People waved black flags, banged on drums and pots and pans, chanted, and held banners, while prisoners in orange jumpsuits filled the windows to look and wave.

Several people also shared personal stories. One man paced up and down in the street, screaming, “20 years. 20 damn years. I lost my 20s and 30s, the best years of my life, because of .25 grams of crack-cocaine.”

After the demo folks met up at a nearby library to meet each other, share food, and talk about issues confronting the struggle against prisons locally and nationally. The dinner drew a diverse array of organizations and individuals, and the conversation is just beginning.

(Stay tuned for pictures, etc.)

by Bill Quigley

Today US Army Private Bradley Manning is to be formally charged with numerous crimes at Fort Meade, Maryland. Manning, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic Parliament, is charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents exposing secrets of the US government to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. These documents exposed lies, corruption and crimes by the US and other countries. The Bradley Manning defense team points out accurately that much of what was published by Wikileaks was either not actually secret or should not have been secret.

The Manning prosecution is a tragic miscarriage of justice. US officials are highly embarrassed by what Manning exposed and are shooting the messenger. As Glenn Greenwald, the terrific Salon writer, has observed, President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all other presidents combined.

One of the most outrageous parts of the treatment of Bradley Manning is that the US kept him in illegal and torturous solitary confinement conditions for months at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia. Keeping Manning in solitary confinement sparked challenges from many groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU and the New York Times.

Human rights’ advocates rightly point out that solitary confinement is designed to break down people mentally. Because of that, prolonged solitary confinement is internationally recognized as a form of torture. The conditions and practices of isolation are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention against Torture, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination.

Medical experts say that after 60 days in solidary peoples’ mental state begins to break down. That means a person will start to experience panic, anxiety, confusion, headaches, heart palpitations, sleep problems, withdrawal, anger, depression, despair, and over-sensitivity. Over time this can lead to severe psychiatric trauma and harms like psychosis, distortion of reality, hallucinations, mass anxiety and acute confusion. Essentially, the mind disintegrates.

That is why the United Nations special rapporteur on torture sought to investigate Manning’s solitary confinement and reprimanded the US when the Army would not let him have an unmonitored visit.

History will likely judge Manning as heroic as it has Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

It is important to realize that tens of thousands of other people besides Manning are held in solitary confinement in the US today and every day. Experts estimate a minimum of 20,000 people are held in solitary in supermax prisons alone, not counting thousands of others in state and local prisons who are also held in solitary confinement. And solitary confinement is often forced on Muslim prisoners, even pre-trial people who are assumed innocent, under federal Special Administrative Measures.

In 1995, the U.N. Human Rights Committee stated that isolation conditions in certain U.S. maximum security prisons were incompatible with international standards. In 1996, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture reported on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in U.S. supermax prisons. In 2000, the U.N. Committee on Torture roundly condemned the United States for its treatment of prisoners, citing supermax prisons. In May 2006, the same committee concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”

John McCain said his two years in solitary confinement were torture. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” The reaction of McCain and many other victims of isolation torture were described in an excellent 2009 New Yorker article on isolation by Atul Gawande. Gawande concluded that prolonged isolation is objectively horrifying, intrinsically cruel, and more widespread in the U.S. than any country in the world.

This week hundreds of members of the Occupy movement merged forces with people advocating for human rights for prisoners in demonstrations in California, New York, Ohio, and Washington DC. They call themselves Occupy 4 Prisoners. Activists are working to create a social movement for serious and fundamental changes in the US criminal system.

One of the major complaints of prisoner human rights activists is the abuse of solitary confinement in prisons across the US. Prison activist Mumia Abu-Jamal said justice demands the end of solitary, “It means the abolition of solitary confinement, for it is no more than modern-day torture chambers for the poor.” Pelican Bay State Prison in California, the site of a hunger strike by hundreds of prisoners last year, holds over 1000 inmates in solitary confinement, some as long as 20 years.

At the Occupy Prisoners rally outside San Quentin prison, the three American hikers who were held for a year in Iran told of the psychological impact of 14 months of solitary confinement. Sarah Shourd said the time without human contact drove her to beat the walls of her cell until her knuckles bled.

When Manning was held in solitary he was kept in his cell 23 hours a day for months at a time. The US government tortured him to send a message to others who might consider blowing the whistle on US secrets. At the same time, tens of thousands of others in the US are being held in their cells 23 hours a day for months, even years at a time. That torture is also sending a message.

Thousands stood up with Bradley Manning and got him released from solitary. People must likewise stand up with the thousands of others in solitary as well.

So, stand in solidarity with Bradley Manning and fight against his prosecution. And stand also against solitary confinement of the tens of thousands in US jails and prisons. Check out the Solitary Watch, and Occupy 4 Prisoners for ways to participate.

