Prisoner being TORTURED at SCI Coal Township: Urgent Solidarity Needed!

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The following is an Action Alert from the HRC-FedUp! Emergency Response Network, about prisoner-advocate Andre Jacobs who is being tortured in retaliation for his speaking up in defense of a fellow prisoner who was being deprived food.

Take action for one who has taken action for others!

Please take action immediately

HRC just received a report from Andre Jacobs' grandmother that last Thursday he was taken from his solitary confinement cell and strapped to a restraint chair for 17 straight hours after he spoke up in defense of another man being deprived food by guards.

See the Call-in Guide below and take action today. Forward this message wide and ask people to subscribe to our action alert list. Torture thrives in secrecy and we need numbers. Spread this on Facebook. Please help.

We only know of Andre's situation because his grandmother went to visit him today (Monday).

He has been held without clothing for days and given only a thin garment to cover himself. Andre has been deprived of showers, legal property, hygiene and cleaning items. This is the 2nd time Andre has been stripped of clothing and property in less than two months. He is not supposed to be given property or clothing until Thursday.

Please take action immediately. Andre Jacobs is a leader in the human rights struggle inside the prison walls and has been subjected to systematic, racist dehumanization by prison personnel with the full knowledge and consent of the DOC hierarchy for years. Just last week he was in Luzerne County for a preliminary hearing for "riot" charges stemming from a series of retaliatory assaults, taserings, and pepper-spraings perpetrated against himself and 6 others at SCI Dallas at the end of April. This incident is featured in the HRC report Resistance and Retaliation.

Andre is a 28-year-old jailhouse lawyer being targeted for neutralization because he inspires prisoners to stand up for their human rights, to fight racism via constitutionally-protected means, and to educate themselves and their families about the real function and purpose of these prisons.

HRC will send an update and call for further action later in the week. Thank you all for caring and taking action. It does matter. Please email and/or call 412-654-9070 and inform HRC that you have taken action. It helps us monitor the response and keep updated on the situation.



******* CALL-IN GUIDE **********************************

Please call

• Supt. Varano 570.644.7890
• Regional Secretary Klopotoski 717.975.4865
• DOC Secretary Shirley Moore Smeal 717.975.4918
• OPR Director Barnacle 717.214.8473

Also Representatives Waters, Vanessa Brown, and Caltigirone (who were at the recent hearing on solitary), local and federal law enforcement, and all other appropriate persons. (click the links for phone numbers)

Spread the word to anybody with the decency to speak out. Tell them you are with the Human Rights Coalition (if you want to be identified as such) and that these actions are criminal.

Inform the prison officials and legislators of the ongoing abuse. Tell them the details above.

Demand the following when speaking to the prison and the DOC officials:

1) Andre is to be given clothes immediately
2) Andre is to be given writing materials immediately
3) Andre is to be given his legal property immediately
4) Andre is to be given all his state issue items and personal property immediately
5) these racist guards are to keep their hands off of him and stop abusing him


Ask the following (specifically of SCI Coal Township, whose Supt. Assistant is Kandis Dascani--she will say confidentiality prevents her from speaking, don't fall for this, don't let her put you off, tie up her phone and do not lay off):
1) when did Varano authorize this?
2) what is the justification for this?
3) Does Andre have clothes yet? does he have his property? does he have writing materials?
4) what policy number and section is this authorized by?

Inform DOC officials: That HRC intends on filing criminal charges and launching an investigation into the systematic torture of prisoners at SCI Coal Township.

Request that legislators investigate the prison system.

Love, Solidarity, and Struggle,

HRC-Fed Up!
Contact Information

phone:412-654-9070

Click here to subscribe to the HRC's mailing list

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Support Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

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i strongly encourage visitors to this blog to read the following call to support Kevin Rashid Johnson, put out by comrades Kim and Than.

As somebody who (tries to!) correspond with Rashid - we're working on getting a book of his writings out this Fall - i can personally attest to the fact that his mail is indeed being fucked with. Just the other day i received two letters i had sent him returned to me by the prison with a note saying "no approval" and "unauthorized correspondence". & of course i'm not the only one, this is just one example of the ongoing interference, part of a policy aimed at keeping Rashid and other politically active prisoners isolated.

So please take the time to read the following, and to write a few letters in support of this comrade.

A letter writing campaign is being launched to lend support to Kevin Rashid Johnson. Rashid is incarcerated in Red Onion State Prison which is located in southwest Virginia. He is a member of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party-Prison Chapter. (To clarify, this group has nothing to do with the racist group, the New Black Panthers). He became political during his time at Red Onion. He is very outspoken and a active organizer. Because of this there has been virtually continual retaliation against him.

Housed at a super max facility which entails being locked in a cell 23/7, more or less continual isolation, all inmates undergo trauma. But because of his revolutionary politics, Rashid is under exceptional pressure. He regularly has his mail withheld. Mail is a lifeline for these folks and to have it confiscated is psychologically damaging. He is denied food and medical attention. On occasions too numerous to recount he has been beaten and tortured by correction officers. He often is put in 5 point restraint. This entails strapping a naked prisoner to a bare steel frame bed with their hands and feet shackled. Prisoners are left for days in this condition.

If inmates have no support on the outside these abuses go unchecked. Rashid has asked that some action be taken on his behalf. If you could please send a letter of support to Rashid and to Warden Tracy Ray informing him that you have heard of Rashid’s situation and you demand he be given his mail. Receiving mail is a major concern for Rashid.

Virginia has a reputation as the worst state prison system in the nation. It is notorious for the abuses that occur. Super max institutions are the absolute worst. In southwest VA we have Wallen’s Ridge and Red Onion. Folks who used to work in the coal fields now have the prisons to work in. The restructuring of the coal industry killed their jobs and their area. Prisons were built on blown up mountains. Tensions between the economically deprived white rural prison employees and the mostly Black urban inmates runs very high. Racism is overt. These places are powder kegs.

Rashid and the other Panthers at these institutions believe it is the capitalist system which oppresses us all. They know the root of gangs was to unite communities to “police” themselves. With this in mind they educate fellow prisoners to come together and end gang related fighting. The system seeks to divide the prisoners so any show of unity is a great threat to them.

We can vouch for Rashid. He is a committed and honest person . You may send one letter of support or end up with a relationship of letter writing. Rashid is a consummate debater. Your support is urgently needed. I will point out that writing to a political prisoner, who is actively monitored by the FBI and assaulted on their behalf, will alert the “authorities” to your identity. You could use an alias or a PO box. We use our names and address, but you have to ascertain your own comfort level.

Solidarity Always, kim and than grove


Write to any or all of the following:

Kevin Rashid Johnson #1007485
Red Onion State Prison
P.O. Box 1900
Pound, VA 24279

Tracy S. Ray, Chief Warden
Red Onion State Prison
P. O. Box 970
Pound, VA 24279

Gene M. Johnson, Director
Virginia Department of Corrections
P.O. Box 26963
Richmond, VA 23261-6963

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Woman Dies in 107-Degree Cage in Prison: SWOP Remembers Marcia Powell

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Reposting this important piece from Bound not Gagged:

Woman Dies in 107-Degree Cage in Prison: SWOP Remembers Marcia Powell

For Immediate Release
Contacts: SWOP-USA 1-877-7... ext 2
Liz Coplen- SWOP-Tucson Peggy Plews- Arizona Prison Watch
info@swop-tucson.org freemarciapowell@gmail.com


On Friday December 18th sex workers from around the country are gathering to remember Marcia Powell, a woman considered mentally impaired by the court, who was incarcerated for solicitation of oral sex and sentenced to over two years in prison. On May 20, 2009, Marcia Powell died after being left in an uncovered outdoor cage in 107-degree heat at Arizona’s Perryville women’s prison. Sex workers and prisoners’ rights activists rally at the Arizona Department of Corrections as part of a series of events in conjunction with the 7th Annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
Tucson, Arizona December 15, 2009 -December 17th is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. This event was created by Sex Workers Outreach Project, SWOP-USA (http://www.swopusa.org), a national social justice network dedicated to the fundamental human rights of sex workers, focusing on ending violence and stigma through education and advocacy.
In 2009, sex workers from around the globe met gruesome deaths and endured unspeakable violence. Some died at the hands of a solitary perpetrator; others were victims of serial “prostitute killers.” While some of these horrific stories received international media attention, other cases received little more than a perfunctory investigation. Many cases remain unsolved, sometimes forever.
On Friday December 18th, SWOP-Tucson calls on sex workers and other activists from around the country to gather in remembrance of Marcia Powell, a woman considered mentally impaired by the court, who was incarcerated for solicitation of oral sex and sentenced to over two years in prison. On May 20, 2009, Marcia Powell died after being left in an uncovered outdoor cage in 107-degree heat at Arizona’s Perryville prison for women. Attention to Powell’s death revealed that this type of confinement was routine; women were left in these cages regularly.
“Marcia was the victim of dual forms of injustice, as a sex worker and as a prisoner,” said Liz Coplen of SWOP. “The prohibition of prostitution results in selective prosecution that puts some of the most vulnerable in our society at the mercy of a system that robs them of their basic respect and dignity.” For decades efforts to curb sex work have not only failed to reduce incidences of prostitution, but they have corrupted our justice system resulting in selective enforcement, racial profiling and inhumane treatment of those who don’t have the financial resources to fight back.
Violence against sex workers is epidemic and rarely taken seriously. The criminalization of prostitution legitimizes this abuse so that sex workers are the targets of violent crime with little recourse. Incarceration is not a solution to the issues of poverty and security that some sex workers face. As the death of Marcia Powell in the custody of the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) shows, prison sentences can include the most extreme form of neglect and abuse. As a result of an internal investigation, 16 people were disciplined. A criminal investigation, ongoing at the Maricopa County Attorney’s office, will determine whether criminal charges should be filed in her death. See “AZ corrections workers disciplined in inmate death,” Associated Press, 9/22/09 (http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2009/09/22/3302271-az-corrections-workers-disciplined-in-inmate-death) ; “Inquiry: Inmates often left in sun-exposed jails,” Arizona Republic, 9/25/09 (http://www.azcentral.com/12news/news/articles/2009/09/25/20090925powell0925-CP.html).
On December 18th, noon, SWOP, Arizona Prison Watch and Friends of Marcia Powell are gathering at the Arizona Department of Corrections in Phoenix for Marcia and other prisoners, and sex workers everywhere, as we call for respect for human rights.
To see full letter submitted to AZ Department of Corrections here: http://www.swopusa.org/files/December18thLetter.pdf
What: Rally-Remembering Marcia Powell and other prisoners and sex workers
When: Friday, December 18th, 2009, 12 Noon
Where: Steps of the AZ Department of Corrections, 1601 West Jefferson St. Phoenix, AZ 85007
On December 17th SWOP-Tucson, is presenting two events in Tucson:
http://www.swop-tucson.org/?page_id=4
A performance art/art installation called “No Human Involved (NHI),” 5- 6 PM at El Presidio Park,160 West Alameda Street, in Tucson, AZ and a “Memorial Ritual and Vigil” 6:30 – 7:30 PM at El Tiradito Shrine, a national historic site at 354 South Main Avenue in Tucson, AZ.
Visit SWOP USA’s website at http://www.swopusa.org/dec17 to find a December 17th event in your town.
2009.National.Release.Letterhead

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Robert King & Terry Kupers: The Psychological Impact of Imprisonment

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Class, Nation, and Health: with some thoughts about H1N1, and building movement capacity

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What follows is a rough version of a talk i gave at Montreal's Native Friendship Center, at the Anti-Colonial Thanksgiving organized by Frigo Vert last night. Many of the articles and documents referenced here are also referenced on the new Kersplebedeb H1N1 page.

