Feb-Mar-97

News from the Gulags

Drugs in Prison
At 1:30 A.M. a prisoner is taken to the A.C. visiting park in a Florida Prison. He is having a urine test for drugs (drugs which the guards bring in!). The guards come around to cells telling the captives to urinate in a small cup. If a prisoner cannot urinate at that time, he is handcuffed and taken to the park, where three guards watch him for an hour. If he cannot urinate within the hour, he gets a Disciplinary Report for disobeying a verbal order; refusing to urinate; "Piss when I say piss!" It doesn't get much more irrational than this.

If a prisoner is found with marijuana or cocaine (that only the guards could have brought in) in his system, he gets 60 days in the hole (disciplinary confinement) and a 180 days of gain time taken away. If he's in good standing with "the man" (emphasize a small "m"), he will get probation and more drugs! Snitches are in excellent standing; servility is de rigueur.

Guards on the Take

I asked a guard at one of the facilities to tell me his biggest fear at the prison. In a flash he answered, "The other guards." I was puzzled and asked him to explain. He described the lucrative scams of some of the high-power guards. Cigarettes at $100 a pack; money sent to P.O. boxes, drugs, sex, the works.

He estimated that a guard on the take could make as much as $10,000 a day. He could keep $2,000 for himself. The rest was payoffs to the top. He looked at me and asked incredulously, "How else can a prison guard who grosses $43,000 a year afford three condos and a boat in Miami?"

Torture of the Week:

The Chicken Wing" in Tomoka Correctional Institution, Daytona Beach, Florida. A prisoner is handcuffed and cuffed at this ankles, the two cuffs then tied together. The prisoner remains in this physical and mental torture (chicken-winged), nude, for at least 5 hours. The chains are removed and he remains nude without so much as a blanket for 3 days. A guy was left in that bare, freezing cell for one week. When he came out, he had lost his voice (from screaming? from freezing?). He was carried out on a stretcher and nobody ever saw him again. They make cars (converted postal vehicles) in Tomoka. The cars are more important than the people. BRING IT DOWN

Write to Warden Pauley, Tomoka Correctional Institution, 3950 Tiger Bay Rd., Daytona Beach, FL 32124. Demand that this torture be ended.

Administrative Segregation-
In the belly of the beast

Hello, please help me! I was arrested in Dallas at the age of 15 in 1987 and certified to stand trial as an adult. I was convicted and sent to the Texas prison system at age 16. I am now 24. In Administrative Segregation I have been attacked several times by prison staff. They attack us for things they don't like and for taking legal action. They lie at disciplinary hearings and have started to plant shanks in our cells. They have taken our radios, TVs, school programs, and commissary privileges. There are no newspapers or magazines for indigent inmates.

Can you imagine the mental state of a person in this environment for six months, a year, or longer? These officials are creating madmen who will one day be released into the free world. No one can predict how we would act after suffering this type of isolation and treatment!
-Stiles Unit, Beaumont, TX.

Desperation & Chutzpah

Charges to Georgia prisoners-$1.00 a month-will be assessed to all prisoners having a minimum of $11 in their accounts for "a monthly management fee"-right! Georgia DOC & The Chase Manhattan!

Terror in the Gulags

Letter from a prisoner: "The Neo-Nazi Pa-trols just came through G-Cell house, conducting strip searches. They turned off the water supply and turned on all the lights from the tower. While the E-Squad members were conducting these strip searches they were making derogatory remarks such as 'bend over and spread your ass-hole,' etc. When they approached my cell I asked them why they were using such unprofessional language. I went on to explain that it was against the laws of the Hebrew Israelite religion to spread my buttocks (Lev 18:22). I asked to speak with the E-Squad supervisor. They came back with a more racist, irrational pig. He told me to cuff-up. I complied. Once this was done I was backed into the back of my cell. One of these pigs pulled my boxer shorts down, grabbed my buttocks and forcibly spread my buttocks. This is part of the humiliation and degradation I suffer in this sick nation."

"The torturer is uncivilized. There is no reason for this society to continue."-A. Feldman

The Florida DOC is indiscriminate in its use of chemical agents, shock shields, and hand-held devices of torture. Recently, due to a number of protests from outside, an "investigation" was begun. " Investigation" is a DOC word for "stall" until the public forgets about it.

