July 22 -- The United Front to Shut Down Security Housing Units (SHU) in California prisons held the second in a series of state-wide educational events. This event was in San Jose, hosted by the Barrio Defense Committee, and focused on the recent settlement agreement around a lawsuit brought by a SHU prisoner against the Department of Corrections, Castillo v. Alamida.

The event opened with a former SHU prisoner describing conditions he called comparable to the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. This included 3 minute showers every other day, half the food given to prisoners outside the SHU, guards placing bets on fights between prisoners, little to no yard time (even though the law mandates 10 hours per week), and virtually no resources to help prepare prisoners for the streets. This man reported the difficulty he experienced socializing when he got out of prisons, going straight from isolation to the streets. He also described the health consequences of the SHU including vision problems because of the constant dark, and headaches when exposed to sunlight. On top of all this, the guards are abusive, trying to mentally break down the prisoners.

Charles Carbone, a lawyer with California Prison Focus, was the keynote speaker at this event. He has worked on Steve Castillo's lawsuit against the DOC for the past two years, a case that has been around for 9 years. Castillo has been in the SHU for 10 years and is a very proficient jailhouse lawyer.

Castillo's case made three claims: 1) The SHU denies prisoners equal protection because it allows discrimination against Latino prisoners since 60% of the SHU prisoner are Latino. 2) Long term SHU confinement (5+ years) is cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. 3) Gang validation regulations are used as retaliation and not based on real evidence.

The Department of Corrections was worried about this case. They filed five separate motions to get the case dismissed, an action that is very unusual for a department that can count on the courts to defend it.

In spite of the strong legal and moral arguments on Castillo's side, Carbone described an injustice system that was certain to rule against them. Prisons are given wide reign to create and enforce policies as they see fit, and the courts back them up. As Carbone himself explained "the legal process is very flawed when it comes to social change."

In spite of this likely loss at trial, the DOC offered a settlement to Castillo. They wanted to buy some peace, a reaction Carbone attributed in no small part to the widespread protests against the SHU both behind bars and on the streets in California.

The settlement, which will be finalized at the end of August, included four major points:

1. The process of validating prisoners as gang members and thus giving them an indeterminate SHU sentence must now include informing the prisoners of all evidence against them and giving them a chance to challenge this evidence. This includes presenting all evidence every 6 years that a prisoner is up for inactive review while in the SHU.

2. The department can't rely on confidential informants just naming names. If an informant claims Jack is a gang member, he must provide evidence of what he personally knows Jack did on behalf of the gang. In the past confidential informants just naming names was a favorite way of validating people as gang members, a very difficult to challenge and easy to falsify piece of evidence.

3. Corrections Officers must explain why they think evidence demonstrates that a prisoner is a gang member. It is no longer sufficient to say that signing a get well card or talking to someone in the library constitutes gang membership without offering some reason that this shows the prisoner is in a gang.

4. A $20,000 litigation fund for prisoners challenging gang validation was established. This fund will be administered by California Prison Focus.

This settlement is not retroactive, so current SHU prisoners will not benefit until they are up for inactive review.

Of course, Carbone noted that the DOC can still follow these rules and continue to validate prisoners as gang members for whatever political reasons they want. But the value of this settlement is twofold. First, it achieves some wider education about the unjust policies used by the DOC and forces some changes to these policies, and second, when the DOC screws up and fails to follow these procedures, the court still retains jurisdiction over the case and can hold the DOC in contempt. Activists both behind the bars and on the outside will be monitoring the DOC closely.

One audience member asked why we can't just go to court and prove the SHU is cruel and unusual punishment. Carbone explained that this argument was used with the Three Strikes law and failed because it is difficult to prove this punishment is "unusual" when it is normal practice in many states. With control units so widespread in the criminal injustice system, it is true that torture is not "unusual" in Amerikan prisons.

Carbone is a lawyer with a clear sense of the limitations of the legal system. During discussion he stressed that legal battles are only one part of the larger battle to shut down the SHU. We must keep pressure on in the streets, in the media, and through educational forums like this one.

A discussion of the recent prison agreement signed by Governor Schwarzenegger in California exposed the prison system as a tool of social control. This agreement states that guards will not be cut unless the prison population is cut. This directly pits the white population of the central valley, where most of California's prisons are located, against the oppressed nations housed in the prisons. The white guards enjoy high salaries and a nice standard of living, but only if the prisons continue to lock of tens of thousands of Black and Latino men and wimmin.

After the event MIM spoke with a Latina womyn whose son was being released from the California Youth Authority (prison) the next day. After five years in CYA (from age 15), she was worried about how he would function on the outside. He was given five years parole. As Carbone noted, parole is designed to fail so that people will be locked back up again. This womyn became active in the prison movement after her son was locked away, and she described her disillusionment with the Amerikan system that she used to believe in. After five years fighting the CYA she was saying clearly that the only answer is revolution.

Many people at this even in San Jose recognized the limitations of fighting for reforms to the criminal injustice system. This is why MIM puts our agenda of taking down imperialism front and center as a part of any of our reformist battles. We don't want to mislead people into thinking that shutting down the SHU will fix the system. But we see battles like this one as necessary under capitalism, to expose the injustice and fight for better conditions for the two million people behind bars in Amerika.

The United Front against the SHU is joining the Barrio Defense Committee in a protest in Sacramento in front of the California Department of Corrections offices, August 20 at noon. Join us there or across the state the first Saturday of every month for protests to shut down the SHU.