From Oct22 Bay Area….Join us!

Tens of thousands of people imprisoned in the US are being subjected to torturous, inhumane conditions. 

 Many are:

 ·       Held in long term solitary confinement; locked in tiny, windowless, sometimes sound proof, cells; cut off from fresh air and sunlight for 22-24 hours every day and given small portions of food that lacks basic nutritional requirements. 

·       Denied human contact and violently taken from their cells for petty violations.

·       Put in solitary arbitrarily, often because of accusations of being members of prison gangs based on dubious evidence, and have no way to challenge the decisions of prison authorities to place them in solitary.

 

Many are forced to endure these conditions for months, years and even decades!  Mental anguish and trauma often results from being confined under these conditions.  Locking people down like this amounts to trying to strip them of their humanity.

 

These conditions fit the international definition of torture!  This is unjust, illegitimate and profoundly immoral.  WE MUST JOIN IN AN EFFORT TO STOP IT, NOW!

 

People imprisoned at Pelican Bay State Prison in California have called For a Nation-wide Hunger Strike to begin on July 8, 2013. They have also issued a call for unity among people from different racial groups, inside and outside the prisons.  People who are locked down in segregation units of this society’s prisons, condemned as the “worst of the worst,” are standing up against injustice, asserting their humanity in the process.  We must have the humanity to hear their call, and answer it with powerful support!

 

A Nation-wide and World-wide Struggle Needs to Be launched NOW to bring an End to this widespread Torture Before those in the Prisons Are Forced to Take the Desperate step of going on hunger strikes and putting their lives on the line!

                                                                                               

To the Government: We Demand an Immediate End to the Torture and Inhumanity of Prison House America – Immediately Disband All Torture Chambers.  Meet the demands of those you have locked down in your prisons!

 

To People in this Country and Around the World: We Cannot Accept, and We Should Not Tolerate This Torture.  Join The Struggle to End Torture in Prisons Now!

 

To Those Standing Up in Resistance Inside The Prisons: WE SUPPORT YOUR CALL FOR UNITY IN THIS FIGHT, AND WE WILL HAVE YOUR BACKS!

 

June 21, 22 and 23 Will Be Days of Solidarity With the Struggle to End Prison Torture!  There will be protests, cultural events, Evenings of Conscience, sermons in religious services, saturation of social media – all aimed at laying bare the ugly reality of wide spread torture in US prisons and challenging everyone to join in fighting to STOP it.

 

Send Your endorsements (name . and if you wish, organization and/or title,  to:

StopMassIncarcerationBayArea@gmail.com

 

 

For more information and to join in this struggle contact the Stop Mass Incarceration Network at:

http://www.stopmassincarceration.org/support-california-prison-hunger-strikers.html

 

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• 9 Petitions Fighting Solitary Confinement (lockupreform.com)
• Support Pelican Bay SHU Prisoners’ Five Core Demands (hunger strike) (stopsolitary.wordpress.com)

Sacramento hearing exposes CDCR’s hidden agenda

by Denise Mewbourne

Almost two years later, the ripple effect of the 2011 hunger strike organized by the Short Corridor Collective in Pelican Bay prison continues to reverberate throughout California. In protest of solitary confinement torture in California’s Security Housing Units (SHUs), 12,000 people in prisons throughout the state participated in the hunger strike.

At the rally outside the Capitol in Sacramento before the Assembly Public Safety Committee’s hearing on solitary confinement Feb. 25, Daletha Hayden, one of many prisoners’ loved ones who came, spoke passionately about her son in the Tehachapi SHU. He has not been able to see or touch his 15-year-old son since he was 3. “This is painful, and it tears families apart,” she said. “We have to fight so our loved ones can be treated as well as animals! My son needs medical treatment, and SHU officials refuse for him to have it.” – Photo: Denise Mewbourne

California currently holds 12,000 people in some form of isolation and around 4,000 in long-term solitary confinement. Around 100 people have spent 20 years or more in these hellholes, including many who are activists against prison abuses, political thinkers and jailhouse lawyers. People imprisoned in the SHU have described it as “soul-crushing,” “hellish,” a “constant challenge to keep yourself from being broken” and “a concrete tomb.”

As a result of the strike, the first legislative hearing in Sacramento occurred in August 2011, and at the grassroots level family members of those inside formed California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement (CFASC) to continue the work they had done during the strike. The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition (PHSS) began strategizing how best to provide support well in advance of the hunger strike and continues its mission of amplifying the voices of people in the SHUs.

The strikers’ five core demands around abolishing group punishment, eliminating debriefing, ending long term solitary confinement, adequate and nutritious food, and constructive programming are still far from being met, although the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) claims to be implementing new policies on how people are sentenced to the SHU as well as how they can exit.

The hearing in Sacramento on Feb. 25, 2013, provided an opportunity for legislators in the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee to hear representatives of CDCR present their new policies and weigh the truth of their claims. The occasion also featured a report back from the Office of the Inspector General about onsite inspections conducted at Pelican Bay, as well as a panel of advocates.

Chaired by Tom Ammiano, the committee had a chance to question the panelists, and at the end there was a scant 20 minutes for public input. Attendance of grassroots activists, including family members and formerly incarcerated people, was organized by California United for a Responsible Budget (CURB). The CURB coalition focuses on reducing the number of people in prison as well as the number of prisons throughout California.

The rally

Beginning with a rally held on the capitol steps, it was an emotional day for many, especially for family members of those suffering in the SHUs and prison survivors. The voices of those in the SHU were powerfully present, both in stories told by family members as well as statements they had sent for the occasion.

