7 Fortune 500 companies with the most employees

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http://ift.tt/1feXzWj

on the main Kersplebedeb website: http://ift.tt/1G04SaR

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Michael Novick Responds to Kali Akuno and Don Hamerquist

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Just a quick heads up that Michael Novick has written a brief response to Don Hamerquist's Thinking and Acting in Real Time in the Real World. It is up on the excellent Three Way Fight blog, at http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2010/03/michael-novick-responds-to-thinking-and.html

Just to recap, Michael is the editor of Turning The Tide, publication of People Against Racist Terror. The pieces he is responding to were both recommended by yours truly last year:

• Navigating the Storm: A Strategic Orientation for Confronting the Advance of Reaction and National Oppression in the "Obama" Era by Kali Akuno of the Malcolm X Grossroots Movement. This text, written in October and drawing on observations by Mike Davis, deals heavily with the Obama presidency that was being prepared for at that time. i have reservations (again) with the programmatic aspects Akuno suggests, but the text is worth reading as it helps to frame some of the subsequent discussion:
• Navigating the Storm: Reprise, also by Kali Akuno. A useful reappraisal of his initial Navigating the Storm piece, again with a focus on the Obama presidency and class dynamics within the united states that may make it less useful for those of us outside of the u.s.- nevertheless, definitely worth reading.
• Thinking and Acting in Real Time and A Real World by Don Hammerquist. An excellent survey of the field before us, Hammerquist discusses Akuno's Navigating the Storm piece and also texts by the Midnight Notes collective and Adam Hanieh of Left Turn magazine.

 All worth checking out...

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Genocide Here and There: Harvard Fellow calls for international community to starve Palestinian children

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Via Electronic Intifada, this news that Martin Kramer of Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs is calling for genocide of Palestinians as a solution to imperialism's hiccups in the Middle East.

Of course this kind of thinking is neither new, nor limited to the Middle East, nor in fact is it even escapable under imperialism. In other words, population control (either pro- or anti-natalist) is just something that folks in power do, whether they make the mistake of talking about it in the media or not. Check out recent comments by Republican Andre Bauer, South Carolina's Lieutenant Governor:

My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed.

You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.

As James Ridgeway tells us,

South Carolina is the 37th worst state when it come to child poverty, 45th worst for infant mortality, and 48th worst for low birth weight babies.

Lest you not have guessed, this of course comes with a clear national dimension: according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 126,000 poor children in South Carolina - over half - are Black. (According to their lying censuses, less than a third of the SC population is Black.)

South Carolina, no less than Israel, is home to both oppressor and oppressed nations.

Here's that Electronic Intifada article:

A fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Martin Kramer, has called for "the West" to take measures to curb the births of Palestinians, a proposal that appears to meet the international legal definition of a call for genocide.

Kramer, who is also a fellow at the influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), made the call early this month in a speech at Israel's Herzliya conference, a video of which is posted on his blog ("Superfluous young men," 7 February 2010).

In the speech Kramer rejected common views that Islamist "radicalization" is caused by US policies such as support for Israel, or propping up despotic dictatorships, and stated that it was inherent in the demography of Muslim societies such as Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Too many children, he argued, leads to too many "superfluous young men" who then become violent radicals.

Kramer proposed that the number of Palestinian children born in the Gaza Strip should be deliberately curbed, and alleged that this would "happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies to Palestinians with refugee status."

Due to the Israeli blockade, the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are now dependent on UN food aid. Neither the UN, nor any other agencies, provide Palestinians with specifically "pro-natal subsidies." Kramer appeared to be equating any humanitarian assistance at all with inducement for Palestinians to reproduce.

He added, "Israel's present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim -- undermine the Hamas regime -- but if they also break Gaza's runaway population growth, and there is some evidence that they have, that might begin to crack the culture of martyrdom which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men." This, he claimed, would be treating the issue of Islamic radicalization "at its root."

The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, created in the wake of the Nazi holocaust, defines genocide to include measures "intended to prevent births within" a specific "national, ethnic, racial or religious group."

The Weatherhead Center at Harvard describes itself as "the largest international research center within Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences." In addition to his positions at Harvard and WINEP, Kramer is "president-designate" of Shalem College in Jerusalem, a far-right Zionist institution that aspires to be the "College of the Jewish People."

