[Pnews] On Russell Maroon Shoatz’s “Death By Regulation" - Now in Hospice

[Prisoner News]

themetropole.blog
<https://themetropole.blog/2021/12/15/on-russell-maroon-shoatzs-death-by-regulation-1997-with-robert-saleem-holbrook-executive-director-of-the-abolitionist-law-center/>
On
Russell Maroon Shoatz’s “Death By Regulation,” 1997, with Robert Saleem
Holbrook, Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center
------------------------------

*This post is part of the Metropole’s Disciplining the Nation series, where
we are spotlighting a primary source that is vital to the retelling of the
history of racial state violence and criminalization in the United States.
Learn more about the series here.*

*By Charlotte Rosen*

“I am not under a court sentence of death. I have, however, been sentenced
to ‘death by regulation.”

These words were written by Russell Maroon Shoatz in 1997, while in
solitary confinement in Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution
Greene. A founding member of Philadelphia’s Black Unity Council, member of
the Black Panther Party, and member of the Black Liberation Army, Russell
Maroon Shoatz was a Black political prisoner who spent nearly 50 years in
Pennsylvania and federal prisons until he was released this past October.
He escaped twice from Pennsylvania state prisons, which serves as the
origin of his name Maroon, which also serves to reference the thousands of
escaped enslaved people who liberated themselves and built independent
maroon communities across the United States colony. Throughout his
imprisonment, and despite ongoing repression and torture from the
Pennsylvania correctional administration, Shoatz continued to organize
against state violence and mentored fellow imprisoned people through his
writings on the prison industrial complex, the legacy of Black struggle,
history of Black maroonage, and more. Over 30 years of his time in
captivity was spent in solitary confinement.

After a long campaign for his release, Shoatz was recently granted
compassionate release
<https://truthout.org/articles/former-black-panther-russell-maroon-shoatz-freed-from-prison-after-49-years/>
on October 25th, 2021 and is now able to enter hospice care surrounded by
family and close friends. He is 78 years old and is suffering from
life-threatening health conditions, most pressingly, Stage 4 cancer.

The life and writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz are not widely known. As
Quincy Saul wrote in an introduction to Shoatz’s collected writings,
<https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=541> this “is no
accident” – the suppression of “maroon ideas, maroon histories, and
programs for maroon futures” is to be expected under a racial capitalist
regime hellbent on criminalizing political dissent and forms of
truthtelling that challenge the carceral status quo. But Shoatz’s analyses
of the US prison industrial complex, recollections and reassessments of the
post-1960s era of the Black liberation movement, and insights on movement
tactics and strategy, deserve the close attention of carceral state
historians serious about listening when the “the pen is with the maroons.”

For *The Metropole*’s “Disciplining the Nation”series, I selected Russell
Maroon Shoatz’s piece “Death by Regulation: Pennsylvania Control Unit
Abuses,” written in 1995 and found here
<http://infoshop.io/media/Death%20by%20Regulation.pdf>. Maroon’s concept of
“death by regulation” is a particularly clarifying concept for historians
and activists alike. Shoatz describes death by regulation as the
late-twentieth century practice of segregating imprisoned people deemed
unruly or “troublemakers” in punitive control units – a “prison within a
prison” or “high-tech isolation and torture holes.” Despite appearing less
cruel than the death penalty and being “governed by clearly defined rules,”
these control units ultimately brought about mass, racially
disproportionate premature death through long-term solitary confinement,
psychological and physical abuse, and social control.

The central topic of “Death by Regulation is the late-20th century
explosion of supermaximum security prisons that use long-term, punitive
solitary confinement to cage individuals classified as “disruptive” or
“violent.” The first prison to contain a control unit was a federal one
built in Marion, Illinois, where more than one hundred radical Black,
Native, Puerto Rican, and white antiracist prisoners were transferred in
1972. Mixing long term solitary confinement with invasive behavior
modification experiments, indiscriminate punishment, and routine
deprivation of communication with the outside world, prisoners in Marion
suffered excruciating tortures. As Eddie G. Griffin, who was imprisoned in
Marion’s control unit, wrote
<http://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC3_scans/3.catholic.worker.hell.very.small.space.1980.pdf>
“It is itself a Death Row for the living. Its creation added the ultimate
dimension to the behavior modification systems. The subtle implication
behind its meaning is made sharp and clear: Conform or Die.”