I’m here to say just a few words about health inequalities, with particular attention to this new flu, the H1N1 or swine flu, and some concerns around it.

The flu is something I became interested in earlier this year, when my husband caught it and became very sick. He spent two months in the hospital, most of that time on a ventilator in a medically-induced coma, and he probably would have died if not for the fact that he received excellent medical care.

People say that you have to already have a serious health condition to be at risk from H1N1, but my husband’s only relevant health problems were very mild asthma and the fact that he gets migraines. In fact, they’re saying now that a quarter of the people who have died of H1N1 were in perfect health beforehand.

Now luckily my husband didn’t die, though his seven weeks in the ICU did make me realize some things. For one, it gave me an appreciation of the fact that even though not many people were dying of the flu, an unknown number of people were getting very very sick, and it was only the fact that there were enough ventilators and ICU beds that allowed them to survive. (The clearest figure i could find about this was that for every H1N1 death, there were four people critically ill with the virus who had to be kept alive in an ICU.)

And that got me thinking about health inequalities, and how they might play out with the flu.

By “health inequality”, I don’t mean the fact that some of us are more healthy than others, or that some of us see the doctor more often. I don’t even mean just the fact that some of us have more ready access to medical care, though that's getting closer. What I’m talking about is not an individual thing, but a collective phenomenon. The fact that different groups of people face different obstacles and challenges to being healthy. That the family you were raised in, the neighbourhood you grew up in, the job you end up doing and the place where you end up living as an adult, these factors all affect your chances of getting particular illnesses, they affect how readily you’ll have access to treatment if you do get sick, and as a bottom line, these things all affect how long you’re likely to live.

That’s what I mean by health inequality.

Health inequality is normally the result of some other kind of inequality. It’s not just caused by bad luck or genetics. More often than not, it is a result of financial inequality, unequal power relations, your position in society.

There are many useful ways of looking at this, but two that i find particularly helpful are class and nation.



Class and Life Expectancy: Some Examples from Montreal

If you go out this door, walk down to St-Catherine street and then take a left and walk for an hour, you’ll end up in Hochelaga Maisonneuve, Montreal’s working-class east end. Folks there have a life expectancy in their low to mid-seventies. In fact, bucking the general trend in most countries, the life expectancy for older residents of the neighbourhood actually went down between 1998 and 2008. (By life expectancy we don't mean how old most people are dying now - that's referred to as the "average age of death" and is usually significantly younger. Life expectancy is capitalism's forecast as to how old people born today are likely to live - indeed, the fact that there continue to be such discrepancies in life expectancy is a stark indicator that the 21st century is not intended to be any more egalitarian than the last one was.)

If on the other hand, you were to go out this door, walk down to St Catherine street and take a right, and walk for about an hour, you’d be in Westmount, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in all of Canada. The folks there, just to use the same measure, have a life expectancy in their eighties.

Now what makes a life expectancy? Lots of things, for instance: how common violence is in your community, what kind of food people eat (and what kind is sold at your local supermarket), what opportunities you have for physical exercise, how stressful or dangerous your job is likely to be, and of course how likely you are to get sick with various diseases due to poor sanitation or overcrowding or pollution.

The thing about these various factors, is they all follow the same contours of wealth and political power. When I was doing a bit of research for this talk, I came across a page hidden like a needle in a haystack on the Quebec government website, in which Montreal was divided up into different neighbourhoods and each neighbourhood was listed along with the prevalence of various diseases, various "quality of life" indicators, and also average annual income. These statistics are not completely honest, engaging in a bit of demographic gerrymandering, by including a few blocks where people are poor into the wealthier neighbourhoods, and including a few middle class blocks in with the working-class neighbourhoods, to dilute the impact of the numbers - but even so, a predictable pattern emerges. The same neighbourhoods – places like Hochelaga Maisonneuve, St-Henri, Montreal North – suffer from higher rates of various health problems, and the same places enjoy better than average health, and those are the wealthier and safer areas. (Although lacking the health information, similar socio-economic statistics can be found on this City of Montreal web page.)

It makes sense, after all, this is one of the big reasons people want to be middle class, or upper class, the fact that they can then afford a healthier and longer and safer and more pleasant life, not only for themselves but for their children, too.

This all is one way of thinking about heath inequality.



National Disparities Within Canada

If class is one useful way to look at injustice, another important concept is nation. The two aren’t the same, but they’re closely related.

Different nations, different peoples, live inside what is called Canada, experiencing very different living conditions, and obviously this leads to differences in health. We may live just down the block from each other, but for all that many of us effectively live in different countries.

Again, to use life expectancy as a bottom line, folks in Westmount might be expected to live into their eighties, folks in Hochelaga Maisonneuve into their mid- seventies, well Indigenous people in Canada, on average, have a life expectancy in their low seventies (high sixties for men, mid-seventies for women). That's all the Indigenous folks counted as such by Statistics Canada, including those who have "made it", including those in communities with more resources: a national average just slightly below that of the poorest of Montreal's neighbourhoods.

Canadian colonialism and genocide create this discrepancy - the Indigenous life expectancy results from different health issues and trends than what is found in the settler community. We're not just talking a little more of this disease or slightly less of that vitamin, but tragically high death rates amongst young people, often due to violence and various forms of substance abuse (See pages S54-S55 of the Revue Canadienne de Santé Publique Vol. 96, Supplément 2). That’s a direct result of genocide, Canada's long term assault on the ability of subject nations to reproduce and maintain themselves in a healthy way.



Looking at Communities

Now these statistics are just that, statistics. They’re all about averages and generalities, they deal with large numbers of people, millions in fact. For that reason, while they're useful as an initial tool, they can also trick you into missing some important details. Just as it's misleading to talk in broad generalities about “Canada” without specifying the different classes and nations here, it’s also misleading to talk in generalities about neighbourhoods or broad national categories like “Quebecois” or “settler” or “Indigenous” without keeping in mind that not everyone in these categories is dealing with the same situation. Definitely not all settler communities are the same, definitely not all immigrant communities are the same, definitely not all Indigenous communities are the same. Ignoring this has real political consequences that can screw us up.

Now a community may be geographic, like Hochelaga Maisonneuve or St. Henri or Kanesetake, but it may be more amorphous than that. Not all communities are found on maps, not all communities have a longitude and a latitude. We may not normally think of them as communities, but in terms of health, your job may provide a community, for instance a factory may be a community. A school may be a community. If you're a sex worker, then that may be a community. And if you’re living on the street that’s a particular community, if you’re living at the Y, or staying at a shelter, then that’s a particular community. If you’re in prison, then you'd better believe it: in terms of your health, that's a distinct community.



Locked Up or On the Street

This does not diminish the importance of nations and classes. On the contrary: if you check out these situations, or if you’re forced to live in them, you see that in fact they’re not separate. In fact, it is in specific communities that nations and classes exist in their sharpest, most intense, form. Like on the street: in Hamilton, Ontario, for instance, where Indigenous people represent 2% of the city’s population, but 20% of the homeless population. Or Edmonton, where Indigenous people make up 43% of the homeless population, though only 6% of those who have homes. (Aboriginal Housing Background Paper, Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation November 2004)

Or take a look at Canadian prisons and penitentiaries: Indigenous people are locked up over six times as often as anyone else in Canada. A few years back they did a "snapshot" study of all the prisons, penitentiaries and jails in Canada, to see exactly who was locked up: in Saskatchewan Indigenous people were imprisoned at almost ten times the overall provincial rate; they were 76 per cent of that province’s prisoner population. In Manitoba, 61 per cent of prisoners were Indigenous; in Alberta, it was over 35 per cent. (Racial Profiling in Canada, p. 81, quoted in Sketchy Thoughts)

So when we’re talking about communities, even when we don’t mean actual geographic communities that you can find on a map, even when we’re talking about something like being on the street or in prison, it should be clear that we’re still talking about something that has very clear class and national characteristics. Not everyone has an equal chance of ending up in these situations, not everyone has an equal chance of getting out of them.

In terms of health, in terms of well-being, if you’re in a particularly oppressed community, your reality will be a lot more intense than what you see in the broad reassuring national statistics. To give an example: 1 in 125 people in Canada is thought to have Hepatitis C, a potentially fatal illness. According to a study carried out in 2004, the rate is almost one in four (23.6%) for prisoners in the federal system. To give another example: Canada-wide, just over one in a thousand (0.13%) people were HIV positive in 2004, but almost one in twenty women in prison (4.7%) had the virus. (Moulton, Donalee. "Canadian inmates unhealthy and high risk." CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal. 2004) Similar kinds of discrepancies exist if you’re talking about tuberculosis or many other serious health problems.

Prisoners are one such group, people without good housing are another. A study that just came out this week in the British Medical Journal tells us that in Canada, if you're a woman living in a rooming house at age 25, your life expectancy is less than fifty years of age. If you’re a man living on the street at age 25, your overall life expectancy is less than forty. Less than half the national average. (Hwang, Stephen W., Mortality among residents of shelters, rooming houses, and hotels in Canada: 11 year follow-up study, BMJ 2009;339:b4036)

Understand it: nations and classes find their lived reality in communities. Communities with their own vulnerabilities and peculiarities, their own cultures, their own realities. This is important when thinking about health crises, because when disaster strikes, it will normally strike first in a specific community. Partly because germs and pollutants are distributed that way, and partly because social power and wealth are distributed that way. When there's an outbreak of some disease, most communities will probably be mildly affected, if at all. Oftentimes, there will even be big differences within various oppressed and colonized peoples, as only certain subgroups are made to bear the brunt of whatever capitalism is dishing up this season. (At least at first.)

So we have this obscene situation, that as a society, we’re often moaning about possible disasters that aren’t very likely at all, while people around us are actually living the disaster, or living the crisis, right now before our eyes. But most people choose not to see it.

It’s important to keep this in mind, because if you yourself are in a community struck by disaster, then these big reassuring statistics can make you feel like what's happening to you is exceptional and aberrant, perhaps even your fault or your community's fault. But in reality while it may be exceptional, it is also intrinsic to the system, and more often than not your personal hell has been noted and deemed acceptable by those who claim to be in charge.

On the other hand, if you are lucky enough to not be in the line of fire, then those statistics, by lumping people and communities together in these big categories, can give you a false sense that nothing anywhere is really all that bad. Those cases where people are in a serious crisis, where diseases like tuberculosis and Hepatitis C are not only common but are the norm, those situations end up being hidden, camouflaged by the large numbers of cases where people are managing to hold it all together.



H1N1: Parsing Opinions

This new flu, the "swine flu" or H1N1, it's an easy topic to spin bullshit about, and a lot of people are spinning bullshit about it. It’s easy to spin bullshit because this is a new strain of the flu, and it hasn’t been around during a flu season yet, and so no one can really know how serious it will be. According to some people the flu will wipe everyone out, according to some people it’s harmless but the vaccine will kill you – and all these folks seem to contradict themselves and rely on junk science, but they get a hearing because most of us know we can’t trust the government, and we’re often scientifically illiterate ourselves. If you’re bored, you can make up any old end-of-the-world fantasy story, and someone out there is likely to believe you. (If you don't believe me, just try it.)

But just because we don’t know something, that doesn’t mean that we can’t talk intelligently. Just because any crazy idea will get a hearing, doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to try and be logical and reasonable in seeing what might come.

Within the sane range of opinion, there’s two ways of looking at H1N1, and at what is likely to occur. One way is to point out that most people do not get very sick from it. Only 90 people in Canada have died so far from H1N1, while the regular flu kills thousands every year. This is an important point. According to this view, it's not so much a pandemic as a scamdemic, a fabricated excuse for some big pharmaceutical companies to boost their profits.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that the regular flu normally kills hardly anyone in the summertime or spring, and that’s when H1N1’s deaths have occurred so far. To compare the regular flu's winter toll with that of H1N1 over the summer is to make certain assumptions that contradict what years of epidemiology tell us about when flu infections - and serious illnesses, and deaths - will spike.

