by Kiilu Nyasha
Hugo Pinell, Mumia Abu Jamal and Nuh Washington are political prisoners Kiilu Nyasha
has corresponded with during their decades behind enemy lines. Washington was never
able to regain his freedom, having died in prison of cancer in 2000. - Drawing:
Kiilu NyashaPresident Barack Obama has clearly stated, “We don’t torture.”
Oh, yes we do. Big time.
A myriad of studies have clearly shown that human beings are social creatures –
making prolonged isolation torture.
The New Yorker published an article March 30, 2009, by Atul Gawande titled,
“Hellhole: The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term
solitary confinement. Is this torture?”
Gawande asks, “If prolonged isolation is – as research and experience have confirmed
for decades – so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up
with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other
country in history has?”
By 2000, some 60 supermax prisons had been opened nationwide, in addition to new
isolation units in nearly all maximum-security prisons.
The first such gulag was established in 1983 in Marion, Illinois. In 1989,
California opened Pelican Bay State Prison near the Oregon border housing over 1,200
captives. It’s been the model for dozens of other states to follow. The SHU
(Security Housing Unit) is entirely windowless, and from inside a cell with doors
perforated with tiny holes, prisoners can only see the hallway.
They’re confined 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year with just
a brief time (when permitted) in the “dog run” or outdoor enclosure for solitary
exercise with no equipment, not even a ball.
But after nearly 20 years, California is now holding more people in solitary than
ever; yet its gang problem is worse, and the violence rates have actually gone up.
Nationwide, at least 25,000 prisoners are in solitary confinement with another
50-80,000 in segregation units, many additionally isolated but those numbers are not
released.
According to The Washington Post, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons reported
there are 216 so-called international terrorists and 139 so-called domestic
terrorists currently in federal facilities (I’m convinced the real terrorists are on
Capitol Hill). No one has ever escaped from these “most secure prisons.”
In a 60 Minutes segment titled, “Supermax: A Clean Version of Hell” (revisited),
broadcast June 21, 2009, the reporters took cameras into the ADX-Florence, Colorado,
Supermax, where there have been six wardens since it opened in 1994. It’s where Imam
Jalil al-Amin and Mutulu Shakur are held captive, along with myriad other political
prisoners.
One former warden stated, “I don’t know what hell is, but I do know the assumption
would be, for a free person, it’s pretty close to it.”
“Supermax is the place America sends the prisoners it wants to punish the most – a
place the warden described as a clean version of hell.”
In “National Study of Jail Suicides: Seven Years Later,” Lindsay M. Hayes and Joseph
R. Rowan (1988) report that out of 401 suicides in U.S. prisons – one of the largest
studies of its kind – two out of every three people who committed suicide were being
held in a control unit.
In one year, 2005, a record 44 prisoners killed themselves in California alone; 70
percent of those suicides occurred in segregation units.
Bret Grote is an investigator and organizer with Human Rights Coalition-Fed Up! a
prison abolitionist organization based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the Angola 3
Newsletter, Grote details how HRC-Fed Up! documented many hundreds of human rights
abuses in Pennsylvania’s 27 prisons. Their investigations concluded that
Pennsylvania is “operating a sophisticated program of torture under an utterly
baseless pretext of ‘security,’ wherein close to 3,000 people are held in conditions
of solitary/ control unit confinement each day.”
Supermax prisons can also contain death rows where prisoners can spend decades in
isolation torture, with the added torment of impending execution. One obvious
example is the highly political case of former Black Panther journalist and author
Mumia Abu-Jamal, falsely convicted of killing a cop in 1981. Despite hard evidence
of innocence, he’s still locked up in SCI Green, a Pennsylvania supermax, after 27
years on death row and the signing of two death warrants.
These conditions are a flagrant violation of Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution,
which affirms that treaty law (i.e. international law) is the “supreme law of the
land.” Thus, Article 10(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights stipulates, “The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners
the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.”
Contrary to the lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key rhetoric of politicians, a Zogby
poll released in April 2006 found 87 percent of Americans favor rehabilitative
services for prisoners as opposed to punishment only.
The Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, a bipartisan national task
force, produced a study after a yearlong investigation in 2005-2006 that called for
ending long-term solitary confinement of prisoners. The report found practically no
benefits and plenty of harm – for prisoners and the public.
One of the most egregious cases of prolonged torture is the politically-charged
isolation of Hugo Pinell, still held in Pelican Bay’s SHU after nearly 20 years. For
his active resistance back in the 1960s and assault conviction in the San Quentin
Six case (1976), my dear friend has spent a total of 40 years in hellholes – 45 of
his 64 years have been spent in California prisons.
“In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized
segregation,” writes Gawande, “ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is
no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement – on
our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a
30-minute drive from my home.”
Kiilu Nyasha - Photo: Scott BraleyIn the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “Distrust all
in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!”
Power to the people!
Kiilu Nyasha, Black Panther veteran, revolutionary journalist and Bay View
columnist, hosts the TV talk show Freedom Is a Constant Struggle every Friday at
7:30 p.m. on San Francisco cable channel 76. She can be reached at
Kiilu2@sbcglobal.net. For more of her essays, artwork and photos, visit
www.myspace.com/official_kiilu.
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