Women of color and low-income women are not the only ones stigmatized by society and thus the State. This distinction extends beyond those criminalized because of race, ethnicity, or class, and extends to those who have consciously, politically resisted, opposed, or even attacked the injustices and inequalities of the State system of social control. These prisoners are political prisoners; historically among the most feared and despised of all by those who wield State power (Buck).
Political Prisoners
The United States of America was founded by revolutionaries. There is an extensive history of political opposition and struggle. It is considered a matter of pride that the founding fathers of the US rebelled against the British to gain freedom from political persecution and state repression. Despite the pride it takes in its birth from a revolution against tyranny the US government does not differentiate between social and political crime, and denies the existence of political prisoners, claiming that such individuals are incarcerated based solely on their engagement in criminal activity.
The definition of “political prisoner” commonly accepted throughout the world community is:
Men and women who have been incarcerated for their political views and actions. They have consciously fought against social injustice, colonialism, and/or imperialism and have been incarcerated as a result of their political commitments. Even while in prison, these men and women continue to adhere to their principles (Elijah).
The US along with China, Croatia, Cuba, Egypt, El Salvador, Indonesia, Iran and Iraq locks up individuals who have opposed the State or have expressed their abhorrence of government action in adherence to belief in a higher law of human rights to which the State does not adhere (Bennett). US political prisoners have been incarcerated because of their political beliefs and participation in, or support of, armed struggles on behalf of Black/New Afrikan liberation, Puerto Rican independence, sovereignty for Native American people, and against US imperialism (Mazzone). The US silences dissenters by tail and imprisonment and denies it is political. These individuals have defied the State’s authority and are consequently subjected to the force of the State in trials and imprisonment in which they are denied any legal distinction as political dissenters, prisoners of war or political prisoners (Bennett).
There are currently more than one hundred individuals in US prisons who contest the US’ assertion and identify as political prisoners, prisoners of war, and prisoners of conscience. Ten percent of these political prisoners are women. US political prisoners can be roughly divided into three categories:
- Members of US oppressed nationalities who are prosecuted and imprisoned for political activities in furtherance of their movements for liberation and justice. Included in this group anti-colonial combatants or prisoners of war – members of national liberation movements who as part of clandestine organizations have employed armed struggle as a means to achieve self-determination and independence for their nation and upon capture have the right, under the Additional Protocols of the Geneva Convention and the UN General Assembly Resolutions, to POW status and not to be tried as domestic criminals.
- Foreign nationals whose political status or political activities against allies of US imperialism (e.g. Israel, Great Britain, El Salvador) result in detention or imprisonment.
- White people who have acted in solidarity with the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities and/or in opposition to US foreign or domestic policies (Deutsch & Susler).
Political prisoners are not merely a phenomenon of the developing world. They exist within the US. These individuals are oppressed and unjustly imprisoned because of their politics and their struggle against the power of the State. Political prisoners have acted consciously against the social/political order. It is their politically motivated beliefs that have singled them out for state repression.
I was a political prisoner for a little over fourteen years, in a case called the Resistance Conspiracy Case. The US government said we were guilty of “conspiring to protest, change and oppose policies and practices of the United States government in domestic and international affairs through violent and illegal means.” And we said the domestic and international policies and practices of the United States government were violent and illegal.
Laura Whitehorn
Political activists and fighters for justice are criminalized by the courts and the media. The media functions as a propaganda organ of the state, coloring the political prisoners as criminals, rather than revolutionaries who are fighting on behalf of oppressed minorities and against unjust State policies. The State has a vested interest in painting these people as criminals and terrorists because they are incredibly dangerous: they have the power to tell the truth, and expose this system. The State needs to silence political prisoners to prevent the public from listening and understanding their actions against the oppressive State (Warren). Women political prisoners face even greater oppression as prisoners as well as women.
Women Political Prisoners
Not only are you detained; not only do torture, blows, humiliation, disdain, isolation, and prison await you as they do your male counterparts. You are also a woman in this man’s world. You will soon realize what this means… A system of moral values so strictly defined through shame, sexual repression, and gender difference, allows a double repression: fascist and male chauvinist.