Although radical collectives such as the Committee to End Marion Lockdown
(CEML) fought
<http://www.freedomarchives.org/Out_of_Control/01_introduction.html> boldly
to prevent the spread of control units, prisons built with or entirely
consisting of control units proliferated in the 1980s through the 1990s
with the express purpose repressing political and politicized prisoners.
The In 1980, there were just two federal super-maximum or “supermax”
prisons. By 2005, 44 states had supermax facilities. These supermax prisons
are constructed to cage prisoners in single cells for 23 hours a day, for
an indefinite period of time – a practice that the United Nations Human
Rights Council now deems a form of torture. Beyond the expansion of
supermax prisons, almost all prisons and jails now have control units used
for solitary confinement of prisoners. Studies of specific state prisons
also suggest that Black and Latinx prisoners are disproportionately
confined and punished through long-term solitary confinement in control
units.

Maroon wrote “Death by Regulation” while he was imprisoned in the control
unit at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution Greene, where he was
caged for 18 years. In addition to the light being left on in his cell 24
hours a day, he endured frigid temperatures, complete social isolation,
nutritional violence (in the form of smaller portions of nutritionally
deficient food), medical neglect, racist abuse from guards, little to no
access to intellectual, educational, vocational, or therapeutic
programming, censorship of mail and reading material, restricted property,
non-contact visits, and more. In “Death by Regulation,” Shoatz describes
how control units operate using a form of “clean torture” that “break[s]
your mind” and “will to resist” in order to “coopt you as a willing pawn in
their war to pacify and exploit you for the service of capital.” These
units render their caged inhabitants civilly if not biologically dead –
thus death by regulation. “Control unit facilities cannot be allowed to
exist,” he wrote, because “they serve no purpose other than to dehumanize
their occupants.” Prisons and their “supermaxification,” Shoatz suggests,
represent sites of genocide rooted in the history of US racial slavery,
Indigenous dispossession, and imperialism. “I’m being housed in a ‘death
camp,” Shoatz wrote in another piece in 1997, adding, “I mean that
literally.”

To better contextualize “Death by Regulation: Pennsylvania Control Unit
Abuses” and its impact at the time of its publication, I met with Robert
Saleem Holbrook, the Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, to
discuss Shoatz’s writings and work. Holbrook speaks about his experience
learning from and struggling alongside Shoatz in Pennsylvania prisons, the
power of Shoatz’s concept of “death by regulation,” the importance of
history for contemporary prison and police abolition movements, and much
more.

The following is a transcript of my conversation with Holbrook on Shoatz’s
work and organizing, which has been edited for length and clarity.

CR: To begin, do you mind introducing yourself?
Robert Saleem Holbrook

RSH: My name is Robert Saleem Holbrook; I’m the Executive Director of
the Abolitionist
Law Center <https://abolitionistlawcenter.org/>. I’m also a co-founder of
the Human Rights Coalition. My pronouns are he/him. I did 27 years in
prison for an offense that I was convicted of as a child, and when I was
inside prison, I was very fortunate to make the acquaintance of and be
mentored by political prisoners in Pennsylvania – that resulted in me
becoming the person I am today.
[image: Headshot of Charlotte Rosen: white-presenting femme with shoulder,
length curly brown hair, brown eyes, wearing gold hoop earrings and a black
shirt.]Charlotte Rosen

CR: Jumping off from that, something I learned about Maroon, not only
through reading his work but also through a lot of the events that have
been happening around efforts to free him and get him proper care, has been
his extensive organizing work inside – which was arguably a form of mutual
aid, of political education – and so I was just wondering if you could
share a little bit about what your experience learning from him was like.

