Berkeley, CA November 23 Today MIM helped bring a mock "Security Housing Unit" or SHU to the University of California, Berkeley. The SHUs are sensory deprivation torture. SHU prisoners spend 22 hours a day in windowless, 6x9 cells. Activists passed out information on SHU conditions and collected just over 100 new signatures on a petition demanding the SHUs be shut down.(1)
The mock SHU action preceded a November 25 meeting between state Senator Richard Polanco, the California Department of Correction (CDC), and a few select prisoner advocacy groups. This meeting discussed the demands of SHU prisoners in Pelican Bay, who have been on hunger strike since October 19. Senator Polanco expressed support for the striking prisoners.
MIM and its allies in this campaign go further and call for the abolition of the SHUs, which serve no legitimate purpose. The Berkeley action followed a week-long vigil in downtown San Francisco the first week of November, organized by MIM, the All People's Coalition, the Barrio Defense Committee, the Uhuru Movement and others.
The environment in Berkeley was different from that in San Francisco. In Berkeley the crowd was predominantly white and well off; there were many more homeless people e.g. in San Francisco. Nonetheless we met a number of former prisoners in Berkeley and several people who had worked in the prisons in CA and knew firsthand the horrible conditions.
We met one former prisoner who received MIM Notes while on the inside. He is currently homeless and organizing homeless people. He took a copy of the petition to gather more signatures. A defense attorney stopped to talk about the conditions in prison, donate money California SHU protests reach Berkeley to our work, and sign the petition. Several people working in the prisons also stopped to support the protest. And a number of high school students taking SAT classes at UC Berkeley stopped to sign the petition on their lunch break.
In a classic example of the influence of knowing someone in prison, a MIM activist talked to two young white men about the issue. One of them said that everyone in prison is no good and a criminal and deserves to suffer. The other one said to him âhey, my dad's in prison and eagerly signed the petition proclaiming how much he would hate to be locked in the SHU. He then convinced his friend to sign as well. At the rate imprisonment is rising in the U.$., the number of people who have been or know someone in prison is reaching far into the population. And this provides a significant base of support for our fight against the criminal injustice system. This is concentrated in the Black and Latino communities which are disproportionately targeted by the criminal injustice system but reaches many whites as well. This explains the higher level of support for the protest in downtown San Francisco relative to the supposedly progressive Berkeley.
Readers should not take these examples of support as a sign that we met no opposition. The SHU protest was the same day as the "big" Berkeley vs. Stanford football game. The crowds of sports fans were far from sympathetic to the protest. Many of them walked by commenting "I think torture is good." This is no surprise as the largely white petty bourgeois crowds reflect the interests of mainstream Amerika in general.
At the end of the football game (won by Berkeley), a crowd of thousands rushed the field and, after repeated clashes with police, successfully pushed their way through and tore down the goal post. They then took to the streets, shutting down traffic in their victory march carrying the goal post onto another part of the Berkeley campus. According to a policeman who stopped to ask what was in the mock-SHU, no arrests were made in connection with the crowd at the football field.
This tolerance of blatant property destruction and illegal activity demonstrates the unity between the white nation and the criminal injustice system. Blacks and Latinos living in poverty who steal food or other property to feed their family are sent to prison, and crowds of oppressed nation youth demonstrating bring down serious police repression. But white students tearing down a goal post and taking over the streets without a permit results merely in news camera coverage. Media that was uninterested in the SHU protest. As the crowd surged past the mock-SHU we didnât see a single police office anywhere nearby.
Notes: 1. The petition and an informational flyer can be downloaded from http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/ agitation/prisons/index.html.