Angela Davis
In recognizing the existence of women political prisoners, the fundamental myths of American democracy are disrupted, and the gendered, racialized, and individualized notions of revolutionary struggle are subverted. In looking at the relationship between women political prisoners and the state, emphasis is placed on the state’s reliance on coercion as a means of political and social control. Coercion is easily disguised as rendering it “normal,” and thus invisible. It is imperative that this coercion be made visible within the system itself and by all citizens who live in a society where this coercion exists, for coercion is often masked by disciplinary technologies or becomes routinized or normalized, often masked by disciplinary technologies, rendering it effectively invisible. To resist power’s force the coercion must be made visible. By acknowledging the coercive power of the state, power becomes visible and verifiable offering sites of resistance and contestation (Mazzone).
Critical feminist analyses of women and prison argue that, historically, women have been incarcerated not only for breaking the law, but also for noncompliance with societal norms and expectations (Carleen). The social control of women leads to further state control via the criminalization and incarceration processes. The social control of women takes various forms, with some women, particularly women of color, suffering from the coercion and oppression of institutionalized racism with in the US criminal justice system. As incarcerated women, political prisoners face the same gendered forms of discipline and coercion as do all incarcerated women. As political women, they are subjected to particular forms of social control specific to their identity as women political prisoners (Howe).
Acts & Laws
Historically
In 1950, Senator Paul McCarran (D-Nevada) sponsored a bill that became known as the McCarran Internal Security Act. It is considered one of the most controversial and least understood laws in the history of the republic (Quinney). It is of great importance that it is understood as it concerns Americans national safety and individual liberties, and was among the first laws put in place that openly infringed upon American’s freedom of speech rights.
The Act, unofficially referred to as the anticommunist law, required all members of the American Communist Party, among others, to register with the Attorney General, regardless if these individuals had ever engaged in violent acts or had ever advocated the use of violence – their association with certain suspect groups was deemed sufficient to place them under suspicion and surveillance (Imready).
World communism was regarded as a compelling enough reason to engage in otherwise unconstitutional political intimidation. The fear of communism has now been replaced with the fear of terrorism.
The Act had a provision that set the stage to authorize the creation of concentration camps for “emergency situations,” using the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as a legal precedent. The intention was to set the stage for rounding up suspected political dissenters and subversives and place them all in large camps, should the government ever feel the need. The particular provision was not repealed until the 1970s, after a great deal of protest and work by civil rights groups.
President Truman vetoed the bill stating:
The basic error of this bill is that it moves in the direction of suppressing opinion and belief. This would be a very dangerous course to take, not because we have sympathy for Communist opinions, because any governmental stifling the free expression of opinion, is a long step toward totalitarianism… The course proposed by this bill would delight the Communists, for it would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in the world.
Congress voted 89% in favor to pass the bill over his veto. McCarran’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee worked closely with the FBI conducting hearings on political subversives for the next twenty-seven years.
In 1952, McCarran joined Congressman Francis Walter (D-PA), an advocate against world communism, in creating and passing the McCarran-Walter Act. This was also passed over Truman’s veto. Essentially, it was an immigration bill, assigning strict quotas to the immigration of anyone wishing to enter the US from undesirable parts of the world – namely not European (Imready).
A provision of the bill stated that anyone accused of voicing the wrong political opinions, could be denied entry into the US. If they were presently in the US working, visiting, or seeking citizenship, they could be immediately deported (Nash). These provisions proved extremely useful for the political aims of whatever administration was in power.
The McCarran-Walter Act was abolished in 1994, but additional Acts were passed further opening the Pandora’s Box of civil rights infringements begun by the McCarran-Walter Act. Under the Bail Reform Act of 1984, politically motivated offenders may be held in preventative detention, which is in violation of international law by designating “dangerous to the community,” those persons who most actively struggle for self-determination. These offenders may be charged with violation of broad conspiracy laws which rely on evidence of political associations and beliefs to prove “criminal” agreements. The Seditious Conspiracy law and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) allow for criminalization of membership in political organizations and national liberation movements. These statutes have been used to incarcerate political activists with lengthy sentences.
