Under Lock & Key

The Under Lock and Key (#4 – September 2008) article on psycho-sexual warfare vs. political prisoners hit me hard because that’s what’s been happening to me except on a different level of sexuality. Female officer would pay me porno mags, drugs (both pills and street), tobacco, lighters, stamps, even sexual favors such as hand jobs or blow jobs to masturbate in the open where they could see. I was even charged on multiple counts of indecent exposure. I was told by some higher up the ladder that it was best not to fight it and go along so I did. This institution is most notorious for what’s called IEX, Indecent Exposure.

I was attacked and assaulted by 4 officers on the facility B yard at High Desert State prison. Then 40 officers in riot gear came on the yard – 20 officers set up a line of protection for their partners while the other 20 attacked and assaulted me with the first 4 officers. I was beaten black and blue, I was bloody with abrasions and lumps and bumps and I suffered a psychological break down.

Here in the Youth Correctional Facilities (YCFs) of California the wards are put into training camps to further their commitment to a life long criminal pursuit. The “youth councilor” (a.k.a. the imperialist swine puppet) make sure to not only further the cause of these criminal acts, but they play other methods of corruption throughout the units where they’re all given power over their assigned group of prisoners. All under one higher echelon of imperialist corruption, called administration control.

These YCC (Youth Correctional Councilor) and YCO (Youth Correctional Officer) are given power over the wards who are incarcerated in these housing units. The job of the YCC is to study their assigned wards and learn their past history and behavior, then act like they have solutions to prevent any further violence or acts of criminality that these wards might do. At the same time they (YCCs and YCOs) use their power to manipulate the ward’s behavior by falsely accusing the wards of doing or saying things that reflect off their past when they have not done anything at all. This of course frustrates these prisoners to the point that they attack the pigs, throw bodily fluids at these pigs, or they simply tongue lash, i.e. verbally threaten these pigs.

Just two months ago a ward here was placed on Specialized Modified Program (SMP) lockup for these same treatments. One day when he asked a YCC if he could shave, the YCCs all ignored his request. Then when he asked again the YCC he initially asked told him to “shut the fuck up or I’ll put you on suicide watch.” The ward then began to get frustrated and loud, which gave the YCC the incentive to go through with his threats. That same YCC said this ward had made threats to kill himself, so the YCOs used chemical agent spray to detain him, then they took him to the suicide unit. I was a witness to the whole incident – he didn’t say any of the things they claim he said.

There have been many more incidents where these pigs have lied and then tried to cover their mistakes with more lies. I mean why else would the higher ups put cameras in every unit, down every hall in this facility. Up north too, in Chad. The sick thing is that to some of these pigs this sort of treatment towards us is fun for them.

While here at the California Medical Facility I noticed a lot of things that staff should not be doing. I decided to file 602s against medical staff for their actions dealing with prisoners whose mental state is unstable. For my efforts I have had reprisals taken against me in the form of “keyhea.” Keyhea is the practice of staff forcing medications on prisoners, claiming the prisoner is a threat against others and themselves.

To find one a threat to others or to oneself, first the psychologist says that s/he feels the prisoner should be put on keyhea for their own safety and the safety of others. Then another psychologist who is also employed by CDC comes and evaluates the prisoner to determine their mental state, and they are not going to go against their fellow psychologist any more than one of these C/Os will go against another C/O. Then another psychologist is sent in to also do an evaluation of the prisoner’s mental state and they are supposed to be an independent party, but they are hired by the Board of Prison Terms, which is an extension of the CDC. If this “independent” person wants to get their contract renewed with the Board of Prison Terms then it is in their best interest to side with the CDC. When I told him this, he got real upset and started to turn red. Everything is in their favor and nothing for the prisoner.

I have met a number of brothers who were high up in the BGF, Black Panthers, Bloods, and Crips, who were taken down by medication so that they couldn’t fight the system, and these political prisoners who have the potential to lead other prisoners and teach the younger ones also how to fight the system have had their minds snapped by all the medications, so they never come back from it, and they are never the same again. This is what the system wants because now they can control them.