Pro-Israel speakers from the United States often participate in the the Herzliya conference, an influential annual gathering of Israel's political and military establishment. This year's conference was also addressed by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and, in a first for a Palestinian official, by Salam Fayyad, appointed prime minister of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.

Kramer's call to prevent Palestinian births reflects a long-standing Israeli and Zionist concern about a so-called "demographic threat" to Israel, as Palestinians are on the verge of outnumbering Israeli Jews within Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories combined.

Such extreme racist views have been aired at the Herzliya conference in the past. In 2003, for example, Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, an Israeli government armaments expert, called on Israel to "implement a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population," a reference to the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.

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Words to the Misguided

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A nice appeal to those who find themselves attracted to the patriot movement, care of Phoenix Class War Council:

As it now stands, much of the patriot movement demands not an end to fascism, but an exemption from the fascism that it demands for others.

To read the whole post, click here.

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Armed Struggle, the RAF, and Projectiles for the People: An Interview with Andre Moncourt and J. Smith

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Gabriel Kuhn has interviewed André Moncourt and J. Smith, the editors of Projectiles for the People, about their book, the RAF, and armed struggle. The complete interview is reposted here and also on the german guerilla website. A slightly abbreviated German version of this interview will appear in the German journal Arranca!, No. 41, December 2009. A Swedish version is up on the activist website Motkraft.

1) The amount of work that has gone into this project must have been enormous. What motivated you to do this?

André: Several things, really. For myself, no small part was the fact that I lived in Germany for various periods of time during the 80s, and as a result developed friendships and working relationships with people in both anti-imp and autonomist circles, giving me access to documentation and to a variety of points of view. The North American left has always had a keen interest in German far left politics, reflected by the overwhelming amount of space devoted to the RAF, the RZ and Rote Zora in the two magazines dedicated to urban guerrilla politics that were published in Canada from the early1980s to the mid-90s, Resistance and Arm the Spirit. Armed with my originally quite rudimentary German and a big ass dictionary, I became one of the translators for both of those projects, producing some fairly low quality translations of RAF texts, a number of which, for better or worse, have found their way onto the excellent website Ronald Augustin maintains. When the idea of collecting the texts into a book arose, it became obvious that the translations needed to be seriously reviewed and reworked, and as I was responsible for many of the problems existing in the original translations, the task of fixing them logically fell to me. There is much about the RAF that makes it unique and much that makes it archetypical of the western guerrilla in the First World during the Cold War, and both of these aspects provide lessons best learned by firsthand experience with the RAF’s unparalleled written output.

J. Smith: Initially i expected my contribution to this project to be quite minor: looking over some translations and writing some brief introductory texts to help contextualize them – i had hopes of perhaps finding some movement history of Germany and summarizing the key facts. But as i soon discovered, no such movement history existed (at least in English), and so in order to properly explain the RAF, we had to do the research ourselves.

We really had no choice, because the RAF’s story is so deeply enmeshed in the history of the West German revolutionary left, and its own intellectual output is so thick with references to the politics of its time and location, and also to the ongoing communist project, that to give the group and its ideas the respect they deserve requires a through explanation of what was going on at the time.

In retrospect i suspect that when not due to outright bad faith, many of the slanders directed at the RAF from the left – that the guerillas were “crazy” or “rigid” or “authoritarian”, or that their texts simply “do not make sense” – may stem from an ignorance of their political and intellectual context. The RAF’s project was based on positions that had emerged from the New Left, not only in West Germany but internationally. Their strategy was likewise predicated on the existence of a revolutionary left and international circumstances that no longer exist in anything like the same form. If one fails to grasp this, then their actions and ideas certainly must seem incomprehensible.

2) André, you mentioned that the North American left has always had a keen interest in German far left politics. Can you name the reasons for this?

André: Some of the reasons are, I think ideological, and some are practical. Broadly speaking, one can divide armed struggle in the First World during the period to which we are referring to into four tendencies: national liberation struggles, such the IRA or the ETA; struggles against fascist or extremely authoritarian regimes, such as those waged by the PCE(r)/GRAPO or FP25; working class based struggles, such as the BR; anti-imperialist or social revolutionary armed actions within the metropole, such as those carried out respectively by the RAF and the RZ in Germany.