BOOK REVIEWS
The American Way of Crime
(From Salem to Watergate)
by Frank Browning and John Garassi ,G.P. Putnam's sons, N.Y.

"In an unjust society, criminal behavior is a form of individual rebellion."

The legal history of the United States is about who controlled the money and how they schemed to keep it. It has nothing to do with justice.

In 1630 John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, considered himself a "reformer" of the Anglican Church of England. He and his Puritan cronies cornered the market on their concept of morality. These sexually repressed, God-fearing hypocrites included civil liberties, economics and even nature, under their jurisdiction. They weren't concerned with an individual and his/her values, but with protection of individual prosperity. The rich, they claimed, were entitled to wealth, whereas the poor were lazy! By the time Winthrop died, the American dual system of justice was established.

These founding fathers were also the founding torturers. They quickly ran out of prison space, since poverty was abounding, so these God-fearing men punished hungry thieves by

· sentencing a woman to wear a cleft through her tongue for half an hour;

· running red hot wires through people's tongues;

· cutting off ears;

· branding thieves with a letter "T" on their foreheads;

· giving 39 lashes and placing the victim in bilboes;

·holding people in chains upside down;

·whipping women as they ran behind horsedrawn carriages.

Most crimes were economic, but "cover-ups" were the order of the day. America's first great "cover-up" was the Salem Witch Trials. The "witches" were a convenient distraction for the farmers of West Salem who found themselves in financial distress. The beat goes on.
By 1700 America was a disconnected place with "crime waves sweeping the cities." Poverty was rampant, and the government realized that it was losing a grip on the citizenry. Spying became the order of the day, so in 1703 "The Society for Suppression of Disorder" was started.

Gangs had begun to form, as criminals needed each other to fight a growing police state and penitentiary system. By the 1800s, so many women were arrested for stealing or prostitution that women's facilities were built at Sing Sing, Auburn, and Albany. The torturers were devising even more ruthless methods to punish these impoverished women-includng gagging them and hanging them by their wrists.

This unfair economic/political/social system was not without its dissidents. "Riots" had become the American way: bread riots, bank riots, riots of every sort. The rise of political activity alarmed the government/rich, who realized that without "legislation" the citizenry would win it. Therfore, "political violence" was treated as "criminal assault." Injuries that resulted from economic riots were treated by the courts as "crimes," and Andrew Jackson, the stalwart of "democracy," thought nothing of bringing out troops to quell riots. By the time of the Haymarket riots, 1886, even the Governor of Illinois, jeopardizing his career, commented on the partiality of the "judge" in the case!

Through all this, the prisoners were building the country free-of-charge in the obscene lend-lease program. Prisoners were used as strike breakers to do substitute work, such as coal mining when the miners were on strike-a back-up slave force of prisoners on hand for every occasion to keep America running smoothly.

Try to read this book. Most libraries have it, or you can write to Putnam in N.Y. Its revelations are astounding. The book ends with Watergate-350 years of cover-ups, 350 years of torture, now torture with technology as prisons drive isolated people insane.

How much longer can an uncivilized society continue? In South Africa before Mandela was president, the law was an illegitimate legal system. Essentially, that's what we have here in the U.S.

Criminal Injustice
Confronting the Prison Crisis
by Elihu Rosenblatt
South End Press, 116 Botolph St., Boston, MA 02115

The hope of liberty and of opportunity is the only incentive to life, especially the prisoner's life. Society has sinned so long against him it ought at least to leave him that. I am not very sanguine that it will, or that any real change in that direction can take place until the conditions that breed both the prisoners and the jailer will be forever abolished.-Emma Goldman
.
So begins Elihu Rosenblatt's new compilation of writings against the prison system in Criminal Injustice: Confronting the Prison Crisis.

In his preface, Mr. Rosenblatt capsules the essence of the problem and puts forth a possible solution: "The changes will be forced upon the system by prisoners organizing and the collective action of an angry, educated populace." He goes on to inform the reader of the magnitude of this industry of social control, citing distortions by the media, which never give us the prisoner's side and instead erroneously portrays "D.A.s and the police as a mythical band of crusaders for justice and truth." Mr. Rosenblatt delves into the "pseudo drug war of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton," which has erupted into an ever more violent society that has produced unprecedented frustrations to its youth.

