Continuing our regular protests the first Saturday of every month, the United Front to Abolish the Security Housing Units (SHU) was out on the streets again September 4th. Protesters took to the streets to denounce these torture isolation cells that prisoners are locked up in for years at a time. The SHU in California is just another name for a prison control unit, something that exists in prisons across the country as cruel, but not unusual, punishment particularly targeted at politically active prisoners.
In Oakland the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM) and Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL) were helped by the annual Art & Soul Festival, which brought larger crowds by our table than usual. We were armed with quarter sheet fliers on the SHU for those who wouldn't stop, and had a constant stream of people willing to sign the petition and discuss torture in prisons. In two hours we gathered over 50 petition signatures. As usual in the predominantly Black downtown Oakland, people were generally aware of what's going on in u$ prisons and were quick to sign.
One 13 year old girl whose father is in prison stopped at our table to find out what we were doing. When she heard we were protesting torture in California prisons she quickly signed the petition and told her sister to sign as well. Later she brought by several friends to sign the petition and hear about the issue. It is not only those in prison who are affected: with so many men in prison it is their wives, children and other family members on the streets who also suffer. With the high lockup rate of Black men, it is no surprise that we find tremendous sympathy to our SHU protest among Black wimmin and youth like this one.
In San Francisco RAIL comrades protested the SHU from 12 PM to 2 PM downtown. Half-way through the protest, another United Front comrade, whose son is being held captive by the California Youth Authority, came by to help with the petitioning. Progress was slow at first and many passers-by seemed apathetic. Comments such as "I like the SHU" were heard more than once and are a good reflection of an overall attitude which seemed prevalent that Saturday. This area is frequented by tourists and shoppers along with homeless and former prisoners. Youth and street people were most receptive to our message.
The protest against the SHU was taken to San Francisco's Golden Gate Park the following Saturday, September 11th for the "Power to the People" festival. Activists from the Barrio Defense Committee and RAIL gathered about 100 signatures from a sympathetic crowd. We displayed a 5 x 4 foot poster laminated quote from Steve Castillo about conditions in the SHU which shook a lot of people. People stopped (despite of the busy movement by the crowd) to read it. The fact sheet was also distributed. We had some excellent discussions with people.
This month we also learned of retaliation by the California prison guards in the aftermath of the court settlement of the Castillo case which challenged SHU conditions and classifications. The settlement won some reforms for SHU prisoners. The prisons use secret evidence and informants to classify prisoners as gang members, evidence that the prisoners can not review or challenge. The Castillo settlement will give prisoners more access to challenge their classification, but still leaves much leeway for the CDC to give out indeterminate SHU sentences with fake evidence. Several prisoners have reported increased brutality by the guards, and attempts to update documentation supposed gang membership to keep prisoners in the SHU longer.
One prisoner who has been the focus of an on-going campaign by the Barrio Defense Committee (an organization in the United Front to abolish the SHU), Jose Luis, was recently attacked by the CDC again. The CDC is using informants to accuse Jose Luis of gang membership, setting him up to linger in the SHU indefinitely. Like many other SHU inmates, he is suffering serious physical health problems from his long term solitary confinement. It is cases like this one that make it clear why we can't just reform the conditions in the SHU and the system used to put prisoners there.
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