I am facing something of that situation, medical staff have lied on me saying that I have been banging my head and hands in an attempt to hurt myself. Yet no medical report was ever done. I am not the only one who Dr. Wiltse has done this to, she is targeting Black prisoners to put on keyhea, and once on keyhea, one has no more say so in what they are given and taken. If I’m put on keyhea I know the system is going to try to break my mind by using medications. I assure you that there is nothing wrong with my state of mind, except that I don’t go for anything they tell me, and that I stand tall in this ongoing fight against the system. I can’t allow myself to fall victim to these perpetrators who are looking to control everyone and anyone they feel is a threat to the system and their way of thinking.

I understand that female staff use sexual exploitation and manipulation on young and political prisoners but keyhea has long since been around, and at least when dealing with female staff who are sexual perpetrators, one is still in charge of their senses and mental facility, but with keyhea one is dependent on them and not in control of one’s mind.

MIM(Prisons) adds: The term Keyhea comes from a lawsuit settled in 1986. The CDCR is required by the lawsuit Keyhea v Rushen, to seek a court order authorizing the administration of long term involuntary antipsychotic medication to prisoners who are considered a danger to others or to themselves or believed to be gravely disabled and incompetent to refuse medication.

I am doing life here at Snake River C.I. in Oregon. Oregon prisons in general censor lots of publications such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Rune books, and the Satanic Bible. Books/magazines with pornography photos or adult content are censored.

Also, there are monetary fines. We here in Oregon get fined for things like disrespect, disobedience of order, etc. The way fines work is if you get fines, and you get money sent in, they take half up to $60. After that they just leave you $30. Then at the end of the month they take whatever you have left so you can never save money, can’t buy a decent pair of shoes, can’t buy anything. If you were to get money put on the last week of the month, you’re burnt. They will take the rest. The disciplinary system here is totally inept and unjustified.

The Intensive Management Unit (IMU) is totally out of whack. We are maximum security prisoners, not in a disciplinary unit, but a programming unit. We have no access to phones, we don’t get mainline commissary, we aren’t able to have personal shoes. Yet any other maximum security prisoner is allowed these things.

These issues are some of the things that are wrong with the Oregon prison system. I won’t even begin with the sentencing system!

Colorado – 3rd in per capital prison spending
47th in per capital education spending
6th fastest growing prison population in the U.S.
No surprise here, is there?

Hello and greetings! I am so glad to have found you. I have been an anti-imperialist since I was fourteen, and more recently I have been studying Marxism. Would you please subscribe me to your publications.

I am intrigued by your URL name “Prison Censorship” [www.prisoncensorship.info is the MIM(Prisons) web site]. Prison censorship has gotten out of control, especially here in Colorado. I should never have come to Colorado, this is truly the quintessential police state if I ever saw one. This is my first (and last!) trip to prison and I would have received probation for my first time offense in any of the prior states I have lived. They don’t screw with our political or religious mail here. That’s one of the only things the ACLU has ever done for us here. As payback, they terrorize all of our other mail and reject numerous legal and constitutionally protected correspondence.

Here I sit in the infamous Texas injustice system. Examples of the conditions here at the Bill Moore Unit include watered down food, cornstarch added to thicken our food, and constantly being given less food than we’re supposed to receive according to the menu. When I complain through the official grievance process, the Unit Grievance officer has the exact same answer no matter what the grievance is about “…it has been investigated and no wrong doing has been found. No further action is necessary.”

At night we have a female ranking officer who, during the winter time, thinks it’s funny to turn the air conditioning on while wearing her winter coat buttoned up and saying how warm it is, while the prisoners are forced to shiver with blankets that are too short. The winter coats we’re given are nothing more than long sleeve shirts.

My unit is under contract to be operated by the Correctional Corporation of America, by the Texas Dept of Criminal Justice. This way when the public are given the numbers of prisoners in the Texas prison system, the state can lie and mention only those in the state run prisons and leave out the numbers in the private prisons.

One day soon I hope we will obtain victory and the corrupt corporate and state employees who misuse prisoners and steal from not only us but also the general public will be placed into the prison system where they so deserve to be.

I would like to expand on some very pivotal issues, starting with Senator Barrack Obama. I am 100% not fooled by Obama’s tactics. I’ve come to see that Mr. Barrack Obama has been trying to capitalize on his skin color and his short time in the projects to trick the oppressed people of this nation into believing he is one of us. The thing that me and Senator Obama have in common is our skin color. Barrack Obama is part of the bourgeois political line. He’s not for the people, he’s only for using the oppressed people for his own political gain.