The bottom line is we just don’t know how serious or how mild the flu will be this winter, and winter is when the vast majority of flu deaths normally occur.

In the meantime though, we do have the experience of the H1N1 this spring. Then the virus played itself out much like other illnesses: people in less wealthy and more oppressed communities were more prone to catching it, and thus formed a larger proportion of those who got very sick. There was a good article in the Globe and Mail a little while back, in the science section, which made exactly this point; its title was “Influenza has a cure: affluence”.

To give one example of how this worked, in June, 14% of people with H1N1 showing up at emergency rooms all across Quebec were showing up at just one hospital, the Montreal Jewish General. This may in part be because it’s just a better hospital and more proficient at diagnosing people, but it may also have something to do with the fact that it’s located in the middle of Cote-des-Neiges, one of the more heavily immigrant neighbourhoods in Montreal. While Cote-des-Neiges is a mixed class neighbourhood, it does contain pockets of real poverty, bad living conditions, and overcrowding. (This statistic, of 14%, was discussed at an information seminar about H1N1 at the Jewish General in June. i am unaware of it having been published to date.)

But there’s something important to grasp beyond the general fact that the flu will be more prevalent in less wealthy neighbourhoods. Like I was saying, no matter what the picture painted by broad statistics, when you look at the specifics you’re going to always find certain communities dealing with much worse situations.

That is precisely what we saw this spring, in a number of communities, where H1N1 became something much much worse. When it became so widespread that a tipping point was reached. To speak in dialectics, one could say the quantitative – the numbers of people sick - became qualitative, meaning it changed the nature of the entire situation. Local resources were overwhelmed, and the crisis entered a different phase. In Garden Hill, St. Theresa’s Point, Sandy Lake – all Indigenous communities – the flu pandemic got completely out of control, local nursing stations were unable to support people’s needs, and over a hundred people had to be medi-vacced to intensive care units in Winnipeg hospitals. Several people died.

Tipping points are like dominos, when one occurs it always risks setting off the next. In terms of what happened this summer, this almost did happen, as ICUs in Winnipeg filled up with critically ill H1N1 patients and there was a real fear that there would not be enough ventilators. Had that occurred (thankfully it didn't) many more people would have died.

While Garden Hill, St. Theresa's Point and Sandy Lake were the only places we know of where things escalated to that level, Indigenous people across Canada were suffering disproportionately from the flu. According to the way the government measures these things, Indigenous people make up less than 4% of the Canadian population – but this summer by the same measure Indigenous people made up 25% of those who got critically ill from H1N1. In Manitoba, where Indigenous people make up roughly 10% of the population, this summer at one point they were over 60% of those who found themselves on ventilators, struggling for life in ICUs.

Nor is it only Indigenous people. Compared to most places, Canada is a fairly “white” country, but according to a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, less than 50% of those who became critically ill with H1N1 in Canada this summer were white; the majority were people of color. It’s perhaps also worth noting that that same report found that almost 70% of those who got critically ill were women, which shows this disease has a gender profile that hasn’t been given enough attention.

We may not be able to predict the future, but given what we do know, we can make some reasonable guesses about the flu this winter. It is clear that the incidence of disease will not be random, and that not all communities will fare the same. No matter what the broad, general, abstract “Canadian” experience this winter, it is guaranteed that in some specific communities the situation will be much much worst. Those hardest hit will almost certainly be Indigenous communities, immigrant communities, working class communities.



A Suggestion to My Comrades

At the height of the outbreak in Garden Hill this spring, Grand Chief David Harper asked Health Canada to set up a field hospital in the community, an idea that the government rejected.

Since then, the Assembly of First Nations asked the federal government to send flu kits to Indigenous households across the country – Health Canada didn't see the point, so instead the AFN had to raise money on its own from the provinces and the private sector.

Just a couple of weeks ago Grand Chief Harper was quoted in the newspaper again, saying “By now, we would have liked to have field hospitals set up so our people don’t have to wait to be airlifted to Winnipeg for treatment.”

This is a reasonable request: for months now everyone from local healthcare providers to the World Health Organization has been saying that if a major crisis occurs in Canada, if a tipping point is reached, if the quantitative becomes qualitative, it will most likely happen in one of the many remote and impoverished Indigenous communities. But the government isn't worried.

So it begs a question for me – which of our movements have things like this on the radar? Which of our movements is poised to respond to a request for a field hospital, or any kind of useful emergency intervention? It reminds me of the ice storm back in 1998, when the whole city of Montreal was paralyzed, many without electricity for weeks, and the army was sent in. Many people were relieved to see the soldiers, we felt we needed rescuing. Why couldn’t any of our movements have played that role?

And why does this question seem silly to some of us? As if the ability to respond to a crisis, the ability to serve the people when the people really need serving, as if all of that was beyond the scope of our responsibilities.

Some of us have the skills, and i know many of us would love to see these capacities developed, but the question is a collective one, not an individual one. We need to explicitly decide as a movement that that’s where we’re going. We need autonomous structures, separate from (and ideally hidden from) the state, in which those with medical skills can frame their work, even if they may be operating within a hospital or a community health organization. We need to become scientifically literate, so that we don’t fall for the latest ridiculous conspiracy theory. Even if not everyone has the interest or the proclivity to get a grasp on "hard sciences", as a movement we need to value that kind of thinking, to appropriate it, to make it our own.

Most importantly, we need to think in terms of filling the role that the state plays, dealing not only with healthcare, but also with everything from garbage disposal to sewage treatment to conflict resolution. If we claim to be against the state, then that becomes our job. If we fail at it, if we fail to do a better job than what's being done now, then even if we do someday drive out the state, even if we do establish no-go areas, sooner or later it will be the people themselves who will demand the enemy's return.

H1N1 may or may not play itself out as a disaster this winter. I certainly don’t believe it will be some Canada-wide cataclysm, but I think it’s likely that in certain specific areas it will be a serious problem, and some people will suffer. If tipping points are reached, if the surge capacity of particular communities is overwhelmed, it won't be pretty. I can tell you from personal experience that the disease can be horrendous.

We know the Harper government is ideologically predisposed to letting poor people die. We know capitalism and colonialism will only make the situation worst. Knowing this, I would argue that our movements have a responsibility to think beyond zines and blogs and lobbying, that we have a responsibility to start doing what we can to build our capacity to offer real help to people whenever and wherever a crisis does occur.

Tags: h1n1 health canada indigenous first-nations poverty prison homelessness

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[October 24] Beyond Prisons, Toward Community Strategies: Supporting work within and against prisons

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Next Saturday in Montreal, definitely worth checking out:

The Prisoner Correspondence Project, Action Santé Travesti(e)s et Transsexuel(le)s du Québec (ASTTeQ), and the 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy present:

Beyond Prisons, Toward Community Strategies:

Supporting work within and against prisons

Saturday October 24th from 4pm to 6pm
at the Comité Social Centre-Sud at 1710 Beaudry (metro Beaudry)

***

Featuring:

• Gisele Dias - Prisoner HIV/AIDS Support Action Network (PASAN), Toronto
• Peter Collins - HIV/AIDS activist and prisoner at Bath Institution, Ontario
• Amazon Contreraz - jailhouse lawyer, trans activist and prisoner at Corcoran, California
• Sadie Ryanne - DC Trans Coalition (DCTC), Washington DC
• Farah Abdill - community organizer, Montreal

Beyond Prisons, Toward Community Strategies will be an afternoon of community organizations and individuals coming together to discuss the ways we can expand our existing models of support and service provision, as prisoners, exprisoners and allies, and work towards a broader movement to end our reliance on prisons.

The presenters–made up of prisoners, ex-prisoners, and allies–will introduce their current projects, which include gay and trans prisoner support, HIV prevention, advocacy for prisoner self-determination, and local initiatives to support folks inside prisons. How can we confront the violence of prison expansion, deepening rates of in-prison HIV transmission, medical negligence and isolation? Through these discussions, we hope to forge coalitions between different community groups and strengthen the day to day struggles both within and against prisons.

*****
whisper translation, childcare, and metro/bus fare available • wheelchair accessible

For directions, information about accessibilty, or if there are other ways we can support your attendance, please contact us at info@prisonercorrespondenceproject.com
514-848-2424 x 7431 * www.prisonercorrespondenceproject.com

Vous pouvez aussi lire ceci en français ici.

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Locked Out 2009

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LockedOut is a resource list for gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer prisoners in the U.S. The list is free, but stamps are always welcome. Requests for books, legal aid, or pen pals will not be answered.

i am posting the 2009 list here ; please note that it is also available as a PDF from http://zinelibrary.info/files/lo2009.pdf

LockedOut is a resource list for gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer prisoners in the U.S. The list is free, but stamps are always welcome. Requests for books, legal aid, or pen pals will not be answered.

LockedOut
c/o Prison Book Project
P.O. Box 396
Amherst, MA
01004
2009 edition

Let us know if you write a group and don’t hear back. If you know about a group not listed, send us their address and we’ll ask them to be listed next time. Feedback welcome!


ABC Paralegal Services
P.O. Box 7187
Austin, TX 78713
Supports all prisoners unjustly convicted, whatever the race/ethnicity, sexual orientation or preferred identity. We are primarily a legal support group assisting political prisoners and social prisoners alike. We are an all volunteer and a free service, but always appreciate the help with whatever you can afford in postage stamps. We help with legal paper writing; court traffic; letters/calls/emails to government officials; furnish hard copy state codes/policy materials; case law research to name the main services.

ACLU National Prison Project
HIV/AIDS/Hepatitis Education Project
915 15th St. NW, 7th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20005
Sends free information on HIV/AIDS/Hepatitis to prisoners. Responds to complaints from prisoners living with HIV/AIDS/Hepatitis and LGBT prisoners. Publishes the STD booklet, Play It Safer, write for a free copy.
Black and Pink c/o Jason Lydon Community Church of Boston 565 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02116
Provides a list online of Trans/Queer/GLB prisoners who are seeking pen pals. Occasionally are able to provide some direct advocacy for individuals or cell-blocks. Send a 25-word (non-sexual) description of what you want from a pen-pal friendship to be listed online.

Books Through Bars
c/o Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen St.
New York, NY 10002
Sends free community-donated books to people in state and federal prison. Will send to any state that allows the books in -- please send any special regulations with your request. Specializes in history and social studies, though we sometimes have fiction written by or about LGBT people. No catalog. 1 request per 6-month period.

Brothers Behind Bars
c/o RFD (Radical Faerie Digest)
P.O. Box 68
Liberty, TN
37095
A quarterly penpal list of gay/bi/trans male prisoners produced and distributed by RFD. Write for details.

California Coalition for Women Prisoners
1540 Market St., Suite 490
San Francisco, CA 94102
Organizes with women and transgender prisoners. Programs include: medical/legal resources and information through correspondence, legal visits to CA state women’s prisons and SF women’s county jail, The Fire Inside quarterly newsletter (free to prisoners), community education and organizing campaigns, and Compañeras--non U.S. citizen women and trans prisoners organizing around immigration and imprisonment.

Cleveland Books to Prisoners
P.O. Box 602440
Cleveland, OH 44102
Sends free books to people in Ohio prisons upon request only. We are a GLBTQ-friendly program, and we seek to increase our connection to GLBTQ people incarcerated in Ohio prisons. We also have a pen pal program.

