Intensive Management Units: Behavior Modification or Psychological Subjugation?
From inside of this beast called the Prison Industrial Complex, I find that the agenda upon which its foundation was laid is being fulfilled to our detriment. I find that Black Men are not only being physically arrested but they are also being developmentally arrested, their psychological, spiritual, political and cultural development confined and suppressed to the point of retardation. But what transpires behind these steel curtains is only a replica of what transpires out there in so-called free society on a smaller scale.
Prisons were constructed from the recesses of man’s mind yet Man’s mind has become subject to prison cells, the very atrocity born of his incomplete thought. I’ve watched prison cells cause man’s mind to regress to the point where he becomes primitive in his application of thought to this reality.
I’ve witnessed confinement to a cell for 23 hours a day in Intensive Management Units (IMU), sensory deprivation, and the deprivation of human contact cause my brothers to become so consumed by emotions that it distorts their ability to conceive reality. At this stage they lose the faculty of progressive thought and this causes them to become perceptual beings instead of conceptual beings, making it hard for them to grasp concepts that transcend their confinement.
This causes them to fall down on all fours psychologically in regression designating for themselves a cave of ignorance as a domicile where ambition is imprisoned. They’re cast out to the peripherals of reality and held hostage there, never pondering the full extent of their inherent potential, therefore never becoming cognizant of the duality in man’s nature. Man can exhibit the highest manifestation of life on earth, or he can exhibit the manifestation of an animal in human form, yet it is not a cell that keeps man confined or imprisons ambition.
Physical freedom is concomitant with, and a product of, psychological liberation. These two elements, physical freedom and psychological liberation, are procured through abstract intellectual concepts, not physical precepts. The ability to grasp abstract intellectual concepts and apply them to one’s plight frees the prisoner and the lack of ability to grasp abstract intellectual concepts and apply them to one’s plight imprisons the free man.
In light of this reality, sensory deprivation becomes self-realization, for it alleviates sounds, smells and circumstances that redirect man’s attention from self, causing estrangement between the physical and the intellect and the deprivation of human contact becomes the introduction to self because it forces man to contemplate self.
It is time that our brothers and sisters overstand that in order to transcend our perceptual confinement, we must elevate our conceptual consciousness! Then and only then will we taste psychological liberation and embrace physical freedom.
Uhuru SaSa (Freedom Now)
