Bonnie Kerness Speech at Stopmax Conference

From:    "Political Prisoner News" <ppnews@freedomarchives.org>
Date:    Wed, July 9, 2008

via: Bonnie Kerness
===============

AFSC Stopmax Conference
Plenary Session
Temple University
May 31-June 1
Bonnie Kerness, AFSC Prison Watch Project

I want to thank the AFSC for renewing its
commitment to issues of isolation and torture in
US prisons; the AFSC Healing Justice staff for
their collective brilliance and spirit and Naima
Black and the Stopmax Team for organizing this extraordinary community.

In the mid 80’s I received a letter from Ojore
Lutalo who had just been placed in the Management
Control Unit at Trenton State Prison. He asked
what a control unit was, why he was in there and
how long he would have to stay. At that point, we
knew little of control units, except for the
ground breaking work of Nancy Kurshan and Steve
Whitman of the Committee to End the Marion
Lockdown (CEML) and the many prisoners who
reached out to the AFSC, which, in 1985 produced
a pamphlet called “The Lessons of Marion”. We
began hearing from people throughout the country
saying that they were prisoners being held in
extended isolation for political reasons. We also
heard from jailhouse lawyers, Islamic militants
and prisoner activists ­ many of whom found
themselves locked down in 24/7 solitary
confinement. The AFSC began contacting people
inside and outside the prisons to see who was
interested in working specifically on control
unit isolation issues, and in 1994 (after eight
years of organizing) we hosted the formation of
the National Campaign to Stop Control Unit
Prisons. This was done with the help of CEML,
Komboa Ervin, who was one of the Marion Brothers,
Corey Weinstein of California Prison Focus,
Alejandro Molina from the Puerto Rican Cultural
Center, students from Oberlin College, young
people across the country who belonged to the
Anarchist Black Cross, the United Church of
Christ, Yaki Owusu of Spear and Shield, the input
of the women held in small group isolation at
Lexington, Ky. and many others who gave strength
and purpose to the work. Some of these people
were actively involved in the different political
movements of the 60’s and 70’s and understood how
control units were being used against us all.
Getting issues of isolation and torture into the
light has been a long road and I bow in gratitude
to those inside who so gracefully and patiently
mentored those of us on the outside.

In 1996, the National Campaign held four Regional
Hearings across the country, giving voice to
people in prison, ex-prisoners, family members,
advocates, lawyers and others whom were impacted
by the use of isolation. In 1997 we came out with
the Interim Report which held data on the
emergence of over 45 control units or supermax
prisons in almost every state. We matched inside
and outside monitors in each state and formed the
testimonies we received into a Listening Project
called “Testimonies of Torture” and the
“Survivor’s Manual”. In 1998, the National AFSC
folded the work of the Campaign into Newark, NJ’s
Prison Watch Project of the New York Metropolitan
Regional Office. During the four years of its
existence, NCSCUP trained dozens of students in
organizing principles, including helping to
develop about half a dozen campus Prisoner
Awareness groups. Many of those former students
are still working for social change today.

The history of the National Campaign to Stop
Control Unit Prisons really began with the
movements of the 60’s and 70’s. My generation
belonged to a society where we genuinely believed
that each of us was free to dissent politically.
In those years, people acted out this belief in a
number of ways. Native peoples contributed to the
formation of the American Indian Movement
dedicated to self determination; Puerto Ricans
joined the movement to free the island from US
colonialism; white students formed the Students
for a Democratic Society and other groups, while
others worked in the southern Civil Rights
movements. This was also a time that the New
Afrikan Independence Movement reasserted itself,
the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was
formed, as well as a time where there was a
distinct rise in the prisoner’s rights movement.
It was time when television news had graphic
pictures of State Troopers, Police, the FBI, and
the National Guard killing our peers. It was a
time when I saw on the evening news the bullet
holes fired by police into Panther Fred Hampton’s
sleeping body, a time when young people
protesting the Viet Nam War died on the Jackson
and Kent State campuses killed by the National
Guard, a time when civil rights workers were
killed with impunity, and a time when we felt as
if there was no opportunity to stop mourning
because each day another activist was dead. These
killings and other acts of oppression led to
underground formations such as the Black
Liberation Army and the Weathermen Underground.