It gets me angry when I hear people say Amerika is no longer a racist country. They are quick to use Barrack Obama to justify that statement, saying they are not racist because an African Amerikan is running for the White House. This is what I want to know: if it’s true that Amerika is no longer racist, why is it that if Barrack Obama starts talking about the empowerment of oppressed people in this country, he wouldn’t stand a chance of becoming President? This country has not changed, it only found better ways to operate its white power structure.

The new Ku Klux Klan are the Boys in Blue (police) and they are fully protected by the Korrupt Government. If you ask me, I think that half of the Amerikan police departments should be sitting in prison, on death row for the murders that they commit every day in the ghettos and barrios. Brothers and sisters, have you ever asked yourself, why do the police get away with just a slap on the wrist after committing a brutal murder? They claim to care for the children, but yet they take the parents away from them, by using lethal force, and false imprisonment tactics.

Back in 2007 the California corrections system changed its name from California Department of Corrections to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. This is a big gimmick. They did that in the attempt to fool the public into believing that the prisons are trying to help prisoners get ready for parole. But that’s nothing but a big front. Nothing has changed, they are still operating on old tactics. They want us to stay blind so they can continue to control the minds of the prison population.

This country is built on lies, corruptness, imperialism, racism, capitalism, etc. I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, and I will not subside my resistance to this Abu-Grahibization (torture).

I am incarcerated at the William P. Clements Unit in Amarillo, TX since 2002. In 2007 I got a case for “conspiring to commit assault on an inmate,” and placed in Administrative Segregation. We are confined 24/7 and we are supposed to get 1 hour of recreation 3 times a week.

Some will do all their time back here because of their Security Threat Group (STG) status. The department of Corrections has a list they go by to determine who fits STG status, so these men only come up for review once a year.

I was placed in AdSeg for “threat to the physical safety of others” yet now I’m classified a confirmed member of a STG. Yes the group I used to be a member of does not fit the requirements. Not only this, out of ALL other confirmed members of this group I used to belong to, I’m the only one in AdSeg.

This unit has somewhere around 700 inmates in the Expansion Cell Block (ECB). This includes “closed custody” which houses 2 inmates per cell, locked down 24/7 except the supposed 1 hour of recreation 3 times a week. In the ECB there are on 3 pods with 68 cells per pod; the rest of the building is AdSeg. These pods have singles cells. They all have showers in the cells and there are 68 per pod.

On September 12 at Clinton Correctional Facility I was a victim of Prison Official’s assault. They came to my cell searching it, and while one CO kept asking me what’s in my cell, as soon as I spoke up another CO kept slapping me in the face roughly for 20 minutes. I told the prison official to keep his hands to himself so COs took me to an isolation area for the beating of Blacks and Latinos where I was roughly beaten for 30 minutes. I was repeatedly assaulted with CO’s intentions to break something (an arm or leg), kick my teeth out, and they shouted racial slurs during these attacks. E block is a Special Housing Unit with no camera to record these attacks.

In a surprising move, Sgt. Randell transported me to the new hospital mental health unit where Sgt. Randell hit me in the face with his stick over my left eye causing a painful injury to my left eye, a bleeding cut on the side and a black eye.

Prison officials have begun to engage more frequently in a monstrous form of prison homicide, a strategy to instill terror in the hearts and minds of Black prisoners. This is Clinton County NY, a white district. We don’t have Black nurses or Black CO employees to lessen the racial tensions here at Clinton Corr Facility. In spite of the brutality, there is no special prosecutor and consequently no conviction of any criminal charge in recent homicide at Clinton Correctional Facility.

Commissioner Brian Fischer talks about NY gang-related violence in correctional facilities, but he is the gang leader of New York. The white supremacy CO mobs with a routine of beatings and murders that Inspector General in New York State Commission of Corrections fails to prosecute. The term homicide means the murder of one human being by another. A big percentage of COs mistreat Black prisoners, and there is no penalty. There is no regard for the life of the Black and Latino prisoners who have been beaten to death.

Prison official’s white supremacy still rules in every sphere, they kill five or six of us every year sending the message, ‘you best behave well or die.’ This philosophy of intimidation and murders lets prison officials legitimize their mob attacks under the name of “back up”. Prison official backup is often no different than the lynch mobs 100 years ago: Brutal murder of Black and Latino prisoners are twisted around and called justifiable homicide.