The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), signed by Clinton in 1996 in response to the Oklahoma City Bombings, and in the US Patriot Act, in response to September 11 further impinge upon individual’s civil liberties and right to dissent. Now the provisions are aimed against the ambiguously defined concept of “terrorism” and “supporters of terrorism,” political activists and prisoners
US Patriot Act
The US Patriot Act is 342 pages long and makes changes to over 15 different statutes. It was passed by overwhelming margins in both the Senate and the House. The US Patriot Act is a large and complex law that has was known by four different names and several versions in the five weeks between the introduction of its first predecessor and its final passage into law. While containing some sections that seem appropriate - providing for victims of the September 11 attacks, increasing translation facilities and increasing forensic cybercrime capabilities - it is clear that the vast majority of the sections included were not carefully studied by Congress. Sufficient time was not taken to debate it or to hear testimony from experts outside of law enforcement in the fields where it makes major changes. This concern is amplified because several of the key procedural processes, applicable to any other proposed laws, including inter-agency review, the normal committee and hearing processes and thorough voting, were suspended for this bill (EFF).
The law has been criticized by civil libertarians and constitutional rights groups as overstepping the bounds of proper law enforcement procedure. The Act gives law enforcement agencies extraordinary new powers unchecked by meaningful judicial review. (Schabner).The Law sacrifices civil liberties for the illusion of safety.
The law is based upon a very legitimate cause: fear. This fear has been encouraged and strengthened by the US government. This fear can not and will not disappear by consenting to further laws and acts, which limit civil liberties and freedom of speech. Surrendering the freedom to dissent the State gives the State enormous power where they are further able to imprison, incarcerate and disappear those who dissent, the undesirables.
A series of serious repressive measures has been instituted and refined in the course of recent criminal prosecution of political activists. Political activists convicted in US courts have received draconian sentences, a great deal more severe than non-political defendants, and often designed to hold them for life, or until they willingly surrender their offensive political beliefs. When prisoner of war status has been claimed, as in the case of the Puerto Rican independistas, and the accused refuse to submit to the court’s jurisdiction, illegal sentences have been imposed (Deutsch & Susler).
COINTELPRO
The purpose of the government’s counterinsurgency strategy is to destroy the growth and support of our struggles for national liberation and social justice, and to deter dissent and civil disobedience… We will continue because in order to achieve justice and peace for our peoples, we must dare to struggle, dare to win.
Alejandra Torres
Many of today’s political prisoners were victims of an FBI counter-intelligence program called COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO consisted of a series of covert actions directed against domestic dissident groups, targeting perceived threats to “domestic tranquility.”
In the FBI’s own words; “the purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize the activities of Black Nationalist organizations and groupings and their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters.” Millions of pages of FBI internal documents revealed a coordinated national program of war against the movement. COINTELPRO and the FBI were waging a war against people, citizens, who were simply trying to exercise rights and stand up for justice (Day & Whitehorn).
In these programs, the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to “disrupt” and “neutralize” target groups and individuals. The techniques were adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence, and ranged from the trivial (mailing reprints of Reader’s Digest articles to college administrators) to the degrading (sending anonymous poison pen letters intended to break up marriages), and the dangerous (encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers).
The Church Committee Report
COINTELPRO involved institutions that interact and relate to each other for the purpose of oppressing communities of color and poor communities in the US, and to make sure that a vanguard did not, and could not succeed in liberating them from the oppressive patriarchal system (Warren).
In response to pressure from a broad spectrum of the American public, a congressional subcommittee, known as the Church Committee, was formed to investigate and study the FBI’s covert action programs. The Church Committee found that the FBI had “conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of the First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence… Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity” (Church Committee).
Before COINTELPRO was dissolved they were responsible for maiming, murdering, false prosecutions and framings, destruction, and mayhem throughout the country. It had infiltrated every organization and association that aspired to bring about social change in America through whatever means they deemed necessary.
Many of today’s political prisoners were incarcerated as a direct result of COINTELPRO’s activities. They were targeted because of their political beliefs more so than their political actions. Unlike those convicted and sentenced for similar crimes, they were given much harsher sentences and routinely denied parole.
…the FBI actually gave covert aid to the Ku Klux Klan, Minutemen, Nazis, and other racist vigilantes. These groups received substantial funds, information, and protection – and suffered only token FBI harassment – so long as they directed their violence against COINTELPRO targets. They were not subjected to serious disruption unless they breached this tacit understanding and attacked established business and political leaders (Mazzone).
