Aug-Sep 96

NEWS FROM THE GULAGS

by Carol Strick , NCX East Coast Correspondent

PRISON SLAVE LABOR IN FLORIDA

Florida and Oregon make the greatest profits from prison slave labor. The fact that Florida is leading the pack comes as no sur-prise. Since 1865, when slavery was "officially" abolished, it was imperative for industrialists to devise another scheme to extend slave labor. Following a logical historical course, "massa" turned to prisons. Chain gangs and prisoner-lease programs became the vehicle to get the New South, including Florida, rebuilt. In his new book, Twice the Work of Free Labor, Alex Lichtenstein details the "contract system," an inhumane work scheme in which prisoners remained under penal control but were "leased to outside contractors, who supervised production and marketing from convict-made goods." "The lease system returned profits that quadrupled operating expenses." Racism played a major part in the scheme of the New South's labor production. Blacks were only allowed to do harsh physical work, such as grading beds for railroads, building roads, and working coal mines, working in chain gangs, shackled, from sunup to sundown, and sleeping in train-like cars that amounted to portable prisons. In the New South, felonies for Whites were changed to misdemeanors so that Whites could pay the fines. There are plenty of Blacks and Latinos in jail today for accumulated fines that couldn't be paid. They are inside as slave laborers!

A photo from Lichtenstein's book shows a prisoner scraping a pine tree for resin for North Florida's turpentine industry. The caption under the photo reads, "No dry clothes provided after long hours in the swampy woods." Florida is still entrenched in prison slavery. The northern part of the state is blanketed with prisons. Jackson and Gadsden Counties have no other industry but prisons. Driving west from Tallahassee, the state capitol, to the Alabama border on I-10, motorists see what appears to be a lush state. Get off at any exit and you'll be shocked at the abject poverty that frequently exists. Gadsden County, which is predominantly Black and has the highest unemployment rate in the state-28% in 1995-also houses the state's first privatized prison.

Gadsden looks like the black hole of Calcutta. The privatized prison, Gadsden Correctional, has recently been opened for women. A series of low, almost windowless barracks, vaults or tombs, are the prison, an eerie place which is actually hidden! There are no signs available leading to it. You have to keep asking people, "Where's the new prison?"

"Go two miles, pass the ravine, make a left, you'll see it on the right."

Poor depressed towns: Quincy, Gretna, Marianna, Sneads, Chatahoochee, and infinite others are hosts to prisons, mental facilities and exploitation. This needs investigation in every state. The tentacles of corporate America, always on the lookout for cheap slave labor, have found it in their own backyards! The Florida map does not include jails, detention centers, reception centers, stockades, work camps, boot camps, forestry camps, and a myriad of juvenile facilities. One prison site can actually contain three prisons.

On Route 90 in Tallahassee, in the city proper, sits a large dated federal prison. The only refurbishing appears to be the triple razor wire! Citizens are brainwashed through TV to accept police brutality. Now razor wire can be subliminally introduced as "good." The state has run amok.
Driving west, we stop at Quincy, another poor depressed area of poverty bordering Gretna. Gadsden County, like its neighbor Jackson County, which harbors Marianna, are testimonies to man's inhumanity to man, to a civilization that is ending like Rome, running out of money to support oppression.

In the 100 plus miles from Tallahassee to Marianna, a small area by Florida's standards, are more than 100 buildings devoted to prison/prison mental/mental experimental health. This is only the tip of the iceberg. No wonder the government is shutting down. It's going into the prisons! Next time you apply to the federal patent bureau, your $1600 check and application may well be headed for Marianna. Unbeknownst to the public, the 1/2 million dollar profit from patents that are processed in the prison there are netting the women who do the work $36 a month! Alibis, aliases, and lies are the order of the day. Quincy Corrections has two names, not uncommon here; it is also known as Gadsden County Corrections.

Driving northwest from Gretna/Quincy, we arrived in Chatahoochee. Apalachee Corrections is a large prison complex which houses PRIDE. Various buildings are related to the prison, including the Apalachee Corrections firing range. Apalachee prisons, like many of the prisons in Florida, is a source of cheap labor under the euphemism PRIDE (Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises).

