Chris Hedges' Columns
The Shame of America’s Gulag
Posted on March 17, 2013 Original Here
By Chris Hedges
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| Illustration by Mr. Fish |
Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo,
both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of
American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and
harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding
abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo,
once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black
Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton
State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her
the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the
prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which
he called “a prison within a prison.” Before being released in 2009,
Lutalo was in the management control unit for 22 of the 28 years he
served for the second of two convictions—the first for a bank robbery
and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity,
he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell,
writing, meditating and tearing up newspapers to make collages that
portrayed his prison conditions.
“The guards in riot gear would suddenly
wake you up at 1 a.m., force you to strip and make you grab all your
things and move you to another cell just to harass you,” he said when we
spoke in Newark. “They had attack dogs with them that were trained to
go for your genitals. You spent 24 hours alone one day in your cell and
22 the next. If you do not have a strong sense of purpose you don’t
survive psychologically. Isolation is designed to defeat prisoners
mentally, and I saw a lot of prisoners defeated.”
Lutalo’s letter was Kerness’ first
indication that the U.S. prison system was creating something
new—special detention facilities that under international law are a form
of torture. He wrote to her: “How does one go about articulating
desperation to another who is not desperate? How does one go about
articulating the psychological stress of knowing that people are waiting
for me to self-destruct?”
The techniques of sensory deprivation and
prolonged isolation were pioneered by the Central Intelligence Agency to
break prisoners during the Cold War. Alfred McCoy, the author of “A
Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on
Terror,” wrote in his book that “interrogators had found that mere
physical pain, no matter how extreme, often produced heightened
resistance.” So the intelligence agency turned to the more effective
mechanisms of “sensory disorientation” and “self-inflicted pain,” McCoy
noted. [One example of causing self-inflicted pain is to force a
prisoner to stand without moving or to hold some other stressful bodily
position for a long period.] The combination, government psychologists
argued, would cause victims to feel responsible for their own suffering
and accelerate psychological disintegration. Sensory disorientation
combines extreme sensory overload with extreme sensory deprivation.
Prolonged isolation is followed by intense interrogation. Extreme heat
is followed by extreme cold. Glaring light is followed by total
darkness. Loud and sustained noise is followed by silence. “The fusion
of these two techniques, sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain,
creates a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a
hammer-blow to the existential platforms of personal identity,” McCoy
wrote.
After hearing from Lutalo, Kerness became a fierce advocate for him and
other prisoners held in isolation units. She published through her
office a survivor’s manual for those held in isolation as well as a booklet titled “Torture in United States Prisons.” And she began to collect the stories of prisoners held in isolation.
“My food trays have been sprayed with mace
or cleaning agents, … human feces and urine put into them by guards who
deliver trays to my breakfast, lunch, and dinner… ,” a prisoner in
isolation in the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility at Carlisle, Ind.,
was quoted as saying in “Torture in United States Prisons.” “I have
witnessed sane men of character become self-mutilators, suffer paranoia,
panic attacks, hostile fantasies about revenge. One prisoner would
swallow packs of AA batteries, and stick a pencil in his penis. They
would cut on themselves to gain contact with staff nurses or just to
draw attention to themselves. These men made slinging human feces ‘body
waste’ daily like it was a recognized sport. Some would eat it or rub it
all over themselves as if it was body lotion. ... Prisoncrats use a
form of restraint, a bed crafted to strap men in four point Velcro
straps. Both hands to the wrist and both feet to the ankles and secured.
Prisoners have been kept like this for 3-6 hours at a time. Most times
they would remove all their clothes. The Special Confinement Unit used
[water hoses] on these men also. ... When prisons become overcrowded,
prisoncrats will do forced double bunking. Over-crowding issues present
an assortment of problems many of which results in violence. ...
Prisoncrats will purposely house a ‘sex offender’ in a cell with
prisoners with sole intentions of having him beaten up or even killed.”
In 1913 Eastern State Penitentiary, in
Philadelphia, discontinued its isolation cages. Prisoners within the
U.S. prison system would not be held in isolation again in large numbers
until the turmoil of the 1960s and the rise of the anti-war and civil
rights movements along with the emergence of radical groups such as the
Black Panthers. Trenton State Prison established a management control
unit, or isolation unit, in 1975 for political prisoners, mostly black
radicals such as Lutalo whom the state wanted to segregate from the
wider prison population. Those held in the isolation unit were rarely
there because they had violated prison rules; they were there because of
their revolutionary beliefs—beliefs the prison authorities feared might
resonate with other prisoners. In 1983 the federal prison in Marion,
Ill., instituted a permanent lockdown, creating, in essence, a
prisonwide “control unit.” By 1994 the Federal Bureau of Prisons, using
the Marion model, built its maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo.