Community United Against Violence
170 A Capp St.
San Francisco, CA 94117
Supports the healing and leadership of LGBTQQ people impacted by violence and abuse. As part of the larger social justice movement, CUAV is working to build safe, whole communities where everyone can thrive. You are not alone. LGBTQQ people in prisons and jails are encouraged to call our 24-hour Safety Line at (415) 333-HELP (4357) for support and referrals--we accept collect calls.

Critical Resistance
1904 Franklin St., Suite 504
Oakland, CA 94612
A nationwide, grassroots organization that seeks to end our reliance on prisons, policing and surveillance. We believe that what makes our communities truly safe are jobs, education, food, shelter and the right to self determination for all individuals. Write for details and a free newspaper.

Human Rights Coalition Fedup!
Pittsburgh Chapter
5125 Thomas Merton Center
Pittsburgh, PA 15224
A prisoner advocacy group working with prisoners in PA. We have an extensive abuse log in which we collect evidence and testimony of those incarcerated for public viewing. We have biweekly letter writing nights to send resources to those incarcerated, we educate the public on prison issues through art exhibits and film screenings, and we also conduct research on prison related issues. We are looking to broaden the base of prisoners we communicate with. Write for details.

Internationalist Prison Books Collective
405 W. Franklin St.
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
Sends books to prisoners in AL, MS, and NC only.

Just Detention International
3325 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 340
Los Angeles, CA 90010
A human rights organization that seeks to end sexual abuse against men, women, and youth in all forms of detention. JDI has three core goals: to hold government accountable for prisoner rape; to transform ill-informed public attitudes about sexual assault behind bars; and to ensure that those who have survived this form of abuse get the help they need. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) prisoners who have been sexually assaulted behind bars are encouraged to contact JDI for a packet of information that includes a list of local and national resources for prisoner rape survivors. Survivors can write to JDI via “Legal Mail” by addressing their letter to Melissa Rothstein, Esq. at the address above.

Out of Control Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners
3543 18th St., Box 30
San Francisco, CA 94110
Supports women prisoners and political prisoners in the U.S. and internationally. Publishes Out of Time newsletter. Free, donations welcome.

POZ
500 Fifth Ave., Suite 320
New York, NY 10110
Free subscription to any HIV+ person who can’t afford it. Write for details.

Queers Against Prisons-Philly
210 S. 49th St
Philadelphia, PA 19139
Hosts a weekly letter writing night called our Black & Pink Letter Writing Program. This is our primary resource for queer prisoners, as we are a group of queers who are interested in corresponding with imprisoned queers. We hope to work as a clearinghouse, connecting those inside with resources and contact on the outside. Write for details.

Prison Book Program
1306 Hancock St., Suite 100
Quincy, MA 02169
Offers National Prisoners Resource List free to prisoners. Book requests accepted, except from CA, KY, LA, MD, MI, NV, OR, and TX. Stamps welcome.

Prison Book Project
P.O. Box 396
Amherst, MA 01004
Sends books to prisoners in CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, TX, and VT.

South Chicago ABC Zine Distro
P.O. Box 721
Homewood, IL 60430
We provide hundreds of zine titles to prisoners - catalogs, resource guides, analysis, history, all kinds of education and literature - all in zine form. We have some GLBTQ titles. Write for catalog.

Sylvia Rivera Law Project
322 8th Ave., 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
Provides free civil legal services and a pen pal program to incarcerated people in New York who are transgender, intersex, or gender nonconforming. We are a collectively-run organization that seeks to make systemic change and increase the political power of our communities.

TGI (Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex) Justice Project
342 9th Street, Suite 202B
San Francisco, CA 94103
Write for details.

TIG Prisoner Pen Pal Project
426 President St.
Brooklyn, NY 11231
We are a list for transgender, intersexed, genderqueer, and gender-variant prisoners to find penpals for support and friendship. Please send us a brief posting about yourself, your contact information, and any regulations in your institution (no mail from other prisoners, etc). It can take a long time to match interested people with penpals, so please be patient.

Wisconsin Books to Prisoners
Rainbow Bookstore
426 W. Gilman St.
Madison,WI 53703
Sends books to WI prisoners and LGBT prisoners nationwide.

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Jim Campbell, Remembered

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A debonaire looking Jim, 1981

It is two years today since Jim Campbell died of a heart attack, bicycling in rural Ontario with his partner Julie. He was 57, and had been looking forward to retiring in a few years, to finally being able to move out of the city.

When i used to visit toronto in the 1980s, Jim was always a great guy to look up and to hang out with. i was a teenager at the time, and he seemed to make the idea of being on the left for the long haul (after all, he must have been in his thirties!) without becoming a lunatic seem accessible and possible.

Plus he was funny as hell, with a sense of humour that could manage the improbable, combining cynicism with hope. i remember on more than once occasion he'd ask - rhetorically, and with a grin - who would be in charge of garbage removal "after the revolution." The question would be answered quickly enough: "I guess people like me will, just like now." A joke born of experience, as you can see below in his reflections on the "lazy faire" middle-class anarchist scene he was a part of for most of his life.

Still on the topic of "the revolution," i remember him joking that when it broke out and things were at their heaviest, he would make the grand sacrifice and volunteer for the dangerous job of going on the European Solidarity Tour. It wasn't self-deprecation, more like a cunning and sweet deflating of the romantic silliness people get into their heads about what the rev will entail.

i knew Jim, and saw him most often, in the 1980s and early 90s. For many of these years his main political activity was putting out Bulldozer/Prison New Service, a news-bulletin (and later newspaper) of writings and artwork by prisoners. It included amongst its authors some of the sharpest revolutionary minds locked down in Amerika at the time. i first read the words of Shaka Shakur, Kuwasi Balagoon, Standing Deer and others in those pages. Eventually with over 2,000 subscribing prisoners, and financed almost wholely out of Jim's wages as a city maintenance worker, PNS/Bulldozer was one of the most important radical publications of its day.

One of my last "political" memories of Jim was when some of us went to table at the Anti-Racist Action conference in Toronto in 1996. Jim had never been a part of ARA, but was certainly a part of "the scene" (i still remember him bumming a cigarette to help calm me down after police on horseback attacked ARA's '93 anti-HF demo), plus he was still one of most respected revs in Toronto, even though he had not been exempt from the internecine fighting which would shortly rip that scene apart. i was tabling with a crew of former ARA members, who were on pretty bad terms with their erstwhile comrades - but with Jim carrying in our pamphlets and magazines (which he got in shit for), we were able to table the entire weekend with no hassles.

Nevertheless, when political conflicts came to a head in Toronto, ripping through the ARA milieu (which was the most dynamic political force on the far left at the time), Jim like many others was left feeling emotionally burnt, and burnt out. i have been told that it was largely this experience which led to his withdrawing from political organizing at that time ... i have also been told that shortly before his death there was some reconciliation, and some tentative attempt to get back in the loop ... But about all this i don't really know, as for me those were busy years - personally and politically - and so with much regret i feel like i hardly saw him during his last decade.

From what i understand, Jim wrote a lot - but mainly in the form of letters to comrades in prison whom he corresponded with. While much of the editorial comment in PNS was undoubtedly by his hand, it wasn't all, and it generally wasn't signed, and so it's difficult to know. Probably his most well-known text is his essay about the Vancouver Five, initially a talk he gave to the Anarchist Lecture Series in Toronto in 1999, then published in the Spring 2000 issue of Kick It Over magazine, and which a group of us subsequently reprinted as a pamphlet (The Vancouver Five: Armed Struggle in Canada - looking online i see it has also been translated into Spanish).

But IMO an even better text is "Fifteen years of Bulldozer and more: The personal, the political, and a few of the connections", a reminiscence by Jim that appeared in PNS #49 in January/February 1995. The article can be viewed and printed as a PDF, but i am also reposting it here. Eitehr way, it is well worth reading in its entirety, not only as movement history, but also as one man's explanation of how he came across his politics:

Fifteen years of Bulldozer and more:
The personal, the political, and a few of the connections*

Fifteen years ago, in February 1980, the Bulldozer collective was formed when 4 or 5 activists from various places in southern Ontario met up in Toronto and decided that we should start working together on prison-related issues since we had individually begun to do so. We were so inspired by the letters we were receiving from prisoners that we decided that should share them more widely, that summer we put out the first issue of a newsletter called Bulldozer - the only vehicle for prison reform.

Much has changed since that time - and generally for the worst. Prison populations have increased in Canada by over 50 per cent, and by much more than that in the U.S. Conditions have deteriorated due to overcrowding and program-slashing. Control Units have proliferated and sentences have gotten longer. More than ever, prisons seem to be an inevitable part of the lives of the poor and marginal. Their role in disrupting and containing the colonized peoples - Native, New Afrikan, and Latino - is as effective and disguised as ever.

With only a few exceptions - i.e. the closing of the Lexington Control Unit for women - the struggle against prisons, inside or out, has been weak and ineffective. Only a few states like New Jersey have any connection with the earlier prison struggles. The prison struggle in Canada which was strong in the late '70s and early '80s met with a combination of reform and repression that killed whatever energy was left. Resistance in the Washington state system which represented one of the final thrusts of the prisoners' movement that reached back to the days of George Jackson was eventually disrupted by forced transfers and overt brutality. Since then conscious and active prisoners have generally found themselves isolated, either deliberately so in Control Units, or simply because the majority of prisoners prefer to remain asleep. Sadly enough, there are many prisoners who have been on our mailing list since the '80s.

On the outside, a small number of very dedicated individuals and groups have kept going, but there has been no movement to speak of until very recently. Prisoner-support work has not been that popular with the left, nor with social activists in general, and as in most movements out here, a year or so seems to satisfy most people's interest in doing the work. In spite of the hard work on campaigns to free particular POWs, such as Leonard Peltier, most of them remain in prison, a constant reminder of our weakness.

But Bulldozer has not survived fifteen years by dwelling on the negative, and I don't intend to. Recently, there have been positive developments on both sides of the border which suggest that we are able to take some political initiative in the crime and punishment debate. The meeting in Philadelphia in December, 1994, in which anti-prison activists from across the U.S. (and Toronto) came together to set up the Control Unit Monitoring Project (CUMP) is certainly a significant step.

CUMP is a major political initiative and will be a test as to whether or not a movement can be built on the outside, working with prisoners, to close down Control Units. The development of this campaign requires a political strategy. As one of the longest standing collectives involved in anti-prison work, Bulldozer has a certain responsibility to assist in this development. Yet we are hampered because we are based in Toronto, and after more than fifteen years involvement with the American left, there is still much that is totally mystifying about radical politics in the U.S.; the enormous division between the various races is particularly perplexing. One of the ways in which we've maintained credibility over the years is because we don't talk about what we don't know. We hesitate to make suggestions as to what outside activists in the U.S. should be doing to advance the struggle, beyond very general principles, because the political realities in the two countries are very different.

With this in mind, I would like to use this article as the beginning of an irregular series that would articulate some of the politics we've developed over the years. It is not intended as a "What is to be Done" but more where we've come from and what we've seen work. PNS does reflect our politics, but they have been more implicit than explicit. We've never written long essays telling prisoners what they should think. Rather, we've tried to provide a forum in which prisoners, individually and collectively, could articulate and develop their politics. We were always more interested in what we could learn, rather than what we could teach. If individual prisoners could learn from us, so much the better, but that would come from ongoing dialogue and communication. The political direction of the paper would be determined by prisoners, even if the decision as to what would or would not be printed was always ours.