I reach out to you from the oppressive and repressive system of Texas slave plantations. I live in a state and system that employs the stereotypical phrase “the color of your skin can get you into places, or rejected from those places.” I speak of that which I’ve seen with my own eyes in this prison. I’ve been serving a life sentence amidst this madness since 2004 and my sensibilities won’t allow me to let it continue without exposing, and hopefully bringing about a solution to the moral abomination I witness on a daily basis.

George Jackson once said “I can be courageous before my enemies because I know I am right and they are wrong; I can even accept death if I must die for my cause, for I prefer the freedom of death over the slavery of life.” Or as the great Mexican freedom fighter Emiliano Zapat declared, “prefiero morir de pie, que vivir de rodillas.” (I prefer to die on my feed, rather than to live on my knees).

Many times before, I’ve witnessed young Latinos, such as myself, being classified as “gang members” in the eyes of the Gestapo-like security threat group coordinators, simply because of the city they originate from or meaningless tattoos. This alone makes it hard for anyone to serve their sentence, either short or extensive, without facing undue harassment from this administration. At one period of time the STG’s spokeswoman and a captain went on a rampage with their crusade to abolish drug and contraband trade throughout these walls. They deemed, through their heavy-handed ignorance and blatant racial profiling, that only the firing of any Latino who had a job in seg, kitchen, laundry, education (that give no pay) as well as not hiring Latinos to those jobs, would be the solution to their problem. As any reasonably intelligent person could have expected, their unprogressive attempt did not stop the influx of drugs or any other items considered contraband (normally free world products not purchasable through commissary).

Another occasion involved a young Latino being brutally assaulted by other prisoners. Again the STG initiated a racially-discriminatory lockdown specifically aimed at only prisoners of the Latino ethnicity. What started out as a 30 day lockdown became a 56 day lesson in inhumanity towards ones fellow man. While prisoners on lockdown were being fed Johnnies (a brown paper bag, with a peanut butter sandwich, bologna sandwich and sometimes a handful of raisings, 3 times a day), were unable to purchase food from commissary and most times denied the privilege of a hot meal once every 2 weeks, others (white and Black prisoners) roamed free. This is not the only unjustifiable act that was perpetrated by this ‘lady’, she went so far as to confiscate the property of those already caged and dehumanized prisoners. The average prisoner’s meager amount of possessions, as allowed by the state, include a small fan, hot pot for cooking, writing supplies, legal material, and what cheap processed food an outside vendor is allowed to sell to us at ridiculous prices. After being stripped of anything comforting or conciliatory, they were left with cheap, plastic mattresses, bed sheets, and toilet paper.

These obvious acts of unrestrained racism and administrational retaliation were no more than a transparent attempt to prevent prisoners from seeking relief through proper grievance procedures. It also kept prisoners from reaching out to family for outside assistance. The denial of visitation privileges was part of the administration’s attempts to hide these atrocities from outside eyes and ears. When families called or asked why they were being turned down for a visit with their son, uncle, husband or father, the administration would resort to excuses or lies such as saying the prisoner had been transferred.

If this is not sufficient evidence that this unit is disproportionately discriminatory against Latinos, I feel inclined to point out that what is being called a riot occurred amongst the Black populace on the same block as the Latino incident. The riot took place two weeks after the Latino’s 56 days had ended, but instead of locking down only Black prisoners, they shut down the whole block for another extensive period of time. The same restrictions were posed here as before.

The divide and conquer tactic, either in a small or great scale, is the source of this treachery and only by uniting as a whole will we start to make a 360 degree progressive change towards annihilating the discrimination being widely practiced. As Ernesto Che Guevara said “live life not celebrating victories, but overcoming defeats.” This is a struggle that calls for strong and focused vanguards to pave the way for those generations to come. Also said by Che “let the blood of the past be the security of the future.” This can only be a success with a united and determined majority.

From the midst of the most constricted organ of the beast’s belly, I will speak the injustices committed, if denied that right, then I will write to all who will read my words, if deprived of even that, I will keep my revolutionary thoughts flowing through my mind while my actions showing that I will not be easily defeated or denied my right to be free!

MIM(Prisons) responds: This divide and conquer tactic is very common in prisons, where the administration will favor one nationality over another. It is typically whites who receive this favor, but it is also useful for them to set up the oppressed nationals to fight each other. In this case it is essential that politically progressive prisoners expose the tactic and refuse to play along with the division.