Prisoners’ families and advocates turned out for a rally followed by the Assembly hearing Feb. 25. The next opportunity to persuade state lawmakers to “stop the torture” is bound to draw far more of the hundreds of thousands of prisoners’ rights supporters from around California. – Photo: Urszula Wislanka

The opening of the letter Gilbert Pacheco read from his brother Daniel in Corcoran Prison summed up the solidarity of the day: “Allow me to expend my utmost respects along with my utmost gratitude and appreciation to all of you who are out here supporting this struggle and allowing mine along with thousands of other voices to be heard! Gracias/Thank you.”

Family members from all over California spoke about loved ones who were being unjustly held for 10, 15, even 25 years or more in solitary confinement, how they were entrapped into solitary and the conditions they face. Marilyn Austin-Smith of All of Us or None, an organization working for human rights of formerly incarcerated people, read a statement from Hugo Pinell, surviving and resisting solitary confinement for 42 years.

Daletha Hayden from Victorville, Calif., spoke about her son who has been in SHU in Tehachapi for four years. He has missed 12 years of his 15-year-old son’s life, having not been able to see or touch him since he was 3. She said, “This is painful, and it tears families apart. We have to fight so our loved ones can be treated as well as animals! My son needs medical treatment, and SHU officials refuse for him to have it.”

Karen Mejia’s fiancé has been in SHU for six years. She stated that to her knowledge, the CDCR never got input from anyone imprisoned in the SHUs regarding their new policies. She went on to say that “if they followed their own policies, the SHU would be half empty, and they don’t want that because of their salaries and budget.”

Recently, they subjected her fiancé to particularly humiliating treatment. After she visited him, they punished him for being “sexually disorderly” with her. She said, “They painted his cell yellow and forced him to wear a yellow suit, which they do for sex offenders. In general population, he could have been killed for that.”

Marilyn Austin-Smith of All of Us or None, flanked by Sundiata Tate and Bato Talamantez of the San Quentin 6, read from a letter by Hugo Pinell, recognized internationally as a political prisoner and the only member of the San Quentin 6 still in prison – now for over 42 years in solitary confinement, most of it in the dreaded Pelican Bay SHU. His name was raised repeatedly in public testimony at the hearing. – Photo: Azadeh Zohrabi

Looking at the hypocrisy in the U.S. around torture and human rights, Dolores Canales from CFASC angrily noted that in a recent case, “All it took was a federal order to stop chimpanzees from being held in solitary confinement. It has been determined it’s detrimental to their mental and physical health, because they are social animals and have a need to see, hear and touch each other. Aren’t humans also social beings?!”

Luis “Bato” Talamantez, one of the San Quentin 6, said, “Sending your love to the people inside and helping them to stay connected and spiritually alive is the most important thing you can do with your life right now.”

The rally ended on a positive note with Luis “Bato” Talamantez, one of the San Quentin 6, saying, “Sending your love to the people inside and helping them to stay connected and spiritually alive is the most important thing you can do with your life right now.”

The crowd then filed into the hearing room, which filled up quickly, so around 40 people viewed it in an overflow area. For the next three hours, a few of the legislators, the human rights-focused panelists and the public in attendance did their best to sort through the obfuscations, omissions, misrepresentations and outright lies told by the CDCR and colleagues.

The lies from CDCR

One mistaken idea the hearing quickly cleared up was that any real oversight might come from the California Rehabilitation Oversight Board (CROB) in the Office of the Inspector General.

Speaking from CROB was Renee Hansen, who became executive director of the board in 2011, after 20 years of working for CDCR. Perhaps that explains the board’s less than thorough attempt at a real investigation of conditions in the SHUs and the glowing report she gave. When asked by Ammiano if they had conducted any surprise visits, she replied they had not.

Every seat was filled for the California Assembly Public Safety Committee’s historic hearing on SHUs Feb. 25, and dozens more watched on TV in an overflow area. Besides the legislators in the hearing room, many more watched in their offices and said they were aghast at what they heard. – Photo: Sheila Pinkel

One of the myths the CDCR uses to justify SHUs is that they house the “worst of the worst,” and this hearing was no exception. Michael Stainer, CDCR deputy director of facility operations, testified: “The offenders in the SHU are 3 percent of the entire population. They have an inability to be integrated because of violence, and are affiliates of dangerous prison gangs. It’s necessary to isolate them to protect the other 97 percent.”

But Canales said: “My son is in there, and he has certificates in paralegal studies and civil litigation. At Corcoran he was Men’s Advisory Council representative, when one person from each ethnic group gets voted in by their peers, and others go to them for help with prison issues.” And it’s not just her son who doesn’t fit the “ultra-violent” profile. “A lot of the guys in there have all kinds of education and are helping others with legal work. Many of them have been using their time to educate themselves.”

Hansen testified they found no evidence of retaliation for the hunger strike. Yet Charles Carbone, a prisoner rights lawyer who testified on the panel, said, “Make no mistake about it: Participating in a hunger strike can get you in the SHU.”

Assemblywoman Holly Mitchell asked, “How can participation in an act of peaceful civil disobedience like a hunger strike be construed as gang activity?” Ominously, Kelly Harrington, associate director of high security transitional programming (STP) for CDCR, said, “Hunger strikes can be viewed as violating institutional security.”

Marilyn McMahon with California Prison Focus reports letters from people in SHUs about food quality going down and portion sizes shrinking, especially after the administration heard of the potential resumption this summer of the hunger strike. “I suspect,” she said, “they may be trying to get them very hungry before the strike, so they will have less desire to do it.”

Assembly Public Safety Committee members Nancy Skinner, Holly Mitchell and Reggie Jones-Sawyer listen to Charles Carbone, Laura Magnani and Irene Huerta (Marie Levin, also on the panel, is out of view) on the prisoners’ advocates panel. Assemblywoman Mitchell’s understanding of the prisoners’ situation and tough questions for CDCR were a highlight of the hearing. – Photo: Sheila Pinkel

In another bold mockery, CDCR claimed their new policies include substantial changes in the process of “gang validations,” the categorizing of people as “gang members or associates,” resulting in SHU placement for indeterminate sentences. In the past, the validation process has been based on points given for tattoos, possession of books or articles the CDCR deems gang-related, having your name on a roster, and/or the confidential evidence of a “debriefer,” another desperate soul who has identified you as a gang member to get out of the SHU himself. Three points is enough to send you to the SHU. According to many reports from SHUs around the state, it often happens that people get sent to there for things that are purely associational and in complete lack of any actual criminal behavior.