Counter cultural politics

Bulldozer's politics are rooted in the counter-culture, going back to a student house begun in the fall of 1971 in Kitchener, Ont. which developed into one of the first anarchist collectives in Canada, with a heavy emphasis on radical psychology and existential philosophy (and sex and drugs and rock and roll.) All through the '70s, the collective tried to maintain a political orientation to counter cultural politics, even as the individualism that was glorified in these movements allowed for the reassertion of race, class and gender privilege, and a reintegration into business-as-usual for many former radicals and activists. In 1979, we moved to the country, and set up a communal dirt-farm with the expectation that it would be a viable rural community from which we could maintain a political practice.

The first issue of Open Road, a kick-ass, and very well produced, anarchist news-journal came out of Vancouver in August of 1976, transforming radical politics in Canada. Many of the articles in that first issue - Leonard Peltier's impending extradition to the U.S., George Jackson Brigade actions, an interview with Martin Soastre, a Puerto Rican anarchist and former POW, coverage of Native and prisoners' struggles - would not look out of place in the PNS today. My own sense of political possibilities and necessities were opened up by the year (1977) which I spent working with Open Road in Vancouver. But there was little opportunity to put them into practice when I returned to Ontario. I became increasingly dissatisfied with the self-indulgence of the counter culture and the anarchist-purism that celebrated it. I missed the more activist-oriented politics of the Vancouver scene but moved to the country anyway to follow the politics of collectivity through to the end.

The farm floundered right from the beginning due to a lazy-faire attitude and middle class arrogance. With self-expression and "do-your-own-thing" as the highest values, most communal members were unable to respond to the realities of a situation determined by an unrelenting hostile climate, and the cycle of the seasons. Having grown up poor and living-in-the-country, it didn't seem to be such a big deal to be back, poor, and living-in-the-country. I left totally disillusioned at the end of 1981, moved to Toronto permanently, cut my hair, and got a full-time job shortly after. I had started to write to prisoners and the first issue of Bulldozer came out while I was still living there. I was keen to continue with the work.

Open Road motivated the creation of a more action-orientated, militant politic in Vancouver such as the Anarchist Party of Canada (Groucho-Marxist) which carried out a series of "pieings" - literally throwing a pie in the face of a politician or celebrity, with Eldridge Cleaver being the most famous "hit" - in order to make a political point. As simple as this may sound, it brought about political and personal transformations from planning and carrying out the actions to dealing with the consequences - confrontations with reactionaries and authorities. The more serious people in the scene started to do support work for the prisoners in the old B.C. Pen whose struggles eventually resulted in its closure. From then on, prisons have been an essential part of the work taken on by our circles.

Out of this came Direct Action, an armed group which in 1982 blew-up an electrical substation on Vancouver Island ($5 million in damages) and a Litton Industries factory north of Toronto that built components for the Cruise Missile ($10 million in damages and several injuries). Some of the same people were also involved in the Wimmin's Fire Brigade firebombing of three video stories specializing in violent porn. They were arrested in January, 1983, immediately putting us into doing support work. In June of 1983 Bulldozer was raided and threatened with a charge of Seditious Libel (calling for the armed overthrow of the state) for the distribution of support-leaflets we were putting out. A mid-wife, living with us at the time, was arrested and charged with "performing an abortion" in an attempt to get information from her about our links to Direct Action. After several thousand dollars in legal fees, and a year of high-stress, all the serious charges were dropped in connection to the raid. After losing several legal challenges over the legality of evidence, the Vancouver Five, as they had come to be called, pled guilty to several charges related to the actions.

Bulldozer was being published irregularly during this time. The 8th and final issue came out in 1985. I was personally and politically exhausted, and Bulldozer as a political project disappeared for two years. Fortunately, a very active group of young high school students in Ottawa had been influenced by the politics put out around the trials of the Vancouver Five. Even as our own political motivation had disappeared in despair, they took the ideas and started working with them, leading to the appearance of Reality Now! an anarchist zine that was very influential. Eventually, their enthusiasm helped to regenerate my own politics. After two years of inactivity the tedium of a comfortable working class life was becoming all too apparent. When Bill Dunne needed an outsider to help him with The Marionette, a prisoners' newsletter he was doing from Marion, I rejoined the struggle. PNS then developed out of The Marionette.

Social history

This provides a brief history of Bulldozer, though it is more of a social than a political history. I want to be clear that Bulldozer developed out of the alternative or cultural politics - i.e. the punks, and hippies, purist anarchism, women, lesbians and gays, etc. - which has been the primary means by which white youth have radicalized over the past few decades. It is all too easy, and certainly necessary, to critique these cultural movements. Their general failure to deal adequately with issues of race and class does make them little more than "white rights" groups as Lorenzo Kom'boa Erwin puts it. The social alienation that originally motivates many white youth into becoming part of these cultural or marginal movements get channeled into an accommodation with race and class privilege. Intense self-absorption, often combined with heavy drug and/or alcohol use, leads them to think that their subjective rebellion has some meaning. But modern capitalism cares little what anyone actually thinks, so long as one produces, or if unemployed, accepts being economically marginal.

The women's movement is, or at least was, different in that it did pose a real threat to the existing patriarchical structures of this society. This can be measured by the severity of the ideological counter-attack waged against it, even if it was discovered that the position of women in society could be changed without endangering the interests of those who get the goods. Awareness of their own misery had lead many women individually and collectively to develop a radical analysis of their social position. This self-awareness became a vulnerability as self-help, New Age therapies - often looted from Native societies in a continuation of the kolonial kleptomania that has characterized white society - were used to help women (and men) to fit into the existing system. Political consciousness was increasingly seen as being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. The necessary struggle to feel good about oneself - self-esteem - allowed for an acceptance of class and racial privilege.

For all that, though, we haven't turned our backs on the alternative movements. The fundamental oppression and super-exploitation of, and violence towards, women remains. And mainstream culture is a death culture, not much wonder that so many young people, working class and middle class, try to find some life outside of it in one movement or another. Going way back into the early '70s where we were more political than the rest of the hippies, and more hippy-like than the other politicos, we've tried to develop what could be termed the political wing of the alternative movements. Through time, our politics chnaged thanks to people such as Kuwasi Balagoon and the local Leonard Peltier Defense Group - with whom we went through some real hard times from '83 to '85 - as we struggled to come to terms with the colonialism, genocide and slavery upon which North Amerikan society is based. I will take up this topic in some other article, but I wish to return to the politics of the alternative movements.

The original insight that the "personal is political" was truly radical in that it went to the root (radical means going to the roots) of social existence, our own individual lives. So great was the contradiction between the myth of social happiness, and the misery found in most people's lives once they looked, that it energized the various social movements from the '60s on. The slogan originally meant that there is a social context to our personal lives, and that a serious examination of who we are would lead us to understand the political context within which we lived. But its subversive impact has been smothered by reducing the political to the personal, as though nothing mattered politically except for one's personal life and a few close friends.

Yet it remains that coming to understand who we are is a necessary first step towards participating in an authentic liberatory process. Part of the impact of PNS itself is because it speaks directly to prisoners' lived-experience, rather than simply offering an intellectual explanation of political reality. The paper helps those who are struggling to know themselves in spite of living in a cage feel strong - and that's a victory. Coming from what could be called a "secular spirituality", we share with traditional Natives, New Afrikans and Muslims amongst others, the sense that an individual's life is a "struggle" in and off itself; that it is our task as humans to unravel the mysteries of our own existence, to determine the truth within it, and to find the proper direction. Politics come back into it since any honest examination should lead to a clear understanding that this society is based on a complex blend of race, class and sex. Many whites, and others as well, unfortunately back off from these political implications.

The critical importance of understanding the connections between politics and one's personal experience became much more vivid for me when I "remembered" five years ago that I had been subjected to severe and frequent sexual abuse as a child. Suddenly my own life made a lot more sense to me. I had discovered the key to my private mythology. The rage which I had learned to channel into my political work became understandable. It made sense to me why I was drawn by the plight of the prisoner. I had spent much of my younger days isolated, brutalized, surrounded by those much more powerful than I who were out to do me harm, used by bigger and stronger boys. An image that had haunted me for years of a prisoner, beaten down, forlorn and forgotten, huddled in a corner of a cell, had come straight from my own life, figuratively if not literally. I had been driven by a vow - as unconscious as it must have been - to not stand by while others were being abused.

There is much that we've learned over the past few years about abuse and healing that have political implications, particularly for prisoners since surely prison is nothing if not a system of institutionalized abuse. I will take this theme up more fully another day. But for now, I will say that as we became more aware of issues around abuse, it made sense to discover that at least half of the activists we knew were sexually and/or physical abused as children. We had lived the lies and hypocrisy of the family, religion and society. Our opposition to all three was not merely some intellectual construct, nor mere political fashion but was born of bitter experience. I did not need the suffering of others - women, Native people, Afrikans, prisoners or whoever - to motivate me politically. I had resisted long before I even knew there was a struggle. Like many of my prisoner-friends surviving long years of isolation and brutality, something within me refused to be broken.

I was in total mental and emotional anguish until well into my twenties, but for whatever unknown reasons, I was able to focus my rage on the corporate-state, and its bullies and bosses. Political activity became a means of eventual resolution. Slowly, but surely, I connected with other misfits, malcontents and losers. The counter culture gave us a certain space to be ourselves. We might still be totally alienated from society, barely able to function day-to-day, heavy drug use helping to keep the pain at bay, yet we were no longer alone. And we would fight back.

In a psychologized society such as ours, political activity will often be shaped by unresolved personal problems. We are driven by our demons. But working through these problems need not mean the end of the political activism that was energized by the inner conflicts. It should, in fact, mean that we target the enemy ever more precisely. The abuse must stop! We can stop being abusive. We can resist the abuse we're suffering. But abuse is not simply due to personal failure or the lack of appropriate therapy or bad genes but totally integral to a homophobic society that uses class, race and sex to determine who gets what. This is where political will comes in. As long as abuse continues, then we must fight against it even if, or especially if, our own pain and suffering has been eased. *

Jim Campbell


Postscript

I have used Bulldozer as a personal identification in the past, and the article above reflects my personal history and opinions, and have played the main editorial role since the beginning. But Bulldozer can't simply be reduced to me personally. There are several people who currently help shape Prison News Service and their efforts are much appreciated. I do want to acknowledge some of the others who have made significant contributions to Bulldozer in the past.

Sunday Harrison has been around Bulldozer more or less since the beginning, especially including the raid and its aftermath. Her technical skills and creativity have helped give PNS a much more professional look than it would otherwise have had. We have very much developed our ideas together - even if on any particular detail we are as apt to disagree as agree.

Bill Dunne, the editor and main writer for the now defunct The Marionette also was a major influence on my thinking. Our years of exchanging letters certainly tightened up many of my arguments. Without him, it is unlikely that PNS would exist.

After the raid in 1983, our support came from our Native comrades and from women working at a Lesbian print shop. Though I barely knew most of these women, they immediately came through with crucial assistance. It is many years later, but I don't forget those who were there when help was needed. The lesbian community has also done the basic work on understanding sexual abuse and how it affects those who survive it. I would not have been able to write the above if it were not for the personal support and political stimulation and information that came from lesbian friends. We are interested in connecting with anyone else who is working to integrate surivor issues with a radical political analysis.

Jim C.

Jim more recently

Like i said, there's not much written in Jim's name, certainly not enough to get a sense of how important his contribution was. This is much in keeping with his general demeanour, which was always humble, though not in any contrite over-the-top way, but more as would befit "a hippy amongst the politicos."

