[Pnews] What Happened At Vaughn Prison?

[Prisoner News]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/vaughn-prison-hostage-attica-uprising/


  What Happened At Vaughn Prison?

by Heather Ann Thompson February 2, 2017 
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/heather-ann-thompson/>

Yesterday, scores of men in Delaware’s largest prison, the Vaughn 
Correctional Center, took over 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/02/inmates-demanding-education-protesting-trump-take-hostages-at-delaware-prison/> 
one of the buildings in their facility. The prison, built in 1971 and 
known for its serious overuse of solitary confinement, is one of the 
state’s most severely overcrowded and punitive facilities.

Hoping to push the state to improve living conditions at Vaughn, the 
prisoners didn’t just take control of building C — they also took guards 
hostage. And to make the public aware of why they were protesting, they 
called the media 
<http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/crime/2017/02/01/delaware-prison-lockdown-vaughn/97342188/>:

    We’re trying to explain the reasons for doing what we’re doing.
    Donald Trump. Everything that he did. All the things that he’s doing
    now. We know that the institution is going to change for the worse.
    We know the institution is going to change for the worse. We got
    demands that you need to pay attention to, that you need to listen
    to and you need to let them know. Education, we want education first
    and foremost. We want a rehabilitation program that works for
    everybody. We want the money to be allocated so we can know exactly
    what is going on in the prison, the budget.

Over the next few hours, the men in Vaughn released all but two of the 
hostages and let nineteen prisoners who wanted to, leave the building as 
well. Meanwhile, law enforcement had begun amassing outside of the prison.

At dawn, the police stormed the facility.

By 7 AM, the ground outside the prison was littered with prisoners 
laying facedown on the concrete with their hands behind their back. One 
of the hostages was on her way to the hospital. Tragically, the other 
was dead.

That’s all we really know. Reliant on information funneled straight 
through the prison officials’ PR machine, and with no access to the men 
inside, we have no idea what the fallout from this rebellion is or might be.

This lack of transparency is typical — and it has terrible consequences.

The history of prison rebellions in this country shows we should be very 
cautious when we have to depend on state officials to tell us what 
happened, or is still happening, in any penal facility experiencing unrest.

Take Attica. Just three weeks ago, guards placed the New York State 
facility under complete lockdown. According to corrections officials, 
this was in reaction to a series of fights that had broken out between 
prisoners there. The men in this facility remained under lockdown for 
several days — it’s unclear how many — and each undoubtedly had his 
small cell “tossed”: his property thrown about and destroyed as guards 
searched for “contraband.” According to Attica’s correction officer 
union 
<http://nypost.com/2017/01/11/attica-prison-on-lockdown-after-bloody-inmate-brawls-break-out/>, 
the lockdown was necessary “to get to the root of what happened.”

But there’s plenty of reason to doubt the guards’ account of the unrest 
and their subsequent actions, just as there are reasons to be very 
worried about what’s happening to the men at Vaughn right now.

Again, Attica is instructive. Forty-six years ago, Attica was the site 
<http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/178182/blood-in-the-water-by-heather-ann-thompson/9780375423222/> 
of one of the most dramatic prison uprisings in American history. On 
September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 men rose up in protest 
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/attica-prison-anniversary-blood-in-the-water-thompson/> 
against the prison’s awful conditions. But rather than recognize the 
cause of the crisis, and work to address it, the State of New York sent 
in hundreds of troopers, who severely shot 128 men and killed 39 — 
prisoners and prison guards alike.

Today, in prisons across the country, the conditions that sparked the 
Attica uprising are even worse. Prisons are more overcrowded. Food 
rations are meager and, since meal services are often contracted out to 
for-profit companies, that food is sometimes spoiled and rotten 
<http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/06/02/aramark-michigan-prison-contractor-maggots-kitchen/28378435/>. 
Medical care is substandard and, again thanks to privatization, is often 
legally negligent 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/privatized-prison-health-care-scrutinized/2012/07/21/gJQAgsp70W_story.html>. 
Prisoners are kept for long periods of time in solitary confinement and 
face serious physical abuse — often accompanied by racial epithets and 
threats — from officers who already retain utter control over them.

So when we hear prisoners are on lockdown for fighting — rather than for 
revolting against deplorable living conditions — or when we witness 
another forcible retaking of a penal facility, we should be both 
skeptical and concerned.

Correction officials have a history of painting prisoners as violent 
thugs and insisting that authorities’ only aim is to restore order and 
safety for all. At Attica, prison officials have a long and 
well-documented track record of lying about the men in their charge and 
literally torturing those who dare to rebel.


        The Case of Kinross

It isn’t simply Attica’s history that should make us concerned about 
what might be transpiring now at Vaughn. Just this past September, on 
the forty-fifth anniversary of the Attica rebellion, prisoners 
throughout the US went on strike 
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/prison-strike-slavery-attica-racism-incarceration/> 
against forced prison labor and the terrible conditions in which they live.

Not surprisingly, corrections officials once again tried to spin this 
unrest by stressing the illegitimacy of the prisoners’ actions: these 
were but violent criminals who had gone on a rampage, and they would be 
dealt with accordingly.

The men and women in these facilities relay a very different story.

Thanks to the efforts of several family members of prisoners — as well 
as a local organization called Michigan Abolition and Prisoner 
Solidarity <https://michiganabolition.org/> (MAPS) — we have a much 
clearer picture of what transpired at one prison in particular: 
Michigan’s Kinross Correctional Facility.