In point of fact, items given points toward validated gang status are often related to cultural identity and/or political beliefs. Some examples are books by George Jackson or Malcolm X, Black Panther Party books or articles, materials about Black August commemorations, the Mexican flag, the eagle of the United Farm Workers, articles on Black liberation, political cartoons critical of the prisons, Kwanzaa cards and Puerto Rican flags, just to name a few.

The CDCR gave a list of their own officials when asked who was doing the gang classifications, and Ammiano noted they were all internal to CDCR, with no independent verification. Family members at the rally spoke of many unfair instances of gang validation points given to their family members. Irene Huerta’s husband was validated for a “gang memo” that was never found!

Carbone confirmed in his testimony that there was no real change in the source items given points, that still only one of your point items even needs to be recent and the other two can be 20 years old, and that “the new program actually expands rather than restricts who can be validated, by the addition of two categories. Initially we just had gang ‘members’ and ‘associates,’ but now we also have ‘suspects’ and ‘to be monitored.’” He went on to say “only the CDCR could call expansion reform.”

Charles Carbone, a prisoner rights lawyer who testified on the panel, said, “Make no mistake about it: Participating in a hunger strike can get you in the SHU.”

As Pacheco says from Corcoran Prison: “This validation process is not about evidence gathering that contains facts. It’s hearsay, corruption and punishment to the point of execution. It’s close to impossible to beat these false accusations on appeal. They know how to block every avenue. In other words, there is no pretense that rights are respected. Shackled and chained we remain.”

The centerpiece of the CDCRs deceptive “reform” is the “Step Down Program,” in theory a phased program for people to get out of the SHU. The program would take four years to complete, although they said it could potentially be done in three. It involves journaling, self-reflection and, in years three and four, small group therapies.

In a statement issued for the event by the NARN (New Afrikan Revolutionary Nation) Collective Think Tank or NCTT at Corcoran SHU, the writers roundly condemned the program, saying that CDCR “has, in true Orwellian fashion, introduced a mandatory behavior modification and brainwashing process in the proposed step down program.” Abdul Shakur, who is at Pelican Bay and has been in solitary confinement for 30 years, calls it the “equivalent to scripting the demise of our humanity” in his article “Sensory Deprivation: An Unnatural Death.”

The passionate testimony of Marie Levin and Irene Huerta will help bring an end to the torturous entombment of their loved ones in the Pelican Bay SHU. – Photo: Becky Padi-Garcia

At the hearing, Laura Magnani from the Friends Service Committee strongly agreed. Magnani pointed out that only in the third and fourth year does very limited social interaction start to happen, that having contact with one’s family continuing to be seen as a privilege instead of a right is fundamentally wrong and that the curricula itself is “blame and shame” based, an approach proven to be damaging. To add insult to injury, she said that what you write in the notebooks can be used against you.

Marie Levin with the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition spoke about her brother Sitawa N. Jamaa at Pelican Bay, a New Afrikan Short Corridor Collective representative and a political thinker. He told her his concerns about the step down program: “The workbooks are demeaning and inappropriate. No one with a gang label will be reviewed for two years of the program, and no phone calls for two more years is far too long.” He’s concerned about CDCR evaluative power over journals, fearing they won’t allow progression if they don’t like the answers, or that they will accuse people of insincerity.

Sundiata Tate, one of the San Quentin 6 and a member of All of Us or None, said: “In terms of CDC, it seems like they’re trying to put a cover on what they’re actually doing. If you take someone who’s been in the SHU for years or even decades and say they have to go into a step down program that will take four years, that’s really just adding cruelty to cruelty. It’s actually more torture.”

Continue Reading @ SF BayView

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• Guarding the Fortresses: How Prison Policies Limit Media Access to Solitary Confinement (solitarywatch.com)

California’s Prison Isolation Units: Necessary or Inhumane?

 

 

In Sacramento, California lawmakers are delving into a growing national controversy over special security units that are used to isolate thousands of inmates from the regular prison population. Civil rights groups say long-term isolation amounts to torture while state corrections officials say the units are necessary and the conditions are humane.

Around the state there are four of these facilities, which are known as Security Housing Units. The most controversial is at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City.

At the heart of the debate: conditions in the units (many inmates are held in windowless cells and have been denied everything from calendars and sweatpants to phone calls); criteria that determine which prisoners are placed there and how they get out; and the lengthy terms some inmates spend in the facilities.

More than 500 California prisoners have been locked in the special units for 10 years or longer, according to state data. Of those people, 78 prisoners have been held inside for more than 20 years.

Over the years, authorities have allowed media into Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit, but access has been limited and the inmates carefully selected by staff.

However, top corrections officials granted unusual access to a team of reporters and videographers from the Center for Investigative Reporting and KQED. We visited all areas of Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit except for a section housing leaders of a 2011 hunger strike.

Using a small camera mounted to a wall, our team was able to record Beasley exercising with a rubber handball in the small concrete pen (prison staff only began allowing the balls last year). At all other times—day and night—he is held in his cell alone. While skylights allow filtered sunlight into the units, there are no windows.