The committee in charge of the operation is appointed by the governor. I would re-name it "Profitable Resources for Industrialized, Deranged Elites" (PRIDE). There is an amazing relationship between the governor's committee and the PRIDE industries. Citrus is an important industry for PRIDE , and a woman who owns one of Florida's largest orange groves coincidentally sits on the governor's "citizens" board!

In Apalachee prisoners manufacture decals for license plates, snazzy decals for cop cars, soap and dairy products for itself and other prisons, also poultry, citrus, shoes, textiles, and sheets. The list is endless for people taking home a $30 a month paycheck. Some prisons specialize in data entry. A letter from an inmate states, "My writing is a little sloppy today because I did the marathon computer data entry [11 1/2 hours], averaging 30¢ an hour, which comes to about $18 every two weeks"!

PRIDE was the brainchild of a former warden at Miami Corrections, who by chance also worked several years in the accounting office of the DOC! She connected the need for cheap labor to idle prisoners, approached bipartisans Senator Bob Graham, Democrat, from the Washington Post publishing fortune, and Jack Eckerd, Republican, billionaire owner of Florida's largest drug chain. Voilá! PRIDE was born. This "local" industry includes the "export" of sport utility cars-former aged postal vehicles converted into snappy gadabouts that are reported popular in Third World countries.

PRIDE will not let go. Plans are in the making for using parolees in a future aqua culture business! If we had detoured south to Calhoun Corr., we would have been in the state labor camp for printing all stationery, flyers, and announcements from the governor and state senate to the entire Florida bureaucracy.

In this tour of oppression, Chatahoochee Mental Health, a surrealistic Kafkaesque nightmare stands out as a bastion of mental abuse. A city in itself-40-50 + buildings, all DOC, are straight out of Fellini. Prison facilities, forensic prisons, and various mental institutions are a monument to mind control. My mind started drifting to thoughts of experiments of the worst kind going on inside.
From Chatahoochee it's a short 20-25-minute drive to Marianna. This is hightech repression. Every conceivable device for monitoring people exists here. Upon entering we are greeted by mammoth boulder rocks lining the grass. No chance of a tank entering! A phone to announce yourself is monitored on closed circuit TV for Shawnee, "behind the wall." The prison is actually four prisons at one site and a work camp. Next door is a heavily guarded state "mental facility." I never imagined how awful this could be. Now I understand clearly how Hitler rose to power. A state-run media, state-run scape-goating labor camps-it is all very obscene.

Wake up America!

Do not allow the state to dehumanize us any longer!

THE HARASSMENT OF PROBATION

I am waiting for a friend who is spending a weekly hour in a rehab class-a condition of his probation. I am having coffee in a drab mall, feeling forlorn, thinking about brothers and sisters inside and their impossible confinement. My mind drifts to my friend and his probation, a continuance of the harassment he was exposed to inside. Each rehab sessions costs $10. The group meets for one hour. When there are five Tuesdays in the month, it's $50 down the drain.

The men sit close together in a tiny room. The session is conducted by a professorial looking counselor, who tells them they are all incorrigible! The best they can hope for is to be aware of their problems. The counselor told my friend that he lives in denial, that he is not participating enough in the session. I told my friend that he could participate by singing "God Bless America"! The counselor insists that my friend admit to his crime (which he denies committing) and express his innermost feelings. The counselor is beginning to sound like a snitch! My friend tells me some of the men's problems. They arise from bizarre family situations. It sounds like the parents of these men are more desperately in need of rehab.

The mandatory class of 10 men grosses $100 an hour. The counselor has 3 such sessions a day, 5 times a week-$1500 to tell people they are incorrigible! One man in the group has a passion for young girls. The counselor prods him to be more specific. He wants to hear more. He sounds like a reporter from the National Enquirer. Nothing is accomplished in these sessions. Most of the men are trying to get out of it. But the counselor has the power to make life extremely uncomfortable. The beat goes on.