The use of prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation exploded.
“Special housing units” were formed for the mentally ill. “Security
threat group management units” were formed for those accused of gang
activity. “Communications management units” were formed to isolate
Muslims labeled as terrorists. Voluntary and involuntary protective
custody units were formed. Administrative segregation punishment units
were formed to isolate prisoners said to be psychologically troubled.
All were established in open violation of the United Nations Convention
Against Torture, the U.N.’s International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Kerness calls it “the war at home.”
And she says it is only the latest variation of the long assault on the
poor, especially people of color.
“There are no former Jim Crow systems,” Kerness said. “The transition from slavery to Black Codes
to convict leasing to the Jim Crow laws to the wars on poverty,
veterans, youth and political activism in the 1960s has been a seamless
evolution of political and social incapacitation of poor people of
color. The sophisticated fascism of the practices of stop and frisk,
charging people in inner cities with ‘wandering,’ driving and walking
while black, ZIP code racism—these and many other de facto practices all
serve to keep our prisons full. In a system where 60 percent of those
who are imprisoned are people of color, where students of color face
harsher punishments in school than their white peers, where 58 percent
of African [American] youth … are sent to adult prisons, where women of
color are 69 percent more likely to be imprisoned and where offenders
of color receive longer sentences, the concept of colorblindness doesn’t
exist. The racism around me is palpable.”
“The 1960s, when the last of the Jim Crow
laws were reversed, this whole new set of practices accepted by law
enforcement was designed to continue to feed the money-generating prison
system, which has neo-slavery at its core,” she said. “Until we deeply
recognize that the system’s bottom line is social control and creating a
business from bodies of color and the poor, nothing can change.” She
noted that more than half of those in the prison system have never
physically harmed another person but that “just about all of these
people have been harmed themselves.” And not only does the criminal
justice sweep up the poor and people of color, but slavery within the
prison system is permitted by the 13th Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution, which reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted, shall exist within the United States. …”
This, Kerness said, “is at the core how the
labor of slaves was transformed into what people in prison call
neo-slavery.” Neo-slavery is an integral part of the prison industrial
complex, in which hundreds of thousands of the nation’s prisoners,
primarily people of color, are forced to work at involuntary labor for a
dollar or less an hour. “If you call the New Jersey Bureau of Tourism
you are most likely talking to a prisoner at the Edna Mahan Correctional
Institution for Women who is earning 23 cents an hour who has no
ability to negotiate working hours or working conditions,” she said.
The bodies of poor, unemployed youths are worth little on the streets but become valuable commodities once they are behind bars.
“People have said to me that the criminal
justice system doesn’t work,” Kerness said. “I’ve come to believe
exactly the opposite—that it works perfectly, just as slavery did, as a
matter of economic and political policy. How is it that a 15-year-old in
Newark who the country labels worthless to the economy, who has no hope
of getting a job or affording college, can suddenly generate 20,000 to
30,000 dollars a year once trapped in the criminal justice system? The
expansion of prisons, parole, probation, the court and police systems
has resulted in an enormous bureaucracy which has been a boon to
everyone from architects to food vendors—all with one thing in common, a
paycheck earned by keeping human beings in cages. The criminalization
of poverty is a lucrative business, and we have replaced the social
safety net with a dragnet.”
Prisons are at once hugely expensive—the
country has spent some $300 billion on them since 1980—and, as Kerness
pointed out, hugely profitable. Prisons function in the same way the
military-industrial complex functions. The money is public and the
profits are private. “Privatization in the prison industrial complex
includes companies, which run prisons for profit while at the same time
gleaning profits from forced labor,” she said. “In the state of New
Jersey, food and medical services are provided by corporations, which
have a profit motive. One recent explosion of private industry is the
partnering of Corrections Corporation of America
with the federal government to detain close to 1 million undocumented
people. Using public monies to enrich private citizens is the history of
capitalism at its most exploitive.”
Those released from prison are woefully
unprepared for re-entry. They carry with them the years of trauma they
endured. They often suffer from the endemic health problems that come
with long incarceration, including hepatitis C, tuberculosis and HIV.
They often do not have access to medications upon release to treat their
physical and mental illnesses. Finding work is difficult. They feel
alienated and are often estranged from friends and family. More than 60
percent end up back in prison.