Reporter: Michael Montgomery
Videographer: Singeli Agnew
Editor: Lisa Pickoff-White
Produced by KQED and the Center for Investigative Reporting

 

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• The “Vicious Cycles” Created by Solitary Confinement (moorbey.wordpress.com)
• California starts emptying solitary confinement cells (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
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• Pelican Bay families support prisoners (dmitryev.wordpress.com)

How CDCr scams California taxpayers

by Mutope Duguma

Prior to our two hunger strikes in 2011, we prisoners who are suffering indefinitely in solitary confinement for being validated as prison gang members or associates, held in these Administrative Segregation (Ad-Seg) and Security Housing Units (SHUs) anywhere from one to 40 years, have been unable to successfully challenge these conditions because the CDCr* was and is the conspirator in this safety-and-security-of-the-institution scam/scheme that fleeces Californians out of their taxpayer dollars.

Prisoners wait for appointments at a prison mental health clinic. Bloomberg reported Dec. 11 that a California psychiatrist who was trained at a medical school in Afghanistan made $822,302 at taxpayer expense last year. – Photo: Noah Berger, Bloomberg

For the past 40 years, prisoners have been removed off general population (GP) due to being validated as alleged prison gang members or associates. This is the sole reason for our placement: not behavior.

If it was behavior-based lockup, none of us would be in SHU.

CDCr started this indefinite lockup in the mid- to late 70s, 1975 to 1979, and CDCr soon realized that there was an economic incentive for labeling prisoners as a threat to the safety and security of the institution.

CDCr also locked people up for their program failure by sentencing them to determinate SHU lockup, meaning that if you commit a SHU offense, you will be held in solitary confinement for a period of time, anywhere from three months to five years. If you are a repeat offender, then you will be given an indeterminate SHU program, classified under the program as a failure or disruptive group.

But that placement is based on what the prisoner actually did, as evidenced by Rules Violation Reports (RVR), which are used to justify one’s SHU placement. This basis is supposed to afford the prisoner the right to his or her due process, and if the prisoner maintains good behavior, he or she would be released from SHU by the Institutional Classification Committee (ICC). Due process is, or was, afforded to all under the indeterminate SHU, because your behavior actually dictated your release.

CDCr decided that they wanted a certain class of prisoners off GP and that they – CDCr officials and officers – could, at the same time, make a profit, because as we have explained, it costs a lot more to hold someone in solitary confinement. Rounding up figures, costs are in the amount of $71,000 annually for each solitary confined prisoner and $60,000 annually for each prisoner in GP.

CDCr started this indefinite lockup in the mid- to late 70s, 1975 to 1979, and CDCr soon realized that there was an economic incentive for labeling prisoners as a threat to the safety and security of the institution.

The prison gang validation system would not be used to place prisoners indefinitely in indeterminate-SHU programs – NO consideration for good behavior, like, for instance, remaining discipline free, no criminal offenses, no gang offenses etc. This validation system is run by the prison gang intelligence (?) officials and officers, and the use of prison informers, accusing other prisoners of being part of a prison gang. A prisoner could be discipline free for years on top of years and still be placed in solitary confinement for the rest of his life – on the word of a prison snitch or a corrupt CDCr validation system with an indefinite term.

Here’s a cost analysis that shows why! Every 500 prisoners placed in solitary confinement in California are worth $71,000 multiplied by 500 equals $35,500,000, or thirty five million, five hundred thousand dollars annually – a lot of extra money for guard pay.

But there are more than 3,000 prisoners in solitary confinement – in SHUs – in California. Sadly, we are not counting the 14,000 prisoners held in Ad-Seg, anywhere from one to eight years, at a cost of $77,740 a prisoner. And they are being held illegally in Ad-Seg throughout CDCr prisons, waiting to go to SHU for long periods of time, in violation of CDCr California Code of Regulations, Title 15, Rules and Regulations governing Ad-Seg retention. Prisoners have been held for years awaiting space in SHU units because of overcrowding.

CDCr decided that they wanted a certain class of prisoners off GP and that they – CDCr officials and officers – could, at the same time, make a profit, because as we have explained, it costs a lot more to hold someone in solitary confinement.

Director of CDCr Matthew Cate [this was written before his recent resignation] and Undersecretary Terri McDonald lied when they said that there are only 3,000 prisoners held in SHU, because Ad-Seg is no different from solitary confinement; it is the beginning of the physical and psychological torture of prisoners held in solitary.

Many Ad-Seg prisoners debrief (snitch) before they are even validated to get out from under these conditions and for their own selfish reasons. That is one of the reasons why CDCr officials hold them in Ad-Seg so long, isolated, in order to magnify their suffering. Many Ad-Seg prisoners are treated so badly that they begin to file 602 appeals to be sent to SHUs, where their only relief is to receive their personal property while still being subjected to torture inside these SHU units.

The governor and the CDCr director are lawyers who should be prosecuted for their crimes against humanity – i.e., torture – and abuse of the power entrusted to them, and the race based confinement placement.

CDCr and the state of California should be held accountable for the fleecing of the California tax payers, for the countless billions of dollars they have been swindled out of. Because CDCr is not paying $71,000 dollars per year on each prisoner held in solitary confinement.

Every taxpayer NEEDS to realize this.

CDCr gets $180 million annually from the state, and 80 percent of that goes to payroll, amounting to $144 million. This leaves only 20 percent, or $36 million, to oversee a total of 3,234 prisoners to be taken care of annually on that $36 million. And Pelican Bay shaves still more off of that $36 million in order to put more money into staff pockets.

Here are CDCr’s annual housing costs for 2010-2011:

• per SHU prisoner: $70,641
• per GP prisoner: $58,324
• per PSU (psychiatric unit) or EOP (enhanced out-patient program) prisoner: $171,857
• per Ad-Seg or ASU prisoner: $77,740
• per Level 1 (low risk) prisoner: $43,640

These numbers alone should build outrage toward shutting down these torture chambers. This is fleecing of taxpayer dollars – i.e., embezzlement, fraud, misappropriation etc. The United States governments – local, state and federal – have manufactured ways to steal taxpayer monies by utilizing a race-based system of exploitation of people of color, especially here in California.

