April 15, 2004 - A MIM comrade spoke on a panel at the Pacific Sociological Conference addressing "Applied Sociology and Corrections." The panel was primarily comprised of activists involved in fighting various aspects of the criminal injustice system. The MIM representative spoke about the criminal injustice system in general and why it is necessary in Amerika and then talked more specifically about control units and the campaign against Security Housing Units in California prisons.
Why do we have such a high imprisonment rate in Amerika? This country has the highest imprisonment rate in world with more than 2 million people in prison. In 1972 the rate of imprisonment was around 100 per 100,000. About the same it had been since 1925 when these sort of statistics began to be compiled. After 1972 the incarceration rate climbed to 455 per 100,000 in 1990. As of December 2002 the rate was 701 per 100,000 people.
The numbers become even more frightening when broken down by race:
U.S.
incarceration rates by race, June 30, 2002:
But yet with all this information, we also know that statistics show clearly that prisons don't stop crime. As imprisonment has increased since the 1970s, government defined criminal activity has remained relatively stable.
So we have to ask the question, why the rise in incarceration rates after 1972? To answer this we have to look at what happened in the 1960s. The imprisonment increases came in the immediate wake of massive urban rioting and the FBI sponsored terrors campaigns against oppressed nation revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party. After the civil rights movement, with an end to official segregation and rampant Klan terror, the police had to step in to keep the oppressed nations down. Unofficial segregation led to city areas without any white population and exclusively white suburbs. The inner cities were transformed into minimum security prisons with stepped up police presence.
Amerika needed a new form of social control as well as a new theory for legitimizing its exercise. The legal prison system was Amerika's answer. The mainstream media and the government helped define oppressed nationals as criminals. Using the legal system as the principal vehicle of social control was the perfect response to the growth in civil liberties consciousness because within this paradigm the "criminal" forfeits their rights through his or her activity. Cops have means available to them not available to the Klan: long term incarceration with the endorsement of the legal system.
While civil liberties may be seen as having succeeded in changing the nature of white nation oppression over its internal colonies (desegregation), it did not change the fact that these nations are still "kept in their place."
Prisons have two main purposes. First, they take dissenting groups or individual dissenters out of circulation. Second, prisons break up existing structures, be they communities, families, or organizations.
The government (in Amerika what we call a bourgeois dictatorship because it is those who own the resources and wealth - the bourgeoisie - making the decisions) uses it's tools, including prisons, to maintain it's position of power.
People say that it is not "dissenters" who are punished but "criminals." But criminality itself is a political term defined by those in power (the bourgeoisie) to control oppressed groups. Courts cloak this role by claiming to only defend the law, as if this was a neutral process without class and nation based biases. The very definition of crime has been defined by the leaders of this society to ensure that their genocidal crimes against humanity are rewarded (murdering, raping, pillaging around the world), and that the oppressed are punished for existing, let alone resisting.
There are no laws that say Blacks and Latinos should be executed more often or that execution is necessary for the murder or rape of a white person. But that's what makes bourgeois society so sinister; it defines "crime" and "justice" in a way which ensures that the desired effect of bolstering white nationalism is achieved. With a fully functional prison system locking up oppressed nations and serving to maintain social control, why does Amerika need Control Units?
Control units are a generic name for long term solitary confinement cells. Control units may vary from prison to prison but they can be generally characterized as: Permanently designated prisons or cells in prisons that lock prisoners up in solitary or small group confinement for 22 or more hours a day with no congregate dining, exercise or other services, and virtually no programs for prisoners. Prisoners are placed in control units for extended periods of time. Prisoners are usually placed in control units as an administrative measure, with no clear rules governing the moves. This makes it virtually impossible for prisoners to challenge their placement.
Control units have various names such as Adjustment Center, Security Housing Unit (SHU), Maximum Control Complex (MCC), administrative maximum (ad-max), Intensive Management Unit (IMU) and administrative segregation (ad-seg). Prisoners spend years of isolation in tiny cells, usually 6 by 8 feet for 22 - 23.5 hours a day. In some cases the long term isolation is complete, in others it is small group isolation; both conditions are tremendously damaging to humans. The short time that they do spend outside their cell is within a cement or chain link "dog pen" that lacks any kind of equipment and proper space for physical exercise. Participation in programs including religious services, educational programs, work and job training, congregate dining and exercise are all prohibited. Medical care is also greatly limited.