The Church Committee ended its review of COINTELPRO concluding: “The American people need to be assured that never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.” That was just over twenty-five years ago. The American people are in need of reassurance once more. As if the prison situation was not completely unjust, immoral, and evil to begin with the outrages and false imprisonments increase in an attempt to find those responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Within hours of the attacks, several of the political prisoners were rounded up and put into administrative segregation, known as the hole. Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memorandum to the BOP directing them to terminate all communications, both social and legal for certain prisoners (Elijah).
Post September 11
Political prisoners have always been an especially vulnerable and abused subset of the American prison population. In the wake of September 11, they have been targeted for new abuse, and those people identifying as the number of people claiming political prisoner or prisoner of war status grows with continuing violations and infringements on individual’s right to freedom of speech and protest. As citizens more readily accept infringements on their constitutional rights and civil liberties in the name of security and protection against a nameless faceless terror (Henthoff).
The US government assures the people that that wartime encroachments are only temporary, but as there are no clearly defined definitions, and no concrete enemy, the war can go on indefinitely. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said that the war will not be over until there are no terrorist organizations of potentially global reach left in the world. The US definitions of terrorism and terrorist are even more elusive than these organizations. The only assurance that this gives the American people is that further erosions of privacy, freedoms, and principles will continue (Dreyfuss).
The FBI works in conjunction with state and local police gathering significant amount of information on groups that have no tendencies toward violence. The ACLU has found that the police have been maintaining dossiers on thousands of people in a variety of organizations (Dreyfuss). These individuals are not even suspected of a crime and organizations that don’t have a criminal history are labeled as criminal extremists for opposing US policies, and the “War on Terror.”
The FBI has been collecting extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its “Counterterrorism” squads. The FBI. is dangerously targeting Americans who are engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent. Attorney General John Ashcroft has eased the tight restrictions placed upon the FBI’s investigations of political activities put in place after the exposure of COINTELPRO. Ashcroft claims that it is essential that the FBI be able to investigate terrorism aggressively, and the bureau's recent strategy in policing demonstrations is an product of this policy (Lichtblau).
A memorandum circulated throughout the FBI on October 15 found that The bureau "possesses no information indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part of these protests" and that "most protests are peaceful events.” (Lichtblau) While this is true the FBI continues to monitor and keep dossiers and records on a plethora of people who are practicing their rights as citizens. Increasingly more people are arrested or detained on trumped up charges. Acts and laws that claim to advocate protection and security from the spectral terror are being used as weapons against citizens who dare oppose the almighty State.
Control Units
Those who are guilty of ordinary criminal violations are not normally regarded as dangers to the state itself, while those who challenge fundamental political structures or policies may be regarded as “subversives committing crimes against the state,” and subjected to political repression, as opposed to ordinary criminal procedures.
Robert Justin Goldstein
The term “control unit” was first coined at United States Penitentiary (USP) at Marion, Illinois in 1972, and has come to designate a prison or part of a prison that operates under a “super-maximum security” regime. Control unit prisons all share the following defining features:
- Prisoners in a control unit are kept in solitary confinement in tiny cells (six by eight feet) for between twenty-two and twenty-three hours a day. There is no congregate dining, no congregate exercise, no work opportunities, and no congregate religious services.
- These conditions exist permanently and as an official policy.
- The conditions are officially justified not as punishment for prisoners but as an “administrative” measure. Prisoners are placed in control units in “administrative” moves and since there are no rules governing such moves, in contrast to “punitive” moves, prisoners are denied any due process and prison officials can incarcerate any prisoner in a control unit for as long as they choose, without having to give reason (Dowker & Good).
Prison officials and the US Bureau of Prisons (BOP) claim and report to the media that control units:
- Control units contain the most violent prisoners, the “worst of the worst,” who have proved too violent to be held at other prisons.
- Control units reduce violence at other prisons by isolating the most violent prisoners.
- The reduction of violence allows security at these other prisons to be relaxed.
(Dowker & Good).
These claims are completely fabricated. Prisoners have been transferred to control units for writing too many lawsuits, for protesting the brutality of the prison system, for angering prison officials, and, especially, for their political beliefs and ideologies, those who classify themselves as political prisoners. The Prison Discipline Survey initiated in 1989 by the Prisoner Rights Union of Sacramento, California found that sending prisoners to control units, is based on arbitrary and subjective judgments by guards and other officials, and targets prisoners who are most likely to be challenging the prison system (Whitman).