RSH: Maroon has had one of the most major influences on my political
development of any other living person – however, I only really met Maroon
two times and there was a 26 year gap between those meetings. So powerful
were our personal interactions that they resonated with me. For context,
when I was 17 years old at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Camp Hill,
I was placed in the hole. When Camp Hill had a riot [in 1989], Maroon and
other prisoners who were in the holes across the state – particularly who
were political prisoners, politicized prisoners, or prisoners who just gave
the state of Pennsylvania problems – had been sent out of the state and
into the federal system for a year and a half. When Maroon came back into
the state, he was placed back in the hole at SCI Camp Hill, where I was
also being caged. At 17 years old, I probably had been in prison for maybe
a year by this point. So I met Maroon, but I didn’t actually have any
conversation with Maroon. Maroon would come on the gate and talk about
Black liberation history, he would talk about the 1960s and 1970s and the
struggles that our communities went through, as well as like encouraging
younger prisoners who were in the hole like myself to read, to better
yourself, to get yourself in shape. He opened our eyes to not just the
injustices of the system, but why and how we should fight back. That was
1991.

Throughout my travels in the prison system, Maroon wrote a lot, and his
articles would come to us through the prison grapevine as well as in
published pieces – that was the only way he could communicate with us
because he was locked down in solitary confinement; Maroon did close to 30
years in solitary confinement. So the way Maroon communicated to us was
through articles. That was part of our political development, reading
Maroon’s articles about prisons, about the struggle, about political
development, reading Maroon’s critiques of democratic socialism, critiques
of vertical versus horizontal leadership.

Fast forward to 2017, I’m coming up for resentencing so I have to be
shipped to SCI Graterford and Maroon is at SCI Graterford. So this is my
first time actually seeing Maroon in person, where I could touch him, feel
him, and we could sit here and talk.

And that was a really great experience for me because I’m like, here is
someone who has been a mentor for 26 years in prison for me, who mentored
us in inside-outside organization, and on how to be a part of these
liberation struggles and radical movements on the outside, how to have
something to contribute. Our challenge was to connect prisons with the
larger structural issues, the larger structural critiques of America so
that we wouldn’t be fighting in a vacuum, we wouldn’t be in a silo.

After years of reading his letters and his articles about this, to have the
opportunity to meet him and then have a really great candid conversation
with him about – listen, we were thinking that the only ways many of us
were gonna get out was by escaping, by going over the wall, so we did a lot
of studying on that. It was a really challenging conversation with him
because what he did was, he said “listen: we made a mistake along the way,”
and it was like, “what? What do you mean we made mistakes!” And he was
like, no listen – that’s one thing about Maroon, is he’s always ready to
self-critique and do self-evaluation. He said that a lot of the material we
were reading about the liberation movements of the ’60s, the ’70s, even
’80s was not going to translate to the society, to the world, that we were
going out to today. He said listen, I want you to understand that you’re
not going out in that era. There’s no National Liberation movements out
there like that. A lot of the tactics and strategies that we studied in
Latin America, Asia, even Northern Ireland, it’s not going to translate to
that world. It translated in here for us to survive, but it’s not going to
translate out there.

But he said what I do want you to do is take out there your politics, take
out there your values that we developed in here, and then you translate
that to the environment that’s out there. For me, for a lot of us, that is
an example of Maroon’s leadership and how he raised us, and how he trained
us – and when I say training, we *trained* in there. We didn’t look at
political development as reading a book, sitting around a visioning circle.
We were cadres, we trained. And for him to have that self-critical,
self-evaluation moment with us really defines Maroon’s leadership and
organizing style because, had he not had the credibility he had, I don’t
think he would have been able to pull that off with a lot of us, you feel
me? But because he had that credibility and history, when he communicated
that to us, we knew like, OK, we have to go back and reevaluate, and we did.

CR: Moving more towards Maroon’s piece on control units, something that I
think is really powerful about that piece is the framework that Maroon
offers of “death by regulation.” I was wondering if you could talk about
your reflections on that framework, what it brings up for you, or your
reflections on the piece generally.