CDCr gets $180 million annually from the state, and 80 percent of that goes to payroll, amounting to $144 million. This leaves only 20 percent, or $36 million, to oversee a total of 3,234 prisoners to be taken care of annually on that $36 million.

We prisoners are being forced under the brutality of a prison system that has set out to torture us into becoming prison informers by using the power of the system, CDCr, to physically and psychologically torture us by holding us in solitary confinement (Ad-Seg and SHU) indefinitely. This fact is demonstrated by the resistance CDCr has put up in order to maintain their money making machine – i.e., solitary confinement units – against us prisoners.

They have offered us prisoners nothing substantial toward our release from solitary confinement; instead, they have manipulated and blocked any attempt we have made toward our Five Core Demands: 1. An end to group punishment; 2. The abolishment of the debriefing policy and modification of the active/in-active gang status criteria; 3. An end to long term solitary confinement; 4. The provision of adequate food and adequate medical treatment; 5. The provision and expansion of education and constructive programs and privileges, for indefinite SHU prisoners.

They have offered us prisoners nothing substantial toward our release from solitary confinement; instead, they have manipulated and blocked any attempt we have made toward our Five Core Demands.

We have to expose this system of race-based exploitation of prisoners and the fleecing of the California taxpayers by looking at substandard medical care in California prisons. CDCr’s “medical doctors” started using psychiatric medications in order to treat prisoners for various ailments. We are talking about unmanaged doses of drugs, which has led to an influx of highly medicated prisoners in solitary confinement, being diagnosed as crazy. These quack doctors had to know that prisoners would be compromised by these drug overdoses. We can say that prisoners were being used as guinea pigs – i.e., laboratory rats – because this has been going on a minimum of 50 years.

The use of inappropriate drugs, in dosages of questionable amounts, exploded when prisoners were assigned to the solitary units in large numbers. This was the era when the psychiatric and medical doctors began to use these drugs for everything, telling prisoners, “It will only be considered psych medication it you take it in higher doses. We just give you enough for your medical problem, because a lot of these medications work well for your medical condition.”

We are talking about unmanaged doses of drugs, which has led to an influx of highly medicated prisoners in solitary confinement, being diagnosed as crazy.

We can see clearly now that this was nothing but a scheme from the get-go, because it takes $172,857 per inmate to be housed in the PSU/EOP units. These are ridiculous numbers and the American people need to know this truth, because hard working taxpayers are being ripped off of billions of dollars, and the CDCr is the biggest scammer of taxpayers in the history of California, where, currently, you have a family of four, on the streets, living on $23,000 per year.

Yet the CDCr got the state government providing $171,857 per prisoner held in PSU/EOP units, along with $70,641 per SHU prisoner, $58,324 per GP prisoner, $77,740 per ASU prisoner and $43,640 per Level 1 prisoner.

And there’s no money for anything in this state that will improve on the growth and development of children, teenagers and adults throughout the state. The money has been going into the pockets of politicians, judges, lawyers and CDCr personnel. The director of Adult Division of CDCr, Giurbino, makes hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing nothing but overseeing the exploitation of prisoners.

CDCr is a powerful institution because of the fleecing of California taxpayers’ money, which allows CDCr to use billions of dollars toward paying off lawyers, politicians, judges etc. in order to maintain their power structure.

And there’s no money for anything in this state that will improve on the growth and development of children, teenagers and adults throughout the state.

Time is now to destroy Goliath!

One Love One Struggle,

Mutope Duguma, Pelican Bay Human Rights Movement

Send our brother some love and light: Mutope Duguma (James Crawford), D-05996, PBSP SHU D1-117, P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City CA 95532.

*The acronym CDCr, for California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, is sometimes written with a lower case “r” to indicate that the rehabilitation part of its mission has been abandoned in recent years.

Via San Francisco Bay View

 

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New CA prison policies aim to weaken gang ties, reduce number of inmates in isolation cells

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — State corrections officials have announced new policies aimed at dealing with prison gangs and reducing the number of inmates held in isolation cells.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Thursday the new policies will give inmates more incentives to drop their gang activities.

Gang members can earn more privileges and get out of the isolation units in three to four years — instead of six — if they behave and participate in rehabilitation programs.

Prison officials say they recently began reviewing the 3,100 inmates currently held in isolation cells to see if they can be sent back to the general prison population.

Other portions of the new policies will take effect early next year.

Conditions in the isolation units have repeatedly led to widespread inmate hunger strikes.

Via @ Associated Press

 

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Report decries suicides, isolation cells in California prisons

An Amnesty International report says conditions in the state’s security housing ‘breach international standards.’ State officials rebut the findings. Many of the suicides occurred in isolation units.

By Paige St. John, Los Angeles Times

Alex Machado, shown before his incarceration in 1999, committed suicide last year after being placed in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison.

 

For 11 years in California‘s vast prison system, Alex Machado didn’t stand out. Not until the day he was “validated” as a gang member and transferred to Pelican Bay.

There, in solitary confinement, he began to unravel, prison documents showed. He slept little. Hygiene became sporadic. He heard voices and knocking on the walls.

In 15 months, Machado went from being an inmate who helped others craft legal appeals to one who smeared feces on his cell. In October 2011, he killed himself.

California has more inmate suicides than any other state, a total that is rising even as its prison population falls. Almost half those deaths occurred in the system’s segregation cells.

According to an Amnesty International report to be released Thursday, conditions within the state’s security housing “breach international standards on humane treatment.”

“It would crush you,” said Tessa Murphy, an Amnesty International observer who was given unusual access to the isolation units at Pelican Bay and two other California prisons last November.

But California officials rebutted Amnesty’s findings, insisting the state’s security units “follow the national standard. They are clean. They are secure,” said Terri McDonald, who is in charge of prison operations for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

She cited the constant monitoring of those units — the result of federal lawsuits over poor medical and mental healthcare in the state system. “We have not been inhumane,” McDonald said.