For starters, we now know that before the men in Kinross launched a 
formal work stoppage, they had made several attempts to peacefully 
convey their demand for more humane living conditions.

As one man explained in a December 20 letter to MAPS, he and his fellow 
prisoners had grown desperate “to be treated as human beings not like 
animals in a cage.” The prisoners at Kinross live in terribly 
overcrowded facilities — “8 men in a cube made for 4” — and routinely 
endure “racist statements like don’t let me get the whip back out from you!”

They were even forbidden from hugging their children during prison 
visits, apart from hello and goodbye. “Imagine a child looking, coming 
to hug, and a voice on intercom forbidding child to do so?” the same 
prisoner wrote. “Child looks at Dad wondering if he’s diseased or what? 
And can’t touch their father?”

Increasingly in despair over their situation, prisoners chose block 
representatives to bring their grievances to the administration. But 
when they did, several prisoners report, guards destroyed their meager 
personal possessions and moved them to another facility.

The men then tried to press their concerns through a series of peaceful 
demonstrations of unity. “Everyone stood in front of their perspective 
units for the last 30 min of afternoon yard,” another Kinross prisoner 
wrote, describing one such action. “It was to let KCF administration 
know that we were fed up and things had to change.” Still nothing changed.

So they planned a strike for September 9. Their hope? That a broader 
nonviolent action might attract the public’s attention and perhaps, 
finally, win them some improvements.

According to numerous letters, the strike went off peacefully, both when 
the men refused to show up to work on September 9, and the next day when 
they amassed in the yard and met with administrators. Prison 
administrators promised to address at least some of the grievances they 
voiced that day, and the prisoners agreed to return to their cells.

But after they did so, the prisoners were rushed by a heavily armed 
Emergency Response Team 
<http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38941-orange-crush-the-rise-of-tactical-teams-in-prison> 
(at a state expense of nearly a million dollars 
<http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2017/01/04/kinross-prison-riot-michigan-inmates/96146186/>_)_.

Chaos and terror ensued. Prisoners were tear gassed and made to stand 
for hours outside in the freezing rain, and prison property was destroyed.

According to corrections officials, it was an all-out riot. But, as one 
of the prisoner’s insists, what made it violent and ugly was prison 
management’s choice to retaliate. “Regardless of what KCF staff claim,” 
he wrote, “this could have been prevented. If anything they incited a 
riot by lying about what they were going to do to change things.” 
Another Kinross prisoner echoed that account: “The administration went 
to the media and lied to the public about the demonstration, and tried 
to make it seem like we was the problem.”

Those on the outside never heard these stories. Instead, they were 
assured that order was being restored and steps were being taken to 
ensure the safety of staff and inmates alike. The troublemakers who had 
caused the “riot” would be moved into segregation, where they would face 
charges for what they had done. All would soon be well again.

But all, according to scores of Kinross’s prisoners, is hardly well. 
While even prison officials concede that, as one prisoner noted, “It was 
nothing but property damage,” these men have suffered severe retaliation.

“Prisoners were held in terrible conditions in temporarily reopened 
units,” MAPS spokesperson Alejo Stark reports, and although “more than a 
hundred prisoners were transferred and released from the hole [solitary] 
after several weeks, an estimated 150 prisoners are still in the hole” 
at their new facilities and now face “punishments of one to two years in 
very harsh administrative segregation conditions.”

As one prisoner described:

    They put me in unit 5 in the observation cell 125. The cell was a
    mess. The cell smelled like urine and feces, the toilet hadn’t been
    flushed in over two months the floor was sticky and unbearable. The
    toilet had been stained from all the waste in it . . . Over time I
    cleaned the place up, but the stain in the toilet bowl is there for
    life. After 70 days of people watching me use the toilet they
    finally moved me down the hall from where I was.


        Standing With Prisoners

>From Attica in 1971 to Kinross in 2016 to Vaughn in 2017, our nation’s 
prisons are the picture of barbarity. Prisoners are beaten, degraded, 
starved, and treated as less than human. They effectively lose their 
right to due process, and have no protection from cruel and unusual 
punishment.

According to Joe Miano 
<https://buffalonews.com/2017/01/10/attica-lockdown-since-sunday/>, an 
official with the New York State Corrections Officers Police Benevolent 
Association, Attica’s lockdown last month was “a clear example of the 
increasingly high levels of violence and dangerous weapons plaguing our 
prisons.”

But according to the human beings locked in this prison and others 
across the country, the real issue remains one of overcrowding and abuse.

At Vaughn Correctional Center, inmates have complained for years about 
their prison environment.

“They just got to the point where they’re fed up,” a former inmate told 
the /News Journal/. “If [the Department of Correction] is worried about 
the officers and not their demands, if nothing changes, I guarantee 
there will be another hostage situation in a different building.”

While state officials and the prison guard union would prefer to keep 
those conditions hidden behind the prison walls, it’s up to us to demand 
transparency and stand with the prisoners daring to affirm their humanity.

As one prisoner at Kinross wrote: “We need help, I’m shouting out from 
this 8×10 cell, help us! Don’t let them quiet our voice be an amplifier 
for us, don’t let what they are doing to us and throughout the M. D. O. 
C. fade into oblivion.”


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