The U.S. penitentiary at Alcatraz became notorious for holding the most dangerous criminals within the U.S. penal system. In reality it became the first "control unit prison" used as a mechanism to enforce control over prisoners and society. More recently the super-max penitentiary in Marion, Illinois became the new "End of the line" for both state and federal prisoners who prisoncrats considered to be "institutional problems" or "too dangerous" to be housed in any other institution. After a riot in October, 1983, prisoners were permanently confined to their cells for 23 and a half hours a day and all visits were suspended and brutal repression became a daily reality for the inmates. The idea of Marionization spread rapidly throughout the Amerikkkan prison system as prison officials cried that their institutions were unsafe and control over the convict in every way possible was desperately needed.
The truth behind these justifications is that control units are a means of political, economic and social control of a whole group of oppressed and disenfranchised people. These target Black, Latino and indigenous prisoners who are a disproportionate part of control unit populations. Better defined as a prison within a prison, control units are used to defeat prisoners' revolutionary attitudes, organization, militancy, legal and administrative challenges, and anything else the prison administrators deem objectionable. The problem with prisons as a tool of social control in general is that they have also become a breeding ground for resistance of the very system they were meant to enforce. Within prison even those completely uneducated and politically unaware people are put in a position that encourages them to think about the system that locked them up. Extreme repression, overt racism, slave labor, mail censorship, and in many cases imprisonment of innocent people. In general population (where prisoners interact with one another on a daily basis) there is the opportunity to discuss this system with others and to organize resistance.
The uprising in Attica prison in 1971 was a good example of this organized resistance that prisoners were able to pull off because of their interactions with one another. The system fears this kind of organizing and needs a tool within the prisons to stop prisoner activists from educating and organizing others.
A past warden of Marion stated: "The purpose of the Marion control unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in society at large."
Control units have serious mental and physical health consequences for prisoners locked in them. Fundamentally they are a form of torture. MIM has a campaign currently going on to shut down all control unit prisons across the country.
This brings us to talking about California and our work fighting the control units in this state, the Security Housing Units. The five California Security Housing Units (SHUs) - Pelican Bay State Prison SHU, Valley State Prison for Women SHU, California State Prison at Corcoran SHU, California Correctional Institution at Tehapchapi SHU and Corcoran SATF. Currently housing about 2700 people. Reflecting the situation across the country, the California SHU disproportionately targets oppressed nation prisoners, even more than the prison system in general: In 1998 (most recent statistics available) the CDC reported that 34% of the population in all CDC institutions was Latino, and 31% was Black. 82% of those in SHUs were non-white, and 52% of those in SHUs were Latino. This compares to a California population that was 32% Latino, and 7% Black in 1998. Classification system based on supposed evidence of gang membership. This means signing a get well card, talking to another prisoner in the yard, or even just speaking Spanish can get you classified as a gang member. They also use confidential informants who have a strong incentive to make up evidence to get themselves released from the SHU. Prisoners can not challenge this information.
In a recent issue of MIM Notes one prisoner in California wrote: "My ethnicity is Hispanic. When I arrived in the DOC I was asked by a C.O. if I was "a Northern Hispanic or Southern Hispanic", I said "I don't know what you mean." Then I was asked what city I was from. I stated Salinas, cA. It was then that I was classified as a Northern Hispanic. Now I'm labeled as a northerner, which is a gang member from the prison/street gang Nortenos. At that particular point in time I had no idea what that was or what I was about to experience behind these walls. The Southern Hispanics are classified/labeled Surenos, another prison/street gang. The DOC currently has the Northern and Southern Hispanics on a 24 hour, 7 day a week lockdown. We are getting no visits from our families, no exercise outside our cells, and no state issues hygiene."
Our goal locally: to shut down the SHU. Will this change the system? No Will this be progress? Yes, although our goal is to dismantle the entire system. We do not believe that it is possible to reform the Criminal Injustice System.
At this point I would like to read a brief statement from another prisoner in California, locked up in the SHU, about conditions he lives with daily. (read part of Shut Down the SHU Torture Chambers from MIM Notes 299).
It is important to combine theory with practice. This article demonstrates why we are out on the streets fighting to shut down these torture chambers. For those of you here studying sociology, think about how you can apply what you are learning. We are holding protests the first Saturday of every month in cities across the state. We are out collecting petition signatures, and distributing educational literature. Please join us or find other ways to get involved in fighting the criminal injustice system.