It is admitted at the highest level that a prisoner’s political beliefs are a basis for assigning that prisoner to a control unit. Former director of the BOP, Michael Quinlan, claimed in a letter to the Congressional subcommittee that oversees the BOP:
A prisoner’s past or present affiliation, association or membership in an organization which has been documented as being involved in acts of violence [or] attempts to disrupt…the government of the United States…is a factor considered in assessing the security needs of an inmate.
Michael Quinlan, former director of the BOP
It is control of dissent, protest, and liberation movements that these units seek. For those who dissent, protest, and seek to liberate, who are vocal and act on the beliefs that there are certain unalienable human rights, that the US has severely limited these rights, that the US is seeking to kill to murder to maim and hurt all that oppose it and what it believes to be its all mighty power (Isikoff).
Those who dissent are considered the “worst of the worst” because there is the threat that people might listen, people might hear what these political activists have to say and the US fears this because these people are a threat to the patriarchal, racist, class-based policies that hinge on this great democracy. The proliferation of control units in the US is its attempt to suppress the increased likelihood of protests and dissent.
Women’s Control Units
Control units exist for women, as well as men, the goals are the same, to destroy those imprisoned within, or even better, to allow them to destroy themselves. The techniques vary somewhat from the men’s control units, and therefore have been marginalized for not being of the same level of control or torture (Baraldini). The nature of women in society and the ability to subject them to even greater brutalities because of the patriarchal system of oppression is ever present, and creates an atmosphere of very near ultimate desolation.
Women prisoners are confined in a patriarchal system designed for, built by, and run by men (Church). Women’s control units are designed to maximize degradation and debasement. A viciously destructive paternalistic mentality is present in even the “best” women’s prisons, where women are perpetually infantilized by routines and paternalistic attitudes. The control units carry these ideals out to the utmost. Powerlessness, helplessness, and dependency are systematically heightened in the control units (Kurshan).
In 1986, the BOP opened a special new “high security unit,” a control unit, for women within the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. It had the same stated goal of controlling the “most dangerous” prisoners. In reality it was an experiment “coordinated from the highest level of the BOP to develop techniques to break the prisoners” (Carlan). The Lexington control unit is a story of intentional torture that reveals the US government’s lies regarding their denial of imprisoning and punishing individuals for their political beliefs. These women resisted all the intense intentional attempts to break them, and they refused to renounce their political beliefs, to give up the very thing that the US government sought from them (Rev Worker).
Imagine a world without color; any color. Only bright, high gloss white/beige on the walls, floors, ceilings, everywhere one looks. Even the uniforms (ludicrous culottes selected for their ‘feminine’ look) are bleached-out beige. No personal clothing or jewelry are permitted. Next, imagine a world without daylight, without fresh air. Only artificial fluorescent lights – often on all the time; the windows are grilled over with metal grillwork, designed to preclude any vision of what it reveals of the outside world. Artificial air, either too hot or too cold, but never real.
The overwhelming sense of loneliness of this place is all-pervading, the isolation is overwhelming. It is much like stepping off the regular world into some sort of frozen limbo state where an occasional real person floats by, but always by accident and always before one can get ready for enlarged human contact.
Reuben & Norman
Three of the five women moved in the Lexington Unit were political prisoners. The first two inmates imprisoned within the unit were Alejandrina Torres, a 49 year old longtime Puerto Rican revolutionary, and a high school teacher in Chicago. In 1983, she was arrested on seditious conspiracy and other charges and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Susan Rosenberg was arrested in 1984 and charged with possession of false identification papers, explosives, and other weapons. She was accused of being a member of the Revolutionary Action Task Force (RATF) that was attempting armed struggle against the US government. She was sentenced to 58 years in prison, the longest sentence in the history of the US for a weapons charge (Stout).
Neither woman had a previous conviction and neither was convicted of engaging in violence. Torres and Rosenberg charged that they were the subjects of a pilot study of behavior-modification methods, which were tested on them and would be applied to future prisoners of conscience.
They are trying to kill us. But they’d rather we kill ourselves. The conditions at HSU are designed to destroy those who are in it, psychologically and physically, to disintegrate people’s personalities… The constant surveillance, the basement cells, the absence of fresh air and human companionship, the constant glaring lights have on purpose in mind: They are trying to drive us completely out of our minds.