An administrator in charge of the kitchen refused to address their concerns and ordered the men to, “Get their sorry asses back to work.” After that, eight guards came in, threatening the use of force. Eight of the prisoners stood strong, and were immediately locked up.

These eight prisoners have been charged with work stoppage and disobeying a direct order. They all plead not guilty. After a month and a half, they were sent to see the DHO board. The prisoners requested staff statements, video tape of incident, and certain staff’s presence at their hearing, in their defense. They were denied all of these things, and immediately found guilty. The new warden at the prison, Kenneth Lassiter, has expressed that he wants the prisoners put on I-Con (essentially, solitary) indefinitely. According to one prisoner, calling himself simply “one of the strong eight,” “Our rights have been violated. We have tried to write grievances, and inmate janitors have found them in the garbage torn up. Repeatedly.”

The prisoners remain resolute and have expressed gratitude for support and care shown from the outside, and a desire to have news of this injustice spread. “Still we are standing strong. Eight inmates fighting for our rights in this crooked prison, where it seems everybody, including the warden, makes their own rules.”

A Woman’s Cry for Help

I am an inmate at NCCIW, and behind these razor-wire fences egregious medical neglect has been a concern for decades. The health care inside this prison is grossly inadequate, unconstitutional, and has been ignored for far too long. The quality of the health care here has been questioned since as early as the 1990′s, and it continues to get worse.

Most of us women who are behind these fences will return to the outside communities, and the lack of health care while we are incarcerated therefore has a huge impact on society as well, whether it be financially or otherwise.

Women here at this facility have died because medical neglect. For some women, coming to NCCIW is truly a death sentence. Irene Baity had been here for years, with only five left before her release. She was over-medicated on a mental health drug that resulted in her hanging herself. Rosa Moody, from Avery County, came in here on a Friday sick with pneumonia; she was dead three days later. Teresa Jones had Crohn’s disease; inmate Kathy Thompson found her bleeding uncontrollably. The Corrections Officer left her, did not even try to help her. I stood watching helpless, unable to do anything. The second shift CO came in two hours later and got her to the infirmary, where she died.

These are just a few that lost their lives due to medical neglect. I came in here 2010 healthy with two working legs and feet; I now am permanently disabled in my right leg and foot. I walk on crutches now because of medical neglect. I now have a lymphoma tumor on the left side of my neck, and was told by Dr. Lyle Park that I only had six months left to seek a doctor when I got out. We are mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and children, and we deserve health care equal to that of the outside communities. The need for medical treatment has been ignored for too long, far too many women have died here and their plea for help has been ignored. We deserve justice! The state needs to be held accountable for this.

A prisoner at NCCIW

2/7/12

Despite the construction of a new hospital at NCCIW, prisoners remain skeptical. One woman wrote, “As long as it remains unopened, people can still go out and receive real medical treatment. Each day it stays shut, lives are saved.”

But his plan to shutter the Tamms “supermax” lockup is raising questions about how the crowded correctional system could safely absorb its inmate population.

Tamms is an infamous prison in the state of Illinois, highly controversial and the subject of numerous lawsuits alleging prisoner abuse. It is a closed maximum custody prison, with no mess hall and prisoners all doing solitary time 23 hours a day.

Aides said the Democratic governor wants to close the southern Illinois prison and the 80-year-old lockup in Dwight in a quest to cut $100 million, which he’ll lay out Wednesday in his budget plan.

Also targeted are a half-dozen halfway houses for low-level offenders, who would be put on electronic detention and supervised by parole agents whose union says are already overtaxed.

Two juvenile detention centers and four facilities for the mentally ill or developmentally disabled also would cease operation, and human services and law enforcement operations would be consolidated in the Quinn plan.

A spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents prison and human services workers, called the prisons “irreplaceable” because Tamms houses the most dangerous inmates and Dwight is the only maximum-security facility for women.

“Closing them would trigger a dangerous domino effect, destabilizing the entire correctional system and complicating an overcrowding epidemic,” AFSCME’s Anders Lindall said.

But unlike the rest of the state’s prison system, Tamms, opened in 1998, is underused. Just 408 of the Alexander County facility’s 753 beds are occupied and because of extra security, it costs $64,000 a year to house an inmate there — three times the state average, Quinn spokeswoman Mica Matsoff said.

“Tamms is about half-full,” Quinn chief of staff Jack Lavin said Tuesday night. “We have facilities close by. … The cost per prisoner is very high, so it’s an inefficient facility.”

Tamms residents would be moved to the maximum-security Pontiac Correctional Center. Female inmates at Dwight would be transferred to Logan prison in Lincoln, a prison for women that also houses men. Those men would be transferred across town to Lincoln Correctional Center.

Lindall also slammed the governor’s plan to close six “adult transition centers” where inmates nearing release report at night but can work days in the community, get job training or substance-abuse treatment.