It is a taboo to mention the real cause of these problems. Once my friend alluded to the inequities in society. The counselor swiftly shut him up by concluding that his comment was not "relevant."
Two hours later, I am sitting in the probation office waiting for my friend inside to speak to his probation officer. This office has a $123 monthly charge. It is broken down into $52 for the probation visit, an $8 one-time fee for sporadic urine tests, and various charges for the public defender (who advised my friend to plea bargain) as well as court costs-a total of $163 a month from a $210 weekly paycheck to feed the coffers of the DOC.

The probation officer is a fox, smiling and hiding behind his power and lack of accountability. With a snap of his fingers he can have you back inside. Both the counselor and the probation officer are guilty of abusing their power. The common denominator in the probation office is FEAR. My friend is a nervous wreck. Four other nervous wrecks are signing in.

"Herr Commandant, may I have permission to visit another state?"

"I'll think about that tomorrow. In the meantime, pay me. I control you. I can put you back inside."

HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES

In March 1996, the United Nation's Commission on Human Rights issued their annual report. It concerned the "human rights of all persons sub-jected to any form of detention or imprisonment; in particular, torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment."

Some countries were passed over in a single sentence. The U.S. warranted a lengthy report. From the police to the prisons, America was targeted for its severe human rights abuses. This report comes as no surprise to people who are aware of the brutality, sadism, and torture that are the norm in America's criminal justice system.

The United Nations report decried as inhumane police policies of placing people arrested in restraints, face down, on the ground. That practice restricts respiratory movement, and occasionally leads to death from "positional asphyxia."

"Conditions at certain maximum security facilities were said to result in the inhuman and degrading treatment of inmates at these facilities." "Confinement for 23 or 24 hours a day in windowless, sealed, concrete cells; no fresh air or natural light," were specifically mentioned; and heavy gauge perforated metal which "blocks vision and light." A substantial number of SHU prisoners are suffering from mental illness. Conditions "may press the outer bounds of what most human beings can psychologically tolerate"!

On death row at Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida, inmates are not allowed to have fans. There is no relief from the damp, oppressive, Florida heat, especially in summer.
From the Stiles Unit, Texas S.P. in Beaumont, Michael Magoon, a former trustee, was demoted in rank to make him ineligible for parole. Michael is guilty of letting us know about the beatings and murders of inmates that are part of the routine in TDJ. Michael's son is incarcerated with him. He is forced to watch his son beaten by guards and inmates in cahoots with the staff.

In the same prison, William Craig Stevens suffers from severe and chronic asthma. He should be anywhere but in the hot, putrid, stagnant environment of the South Texas oil fields. William needs medicine to stay alive. He occasionally gets a prescription when he gets on the 2:40 a.m. chow line and goes from there to the pill line. Occasionally at 5:00 A.M. he will get the medicine he needs to breathe. More often than not, "the computer broke down" or "the doctor didn't leave a prescription." William is justifiably afraid of suffocating to death.

Shaka Muhammad, at Pleasant Valley S.P. in Coalinga, California, has been subjected to a fifth trial after four previous ones resulted in two hung juries and two mistrials. Shaka, an African American and a Muslim, feels that the prejudice against Muslims is the catalyst for the retrials. He was prosecuted during the Gulf War. At his first trial, the prosecution said to the jury, "If you let these men (Muslims) go, you might as well be living under Saddam Hussein."

Gerald Niles, currently incarcerated at Taylor Corr. Inst. in Perry, Florida, has been placed in Ad Seg. Ostensibly this was done because of supposed threats on his life! More likely this is retaliation for his exposure of the oppressive conditions in the U.S. penal institutions.

Robert Knott, a Native American (Winnebago) artist in ADX Florence, is further harassed and tortured by them in collusion with the counselors. They tamper with his mail and send contrived letters to his friends, family and supporters.

The beat goes on.

Bob Dole: "Juveniles should be tagged forever." So, according to Herr Dole, if you so much as make a mistake at 14 years old, you should carry it to your grave and be forever restricted from meaningful work or opportunity.

Sieg Heil! Bring it down!

ONE STEP FORWARD
According to a spokesperson for the U.S. Justice Dept., the constitutional court of Italy voted in June to block the extradition of an Italian citizen wanted for murder in Florida. The court's decision was based on United States human rights violations. Florida has a death penalty; Italy does not.

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