Caged in the USA: Torture in America’s many prisons

Caged in the USA: Torture in America’s many prisons
By Aviva Stahl – Contributed by angola3news – Cageprisoners.com – 14 December, 2012 – Mostly Water

(Reprinted by Angola 3 News)

Last week, I was lucky enough to be in the audience for a truly remarkable event: a conversation between two men whose lives have been indelibly altered by American’s brutal prison regime, Robert King and Omar Deghayes. At first glance, it might seem as if these two men have nothing in common. King grew up in New Orleans in an era of violent racial repression and is a Black Panther to this day; he was convicted by an all-white jury in 1973 for a murder he did not commit, and spent 32 years in Louisiana state prison. In his earliest childhood, Deghayes lived in Libya, but after his father was murdered by Gaddafi, he and his family fled to the UK. Deghayes was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, where he had been living with his Afghan wife and child, and spent over six years detained at Guantanamo without charge or trial.

Angola, Louisiana and Guantanamo Bay are actually quite near to each other. But for anyone present at the event, it was clear that what Omar and Robert had in common was more than geographic proximity during their confinement. After all, they were both unjustly imprisoned. They both fought for years for their freedom. And they both endured the same torture whilst on the inside: long-term solitary confinement.

Now that the words “Guantanamo Bay” have become synonymous with torture, it’s easy to assume that the tiny isolation cells where Omar and many others were kept, are something new, invented for the Muslim bogeyman. But solitary confinement in America’s “supermax” prisons didn’t begin at Gitmo; it began long before 9/11, long before the War on Terror, long before al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In the 1970s, “control units” were put in place, first in Marion prison (which replaced Alcatraz) and then elsewhere. These control units were largely implemented to neutralize activists imprisoned for struggling for Black and Third World liberation – people like Robert King, Ojore Lutalo, Ray Luc Levasseur, Siliva Baraldini, Leonard Peltier, Assata Shakur, and many others. The idea has always been to break prisoners by invoking in them a sense of total dependence on their captors. As Ralph Arons, a former warden at Marion, once testified in federal court, “The purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large”.

Nor is the use of solitary to control political or politicized prisoners something confined to the era of COINTELPRO. Take Ojore Lutala, who survived 22 years in solitary in the Management Control Unit in Trenton State Prison, New Jersey. In February 2008, the Review Committee rejected Ojore’s request to be released into general population for the umpteenth time, noting:

“The [Committee] notes your concerns regarding your feelings of persecution and discrimination based on your political affiliation. The Committee continues to show concern regarding your admitted affiliation with the Black Liberation army and the Anarchist Black Cross Foundation. Your radical views and ability to influence others poses a threat to the orderly operation of this Institution…”

Interestingly, Marion – where control units were first born – now houses a Communication Management Unit (CMU), in which Muslims are overrepresented by over 1000%. The two CMUs are so strikingly similar to that dark place where Omar was held, that they’ve been nicknamed “Guantanamo North”: they both hold Muslim prisoners with political affiliations deemed to be dubious, in tortuous conditions of long-term solitary confinement.

Control units now exist in almost every state in the nation, and have also morphed into large supermax prisons like ADX Florence. In fact, it’s estimated that today, at least 80,000 people are suffering in solitary confinement in America’s prisons, overwhelmingly poor people and people and colour. And it’s not just the “most dangerous” (read: most political) prisoners languishing in solitary anymore. Oftentimes, it’s the most vulnerable prisoners who end up in solitary – people who are mentally ill, mentally retarded, learning-disabled, or illiterate; these are people who find it the most difficult to follow the minutia of prison rules. More recently, its people perceived to be associated with prison gangs – though as recently explored in an excellent series in Mother Jones, prisoners in Pelican Bay in California may be “gang validated” for seemingly innocuous items like a Christmas card or a drinking cup with a dragon drawn on it.

Solitary confinement… can you imagine it? This is how one inmate at Pelican Bay, Gabriel Reyes, describes it in a 2012 article:

“Unless you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by yourself, between four cold walls, with little concept of time, no one to confide in, and only a pillow for comfort – for years on end. It is a living tomb. I eat alone and exercise alone in a small, dank, cement enclosure known as the “dog-pen.” I am not allowed telephone calls, nor can my family visit me very often; the prison is hundreds of miles from the nearest city. I have not been allowed physical contact with any of my loved ones since 1995. I have developed severe insomnia, I suffer frequent headaches, and I feel helpless and hopeless. In short, I am being psychologically tortured.” …more