There currently are more than 3,100 inmates living in California’s maximum security segregation units, and thousands more in similar administrative segregation units.

The windowless, 7- by 12-foot cells at Pelican Bay exceed international space standards for a single inmate. The only way in or out is through a perforated steel door that looks out onto a concrete wall.

Except for an unknown number of prisoners who have cellmates, Amnesty International reported that there was no contact with other inmates and little interaction with the guards — who monitor them via closed circuit cameras, open doors with remote switches and push food through slots.

Segregated prisoners do not have access to rehabilitation programs, the report said. They are permitted to exercise 90 minutes a day, inside a concrete enclosure through which a slice of sky is visible 20 feet overhead.

Group therapy consists of inmates in individual holding cages lined up before a therapist; physicians examine ill inmates through the closed cell door.

According to state officials, the average stay in solitary confinement is 6.8 years — although California is set to begin a trial program next month that would allow compliant inmates out of isolation after four years.

But Amnesty International reported that at least 500 prisoners have spent more than 10 years in isolation. Seventy-eight inmates have been segregated for more than 20 years.

“There is no question … the conditions are among the worst in the nation,” Murphy said.

Continue Reading @ The LA Times

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California prisoners make historic call for peace between racial groups in California prisons and jails

by Isaac Ontiveros, Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity

Oakland – Prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) have announced a push to end all hostilities between racial groups within California’s prisons and jails. The handwritten announcement was sent to prison advocacy organizations. It is signed by several prisoners, identifying themselves as the PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Collective. [Their statement follows this one.]

The Attica rebellion in upstate New York Sept. 9-13, 1971, saw thousands of prisoners take over the prison, protesting intolerable conditions and infuriated by the assassination of George Jackson at San Quentin on Aug. 21, 1971. The secret of their unprecedented strength was their multi-racial solidarity. Here, Black and white prisoners sit on a wall during a meeting called by the organizers.

The Short Corridor refers to a section of Pelican Bay Prison’s notorious Security Housing Unit (SHU). Pelican Bay’s SHU was the point of origin for last year’s hunger strikes which rocked California’s prison system, at one point including the participation of nearly 12,000 prisoners in over 11 prisons throughout the state.

The statement calls for the cessation of all hostilities between groups to commence Oct. 10, 2012, in all California prisons and county jails. “This means that from this date on, all racial group hostilities need to be at an end,” the statement says.

It also calls on prisoners throughout the state to set aside their differences and use diplomatic means to settle their disputes. The Short Corridor Collective states, “If personal issues arise between individuals, people need to do all they can to exhaust all diplomatic means to settle such disputes; do not allow personal, individual issues to escalate into racial group issues.”

The statement calls for the cessation of all hostilities between groups to commence Oct. 10, 2012, in all California prisons and county jails. “This means that from this date on, all racial group hostilities need to be at an end,” the statement says.

In the past, California prisoners have attempted to collaborate with the Department of Corrections to bring an end to the hostilities, but CDCR has been largely unresponsive to prisoners’ requests. The statement warns prisoners that they expect prison officials to attempt to undermine this agreement.

Occupy San Quentin on Feb. 20, 2012, a major demonstration in support of prisoners, united people across race, class, age and gender dividing lines. – Photo: Alex Darocy, Indybay

“My long-time experience in urban peace issues, gang truces, prevention and intervention is that when gang leaders and prisoners take full stock of the violence and how they can contribute to the peace, such peace will be strong, lasting and deep. I honor this effort as expressed in this statement,” says Luis J. Rodriguez, renowned violence intervention worker and award-winning author of “Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.”

Rodriguez has helped broker gang truces throughout the U.S. as well as in other parts of the world. This spring, Rodriguez was involved in a historic truce between gangs in El Salvador leading to a 70 percent drop in violence in that country.

According to Rodriguez, “What is needed now – and where most peace efforts fail – is the meaningful and long-lasting support of society and government, in the form of prison reform, training, education, drug and mental health treatment and proper health care. We need an end to repressive measures that only feed into the violence and traumas.”

George Jackson, a strong advocate of solidarity across race lines, recognized “that in every situation where race has arisen to become a sharp dividing social factor, the hands of the capitalists can be seen pulling the strings, and it is only they who benefit from the conflicts,” writes Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, a present-day prisoner often compared to Jackson. This banner graced the Occupy San Quentin demonstration on Feb. 20, 2012. – Photo: Alex Darocy, Indybay

Azadeh Zohrabi of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition sees the agreement as a positive development that stems from last year’s hunger strikes. “While living through some of the worst conditions imaginable, the authors of this statement continue to work for change,” states Zohrabi. “While the prison administration drags its feet on even the most basic reforms, these guys are trying to build peace throughout the system. That says a lot about their humanity and hope.”

Advocates and the Short Corridor Collective are eager to spread the word as far and wide as possible and implement peace plans throughout California’s prisons and jails. “We must all hold strong to our mutual agreement from this point on and focus our time, attention and energy on mutual causes beneficial to all of us [i.e., prisoners] and our best interests,” says the Collective.

“The reality is that, collectively, we are an empowered, mighty force that can positively change this entire corrupt system into a system that actually benefits prisoners and thereby the public as a whole.”

“While living through some of the worst conditions imaginable, the authors of this statement continue to work for change,” states Zohrabi. “While the prison administration drags its feet on even the most basic reforms, these guys are trying to build peace throughout the system. That says a lot about their humanity and hope.”

The PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Collective has strongly requested that its statement be read and referred to in whole. It follows here:

Agreement to end hostilities

Dated Aug. 12, 2012

To whom it may concern and all California Prisoners:

Greetings from the entire PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Hunger Strike Representatives. We are hereby presenting this mutual agreement on behalf of all racial groups here in the PBSP-SHU Corridor. Wherein, we have arrived at a mutual agreement concerning the following points:

1. If we really want to bring about substantive meaningful changes to the CDCR system in a manner beneficial to all solid individuals who have never been broken by CDCR’s torture tactics intended to coerce one to become a state informant via debriefing, that now is the time for us to collectively seize this moment in time and put an end to more than 20-30 years of hostilities between our racial groups.

2. Therefore, beginning on Oct. 10, 2012, all hostilities between our racial groups in SHU, ad-seg, general population and county jails will officially cease. This means that from this date on, all racial group hostilities need to be at an end. And if personal issues arise between individuals, people need to do all they can to exhaust all diplomatic means to settle such disputes; do not allow personal, individual issues to escalate into racial group issues!

Like the Attica rebellion, the Lucasville prisoners who took over their prison in April 1993 deliberately united across the racial lines that prison authorities use to divide and conquer prisoners. The multi-racial leadership has remained united to this day throughout their isolation on death row. This photo of a sign made during the rebellion was used as an exhibit during their trial in 1996. – Photo: Courtesy Staughton Lynd

3. We also want to warn those in the general population that IGI [Institutional Gang Investigators] will continue to plant undercover Sensitive Needs Yard (SNY) debriefer “inmates” amongst the solid GP prisoners with orders from IGI to be informers, snitches, rats and obstructionists, in order to attempt to disrupt and undermine our collective groups’ mutual understanding on issues intended for our mutual causes (i.e., forcing CDCR to open up all GP main lines and return to a rehabilitative-type system of meaningful programs and privileges, including lifer conjugal visits etc. via peaceful protest activity and noncooperation e.g., hunger strike, no labor etc.). People need to be aware and vigilant to such tactics and refuse to allow such IGI inmate snitches to create chaos and reignite hostilities amongst our racial groups. We can no longer play into IGI, ISU (Investigative Service Unit), OCS (Office of Correctional Safety) and SSU’s (Service Security Unit’s) old manipulative divide and conquer tactics!

In conclusion, we must all hold strong to our mutual agreement from this point on and focus our time, attention and energy on mutual causes beneficial to all of us [i.e., prisoners] and our best interests. We can no longer allow CDCR to use us against each other for their benefit!

Because the reality is that collectively, we are an empowered, mighty force that can positively change this entire corrupt system into a system that actually benefits prisoners and thereby the public as a whole, and we simply cannot allow CDCR and CCPOA, the prison guards’ union, IGI, ISU, OCS and SSU to continue to get away with their constant form of progressive oppression and warehousing of tens of thousands of prisoners, including the 14,000-plus prisoners held in solitary confinement torture chambers – SHU and ad-seg units – for decades!

We send our love and respect to all those of like mind and heart. Onward in struggle and solidarity!

Presented by the PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Collective:

• Todd Ashker, C-58191, D1-119
• Arturo Castellanos, C-17275, D1-121
• Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa (Dewberry), C-35671, D1-117
• Antonio Guillen, P-81948, D2-106

And the Representatives Body:

• Danny Troxell, B-76578, D1-120
• George Franco, D-46556, D4-217
• Ronnie Yandell, V-27927, D4-215
• Paul Redd, B-72683, D2-117
• James Baridi Williamson, D-34288. D4-107
• Alfred Sandoval, D-61000, D4-214
• Louis Powell, B-59864, D1-104
• Alex Yrigollen, H-32421, D2-204
• Gabriel Huerta, C80766, D3-222
• Frank Clement, D-07919, D3-116
• Raymond Chavo Perez, K-12922, D1-219
• James Mario Perez, B-48186, D3-124

Note: All names and the foregoing statement must be shown verbatim when used and posted on any website or other publication.

Send our brothers some love and light and solidarity. Write to them using the listed names, numbers and housing and add the address: P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City CA 95532. The Bay View sends them all our highest respect, appreciation and best wishes for this historic action. We also thank PHSS for transcribing this statement.

Via  @ SF BayView

Destroying the soul

English: Pelican Bay State Prison, looking west, taken July 27, 2009, from 6,500 feet MSL (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Colin Dayan for The Washington Post

We as a nation are guilty of the most horrific treatment of prisoners in the civilized world. In March, 400 prisoners in California’s Security Housing Units, as well as a number of prisoners’ rights organizations, petitioned the United Nations asking for help. Since then, the Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison who have each spent between 10 and 28 years in solitary confinement . A class-action suit in Arizona challenges inadequate medical and mental health care that subjects prisoners to injury, amputation, disfigurement and death — especially in prolonged solitary confinement.

Supermax detention is the harshest weapon in the U.S. punitive armory. Once, solitary confinement affected few prisoners for relatively short periods. Today, most prisoners can expect to face solitary, for longer periods and under conditions that make old-time solitary seem almost attractive. The contemporary state-of-the-art supermax is a clean, well-lighted place. There is no decay or dirt. And there is often no way out.

This is not the “hole” portrayed in movies. As a sign of professionalism and advanced technology, extreme isolation and sensory deprivation constitute the “treatment” in these units. Supermaxes modify inmates’ spatial and temporal framework, severely damaging their sense of themselves: a terrible violence against the spirit and a betrayal of our constitutional and moral responsibilities.

More than a decade ago, I began visiting the “Special Management Units” at the Arizona State Prison Complex-Eyman in Florence. I completed a series of interviews in an attempt to understand this new version of solitary confinement. Prisoners there are locked alone in their cells for 23 hours a day. Their food is delivered through a slot in the door of their 80-square-foot cell. They stare at unpainted concrete walls onto which nothing can be put. They look through doors of perforated steel, what one officer described to me as “irregular-shaped Swiss cheese.” Except for the occasional touch of a guard’s hand as they are handcuffed and chained when they leave their cells, they have no contact with another human being.