About 1,100 inmates from those centers would have to wear electronic monitoring bracelets and report to parole officers. Lindall said about 300 parole agents are already overworked monitoring 30,000 parolees.

from Red Bird Prison Abolition

On Wednesday evening, twenty-five prisoners at Ohio’s super-max prison ate their first meal since Sunday night. The hunger strike was inspired by the Occupy4Prisoners National Day of Action called by Occupy Oakland. According to Siddique Abdullah Hasan, one of the hunger strikers, they initially intended a one day fast as a “symbolic gesture, a way of locking arms with the people on the outside.”

By Monday evening, the prisoners had decided to issue demands and continue refusing food. Their demands included specific changes in the conditions of their confinement at Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP) as well as calls for broader reforms. They resumed eating after Warden David Bobby agreed to grant a number of their demands including:

1. Reversing the recent decision to reduce outdoor recreation time for prisoners to a schedule alternating between 3 and 4 hours per week
2. Improving enrichment programming, including new movies and religious movies for the prison television station.
3. Bringing the head dietitian from Central Office in Columbus to review OSP food policies and hear prisoner complaints about inedible and scorched food.
4. A number of specific instances of price-gouging, skimping and lack of variety in the commissary.

Hasan said “Warden Bobby has been a man of his word in the past, so we don’t anticipate the kind of situation going on in California” referring to slow response to negotiations during last years large prisoner hunger strikes in California.

The prisoners consider their hunger strike a victory because they won these specific demands and also because they helped raise awareness of state and even nation-wide issues regarding the artificial economy of state pay and commissary prices.

Prisoners from across the institution participated in the hunger strike, including Siddique Abdullah Hasan a Muslim Imam who has been on death row fighting what he says is a wrongful conviction following the 1993 Lucasville Uprising. More information about the Lucasville Uprising is available on a new website Hasan and other prisoners helped create at LucasvilleAmnesty.org

From the Bay View

Editor’s note: This comes from the brilliant minds – locked away in one of the most restrictive prisons in the U.S. – who brought you “California prison hunger strikers propose ‘10 core demands’ for the national Occupy Wall Street Movement,” the Bay View’s most read story, with 9,980 pageviews, from Dec. 6, 2011, to Feb. 19, 2012.

by J. Heshima Denham, Zaharibu Dorrough and Kambui   Robinson of the NCTT Corcoran Security Housing Unit (SHU)

“But beneath this conventional enthusiasm and amid this ingratiating ritual toward the dominant power, you can easily perceive in the wealthy a deep distaste for the democratic institutions of their country. The people are a power they both fear and despise.” – Alexis De Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”

Greetings, brothers and sisters. A firm, warm and solid embrace of revolutionary love is extended to you all.

As we proceed in this period of evolution in our struggles for substantive social change in the U.S. via the national Occupy Movement, the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Movement, the Anti-Imperialist Movement etc., it is imperative that we not only understand that we are all representative of a single socio-political and historic motive force, but those in opposition to our democratic aspirations are the very same political, social and economic powers that this nation has relied on to ensure the integrity of democracy, social justice and economic equality. This is a contradiction.

This historic contradiction will NOT be resolved via our disparate efforts. Substantive change will only be realized through a comprehensive strategic approach, coordinated and conducted by us all. Simply put, we are a single movement, and for us to have the social impact necessary to compel progress we must proceed with this realization as out guiding ethos. We of the NCTT (New Afrikan Collective Think Tank) in the Corcoran SHU (Security Housing Unit) have a proposal on effective strategic organizing we’d like to share with you here, but before we do so we think it is imperative that you all understand the historic significance of what we are all a part of.

It is our assessment that what is occurring today as it relates to the national protest movement (i.e., Occupy Wall Street, Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity etc.) is the unfinished legacy of the struggle for social justice necessary for the U.S. to fulfill its democratic potential. This struggle is part of the rich and courageous legacy of abolitionists, women’s rights activists, organized labor, populists, human and civil rights activists and other democratic struggles of the nation’s past.

Social revolution has always been imperative to this type of substantive change. This calls for the recognition and coming together of people – citizens from different cultural, economic and ideological backgrounds – realizing the common interest inherent in this truth: that we all inhabit the same planet, breathe the same air, are part of the human family.

READ THE REST AT THE BAY VIEW

Sean Swain is an anarchist political prisoner imprisoned in Mansfield Correctional Institution.

In 2007, in a published interview I observed that if Ohio prisoners simply laid on their bunks for 30 days, the system would collapse. I wasn’t talking about just the prison system, but Ohio’s entire economy.

