June-July 97

PRISONS AND SENSORY DEPRIVATION TORTURE

The U.S. criminal justice system is remarkably ineffective, absurdly expensive, grossly inhumane and riddled with racism. The slaughter of youth of color characterizes many big city police departments. Our sentencing practices have led to the imprisonment of over one and a half million people in State and Federal facilities, with another three and a half million under other forms of social control.

·The use of sensory deprivation as a form of behavior modification began as an experiment with the political prisoners of this country--members of the Black Panther Party, members of the Puerto Rican Independenistas, the American Indian Movement, white members of the Plowshares, the Black Liberation Army, Islamic militants, jailhouse lawyers and prison activists were suddenly removed from the general population and placed in isolation. They are placed there for who they are or for what they believe. The former warden of Marion Penitentiary has been openly quoted as saying that the purpose of a control unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and society at large.

·There is no way to articulate the horror of endless sensory deprivation. Picture living in a human cage about the size of a bathroom.You are there 24 hours a day, day in and day out, year in and year out. You may be allowed out once every other day for an hour and a half in a concrete yard. You may be allowed one 15 minute phone call a day and that call is monitored. In some of the units you get one call every three months. Your mail and reading material is censored. If for some reason you have to leave your cage, you are strip searched which often includes a pointedly humiliating anal probe. You are shackled around your waist and handcuffed. You are entirely under the control of prison guards who carry long, black clubs they refer to as "nigger beaters." Sensory deprivation and isolation are brainwashing techniques which are no accident. The world of control units and supermax prisons is a world in which isolation and segregation for long and indefinite periods of time has led to a psychological brutality of ugly proportion. The expanded use of these units has led Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the World Organization Against Torture/USA to cite the United States with their concerns. Their use of isolation units breaks United Nations Covenant Against Torture and the United Nations Covenant for the Treatment of Prisoners, both of which the United States has signed.

·The political function they serve is inescapable. Police, the courts and the prison system all serve as social control mechanisms. The economic function they serve is equally as chilling. America is enchanted with this form of neo-slavery. The wall of silence that has been built around prisons and prisoners has got to be broken down. We need organizers of campus and community groups, letter writers, people who will become part of a nation-wide emergency response network for telephone calls, faxes and letters when we protest conditions, treatment and brutality.

·Prisons are one of the largest growth industries in the US at this time. It is no accident that the technological revolution has been accompanied by the largest explosion of prison-building in the history of the world. The expansion of the prison system in this country has been a boon to everyone from architects, plumbers and electricians to food vendors, all with one thing in common--a gourmet paycheck earned off the backs of males of color. With the full cooperation of politicians and media, the public is being sold a "War on Crime" and a "War on Drugs" as the cure for the constantly hawked, yet non-existent rising rate of crime.

Prison issues are class issues and until prison organizers and outside organizers begin opposition on a more serious and protracted level, prison administrations don't even have to respond to our complaints. The insidious crippling mostly of our poor young people of color in the prisons is expanding and none of this is about the rate of crime. It is about capitalism, it is about racism and classism.

Support the National Campaign to Stop Control Unit Prisons by contacting Bonnie Kerness, American Friends Service Committee, Criminal Justice Program, 972 Broad Street, 6th Floor, Newark, NJ 07102.

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