Susan Rosenberg
The women imprisoned in the control units were denied access to the prison library, as well as the entertainment and recreation facilities. The only reading material they are permitted must be approved by the prison officials and is limited to five items at a time. There is a color television in each cell. Rosenberg was quoted in Reuben and Norman as stating: “Only in America can you abuse people, take away their human dignity, and then give them a TV and that makes it OK” (Reuben).
According to a BOP directive dated September 2, 1986:
The 16-bed High Security Unit for females [was] developed to meet the needs for very secure prison space for females where placement in less secure facilities is not appropriate. Candidates for placement in this unit are those females whose confinement raises a serious threat of external assault for the purpose of aiding the offender’s escape… Assignments to the unit will be made without regards to such factors as… disciplinary reasons, but are a matter of classification.
Reuben
The prison authorities carefully planned and executed their deliberate plans. Segregation, isolation, degradation and abuse are programmatic techniques intended to force the women to reject their political positions and associations (Stout). The prison authorities organized direct physical abuse of the women prisoners, intended to create a sense of powerlessness and the stress of permanently facing assault. Alejandra Torres stated, “I feel violated every moment of the day.”
This program sets up a hierarchy of objectives. The first of these is to reduce prisoners to the state of submission for their ideological conversion. That failing, the next objective is to reduce them to a state of psychological incompetence sufficient to neutralize them as efficient, self-directing antagonists. That failing, the only alternative is to destroy them, preferably by making them desperate enough to destroy themselves.
Korn
The objective of these programs is to reform the prisoners at all costs, especially their ideological resistance. Unless prisoners completely denounce their past and any potential future associations, they can never meet the already loosely defined criteria for transfer from the unit (Stout & DelloBuono). The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation’s (ACLU) National Prison Project filed a report on the HSU noting “the near complete lack of procedural policies governing the unit. The BOP has no rules governing administrative moves, in contrast to punitive moves, prisoners can be any denied any due process and prison officials can incarcerate any prisoner in a control unit for as long as they choose without having to give a reason (Dowker & Good) The policy exists without a system of checks and balances – the word may come from above, and as long as it is administrative, a management decision, then there is no need for it to be kept in balance – for there is no corruption in the American political system. Furthermore, the US does not have any political prisoners.
The power of the institution over the prisoners was total, beyond questioning and accounting, even if it appeared to violate traditional fairness of common sense.
Korn
The severity of the crimes that merit this special and unique treatment would appear to be of tremendous severity; the crime is political opposition of the US and US policies. These women are guilty of fighting for social justice and against colonist rule; they are guilty of opposing the United States imperialistic policies. This is a crime that the US does not take lightly; these women are not allowed to rot with the other victims of the state in overcrowded underfunded state penitentiaries with the rest of the 90,000 women imprisoned today. Special treatment is given to these enemies of the state.
The conditions and treatment of inmates held at HSU came to the attention of the ACLU Prison Project and two ACLU attorneys and a psychologist-criminologist were permitted to tour the facilities. They found an almost complete lack of procedural guidelines governing the staff, first amendment violations, specifically freedom of association. The living conditions were imposed upon the women was declared as “morally repugnant” and reputable as “incompatible with the protections guaranteed in the constitution (ACLU).
The ACLU National Prison Project recommended that the HSU be closed down or utilized merely for short-term disciplinary confinement of women for women assigned to the maximum security Lexington prison. Calls from ACLU, Amnesty International, prison rights activists, and humanitarian groups led to the closure of HSU on August 19, 1988. In its twenty two month life span the HSU it had been a formal agenda item at the US-USSR Summit Conference, had been condemned by national and international human rights advocates, including a 38 page report by Amnesty International, it had been held by a US federal judge to have been operated in violation of the First Amendment, and had come to symbolize America’s hypocrisy on the issues of human rights and political prisoners (Churchill & Wall).
The things that are taken for granted as basic components of human existence – natural light, fresh air, color sound, human contact, various smells – were conspicuously, intentionally absent from the lives of the women confined to the HSU; as were equally important slightly more subtle human needs of privacy spheres, intellectual stimulation, comradeship, continuing connections to family , friends and caring others, undisturbed sleep, health care, educational and recreational options, and spiritual comfort (ACLU).