The government, in response to this massive
outcry against social inequities and for national
liberation, utilized an FBI Counter Intelligence
Program called COINTELPRO, which had as its
objective the crippling of the Black Panther
Party and other radical forces. Over the years
that this directive was carried out, many of
those young people who weren’t murdered were put
in prisons across the country. Some, now in their
60’s and 70’s are still there. Those directives
are still being carried out, only now we have an
entire office of Homeland Security monitoring
what it calls “radical prisoners”.

While the US denied that there were people being
held for political reasons, there was no way at
the time, to work with prisoners without hearing
repeatedly of the existence of such people,
including individuals who clearly fit the United
Nations definition of political prisoners and
prisoners of war ­ and the particular treatment
they endured once in prison. As early as 1978,
Andrew Young , who was US Ambassador to the
United Nations, was quoted in newspaper
interviews as saying that “there were hundreds,
perhaps thousands of people I would describe as
political prisoners” in US prisons.

Across the nation, we saw an enhanced use of
sensory deprivation/isolation units for such
people, and it was this growing “special
treatment” which we began monitoring. At the
time, Ralph Arons, a former warden at Marion, was
quoted at a congressional hearing as saying, “The
purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control
revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in society at large”.

For those of us who have been in the struggle for
decades, the deliberate use of long term sensory
deprivation is haunting. People that we’ve known,
worked with and loved have been, and some still
are, being held in this manner. Some of those are
people in the audience today. The names ­ Ojore
Lutalo; Sundiata Acoli, who the Management
Control Unit in NJ was built for in 1975; Assata
Shakur, who was held for over five years in
isolation. Marshall Eddie Conway, Albert Nuh
Washington, who died in prison; Geronimo Pratt;
Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Mumia Abu
Jamal; Leonard Peltier, David Gilbert, Marilyn
Buck, Sekou Odinga, Ray Luc Levasseur, Kazi
Toure, Masai Ehehosi; Leonard Peltier, Oscar
Lopez Rivera, Alejandrina Torres, Dylcia Pagan,
Bashir Hameed, Standing Deer and Sekou Odinga,
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin; Richard Williams, Tom
Manning, Merle and the rest of the Africas,
Africa, Susan Rosenberg, Laura Whitehorn, Linda
Evans, Marilyn Buck, Sylvia Baraldini, Mutulu
Shakur, Imam Jamil Al-Amin - these names and
dozens of others ­ haunt the spaces of every
control unit, SHU, DDU, ad seg unit and special
housing unit in the country. No matter what name
they are given, their purpose is the same as it
is in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo ­ the breaking of
minds. For every name I’ve read, there are a thousand more.

For people of my generation, this work is done
with a compelling and lifetime passion and an
understanding that the work is not risk free.
We’ve made a promise to those dead and alive to
abolish these torture chambers. People throughout
the world are beginning to understand what the
prisoners have been saying to us for decades
about the oppressive tactics of the US
government. The department of corrections is more
than a set of institutions, it is a state of
mind. It is that state of mind which has expanded
the use of isolation, the use of devices of
torture and the Counter Intelligence Program, as
part of Homeland Security, against activists,
both inside and outside the walls. Ojore Lutalo,
the man who first contacted us in 1986, was
released from the control unit via litigation in
2002 after 16 years in isolation. In 2004, he let
us know that he had been placed back into the
Management Control unit with no charges pending
or any explanation. When I called the Department
of Corrections, it took many conversations before
I was bluntly told that this was upon the order
of Homeland Security, that he is one of a number
of prisoners across the country who they have targeted in this way.

