[Ppnews] 'People Power' Pries Abu-Jamal from Punitive Administrative Custody

[Political Prisoner News]

'People Power' Pries Abu-Jamal from Punitive Administrative Custody


Created 01/29/2012 - 20:47
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1032
Linn Washington Jr.



He's out!

Credit 'people power' for getting internationally known inmate Mumia 
Abu-Jamal sprung from his apparently punitive, seven-week placement 
in 'The Hole.'

For the first time since receiving a controversial death sentence in 
1982 for killing a Philadelphia policeman, the widely acclaimed 
author-activist finds himself in general population, a prison housing 
status far less restrictive than the solitary confinement of death row.

Inmates in general population have full privileges to visitation, 
telephone and commissary, along with access to all prison programs 
and services, all things denied or severely limited to convicts on 
death row waiting to be killed by the state.

In early December 2011, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections 
officials, after the federal courts had removed his death penalty and 
the Philadelphia District Attorney opted not to attempt to re-try the 
penalty phase in hopes of winning a new death sentence, placed 
Abu-Jamal in Administrative Custody (a/k/a 'The Hole').

Administrative Custody is confinement in a Spartan isolation cell 
where conditions are more draconian than even death row.

The release of Abu-Jamal from Administrative Custody into general 
population on Friday, January 27, 2012 followed with a multi-layered 
protest campaign by his supporters worldwide that included flooding 
Pennsylvania prison authorities with telephone calls, collecting 
petitions containing over 5,000 signatures and a complaint filed with 
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.

Supporters condemned the Administrative Custody placement, calling it 
retaliation for Abu-Jamal's having successfully defeated the state's 
efforts to execute him. Abu-Jamal, a model prisoner, did not meet any 
of the 11 specific circumstances listed in Pennsylvania DoC 
regulations dictating administrative custody placement.

Prison staff evaluations of Abu-Jamal since his December death row 
removal, sources said, listed him as "polite [and] respectful." Those 
positive evaluations did not evidence any of the incorrigibility or 
other serious misbehaviors that usually trigger AC placement.

"When people are united around an issue they have power. This is the 
power of the people all races in many places," said Pam Africa, 
director of the Philadelphia-based International Concerned Friends 
and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Abu-Jamal, in a statement released through his wife Wadiya Jamal, 
thanked his supporters for their hard work. "I am no longer on death 
row, no longer in the hole, I'm in population," Abu-Jamal's statement 
noted. "This is only Part One and I thank you for the work you've 
done. But the struggle is for freedom!"

Media reports quoted Pennsylvania DoC spokespersons confirming 
Abu-Jamal's placement in general population at Mahanoy Prison, a 
medium security facility about 100 miles from Philadelphia in central 
Pennsylvania where he was transferred last December from another 
prison in western Pennsylvania that houses the state's death row.

DoC spokespersons had previously declined comment on Abu-Jamal's 
Administrative Custody placement, citing regulations covering inmate privacy.

Prison officials advanced ever-changing rationales for keeping 
Abu-Jamal in AC at Mahanoy, including the curious claim of that they 
were waiting for legal clarification that the courts had formally 
replaced Abu-Jamal's death sentence with life in prison.

That Kafkaesque claim contradicted the DoC's own documents 
specifically acknowledging that federal courts had vacated the death 
sentence (thus requiring a default life sentence) and Philadelphia's 
DA having dropped appeals to reinstate the death sentence.

Typical of the way that Abu-Jamal's long-running case has shone a 
bright light on grievous abuses within the criminal justice system, 
his AC placement exposed what independent prison monitors have long 
contended is a dirty secret of Pennsylvania's prison system: 
authorities using Administrative Custody isolation to maliciously 
penalize inmates who are not violating prison rules.

Bret Grote, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Human Rights Coalition, 
said during a media interview that prison authorities misuse 
Administrative Custody as repression against inmates for their 
political activism, their complaining about poor conditions in 
prison, their roles as jailhouse lawyers and often for racist reasons.

Grote said Pennsylvania's DoC holds approximately 2,500 of its 
fifty-thousand-plus prisoners in solitary confinement on any given 
day. That's five percent of the total.

"Andre Jacobs and Carrington Keys, two members of a group of 
prisoners known as the Dallas 6 [Dallas is a Pennsylvania prison] 
have been held in solitary for approximately 11 and nine years 
respectively as a result of their speaking out against torture and 
other human rights violations inside the state's control units," 
Grote said during an interview with Prison Radio.

Philadelphian Russell "Maroon" Shoats, a former Black Panther Party 
and Black Liberation Army member, has spent 30 of his 40 years in 
prison inside an isolation cell despite not having any prison 
infractions, said his daughter Theresa Shoats during a press 
conference in Philadelphia held one day before Abu-Jamal's release.

"Prison officials keep my Dad in solitary instead of releasing him 
into general population because they say he is a leader. My Dad turns 
70 this year and he has medical problems, some from being in solitary 
for so long. Keeping him in solitary is unfair," Shoats said about 
her father, who was convicted of killing a Philadelphia policeman.

"My Dad says he encourages young inmates to read to stay sane. Why 
does that make him too dangerous for general population? He told me 
that 15 young men hung themselves in SCI Greene during a one-year period."

King Downing, director of the American Friends Service Center's 
Healing Justice Program, said prison authorities nationwide misuse 
solitary confinement to "silence political prisoners." Downing hosted 
the press conference where Shoats spoke alongside other speakers 
representing Abu-Jamal.

Last October, Juan Mendez, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture, 
called on all countries worldwide to ban the use of solitary 
confinement of inmates as punishment and/or an extortion technique, 
except in very exceptional circumstances.

Mendez cited scientific studies establishing the mental and medical 
damage arising from prolonged isolation. His report stated that an 
estimated 20,000-to-25,000 persons regularly occupy solitary 
confinement cells across America.

Recently a federal jury awarded a New Mexico man $22-million for 
violations of his constitutional rights arising from his having spent 
two years in solitary confinement in a county jail in Albuquerque 
following a drunk driving arrest. Although during that entire time he 
was never even charged or brought to trial, authorities in Dona Ana 
County New Mexico vow to appeal that verdict, one of the largest 
damage judgements in history for illegal incarceration.

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