Here are the very few texts by Jim that have found their way into cyberspace:

• Who will Feed the Chickens?
• Report on an Anarchist Black Cross Conference (from PNS #47, Sept/Oct 1994)
• From 1988 Gathering to AR!1998
  
• The Vancouver Five: Armed Struggle in Canada

There are also two articles by Dominic Ali about PNS:

• The Tense World of Jail Journalism (American Journalism Review, Dec. 1996)
• Hard Labour: Jim Campbell's Solitary Crusade to Create a Free Press Behind Bars (Ryerson Review of Journalism Spring 1996)

And of course reminiscences both personal and political following his passing:

• Lives Lived - Jim Campbell (the Globe and Mail March 19 2008, by Jim's friend Richard Swift and his partner Julie Thiers)
• Remembering Jim Campbell (the Fifth Estate Spring 2008, Vol. 43 #1 #37, by David Watson)
• Stark Raven Radio interview with Bob Sarti & Ann Hansen, who share stories memories of Jim and his work (available on Radio4All and mirrored here)
  

A plaque at Dragonfly farm, to Jim's memory
click to see larger detail

hopefully we'll see you in the next world Jim; until then, you are missed...

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Exposing 'Little Guantanamo:' Inside the CMU

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The following from political prisoner Daniel McGowan's support group:

From: "Family & Friends of Daniel McG"
Date: Thu, September 10, 2009

Dear friends,

Daniel's article, "Exposing 'Little Guantanamo:' Inside the CMU" is now handsomely laid out and available for download in screen-reading or printable booklet form! If you still haven't read it, this is a very important expose and analysis of the ominous and unconstitutional new prison facilities, the Communication Management Units. It contains new information, straight out of the CMU, and it will be a real asset in our efforts to counter the US government's war on dissent and free speech, in and outside of the prison system.

So by all means, download it, read it, link to it, print it, table with it, share it with your friends, your family, your local infoshop, prisoner support group, and everyone else. The CMUs must be investigated and reviewed.

You can find it here: http://www.supportdaniel.org/cmu
Direct links to download PDFs can also be found here for web and here for print.

Special thanks to our friends in NYC Anarchist Black Cross of the ABCF for their collaboration in publishing and distributing this!

Also, check out this great interview Daniel did with our friends at Last Hours:
http://www.lasthours.org.uk/interviews/interview-with-eco-anarchist-prisoner-daniel-mcgowan/
as well as an interview with us for a recent Earth First! Journal article:
http://www.earthfirstjournal.org/article.php?id=461


Forward!,
Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan
supportdaniel.org

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Thirty Eight Years Ago

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thx to Kasama for posting this...

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Doctors Complicit in CIA Torture Programme

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No surprise here: Physicians for Human Rights has released a report detailing some of the torture techniques the CIA admits to using at Guantanamo Bay, showing how doctors played a central role in this programme of abuse.

Amongst the fun and games the CIA engaged in:

• Mock executions;
• Denying solid foods for weeks or even months;
• Denying access to a toilet - forcing prisoners to wear diapers - for prolonged periods of time;
• Brandishing guns and power drills to threaten prisoners;
• Threats to sexually assault family members and murder children;
• "Walling" — repeatedly slamming an unresponsive detainee's head against a cell wall; and
• Confinement in a box.

You can read the complete IPHR report here.

The activities at Gitmo torture camp, horrific as they are in their own right, fall within deeper dynamics at work in imperialist society.

1. Torture is an unofficial but wink-wink-nudge-nudge acknowledged part of imprisonment in the united states, but the attempt to legally justify torture represents a potential to more effectively regulate, use, and institutionalize violence against prisoners in the future
2. Culturally, violence and abuse are becoming more and more fascinating, and appealing, to large numbers of people. So long as they occur in the proper setting (to all things their place!) and come with a fig leaf of moral-legal justification. In this sense, the abuse at Gitmo both drew on - and has fed into - this deeper tendency towards brutality.

Michel Foucault, in his book Discipline and Punish, argued that the rise of prisons as the preferred form of punishment coincided with a move away from exemplary (but inconsistent) torture and towards more homogenous and scientific forms of social control. He correctly recognized that the dominant dynamic was the establishment of a surveillance society, a panopticon where all could be seen.

There can be no denying that Foucault was largely correct, but i think he underestimated the degree to which brutality and horrific violence continued on a parallel track with more and more extensive surveillance. Torture re-enters the discourse of punishment time and time again, only now with the prerequisite that its victims must first be dehumanized. Whereas in the seventeenth century public torture was used as a means to terrify the population at large, by turning the criminal who they might identify with into a spectacle of lived agony, today torture is used as a means to entrench the public perception that they - the tortured - are of a different nature than us.

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Isolation-Torture in the u.s.a

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The following is an important article by Dr. Atul Gawande, on the subject of isolation-torture as it is practiced in u.s. prisons. The article appeared in the March 30, 2009, edition of The New Yorker, and is available on their website here.

One of the most striking things for me, when doing research for the book Projectiles for the People, about Germany's Red Army Faction, was the way in which isolation was viewed as a new and utterly terrifying form of torture by the European radical left in the 1970s. There the use of strict isolation, as well as sensory deprivation, was pioneered as part of the state's strategy to destroy the minds of political prisoners. [i have just uploaded to the german guerilla website the chapter on isolation torture and the RAF prisoners' resistance to it: Staying Alive: Sensory Deprivation, Torture, and the Struggle Behind Bars]

What struck me about this was the fact that the conditions they were protesting - conditions that they experienced as the nightmarish cutting edge of a new form of fascism based in the prison system - have now become so widespread, at least in North America. Whereas at the time isolation torture inflicted on a few dozen captured members of the RAF shocked the consciences of wide segments of the population, as some radicals predicted even then, today this form of "clean torture" (clean because it leaves no visible wounds) has been generalized and inflicted upon tens of thousands of people.

This article is well worth reading, if it strikes you as too long to read on the screen you can print it out from The New Yorker website here.

Hellhole: The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?

by Atul Gawande March 30, 2009

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.

He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn’t know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants—in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.

At first, Harlow and his graduate students couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They considered factors such as diet, patterns of light exposure, even the antibiotics they used. Then, as Deborah Blum recounts in a fascinating biography of Harlow, “Love at Goon Park,” one of his researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their soft blankets. Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were missing in their Isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd experiment, he gave them an artificial one.

In the studies, one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem more comforting. The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire mother. But they became deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it. They slept curled up on it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements: they wanted only “their” mother. If sharp spikes were made to randomly thrust out of the mother’s body when the rhesus babies held it, they waited patiently for the spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys remained psychologically abnormal.

In a later study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers found that the test monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary monkeys, “usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by . . . autistic self-clutching and rocking.” Harlow noted, “One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later.” After several weeks in the company of other monkeys, most of them adjusted—but not those who had been isolated for longer periods. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow wrote. They became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts—regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.

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The research made Harlow famous (and infamous, too—revulsion at his work helped spur the animal-rights movement). Other psychologists produced evidence of similarly deep and sustained damage in neglected and orphaned children. Hospitals were made to open up their nurseries to parents. And it became widely accepted that children require nurturing human beings not just for food and protection but also for the normal functioning of their brains.

We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn’t have anything like a child’s dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we do. We don’t have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.

Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the “soul-destroying loneliness,” as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact.

The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we’ve learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement—from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, “Den of Lions,” recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Anderson was the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press when, on March 16, 1985, three bearded men forced him from his car in Beirut at gunpoint. He was pushed into a Mercedes sedan, covered head to toe with a heavy blanket, and made to crouch head down in the footwell behind the front seat. His captors drove him to a garage, pulled him out of the car, put a hood over his head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape. For half an hour, they grilled him for the names of other Americans in Beirut, but he gave no names and they did not beat him or press him further. They threw him in the trunk of the car, drove him to another building, and put him in what would be the first of a succession of cells across Lebanon. He was soon placed in what seemed to be a dusty closet, large enough for only a mattress. Blindfolded, he could make out the distant sounds of other hostages. (One was William Buckley, the C.I.A. station chief who was kidnapped and tortured repeatedly until he weakened and died.) Peering around his blindfold, Anderson could see a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. He received three unpalatable meals a day—usually a sandwich of bread and cheese, or cold rice with canned vegetables, or soup. He had a bottle to urinate in and was allotted one five- to ten-minute trip each day to a rotting bathroom to empty his bowels and wash with water at a dirty sink. Otherwise, the only reprieve from isolation came when the guards made short visits to bark at him for breaking a rule or to threaten him, sometimes with a gun at his temple.

He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the time. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he’d made in life, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.

His captors moved him every few months. For unpredictable stretches of time, he was granted the salvation of a companion—sometimes he shared a cell with as many as four other hostages—and he noticed that his thinking recovered rapidly when this occurred. He could read and concentrate longer, avoid hallucinations, and better control his emotions. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all,” he noted.

In September, 1986, after several months of sharing a cell with another hostage, Anderson was, for no apparent reason, returned to solitary confinement, this time in a six-by-six-foot cell, with no windows, and light from only a flickering fluorescent lamp in an outside corridor. The guards refused to say how long he would be there. After a few weeks, he felt his mind slipping away again.

“I find myself trembling sometimes for no reason,” he wrote. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to lose my mind, to lose control completely.”

One day, three years into his ordeal, he snapped. He walked over to a wall and began beating his forehead against it, dozens of times. His head was smashed and bleeding before the guards were able to stop him.

Some hostages fared worse. Anderson told the story of Frank Reed, a fifty-four-year-old American private-school director who was taken hostage and held in solitary confinement for four months before being put in with Anderson. By then, Reed had become severely withdrawn. He lay motionless for hours facing a wall, semi-catatonic. He could not follow the guards’ simplest instructions. This invited abuse from them, in much the same way that once isolated rhesus monkeys seemed to invite abuse from the colony. Released after three and a half years, Reed ultimately required admission to a psychiatric hospital.

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

On December 4, 1991, Terry Anderson was released from captivity. He had been the last and the longest-held American hostage in Lebanon. I spoke to Keron Fletcher, a former British military psychiatrist who had been on the receiving team for Anderson and many other hostages, and followed them for years afterward. Initially, Fletcher said, everyone experiences the pure elation of being able to see and talk to people again, especially family and friends. They can’t get enough of other people, and talk almost non-stop for hours. They are optimistic and hopeful. But, afterward, normal sleeping and eating patterns prove difficult to reëstablish. Some have lost their sense of time. For weeks, they have trouble managing the sensations and emotional complexities of their freedom.

For the first few months after his release, Anderson said when I reached him by phone recently, “it was just kind of a fog.” He had done many television interviews at the time. “And if you look at me in the pictures? Look at my eyes. You can tell. I look drugged.”

Most hostages survived their ordeal, Fletcher said, although relationships, marriages, and careers were often lost. Some found, as John McCain did, that the experience even strengthened them. Yet none saw solitary confinement as anything less than torture. This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

Recently, I met a man who had spent more than five years in isolation at a prison in the Boston suburb of Walpole, Massachusetts, not far from my home. Bobby Dellelo was, to say the least, no Terry Anderson or John McCain. Brought up in the run-down neighborhoods of Boston’s West End, in the nineteen-forties, he was caught burglarizing a shoe store at the age of ten. At thirteen, he recalls, he was nabbed while robbing a Jordan Marsh department store. (He and his friends learned to hide out in stores at closing time, steal their merchandise, and then break out during the night.) The remainder of his childhood was spent mostly in the state reform school. That was where he learned how to fight, how to hot-wire a car with a piece of foil, how to pick locks, and how to make a zip gun using a snapped-off automobile radio antenna, which, in those days, was just thick enough to barrel a .22-calibre bullet. Released upon turning eighteen, Dellelo returned to stealing. Usually, he stole from office buildings at night. But some of the people he hung out with did stickups, and, together with one of them, he held up a liquor store in Dorchester.