The book is divided into 6 sections: an Overview, Conditions for Resistance, Women in Prison, The Death Penalty is Dead Wrong, Political Imprisonment in the U.S., and the Nationwide Lockdown. Each chapter is a wealth of information. Mr. Rosenblatt directs us clearly into an accounting for the "horrors of twisting the human spirit by incarceration." With lucidity he demonstrates the true causes of crime and the government myths and lies to a "sleeping public."

Mr. Rosenblatt refers to his work as one in progress. He is progress and he may be the glue we need to bond us into a strong, committed movement. I know that the prisons are populated disproportionately by people of color, but I wasn't certain that drug use amongst this nation's youth involves a majority of white drug users.

A jobless person is arrested, does time, is released into a greater atmosphere of despair. His parole choices include a poorly paying job, welfare, more crimes or death. The federal government, we are informed, is currently constructing 200 more of these houses of horror at a financial drain of $4.3 billion.

We have four choices: to educate the public, to protest this expansion, to join in solidarity with our sisters and brothers inside to crumble these steel bars and make this fair for everyone, or to sit by placidly and watch an uncivilized society take us all down with it.


Prison Privatization
The Sunshine State Is Gloomy

In the quest for more money for a few, prison privatization is a growing field. With total disregard for ethics and morality, prisons built, designed, staffed, and managed by private corporations have eager investors clamoring for more. The "shrine" of Corrections Corporation of America, a prototype private prison, built in Bay County, Florida (fewer guards, more profits, has potential investors flocking here from Australia, Argentina, Canada, England, France, as well as the rest of the USA. Currently, a mere 2.5 percent of all federal and state prisoners are captives in private facilities. A professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Charles Thomas, is excited that "there is unbridled investor enthusiasm" for the kkkamps.

Three of the largest privatized firms are operating in the Sunshine/Gloom state. Profits are soaring.

Individual shares are up. Write to Arthur Leavitt and demand that these Nazi/slaveholder stocks are taken off the board!

Privatized firms reign supreme in marketing, beholden to no standards-cheapest food, least number of guards-to show a profit. Privatization gives bonuses in stock instead of cash dollars, making it easy for guards to take advantage of early retirement and leave the DOC unworried about competition.

As we delve, things get worse. There is a commission to sanction and legalize these Nazi maneuvers. The Florida Correctional Privatization Commission is the glue that binds this insanity. Critics of the plan are fighting back. Although for the wrong reasons. Monroe County was at odds with Whackenhut over what they considered insufficient staffing. Whackenhut pulled out, like a child having a temper tantrum when they couldn't have their way.

A Bay County official, David Miller, said that although he's asked about the "downside" practically every week, he himself can't see it-unless he doesn't consider an explosion waiting to happen a "downside."


ALERTS:

·Lily Shmidt, #31487-054, a captive in the Federal Snake Pit, Carswell, Texas, has been injected with prolixin decante every two weeks for the past five months. The Prison psych was treating Lily for "Schizophrenia." Everyone in Carswell has been diagnosed with ominous, serious mental conditions. How else can they justify their drug program?

Nobody asked Lily if she had any allergies. As a matter of fact, the psycho dept. at Carswell went so far as to declare Lily "incompetent" and get a court order from their legal cohorts for carrying out their plan.

I am sick in my heart from these unaccountable Nazi tactics. As it turns out, Lily did have adverse reactions. Excruciating pain in her left shoulder, constant vomiting, spots on her face, and pain in her sides.How are we going to stop this insanity? An attack from another planet? The collapse of Wall Street (since this is all about money)?

Write to Warden Brogan, P.O. Box 27137, Fort Worth, Texas 26127, and demand an end to experimental drugging of captives. Write to Lily. Give her some hope that we are out here.


·Amy Smith, #620118, Rt. 4 ,Box 800, Gatesville, TX. 76528, was sent to prison for drugs- which could have come into her neighborhood from the CIA. She is being kept in prison as retaliation for suing the prison and officials when she reported sexual abuse and nothing was done. NOW legal defense-are you listening? This is a woman who needs help with her lawsuit. She has stood up for thousands of women who are constantly abused, sexually and physically, in the kamps. Contact Amy at the above address or Margaret Walker, at the Texas ACLU: 512-441-0077.

A perversion by any other name is still a perversion:

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