I came to that conclusion because I recognized that 50,000 prisoners work for pennies per day making the food, taking out the trash, mopping the floors. We produce parts for Honda and other multi-nationals at Ohio Penal Industries (OPI), making millions of dollars in profit for the State. If we stopped participating in our own oppression, the State would have to hire workers at union-scale wages to make our food, take out the trash, and mop the floors; slave labor for Honda and others would cease.

Ohio would lose millions of dollars a day in production. The State’s economy would not recover for a decade.

When I made that observation, I didn’t know for certain that I was right. I suspected I was. But more than a year later, prison officials came to get me. My cell was plastered with crime tape. All of the fixtures, including lights, sink, and toilet, were removed and inspected, something  that I haven’t seen happen in 20 years of captivity. I was taken to segregation and slated for transfer to super-max.

The reason? My observation, in a year-old published interview, that Ohio’s economy would collapse without prisoner labor.

That’s when I knew my observation was right. The enemy confirmed it.

I eventually avoided super-max because my friends and supporters made enough noise, but I am now on a Security Threat Group list even though I have never been part of any organization, and my incoming mail is screened.

I share all of this in order to underscore how seriously and irrationally terrified the Sate is about the possibility of anyone awakening the prisoner population to its own power. The State is hysterically shit-in-their-pants petrified of an organized prisoner resistance, the way plantation owners feared a slave uprising.

I was subjected to repression in 2008. Since then, the situation for the State has become even more dire. Given austerity cuts and privatization of a few prisons, the guard-to-prisoner ration has drastically dropped, leading to more disruption in the standard prison operations. On top of that, the Kasich administration’s efforts to bust public workers’ unions, though a failure, has destroyed the morale of guards and staff, the majority of whom now only care about collecting their pay checks. With each downturn in the economy, the prison system takes more essential services from prisoners—from medical to food to clothes—and thereby increases the hostility and resentment of the prisoner population.

With very little effort, very little money, and a great deal of advanced planning, Ohio’s prison population could be inspired to completely disrupt the operation of the entire prison complex. If such a disruption were to occur, it would cause more than the economic collapse of the Sate the I already discussed. Such a disruption would ultimately seize from the State the power to punish. This would pose more than a simple political problem for the government: in such a scenario, it loses all power to enforce its edicts and impose itself; the government ceases to be the government.

Such a development would be a great benefit to the Occupy Movement. While Occupy directly challenges the crapitalist system, it must be remembered that the global crapitalist Matrix uses governments as factory managers. If you protest private bankers, you get beaten by public cops. Given the recent bail-outs, the public trust is nothing more than a corporate slush-fund. It is nearly impossible in this Blackwater-Enron out-source era to tell where governments end and corporations begin—and vice-versa.

The prison complex is an essential component to the larger crapitalist Matrix. If an Occupy-prisoner collaboration in Ohio could take the prison system out of the enemy’s control—if the Occupation could expand to the prisons—we can collectively create the prototype for the larger movement to replicate, building a momentum that collapses prison complex after prison complex, paralyzing state government after state government, spreading like a computer virus, liberating and de-colonizing the most-essential and intimidating bulwark against freedom the empire relies upon: the prisons.

For those of you who are part of the 99% but don’t really want to identify with this segment of the 99% and object to possibly causing all of these criminals to go free, I remind you: The most hardened and irremediable criminals, the most ruthless killers and rapists, currently run the Fortune 500; they dictate U.S. foreign policy; they drive cars emblazoned with “To Protect and To Serve.” You serve the agenda of those criminals if you turn your back on these “criminals.” Without us, you’re not the 99%. If my math is right, without us, you’re only about 94%.

This 5% is only waiting for the invitation.

You can let your enemy keep his slaves and possibly defeat you over time, or you can liberate his slaves and defeat him quickly.

To me, it’s a no-brainer. It’s a matter of actually living up to what you present yourself to be—something your enemy has never done.

We’re still waiting for that invitation.

Sean Swain

Mansfield Correctional Institution

We will begin festivities around 7pm, there will be speakers sharing their Bob Sheldon stories with us. We will also be giving out this year’s Bob Sheldon award (to the Human Rights Center, or HRC). Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe will be providing the food.

If you have a story that you would like to share with everyone, please let us know! (email us at ibooks@internationalistbooks.org) This event is all about Bob and his legacy, so the more people who come out to share, the better!

Thank you and we hope to see you all soon!

<3 and Rage,

Internationalist Books Co-managers, Volunteers and Board Members

“Rebellious kisses wake we children of the sun dancing fire freedom blooming red.”

Collective Sun is an intergenerational body of work exploring the impact prison and policing has on our bodies, our families and our communities.

Part performance, part art exhibit, and part audio installation. Collective Sun shares stories of resilience and hope, and reminds us to love one another until we can all be whole.

Through Collective Sun, families of color gain a voice to proactively address the impact of the prison industrial complex, creating a platform where art and culture become the means for solution-oriented, civic engagement in local/regional political actions.