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<h1 id="reader-title">What Happened At Vaughn Prison?</h1>
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<p><span class="dropcaps">by <a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/heather-ann-thompson/"
title="Posts by Heather Ann Thompson" rel="author">Heather
Ann Thompson February 2, 2017</a><br>
</span></p>
<p><span class="dropcaps">Y</span>esterday, scores of men
in Delaware’s largest prison, the Vaughn Correctional
Center, <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/02/inmates-demanding-education-protesting-trump-take-hostages-at-delaware-prison/">took
over</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/crime/2017/02/01/delaware-prison-lockdown-vaughn/97342188/">called
the media</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>At dawn, the police stormed the facility.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This lack of transparency is typical — and it has
terrible consequences.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://nypost.com/2017/01/11/attica-prison-on-lockdown-after-bloody-inmate-brawls-break-out/">union</a>,
the lockdown was necessary “to get to the root of what
happened.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Again, Attica is instructive. Forty-six years ago,
Attica <a
href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/178182/blood-in-the-water-by-heather-ann-thompson/9780375423222/">was
the site</a> of one of the most dramatic prison
uprisings in American history. On September 9, 1971,
nearly 1,300 men <a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/attica-prison-anniversary-blood-in-the-water-thompson/">rose
up in protest</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/06/02/aramark-michigan-prison-contractor-maggots-kitchen/28378435/">spoiled
and rotten</a>. Medical care is substandard and, again
thanks to privatization, is often <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/privatized-prison-health-care-scrutinized/2012/07/21/gJQAgsp70W_story.html">legally
negligent</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h4>The Case of Kinross</h4>
<p><span class="dropcaps2">I</span>t 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 <a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/prison-strike-slavery-attica-racism-incarceration/">went
on strike</a> against forced prison labor and the
terrible conditions in which they live.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The men and women in these facilities relay a very
different story.</p>
<p>Thanks to the efforts of several family members of
prisoners — as well as a local organization called <a
href="https://michiganabolition.org/">Michigan
Abolition and Prisoner Solidarity</a> (MAPS) — we have
a much clearer picture of what transpired at one prison
in particular: Michigan’s Kinross Correctional Facility.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!”</p>
<p>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?”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But after they did so, the prisoners were rushed by a
heavily armed <a
href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38941-orange-crush-the-rise-of-tactical-teams-in-prison">Emergency
Response Team</a> (at a state expense of nearly a <a
href="http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2017/01/04/kinross-prison-riot-michigan-inmates/96146186/">million
dollars</a><u>)</u>.</p>
<p>Chaos and terror ensued. Prisoners were tear gassed and
made to stand for hours outside in the freezing rain,
and prison property was destroyed.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>As one prisoner described:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<h4>Standing With Prisoners</h4>
<p><span class="dropcaps2">F</span>rom 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.</p>
<p>According to <a
href="https://buffalonews.com/2017/01/10/attica-lockdown-since-sunday/">Joe
Miano</a>, 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.”</p>
<p>But according to the human beings locked in this prison
and others across the country, the real issue remains
one of overcrowding and abuse.</p>
<p>At Vaughn Correctional Center, inmates have complained
for years about their prison environment.</p>
<p>“They just got to the point where they’re fed up,” a
former inmate told the <em>News Journal</em>. “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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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415 863.9977
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