The Shawnee Unit
The HSU was shut down in 1988, and the new Shawnee Unit was opened in Marianna, Florida. The Shawnee Unit despite its inhumanities and the implicit power games committed against the women within had to cope with not being classified as a control unit because it does not use the same physical brutality as men’s control units (Baraldini). Women’s struggle to gain recognition as equal participants in the struggle to close control units has deeper implications. Women’s resistance has been diminished, and the brutality of psychological methods of control and behavior modification has been overlooked.
Political prisoners and Prisoners of War have spent the majority of their time in the various control units, distancing them from their movements, indirectly playing into the principle objective of the government: isolation. Isolation is used here to mean the turning of political prisoners into symbols to be remembered as historical leftovers of a more militant past, while ignoring them as continuing participants in today’s progressive movements (Churchill & Wall).
The Shawnee Unit had the same security mission of the HSU: to control, isolate, and neutralize women who, for varying reasons, pose either a political, escape, or disruption threat. Neutralization insures that the women imprisoned within will never leave the prison with the full capacity to function (Korn).
The illusion that Shawnee is not a designated or manipulated environment is carefully controlled by the BOP. They do not want to see this unit closed down as was the case with HSU. It is designed to deflect any concern from the outside about human rights abuses – it is meant to appear comfortable and attractive. This appearance is a lie (O’Meveney).
The women of Shawnee live in a psychologically assaultive environment that aims at destabilizing women’s personal and social identities. This is true of the prison system as a whole; but in Shawnee it has been elevated to a primary weapon, implemented through a physical layout and day-to-day regimen that produce inwardness and self-containment. Women are under constant video surveillance, there is no privacy whatsoever. Lockdown is not needed because there is nowhere to go, and individuals can be observed and controlled better while having the illusion of mobility (Baraldini).
The women who are classified as political prisoners are told that this will be their world for the rest of their lives. Shawnee is like being in a suffocating cocoon, where all forms of visual stimulation and communication are replaced by at television. Women in prison are at the very bottom, the misogyny and contempt for women in the society as a whole are compounded by the way the prison system is organized to exploit and utilize women’s oppression. (Korn)The BOP characterizes some women as “dangerous” and “terrorist” going beyond the acceptable bounds of acceptable female behavior in the US, making them the target of particularized repression, scorn and hatred. To be classified maximum security is to be seen as less than human, by definition not eligible for “rehabilitation” (Baraldini).
We survived relatively intact only because we knew what the Justice Department was trying to do to us, and that knowledge enabled us to hold onto our political commitments and identities with strength. When we were enraged and tempted to live out the stereotypical behavior that they expected (i.e. to be violent) we had a collective of each other. The unity of the political prisoners and some of the social prisoners allowed us to laugh, to find humanity in each other, and to carry on. Despite the most extreme efforts of the BOP, they did not win. We never lost memory or reality of ourselves or of our political opposition to US imperialism.
Susan Rosenberg
The development and investment into control units is indicative of a new and intensified phase of experimentation. No state would spend millions upon millions of dollars annually simply to control several hundred prisoners. This is illogical, it does not make economic or political sense. There are much less expensive and easier ways to attain this goal, if it was indeed the only goal (Korn). The State has a vested interest in neutralizing these women, in destroying that which they find so repugnant: their political ideologies and beliefs. Despite the hell of these conditions, these women refuse to submit to the State, they refuse to surrender their belief in social justice, the one thing that the State can not take from them.
The International Tribunal on Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War in the US
From the 7th to the 10th of December in 1990 the Special International Tribunal on the Human Rights Violations against Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War in the United States was held at Hunter College in New York City. The tribunal was sponsored by eighty-eight organizations from various sectors. More than 1200 people attended, from ten countries representing every continent and fifteen states of the US. The tribunal assumed jurisdiction under international law approved by the UN.
The US refuses to accept universally recognized humanitarian protections for peoples fighting colonialism, apartheid and alien domination. The US government has given strong selective support to the freeing of political prisoners throughout the world, while denying the existence of political prisoners in the US, claiming that these political prisoners and prisoners of war are “terrorists” and “criminals.”
The US must be held to the same standard of international law and human rights as other countries around the world. The US’ denial of the existence of political prisoners and prisoners of war in its prisons, and consequent failure to afford such prisoners the fundamental protection of humanitarian international law, constitutes serious violations of human rights requiring immediate attention of world public opinion and rectification by US government.