In this condition of enforced idleness, prisoners are not eligible for vocational programs. They have no educational opportunities; books and newspapers are severely limited; post and telephone communication virtually nonexistent. Locked in their cells for as many as 161 of the 168 hours in a week, they spend most of the brief time out of their cells in shackles, with perhaps as much as eight minutes to shower. An empty exercise room — a high-walled cage with a mesh screening overhead, also known as the “dog pen” — is available for “recreation.”

These are locales for perpetual incapacitation, where obligations to society, the duties of husband, father or lover are no longer recognized. An inmate wrote me, “People go crazy here in lockdown. People who weren’t violent become violent and do strange things. This is a city within a city, another world inside of a larger one where people could care less about what goes on in here. This is an alternate world of hate, pain, and mistreatment.”

Situated on 40 acres of desert, Special Management Unit 2 is surrounded by two rings of 20-foot-high fence topped with razor wire, like a nuclear-waste storage facility. During my visits, I learned that those who have not violated prison rules — often jailhouse lawyers or political activists — are placed apart from other prisoners, sometimes for what is claimed to be their own protection; sometimes for what is alleged to be the administrative convenience of prison officials; sometimes for baseless, unproven and generally unprovable claims of gang membership.

We citizens are proud of our history. We are a nation of laws. But what kind of laws? Laws that permit solitary confinement, with cell doors, unit doors and shower doors operated remotely from a control center, with severely limited and often abusive physical contact. Has society’s current attention to the death penalty allowed us to forget the gradual destruction of mind and loss of personal dignity in solitary confinement, including such symptoms as hallucinations, paranoia and delusions?

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham came to believe that solitude was “torture in effect.” Other 19th-century observers, including Charles Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville, used images of premature burial, the tomb and the shroud to represent the death-in-life of solitary confinement. Some 25,000 inmates are languishing in long-term isolation in America’s supermax prisons, with as many as 80,000 more in solitary confinement in other facilities.

A Senate Judiciary Committee panel heard testimony last month on solitary confinement. I hope that someone reminded lawmakers of Justice William Douglas’s words nearly 40 years ago: “Prisoners are still ‘persons.’ ”

Via @ Washington Post

 

 

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Civil rights group sues California over the state’s Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison

By Rina Palta

Rina Palta, KPCC

A bunk in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, CA. (August, 2011)

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed suit in federal court Thursday on behalf of California prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Units, the most isolated, restrictive prison cells in the state.

Inmates in the SHU (pronounced “shoo”) spend 22 and a half hours in their cells each day and have more limited access to other prisoners, visitors, and programming than inmates in the general population. They’re mostly kept one person to each cell and exercise once a day in a concrete, enclosed space.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials have said that conditions in the SHU are admitedly restrictive, but with good reason. SHUs are CDCR’s primary method for combatting prison gangs, which they say wreak havoc on the prison population and have close ties to criminal street gangs.

People get to the SHU one of two ways: either they’ve committed a new crime while in prison (like assault or murder); or they’re deemed prison gang members or “affiliates.” Those convicted of a crime serve a fixed sentence, those in the SHU because of gang affiliations are kept there indefinitely. Currently, Pelican Bay’s SHU has 1,128. In August 2011, Warden Greg Lewis said about 95 percent of SHU inmates were serving indefinite terms.

Currently, the way back to a lower level cell for these inmates is a process called “debriefing,” which amounts to telling prison officials everything the inmate knows about prison gangs. Inmates can also get out if they demonstrate having no gang activity for six years.

On a press tour of Pelican Bay last year, prison officials said debriefing allows them to know the inmate is no longer a gang threat and also provides useful information in dealing with a major prison problem. Restricted communications—which officals say does not amount to “solitary confinement”—is used to keep gang “shot callers” from passing on orders and information to subordinates.

Continue Reading @ SCPR.org

Occupy Wall Street Takes On U.S. Prison Conditions

By Laird Harrison

SAN QUENTIN, Calif., Feb 20 (Reuters) – Hundreds of anti-Wall Street demonstrators and prison reform activists joined forces outside San Quentin State Prison in California on Monday to protest high incarceration rates and living conditions for inmates.

Speakers said the state’s sentencing laws were too strict. They called for an end to solitary confinement and the death penalty and said children should not be tried as adults.

“I myself experienced more than 14 months of solitary confinement,” said Sarah Shourd, 33, an American imprisoned in Iran after being arrested while hiking near the Iraq border in 2009. “After only two months, my mind began to slip.”

She was joined at the protest by Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, who spent more than two years in prison in Iran after being arrested with Shourd, and by former members of the Black Panthers African-American activist group who spoke of a history of problems at the San Quentin prison.

The prison is California’s oldest correctional facility and houses the state’s only gas chamber.

Activist Barbara Becnel said prisoners were drawing inspiration from the Occupy movement, which spread across the country last autumn with calls for greater economic equality. The movement has lost ground as many U.S. cities evicted protesters from their tent camps.

“We have merged the prison rights movement with the Occupy movement,” Becnel said, quoting a message she said came from San Quentin death row prisoner Kevin Cooper. “The 99 percent has to be concerned about the bottom 1 percent.”

Marin County Sheriff’s Office Sergeant Keith Boyd estimated the crowd numbered 600 to 700 people at its height.

Demonstrators held a moment of silence for Christian Alexander Gomez, 27, who died on Feb. 2 while on a hunger strike in California’s Corcoran State Prison.

Gomez was among thousands of California prisoners who have staged hunger strikes in waves since July, starting with protests against isolation units at Pelican Bay State Prison.

The strikes began after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May that California prison overcrowding was causing “needless suffering and death” and ordered the state to reduce the number of prisoners to 110,000, still well over the maximum capacity, from 140,000.

Continue Reading @ Huffington Post