RSH:  Just hearing that just brought me back, wow… I literally remember
first reading the article when I was in the special management unit at SCI
Greene, I believe it was 1997. Maroon was in the units maybe not even 50
yards from me but I never saw him for three years. So he was in a control
unit, I was in special management unit. And when I first read that, it was
really incredible because our civil death was codified by regulation and
statutes. So when I was sentenced to life without parole, basically you
were civilly dead, from a statutory standpoint. But then, when we were
placed in prison, when I was sent into the special management unit, which
was not just a hole within a hole, but a hole within a hole within a hole,
reading [the phrase] death by regulation… I was like, that’s what they
doing, they basically put us in this unit and said “you’re dead, you don’t
exist, and we really don’t care. You’re gonna be in this unit 23 hours a
day, one hour out for exercise 5 days a week, 24 hours on the weekend.”

That’s basically just death, just erasing you. So reading that article
about control units and how your entire existence boils down to death, the
administration having control over you and grinding you down, because
that’s what it’s about. Maroon was defining long term solitary confinement
and long term isolation as state violence – and see, a lot of people, when
they look at solitary confinement, they don’t look at it as state violence.
You’ll even hear things like, “it’s torture” – but what is torture? It’s
state violence. When the state is doing it, when the state sanctions it,
endorses it, that’s state violence. And so that framing [of death by
regulation] alone put the onus on something different; this isn’t torture,
this is about an unjust state. And those were the leaps that Maroon made
for us.

It would be very easy for us to fall into thinking “it’s just these units,
it’s just these guards on the unit, it’s this prison.” Maroon was always
like, no, you’re looking at it from a smaller level, you need to look at it
from this larger level. These units will always exist, these guards will
always exist, this oppression will always exist, this torture will always
exist, as long as the state that sanctions it exists. And that for us was
always like, eureka.

CR: As an historian, I often think about how learning about the history of
policing and prisons is inherently radicalizing. The more you know about
the history of the carceral state, the more it becomes clear to me at least
that abolition is the only way forward. So I am curious what learning about
the history of criminalization and imprisonment has been like for you or
meant for you, or perhaps what kinds of historical lessons or ideas do you
often return to from history?

RSH: One thing I have learned from history and that has always been
important for me to articulate is that prisons and policing are not an
anomaly within the United States. They’re part of the same structure that
must be abolished. And you can’t separate them from capitalism, from racial
capitalism.

Throughout my imprisonment, one thing I would do and still do, is I study
my opponent. Whether it was boxing, whether it was prison, whatever it was,
I always had to study my opponent. So my first couple years in prison I
just immersed myself in reading books about the history of prisons in the
United States, whether it was Eastern State Penitentiary, Sing Sing, the
Auburn experiment, the development of the prison movement in California,
Pennsylvania’s prison movement… that was my world, because I was sentenced
to die there.

So I wanted to see how my class resisted [the prison]. This approach always
really helped me, because one, I looked at myself as part of an oppressed
class, that was oppressed by a larger state, a larger system that was
unjust and that created this class, and that created the conditions for
social crime. So for me, piecing all of that together, and always returning
to the fact that if we’re going to talk about abolishing police, if we’re
going to talk about abolishing prisons, if we’re going to talk about
abolishing racial injustice – at the end of the day we’re going to have to
talk about abolishing the social contract that has governed the United
States since its founding, and then we’re also going to have to talk about
the larger picture of abolishing global capitalism.

Once I was able to connect the fact that prisons and police are not
anomalies within the United States – that the United States is the problem
– I’ve always been able to connect to that the larger fight ahead of us and
not just get weighed down.

—

To learn more about the Abolitionist Law Center’s work, click here
<https://abolitionistlawcenter.org/>.

*Featured image (at top): “Running Down The Walls 5k benefit for prisoners”
<https://www.flickr.com/photos/109799466@N06/50313226216> by joepiette2
<https://www.flickr.com/photos/109799466@N06> is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
2.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/?ref=ccsearch&atype=rich>*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/ppnews_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20211215/e927b7db/attachment.htm>