“What a disaster that thing was,” he recalls, laughing. They put the store’s owner and the customers in a walk-in refrigerator at gunpoint, took their wallets, and went to rob the register. But more customers came in. So they robbed them and put them in the refrigerator, too. Then still more customers arrived, the refrigerator got full, and the whole thing turned into a circus. Dellelo and his partner finally escaped. But one of the customers identified him to the police. By the time he was caught, Dellelo had been fingered for robbing the Commander Hotel in Cambridge as well. He served a year for the first conviction and two and a half years for the second.

Three months after his release, in 1963, at the age of twenty, he and a friend tried to rob the Kopelman jewelry store, in downtown Boston. But an alarm went off before they got their hands on anything. They separated and ran. The friend shot and killed an off-duty policeman while trying to escape, then killed himself. Dellelo was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He ended up serving forty years. Five years and one month were spent in isolation.

The criteria for the isolation of prisoners vary by state but typically include not only violent infractions but also violation of prison rules or association with gang members. The imposition of long-term isolation—which can be for months or years—is ultimately at the discretion of prison administrators. One former prisoner I spoke to, for example, recalled being put in solitary confinement for petty annoyances like refusing to get out of the shower quickly enough. Bobby Dellelo was put there for escaping.

It was an elaborate scheme. He had a partner, who picked the lock to a supervisor’s office and got hold of the information manual for the microwave-detection system that patrolled a grassy no man’s land between the prison and the road. They studied the manual long enough to learn how to circumvent the system and returned it. On Halloween Sunday, 1993, they had friends stage a fight in the prison yard. With all the guards in the towers looking at the fight through binoculars, the two men tipped a picnic table up against a twelve-foot wall and climbed it like a ladder. Beyond it, they scaled a sixteen-foot fence. To get over the razor wire on top, they used a Z-shaped tool they’d improvised from locker handles. They dropped down into the no man’s land and followed an invisible path that they’d calculated the microwave system would not detect. No alarm sounded. They went over one more fence, walked around a parking lot, picked their way through some woods, and emerged onto a four-lane road. After a short walk to a convenience store, they called a taxi from a telephone booth and rolled away before anyone knew they were gone.

They lasted twenty-four days on the outside. Eventually, somebody ratted them out, and the police captured them on the day before Thanksgiving, at the house of a friend in Cambridge. The prison administration gave Dellelo five years in the Departmental Disciplinary Unit of the Walpole prison, its hundred-and-twenty-four-cell super-maximum segregation unit.

Wearing ankle bracelets, handcuffs, and a belly chain, Dellelo was marched into a thirteen-by-eight-foot off-white cell. A four-inch-thick concrete bed slab jutted out from the wall opposite the door. A smaller slab protruding from a side wall provided a desk. A cylindrical concrete block in the floor served as a seat. On the remaining wall was a toilet and a metal sink. He was given four sheets, four towels, a blanket, a bedroll, a toothbrush, toilet paper, a tall clear plastic cup, a bar of soap, seven white T-shirts, seven pairs of boxer shorts, seven pairs of socks, plastic slippers, a pad of paper, and a ballpoint pen. A speaker with a microphone was mounted on the door. Cells used for solitary confinement are often windowless, but this one had a ribbonlike window that was seven inches wide and five feet tall. The electrically controlled door was solid steel, with a seven-inch-by-twenty-eight-inch aperture and two wickets—little door slots, one at ankle height and one at waist height, for shackling him whenever he was let out and for passing him meal trays.

As in other supermaxes—facilities designed to isolate prisoners from social contact—Dellelo was confined to his cell for at least twenty-three hours a day and permitted out only for a shower or for recreation in an outdoor cage that he estimated to be fifty feet long and five feet wide, known as “the dog kennel.” He could talk to other prisoners through the steel door of his cell, and during recreation if a prisoner was in an adjacent cage. He made a kind of fishing line for passing notes to adjacent cells by unwinding the elastic from his boxer shorts, though it was contraband and would be confiscated. Prisoners could receive mail and as many as ten reading items. They were allowed one phone call the first month and could earn up to four calls and four visits per month if they followed the rules, but there could be no physical contact with anyone, except when guards forcibly restrained them. Some supermaxes even use food as punishment, serving the prisoners nutra-loaf, an unpalatable food brick that contains just enough nutrition for survival. Dellelo was spared this. The rules also permitted him to have a radio after thirty days, and, after sixty days, a thirteen-inch black-and-white television.

“This is going to be a piece of cake,” Dellelo recalls thinking when the door closed behind him. Whereas many American supermax prisoners—and most P.O.W.s and hostages—have no idea when they might get out, he knew exactly how long he was going to be there. He drew a calendar on his pad of paper to start counting down the days. He would get a radio and a TV. He could read. No one was going to bother him. And, as his elaborate escape plan showed, he could be patient. “This is their sophisticated security?” he said to himself. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with “irrational anger,” compared with just three per cent of the general population.* Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.

“There were some guards in D.D.U. who were decent guys,” Dellelo told me. They didn’t trash his room when he was let out for a shower, or try to trip him when escorting him in chains, or write him up for contraband if he kept food or a salt packet from a meal in his cell. “But some of them were evil, evil pricks.” One correctional officer became a particular obsession. Dellelo spent hours imagining cutting his head off and rolling it down the tier. “I mean, I know this is insane thinking,” he says now. Even at the time, he added, “I had a fear in the background—like how much of this am I going to be able to let go? How much is this going to affect who I am?”

He was right to worry. Everyone’s identity is socially created: it’s through your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation, many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control.

As a matter of self-preservation, this may not be a bad thing. According to the Navy P.O.W. researchers, the instinct to fight back against the enemy constituted the most important coping mechanism for the prisoners they studied. Resistance was often their sole means of maintaining a sense of purpose, and so their sanity. Yet resistance is precisely what we wish to destroy in our supermax prisoners. As Haney observed in a review of research findings, prisoners in solitary confinement must be able to withstand the experience in order to be allowed to return to the highly social world of mainline prison or free society. Perversely, then, the prisoners who can’t handle profound isolation are the ones who are forced to remain in it. “And those who have adapted,” Haney writes, “are prime candidates for release to a social world to which they may be incapable of ever fully readjusting.”

Dellelo eventually found a way to resist that would not prolong his ordeal. He fought his battle through the courts, filing motion after motion in an effort to get his conviction overturned. He became so good at submitting his claims that he obtained a paralegal certificate along the way. And, after forty years in prison, and more than five years in solitary, he got his first-degree-homicide conviction reduced to manslaughter. On November 19, 2003, he was freed.

Bobby Dellelo is sixty-seven years old now. He lives on Social Security in a Cambridge efficiency apartment that is about four times larger than his cell. He still seems to be adjusting to the world outside. He lives alone. To the extent that he is out in society, it is, in large measure, as a combatant. He works for prisoners’ rights at the American Friends Service Committee. He also does occasional work assisting prisoners with their legal cases. Sitting at his kitchen table, he showed me how to pick a padlock—you know, just in case I ever find myself in trouble.

But it was impossible to talk to him about his time in isolation without seeing that it was fundamentally no different from the isolation that Terry Anderson and John McCain had endured. Whether in Walpole or Beirut or Hanoi, all human beings experience isolation as torture.

The main argument for using long-term isolation in prisons is that it provides discipline and prevents violence. When inmates refuse to follow the rules—when they escape, deal drugs, or attack other inmates and corrections officers—wardens must be able to punish and contain the misconduct. Presumably, less stringent measures haven’t worked, or the behavior would not have occurred. And it’s legitimate to incapacitate violent aggressors for the safety of others. So, advocates say, isolation is a necessary evil, and those who don’t recognize this are dangerously naïve.

The argument makes intuitive sense. If the worst of the worst are removed from the general prison population and put in isolation, you’d expect there to be markedly fewer inmate shankings and attacks on corrections officers. But the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Perhaps the most careful inquiry into whether supermax prisons decrease violence and disorder was a 2003 analysis examining the experience in three states—Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota—following the opening of their supermax prisons. The study found that levels of inmate-on-inmate violence were unchanged, and that levels of inmate-on-staff violence changed unpredictably, rising in Arizona, falling in Illinois, and holding steady in Minnesota.

Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

It wasn’t always like this. The wide-scale use of isolation is, almost exclusively, a phenomenon of the past twenty years. In 1890, the United States Supreme Court came close to declaring the punishment to be unconstitutional. Writing for the majority in the case of a Colorado murderer who had been held in isolation for a month, Justice Samuel Miller noted that experience had revealed “serious objections” to solitary confinement:


A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover suffcient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

Prolonged isolation was used sparingly, if at all, by most American prisons for almost a century. Our first supermax—our first institution specifically designed for mass solitary confinement—was not established until 1983, in Marion, Illinois. In 1995, a federal court reviewing California’s first supermax admitted that the conditions “hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable for those with normal resilience.” But it did not rule them to be unconstitutionally cruel or unusual, except in cases of mental illness. The prison’s supermax conditions, the court stated, did not pose “a sufficiently high risk to all inmates of incurring a serious mental illness.” In other words, there could be no legal objection to its routine use, given that the isolation didn’t make everyone crazy. The ruling seemed to fit the public mood. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, some sixty supermax institutions had opened across the country. And new solitary-confinement units were established within nearly all of our ordinary maximum-security prisons.

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all. At the same time, other states had just a tiny fraction of their inmates in solitary confinement. In 1999, for example, Indiana had eighty-five supermax beds; Georgia had only ten. Neither of these two states can be described as being soft on crime.

Advocates of solitary confinement are left with a single argument for subjecting thousands of people to years of isolation: What else are we supposed to do? How else are we to deal with the violent, the disruptive, the prisoners who are just too dangerous to be housed with others?

As it happens, only a subset of prisoners currently locked away for long periods of isolation would be considered truly dangerous. Many are escapees or suspected gang members; many others are in solitary for nonviolent breaches of prison rules. Still, there are some highly dangerous and violent prisoners who pose a serious challenge to prison discipline and safety. In August, I met a man named Robert Felton, who had spent fourteen and a half years in isolation in the Illinois state correctional system. He is now thirty-six years old. He grew up in the predominantly black housing projects of Danville, Illinois, and had been a force of mayhem from the time he was a child.

His crimes were mainly impulsive, rather than planned. The first time he was arrested was at the age of eleven, when he and a relative broke into a house to steal some Atari video games. A year later, he was sent to state reform school after he and a friend broke into an abandoned building and made off with paint cans, irons, and other property that they hardly knew what to do with. In reform school, he got into fights and screamed obscenities at the staff. When the staff tried to discipline him by taking away his recreation or his television privileges, his behavior worsened. He tore a pillar out of the ceiling, a sink and mirrors off the wall, doors off their hinges. He was put in a special cell, stripped of nearly everything. When he began attacking counsellors, the authorities transferred him to the maximum-security juvenile facility at Joliet, where he continued to misbehave.

Felton wasn’t a sociopath. He made friends easily. He was close to his family, and missed them deeply. He took no pleasure in hurting others. Psychiatric evaluations turned up little more than attention-deficit disorder. But he had a terrible temper, a tendency to escalate rather than to defuse confrontations, and, by the time he was released, just before turning eighteen, he had achieved only a ninth-grade education.

Within months of returning home, he was arrested again. He had walked into a Danville sports bar and ordered a beer. The barman took his ten-dollar bill.