The tribunal conclusively found that the US government’s handling of political prisoners and prisoners of war constitutes torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of various International Laws as well as it is in breach of the First, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment of its own Constitution.
The Special International Tribunal on the Human Rights Violations against Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War in the United States declares:
- Within the prisons and jails of the US exist substantial amounts of political prisoners and prisoners of war.
- These prisoners have been incarcerated for their opposition to the US government policies and actions that are illegal under domestic and international law, including denial of the right to self-determination, genocide, colonialism, racism, and militarism.
- The US government criminalizes and imprisons persons involved in the struggles for self-determination of Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Black/New Afrikan and Mexicano-Chicano activists within the borders of the US.
- Those peoples legitimately struggling for national liberation are not to be treated as criminals, but must be afforded the status of prisoners of war under the Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention.
- The US government also criminalizes and imprisons white North Americans and others who have worked in solidarity with struggles for self-determination, as well as for peace and against nuclear arms, against racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.
- The criminal justice system of the US is being used in a harsh and discriminatory way against political activists in the US.
- The US government’s use of surveillance, infiltration, grand juries, preventative detention, politically-motivated criminal conspiracy charges, prejudicial security and anonymous trial juries deprive political activists of the fair trials guaranteed them under domestic and international law.
- Political activists have been systematically subjected to disproportionately lengthy prison sentences and to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment within the US prison system.
The tribunal therefore calls upon the US government to:
- Release all prisoners who have been incarcerated for the legitimate exercise of their rights to self-determination or in opposition to US policies and practices illegal under international law.
- Cease all acts of interferences and repression against political movements struggling for self-determination or against US policies and practices illegal under international law.
(Adapted from Excerpts from The Verdict of the International Tribunal on Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War in the United States)
Conclusion
There is a growing awareness of the injustices regarding US imprisonment of political prisoners. Despite the US’ refusal to acknowledge the existence of political prisoners they do exist, and activists, humanitarian organizations, and an increasing number of the general public are working to free them through the US system itself as well as international law. This is not enough. While it offers solace to believe that there is an inherent good, an inherent fairness or justice, none exists in this situation. Women in control units are told that they will die there unless they “change their associations” meaning renounce their revolutionary politics and provide information about their comrades and organizations on the outside (Rev Worker). An increasing number of people have been imprisoned in the September 11th aftermath, and the amount of political prisoners will continue to increase if the public is willing to accept further infringements on their rights in the name of protection and security.
Little solace can be offered as the prison system continues to increase exponentially. The conditions of prisons are horrific. Former political prisoner Laura Whitehorn states:
I consider the prison system today to be a form of genocide. Prison has been used against third-world populations inside the United States, in particular African American and Latino populations…Families are destroyed by prisons…When you’re a prisoner, you’re needy. It’s emotionally, psychologically devastating…I understand something of why people don’t want to know about prisons, because it’s too hard…
It is incredibly difficult to have this knowledge of the corruption and injustice within the prison system, regarding prisoners, women prisoners and political prisoners. This knowledge disrupts the belief in the US as a land of rights and freedom. Marilyn Buck is a political prisoner serving fifty years in addition to twenty years prior convictions for conspiring to commit bank robbery. When asked what she needs from people on the outside she responded:
What I need from people is what we all need: to seize our human liberation as much as possible as women, as lesbians, as heterosexuals; to support the right of human beings to have their own nations, their own liberation, and their own justice. If we stopped police brutality; if Black women and men were treated like equal human beings, that would make me feel good, really good, because I would be less dehumanized as a white person in this society. I would not be objectified as the oppressor.
I would like us to be more creative; to be the artists that we all are. I don’t want to see child prostitution. That to me is oppression in the concrete; people having to sell their children to stay alive. Or watching their children in the clutches of the police. Or a woman standing on her feet as a waitress for ten hours a day when her veins are breaking and still no be able to pay the rent and be there for her children.
I was thinking about this the other day – I think about the vision I had when I was a nineteen-year-old of justice and human rights and women’s equality. It was a wonderful vision. I think how it got implemented – how we became rigid and rhetorical within that – took away from that vision. But without a vision, you can’t go forward.
A vision is needed. A revolution is needed. It is not enough for to have this knowledge, without acting upon it. To accept the oppression and unjust imprisonment of these individuals is to support the disparate relations of power that exist within the US, and within humanity itself. There is much to be done.
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