consistent with the 
vast and varied body of post-war literature, demonstrating that guard 
use of physical coercion is highly structured and deeply entrenched in 
the guard subculture".

*Race and revolution*

But while broad patterns can be discerned, these are the numbers that 
are missing: how many of those in solitary confinement are black? How 
many are self-taught lawyers, educators or political activists? How many 
initiated hunger strikes, which have long been anathema to the prison 
administration? How many were caught up in the FBI-organised dragnet 
that hauled thousands of community leaders, activists and thinkers into 
the maws of the US "justice" system during the Black liberation movement 
of the 1960s and 1970s?

Former Warden of United States Penitentiary Marion, the prototype of 
modern supermax-style solitary confinement, Ralph Arons, has stated 
<http://people.umass.edu/%7Ekastor/ceml_articles/cu_in_us.html>: "The 
purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes 
in the prison system and in the society at large."

One of these revolutionaries is Russell "Maroon" Shoats, the founder of 
the Black Unity Council, which later merged with the Philadelphia 
chapter of the Black Panther Party. He was first jailed in early 1970.

Hailing from the gang-war-torn streets of West Philadelphia, Shoats 
escaped twice from prison system, first from Huntingdon state prison in 
September 1977 and then again in March 1980.

Shoats' escapes - the first of which lasted a full 27 days, despite a 
massive national search complete with helicopters, dogs and vigilante 
groups from predominantly white communities surrounding the prison - 
earned him the nickname "Maroon", in honour of slaves who broke away 
from plantations in Surinam, Guyana and later Jamaica, Brazil and other 
colonies and established sovereign communities on the outskirts of the 
white settler zones.

Still, it was not until Shoats was elected president of the 
prison-approved Lifers' Organisation in 1982 - the closest thing to a 
union for inmates, through which they demanded basic rights such as 
proper visiting hours, access to legal documents and healthier food - 
that the prison system decided he was a "threat" to administrative 
stability and placed him in solitary confinement.

For the past 30 years, Maroon has been transferred from one "torture 
chamber" to another, where his best efforts to interact with his fellow 
prisoners or resurrect his old study sessions for the younger generation 
are thwarted at every turn.

In 2006, the US had an incarceration rate for black males that was more 
than five-and-a-half times greater than <http://www.prisonsucks.com/> 
that of South Africa at the end of the apartheid era in 1993.

Yet most mainstream authorities on the prison system in the US - such 
as the eminent scholar Michelle Alexander, whose book /The New Jim Crow/ 
suggests that the prison system is racially "biased" - do not come close 
to touching on the phenomenon of political prisoners, let alone on the 
inmates who take up the cudgels on behalf of their fellow detainees and 
attempt to carve out niches of justice in a massive chamber of terror.

The discussion of solitary confinement as a violation of a basic human 
right comes five decades after Malcolm X first began to preach that 
black people in America should take their grievances not to the US 
Supreme Court, but to the United Nations, to appeal not for civil 
rights, as white bourgeois parlance would have it, but for basic human 
rights, as a colonised people.

He argued not for "integration" into a system that had brutalised and 
enslaved "Africans in America" for years, but for an overhaul of that 
system and a transfer of power away from those who created and 
maintained it. Not master walking hand-in-hand with slave, but an end to 
mastery and slavery altogether.

As a black revolutionary, Malcolm X's words were largely painted over by 
mainstream historians. But if the struggle to end inhumane treatment 
inside prisoners is to become anything more than a largely apolitical 
movement for so-called "civil rights", it must put two long-ignored 
points back on the agenda: race and revolution.

/*Kanya D'Almeida is an editor for the Inter Press Service (IPS) News 
Agency, currently based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. */

/*Bret Grote is an investigator with the Human Rights Coalition, a 
Pennsylvania-based prison abolitionist and prisoner rights organisation.*/

*/The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not 
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy./*

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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