“Then he says, ‘Naw, man, you can’t get no beer. You’re underage,’ ” Felton recounts. “I says, ‘Well, give me my ten dollars back.’ He says, ‘You ain’t getting shit. Get the hell out of here.’ ”

Felton stood his ground. The bartender had a pocket knife on the counter. “And, when he went for it, I went for it,” Felton told me. “When I grabbed the knife first, I turned around and spinned on him. I said, ‘You think you’re gonna cut me, man? You gotta be fucked up.’ ”

The barman had put the ten-dollar bill in a Royal Crown bag behind the counter. Felton grabbed the bag and ran out the back door. He forgot his car keys on the counter, though. So he went back to get the keys—“the stupid keys,” he now says ruefully—and in the fight that ensued he left the barman severely injured and bleeding. The police caught Felton fleeing in his car. He was convicted of armed robbery, aggravated unlawful restraint, and aggravated battery, and served fifteen years in prison.

He was eventually sent to the Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum-security facility in Joliet. Inside the overflowing prison, he got into vicious fights over insults and the like. About three months into his term, during a shakedown following the murder of an inmate, prison officials turned up a makeshift knife in his cell. (He denies that it was his.) They gave him a year in isolation. He was a danger, and he had to be taught a lesson. But it was a lesson that he seemed incapable of learning.

Felton’s Stateville isolation cell had gray walls, a solid steel door, no window, no clock, and a light that was kept on twenty-four hours a day. As soon as he was shut in, he became claustrophobic and had a panic attack. Like Dellelo, Anderson, and McCain, he was soon pacing back and forth, talking to himself, studying the insects crawling around his cell, reliving past events from childhood, sleeping for as much as sixteen hours a day. But, unlike them, he lacked the inner resources to cope with his situation.

Many prisoners find survival in physical exercise, prayer, or plans for escape. Many carry out elaborate mental exercises, building entire houses in their heads, board by board, nail by nail, from the ground up, or memorizing team rosters for a baseball season. McCain recreated in his mind movies he’d seen. Anderson reconstructed complete novels from memory. Yuri Nosenko, a K.G.B. defector whom the C.I.A. wrongly accused of being a double agent and held for three years in total isolation (no reading material, no news, no human contact except with interrogators) in a closet-size concrete cell near Williamsburg, Virginia, made chess sets from threads and a calendar from lint (only to have them discovered and swept away).

But Felton would just yell, “Guard! Guard! Guard! Guard! Guard!,” or bang his cup on the toilet, for hours. He could spend whole days hallucinating that he was in another world, that he was a child at home in Danville, playing in the streets, having conversations with imaginary people. Small cruelties that others somehow bore in quiet fury—getting no meal tray, for example—sent him into a rage. Despite being restrained with handcuffs, ankle shackles, and a belly chain whenever he was taken out, he managed to assault the staff at least three times. He threw his food through the door slot. He set his cell on fire by tearing his mattress apart, wrapping the stuffing in a sheet, popping his light bulb, and using the exposed wires to set the whole thing ablaze. He did this so many times that the walls of his cell were black with soot.

After each offense, prison officials extended his sentence in isolation. Still, he wouldn’t stop. He began flooding his cell, by stuffing the door crack with socks, plugging the toilet, and flushing until the water was a couple of feet deep. Then he’d pull out the socks and the whole wing would flood with wastewater.

“Flooding the cell was the last option for me,” Felton told me. “It was when I had nothing else I could do. You know, they took everything out of my cell, and all I had left was toilet water. I’d sit there and I’d say, ‘Well, let me see what I can do with this toilet water.’ ”

Felton was not allowed out again for fourteen and a half years. He spent almost his entire prison term, from 1990 to 2005, in isolation. In March, 1998, he was among the first inmates to be moved to Tamms, a new, high-tech supermax facility in southern Illinois.

“At Tamms, man, it was like a lab,” he says. Contact even with guards was tightly reduced. Cutoff valves meant that he couldn’t flood his cell. He had little ability to force a response—negative or positive—from a human being. And, with that gone, he began to deteriorate further. He ceased showering, changing his clothes, brushing his teeth. His teeth rotted and ten had to be pulled. He began throwing his feces around his cell. He became psychotic.

It is unclear how many prisoners in solitary confinement become psychotic. Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist, has interviewed more than two hundred prisoners in solitary confinement. In one in-depth study, prepared for a legal challenge of prisoner-isolation practices, he concluded that about a third developed acute psychosis with hallucinations. The markers of vulnerability that he observed in his interviews were signs of cognitive dysfunction—a history of seizures, serious mental illness, mental retardation, illiteracy, or, as in Felton’s case, a diagnosis such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, signalling difficulty with impulse control. In the prisoners Grassian saw, about a third had these vulnerabilities, and these were the prisoners whom solitary confinement had made psychotic. They were simply not cognitively equipped to endure it without mental breakdowns.

A psychiatrist tried giving Felton anti-psychotic medication. Mostly, it made him sleep—sometimes twenty-four hours at a stretch, he said. Twice he attempted suicide. The first time, he hanged himself in a noose made from a sheet. The second time, he took a single staple from a legal newspaper and managed to slash the radial artery in his left wrist with it. In both instances, he was taken to a local emergency room for a few hours, patched up, and sent back to prison.

Is there an alternative? Consider what other countries do. Britain, for example, has had its share of serial killers, homicidal rapists, and prisoners who have taken hostages and repeatedly assaulted staff. The British also fought a seemingly unending war in Northern Ireland, which brought them hundreds of Irish Republican Army prisoners committed to violent resistance. The authorities resorted to a harshly punitive approach to control, including, in the mid-seventies, extensive use of solitary confinement. But the violence in prisons remained unchanged, the costs were phenomenal (in the United States, they reach more than fifty thousand dollars a year per inmate), and the public outcry became intolerable. British authorities therefore looked for another approach.

Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.

So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.

The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

In this country, in June of 2006, a bipartisan national task force, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, released its recommendations after a yearlong investigation. It called for ending long-term isolation of prisoners. Beyond about ten days, the report noted, practically no benefits can be found and the harm is clear—not just for inmates but for the public as well. Most prisoners in long-term isolation are returned to society, after all. And evidence from a number of studies has shown that supermax conditions—in which prisoners have virtually no social interactions and are given no programmatic support—make it highly likely that they will commit more crimes when they are released. Instead, the report said, we should follow the preventive approaches used in European countries.

The recommendations went nowhere, of course. Whatever the evidence in its favor, people simply did not believe in the treatment.

I spoke to a state-prison commissioner who wished to remain unidentified. He was a veteran of the system, having been either a prison warden or a commissioner in several states across the country for more than twenty years. He has publicly defended the use of long-term isolation everywhere that he has worked. Nonetheless, he said, he would remove most prisoners from long-term isolation units if he could and provide programming for the mental illnesses that many of them have.

“Prolonged isolation is not going to serve anyone’s best interest,” he told me. He still thought that prisons needed the option of isolation. “A bad violation should, I think, land you there for about ninety days, but it should not go beyond that.”

He is apparently not alone among prison officials. Over the years, he has come to know commissioners in nearly every state in the country. “I believe that today you’ll probably find that two-thirds or three-fourths of the heads of correctional agencies will largely share the position that I articulated with you,” he said.

Commissioners are not powerless. They could eliminate prolonged isolation with the stroke of a pen. So, I asked, why haven’t they? He told me what happened when he tried to move just one prisoner out of isolation. Legislators called for him to be fired and threatened to withhold basic funding. Corrections officers called members of the crime victim’s family and told them that he’d gone soft on crime. Hostile stories appeared in the tabloids. It is pointless for commissioners to act unilaterally, he said, without a change in public opinion.

This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. For a Presidential candidate, no less than for the prison commissioner, this would have been political suicide. The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a thirty-minute drive from my door.

Robert Felton drifted in and out of acute psychosis for much of his solitary confinement. Eventually, however, he found an unexpected resource. One day, while he was at Tamms, he was given a new defense lawyer, and, whatever expertise this lawyer provided, the more important thing was genuine human contact. He visited regularly, and sent Felton books. Although some were rejected by the authorities and Felton was restricted to a few at a time, he devoured those he was permitted. “I liked political books,” he says. “ ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem,’ Winston Churchill, Noam Chomsky.”

That small amount of contact was a lifeline. Felton corresponded with the lawyer about what he was reading. The lawyer helped him get his G.E.D. and a paralegal certificate through a correspondence course, and he taught Felton how to advocate for himself. Felton began writing letters to politicians and prison officials explaining the misery of his situation, opposing supermax isolation, and asking for a chance to return to the general prison population. (The Illinois Department of Corrections would not comment on Felton’s case, but a spokesman stated that “Tamms houses the most disruptive, violent, and problematic inmates.”) Felton was persuasive enough that Senator Paul Simon, of Illinois, wrote him back and, one day, even visited him. Simon asked the director of the State Department of Corrections, Donald Snyder, Jr., to give consideration to Felton’s objections. But Snyder didn’t budge. If there was anyone whom Felton fantasized about taking revenge upon, it was Snyder. Felton continued to file request after request. But the answer was always no.

On July 12, 2005, at the age of thirty-three, Felton was finally released. He hadn’t socialized with another person since entering Tamms, at the age of twenty-five. Before his release, he was given one month in the general prison population to get used to people. It wasn’t enough. Upon returning to society, he found that he had trouble in crowds. At a party of well-wishers, the volume of social stimulation overwhelmed him and he panicked, headed for a bathroom, and locked himself in. He stayed at his mother’s house and kept mostly to himself.

For the first year, he had to wear an ankle bracelet and was allowed to leave home only for work. His first job was at a Papa John’s restaurant, delivering pizzas. He next found work at the Model Star Laundry Service, doing pressing. This was a steady job, and he began to settle down. He fell in love with a waitress named Brittany. They moved into a three-room house that her grandmother lent them, and got engaged. Brittany became pregnant.

This is not a story with a happy ending. Felton lost his job with the laundry service. He went to work for a tree-cutting business; a few months later, it went under. Meanwhile, he and Brittany had had a second child. She had found work as a certified nursing assistant, but her income wasn’t nearly enough. So he took a job forty miles away, at Plastipak, the plastics manufacturer, where he made seven-fifty an hour inspecting Gatorade bottles and Crisco containers as they came out of the stamping machines. Then his twenty-year-old Firebird died. The bus he had to take ran erratically, and he was fired for repeated tardiness.

When I visited Felton in Danville last August, he and Brittany were upbeat about their prospects. She was working extra shifts at a nursing home, and he was taking care of their children, ages one and two. He had also applied to a six-month training program for heating and air-conditioning technicians.

“I could make twenty dollars an hour after graduation,” he said.

“He’s a good man,” Brittany told me, taking his arm and giving him a kiss.

But he was out of work. They were chronically short of money. It was hard to be optimistic about Felton’s prospects. And, indeed, six weeks after we met, he was arrested for breaking into a car dealership and stealing a Dodge Charger. He pleaded guilty and, in January, began serving a seven-year sentence.

Before I left town—when there was still a glimmer of hope for him—we went out for lunch at his favorite place, a Mexican restaurant called La Potosina. Over enchiladas and Cokes, we talked about his family, Danville, the economy, and, of course, his time in prison. The strangest story had turned up in the news, he said. Donald Snyder, Jr., the state prison director who had refused to let him out of solitary confinement, had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison for taking fifty thousand dollars in payoffs from lobbyists.

“Two years in prison,” Felton marvelled. “He could end up right where I used to be.”

I asked him, “If he wrote to you, asking if you would release him from solitary, what would you do?”

Felton didn’t hesitate for a second. “If he wrote to me to let him out, I’d let him out,” he said.

This surprised me. I expected anger, vindictiveness, a desire for retribution. “You’d let him out?” I said.

“I’d let him out,” he said, and he put his fork down to make the point. “I wouldn’t wish solitary confinement on anybody. Not even him.”



*Correction, April 6, 2009: Three per cent of the general population had difficulties with “irrational anger,” not three per cent of prisoners in the general population, as originally stated.

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