“How do you teach someone to rid themselves
of degradation?” Kerness asked. “How long does it take to teach people
to feel safe, a sense of empowerment in a world where they often come
home emotionally and physically damaged and unemployable? There are many
reasons that ex-prisoners do not make it—paramount among them is that
they are not supposed to succeed.”
Kerness has long been a crusader. In 1961
at the age of 19 she left New York to work for a decade in Tennessee in
the civil rights struggle, including a year at Tennessee’s Highlander Research and Education Center,
where Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. trained. By the 1970s she
was involved in housing campaigns for the poor in New Jersey. She kept
running into families that included incarcerated members. This led her
to found Prison Watch.
The letters that pour into her office are
disturbing. Female prisoners routinely complain of being sexually abused
by guards. One prisoner wrote to her office: “That was not part of my
sentence to perform oral sex with officers.” Other prisoners write on
behalf of the mentally ill who have been left to deteriorate in the
prison system. One California prisoner told of a mentally ill man
spreading feces over himself and the guards then dumping him into a
scalding bath that took skin off 30 percent of his body.
Kerness said the letters she receives from prisoners collectively
present a litany of “inhumane conditions including cold, filth, callous
medical care, extended isolation often lasting years, use of devices of
torture, harassment, brutality and racism.” Prisoners send her drawings
of “four- and five-point restraints, restraint hoods, restraint belts,
restraint beds, stun grenades, stun guns, stun belts, spit hoods,
tethers, and waist and leg chains.” But the worst torment, prisoners
tell her, is the psychological pain caused by “no touch torture” that
included “humiliation, sleep deprivation, sensory disorientation,
extreme light or dark, extreme cold or heat” and “extended solitary
confinement.” These techniques, she said, are consciously designed to
carry out “a systematic attack on all human stimuli.”
The use of sensory deprivation was applied
by the government to imprisoned radicals in the 1960s including members
of the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican
independence movement and the American Indian Movement, along with
environmentalists, anti-imperialists and civil rights activists. It is
now used extensively against Islamic militants, jailhouse lawyers and
political prisoners. Many of those political prisoners were part of
radical black underground movements in the 1960s that advocated
violence. A few, such as Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal, are well known, but most have little public visibility—among them Sundiata Acoli, Mutulu Shakur, Imam Jamil Al-Amin (known as H. Rap Brown when in the 1960s he was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Jalil Bottom, Sekou Odinga, Abdul Majid, Tom Manning and Bill Dunne.
Those within the system who attempt to
resist the abuse and mistreatment are dealt with severely. Prisoners in
the overcrowded Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, a maximum-security
prison in Lucasville, Ohio, staged a revolt in 1993 after years of
routine beatings, degrading rituals of public humiliation and the
alleged murders of prisoners by guards. The some 450 prisoners, who were
able to unite antagonistic prison factions including the Aryan
Brotherhood and the black Gangster Disciples, held out for 11 days. It
was one of the longest prison rebellions in U.S. history. Nine prisoners
and a guard were killed by the prisoners during the revolt. The state
responded with characteristic fury. It singled out some 40 prisoners and
eventually shipped them to Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP), a supermax
facility outside Youngstown that was constructed in 1998. There
prisoners are held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day in
7-by-11-foot cells. Prisoners at OSP almost never see the sun or have
human contact. Those charged with participating in the uprising have, in
some cases, been held in these punitive conditions at OSP or other
facilities since the 1993 revolt. Five prisoners—Bomani Shakur, Siddique
Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb, George Skatzes and Namir Abdul
Mateen—involved in the uprising were charged with murder. They are being
held in isolation on death row.
Kerness says the for-profit prison
companies have created an entrepreneurial class like that of the
Southern slaveholders, one “dependent on the poor, and on bodies of
color as a source for income,” and she describes federal and state
departments of corrections as “a state of mind.” This state of mind, she
said in the interview, “led to Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo and
what is going on in U.S. prisons right this moment.”
As long as profit remains an incentive to
incarcerate human beings and our corporate state abounds in surplus,
redundant labor, there is little chance that the prison system will be
reformed. It is making our corporate overlords wealthy. Our prisons
serve the engine of corporate capitalism, transferring state money to
private corporations. These corporations will continue to stymie
rational prison reform because the system, however inhumane and unjust,
feeds corporate bank accounts. At its bottom the problem is not
race—although race plays a huge part in incarceration rates—nor is it
finally poverty; it is the predatory nature of corporate capitalism
itself. And until we slay the beast of corporate capitalism, until we
wrest power back from corporations, until we build social institutions
and a system of governance designed not to profit the few but foster the
common good, our prison industry and the horror it perpetuates will
only expand.
The World As It Is:
Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
A collection of Truthdig Columns
