Raise Your Voice Against the CMUs - Break the Silence on June 2, 2010

Center for Constitutional Rights

Join the Center for Constitutional Rights and submit your comments about the Communications Management Units to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Description

Raise your Voice against the CMUs:
Let’s Break the Silence Together on June 2nd

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) recently opened up a period for public comment around the establishment of two Communications Management Units (CMUs), units designed to isolate and segregate certain prisoners in the federal prison system from the rest of the BOP population.

Please consider joining the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), along with concerned family members, civil rights & liberties groups, legal organizations, and community-based and religious groups as we collectively submit our comments to the BOP on Wednesday, June 2, 2010.

We encourage you to emphasize the issues raised by the CMUs that matter most to you. In your comments, you might want to highlight one or more of the following issues:

• Lack of due process at the CMU: None of the CMU prisoners have been told why they were designated to the CMU, or what evidence was used to make that decision. They have received no hearing to challenge their CMU designation. Likewise, there is no meaningful review process to earn their way out of the CMU. This lack of transparency deprives prisoners of their due process rights.
• Overrepresentation of Muslim and political prisoners at the CMU: Because there is no oversight procedure of who gets sent to the CMU and why, there has been an unchecked pattern of Muslim prisoners and politically active prisoners being sent to the CMU. Somewhere between 65 and 72% of prisoners at the CMU are Muslim. Others are, and have been, politically active. Their designation to the CMU is both discriminatory and retaliatory.
• Destructive effect of the CMU on families: The meager number of phone calls and visits that CMU prisoners receive, and the blanket ban on physical contact with loved ones – including children – during visits tears families apart and inflicts pointless suffering of the prisoners and their families alike.
• Conditions at the CMU amount to cruel and unusual punishment: The isolation experienced by CMU prisoners, and the ways in which they are prevented from maintaining their family ties, is cruel and serves no legitimate purpose.

You can submit your comments online (visit: http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#documentDetail?R=0900006480ad11c7) or through the mail. Please send concise comments.

If you submit comments via regular mail, please send them to the following address and include the following docket number in your correspondence:
BOP DOCKET #1148-P COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT UNITS

Rules Unit, Office of General Counsel
Bureau of Prisons
320 First Street, NW.
Washington, DC 20534

Please consider submitting your comments by June 2, 2010* and sending us a copy of your comments** as we’re hoping to collect these pieces to illustrate the depth of collective public outcry over the creation of the CMUs.

*The official deadline for comments is June 7, 2010.
**Please send copies via email to: nzamani@ccrjustice.org or via regular mail to: Nahal Zamani, Center for Constitutional Rights, 666 Broadway, 7th floor, New York, NY 10012.