The latest progression of control units are
called “security threat group management units”.
This is particularly egregious because it is the
government which gets to define what a “security
threat group” is. According to a national survey
done by the Department of Justice in 1997, the
Departments of Corrections of Minnesota and
Oregon named all Asians as gangs, which Minnesota
further compounds by adding all Native Americans.
The State of NJ DOC lists the Black Cat
Collective as a gang. The Black Cat Collective is
my free foster son along with two friends who put
on Afro-Centric cultural programs in libraries.
Because my own background stems from the Civil
Rights Era, I am very mindful of who is
considered a “security threat” to this country and how they are treated.

Prison gang policies occur within the context of
larger society and the wider criminal justice
system, and the growth of security threat group
management units are part of the larger policy
agenda regarding US prisons. One of the standards
that the federal government sets in order for
states to receive prison construction subsidies
is to mandate the building of supermax prisons or
security threat group management units.

One of the things that makes this such an
exciting time to re-new our efforts through
Stopmax, is that we now have the growing
understanding of the validity United Nations
international law. The Convention Against
Torture, the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Racial Discrimination, The UN Convention
on Political and Civil Rights and other
international and regional treaties help give us
a new set of legal, educational and organizing tools for social change.

Our work this weekend is very rooted in struggle
against the system and political oppression. It
is deeply touching to me to have representatives
of so many long time political formations
present. Those of us in AFSC rooted in these
issues, continue to hear from prisoner activists,
the mentally ill, people charged with being gang
members and thousands of others ­ all being
housed in extended isolation where devices of
torture are used with impunity. After each
Homeland Security Code change, Prison Watch is
flooded with calls from people reporting loved
ones with Islamic names being placed in solitary without charges.

Our work this weekend is a time when the building
of new relationships and the broadening of our
base can truly create social change. I think we
all need to be mindful of the deep sense of grief
that many of us feel as it impacts on our work
and interactions. There may be groups here who
need to work through differences with one
another. There may be groups here who can form
working alliances no matter what those
differences are. Our priority has to be to work
cooperatively to shut down these torture chambers.

I want to honor our foremothers and forefathers
in this movement for abolition of prisons,
isolation and torture with a poem of Assata
Shakur’s called “No One Can Stop the Rain”, which
reminds us that no one can stop a righteous
movement. We, all of us, are a powerful community
of resistance, and this is a dream come true for me.

Watch, the grass is growing.
Watch, but don’t make it obvious.
Let your eyes roam casually, but watch!
In any prison yard, you can see it, growing.
In the cracks, in the crevices, between the steel and the concrete,
Out of the dead gray dust,
The bravest blades of grass shoot up, bold and full of life.
Watch, the grass is growing.
It is growing through the cracks.
The guards say grass is against the Law.
Grass is contraband in prison.
The guards say that the grass is insolent.
It is uppity grass, radical grass, militant grass, terrorist grass,
They call it weeds.
Nasty weeds, nigga weeds, dirty, spic, savage indian, wetback, pinko,
Commie weeds ­ subversive!
And so the guards try to wipe out the grass.
They yank it from its roots.
They poison it with drugs.
They maul it.
They rake it.
Blades of grass has been found hanging in cells, covered with
Bruises, “Apparent suicides”.
The guards say that the “GRASS is UNAUTHORIZED”.
“”DO NOT LET THE GRASS GROW:”
You can spy on the grass. You can lock up the grass.
You can mow it down, temporarily.
But you will never keep it from growing.
Watch, the grass is beautiful.
The guards try to mow it down, but it keeps on growing.
The grass grows into a poem.
The grass grows into a song.
The grass paints itself across the canvas of life.
And the picture is clear and the lyrics are true,
And the haunting voices sing so sweet and strong
That the people hear the grass from far away.
And the people start to dance, and the people
start to sing, and the song is freedom.

Watch the grass is growing.

Thank you.



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