In Canada, outside of Québec (and, unfortunately, space doesn’t permit us to discuss the relatively complex national liberation politics of Québec, or its armed expression in the 60s, the Front de liberation du Québec), the first three forms of struggle had limited resonance. National liberation outside of Québec had no application, and was often perceived negatively, even on the left. Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s Liberal government, which ruled the country from 1968 until 1984, with the exception of one brief 10-month period, was in fact, in bourgeois terms, and extremely liberal government, particularly with regards to individual rights. While there was a large unionized and fairly militant working class in Canada in those years, left-wing political activity in that milieu was restricted to what Germans would call K-group activity, while the unions supported the New Democratic Party, Canada’s social democratic party.

The far left in Canada at the time was, as was the case in West Germany, rooted in the countercultural New Left. As such, the kind of activity that the West German guerrilla groups engaged in caught the attention of Canadian activists in a way that BR actions, for example, didn’t. Although the book we are discussing is about the RAF, it was not the RAF that drew the greatest attention – ill-informed Canadian activists often wrote the RAF off as Stalinists with guns. It was the Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora that intrigued Canadian activists the most. The decentralized structure, the often low-level nature of the actions and the populist rhetoric resonated with many young Canadian activists, most of whom fell somewhere on a spectrum running from countercultural anarchism to non-Leninist Marxists, like myself, at the time. We all considered ourselves part of a broad “anti-authoritarian” movement. Rote Zora added a quality of militant feminism to the mix that not only broadened the nature of the debate that existed at the time, but also helped bridge some gaps that otherwise would, I believe, have posed greater difficulties.

This element was practically reinforced by the fact that a number of young Canadian activists lived in Germany for extended periods of time in the late 70s and 80s, developing personal, as well as political, ties with their German counterparts in the anti-imp and autonomist movements, facilitating the flow of information.

3) Last year, Germany witnessed numerous events commemorating the "Deutsche Herbst 1977." Most of the events were of dubious political nature. Is it mere coincidence that your volume appears now or did the 30-year commemorations have anything to do with this?

André: We first started talking about doing this book in 2004, and at the time, we were only thinking of one volume. I certainly didn’t see it growing into the four-year project it did. I’m not sure that had I known what I was getting into, I would have done so. First, as a result primarily of the excellent ID-Verlag book Rote Armee Fraktion:Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF(www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/...RAF/RAF/raf-texte+materialien.PDF) and the International Association of Labour History Institutions’ website devoted to the RAF, on which former RAF member Ronald Augustin works (http://labourhistory.net/raf/), it soon became clear that many more documents than had previously been translated existed. Short introductions that I had prepared for the various sections of the book were also clearly inadequate, so J. set about researching and expanding upon these sections. The end result was a history of the RAF that could have stood as a short book in its own right. It is this work that turns the book from a collection of interesting documents into a compelling history that lets the reader see each of these documents in its historical context, something that is of course absolutely vital to really understanding them. If anything, the 30th anniversary of the “Deutschen Herbst” was useful to us because of the information we could draw from various newspaper and magazine articles published at the time, particularly interviews with former RAF members.

4) I think there exists a general scepticism among German-speaking radicals when it comes to outside analyses of "their" history. At the same time, outside perspectives can often prove very enlightening. What can be learned from the RAF experience, in your opinion?

André: As is the case with any such organization, there are both positive and negative lessons. The two years between the RAF’s formation and its 1972 May Offensive spent constructing its infrastructure and clarifying its ideological basis allowed it to survive the decimation of the organization and the arrest of its core leadership following that offensive. This painstaking work laid the basis that would allow the organization to reconstruct itself from the base up at least 4 times during its 30-year history. The RAF prisoners showed people how, even in isolation, trial statements and hunger strikes could be used as survival mechanisms and organizing tools. And, of course, the RAF proved that a small group of organized and committed individuals could deal substantial blows to the state apparatus and its personnel.

On the downside, the RAF’s decision to go completely underground, as opposed to the modus operandi of the RZ’s domestic wing, for example, left the organization isolated and cut off from the day-to-day developments in society and on the militant left, leading to a certain disconnect that could take the organization down the wrong road – the Pimental killing, which we will examine in Volume 2, is perhaps the most obvious example. The RAF’s decision from the 1972 arrests until the “Deutschen Herbst” to orient its rhetoric around a more-or-less traditional anti-imperialist line, while orienting all of its actions at gaining the release of the prisoners, is understandable, but arguably an error.

J Smith: Throughout the imperialist west, the 1970s saw the emergence of different armed organizations on the left. In the United States, there are still dozens of men and women behind bars for the parts they played in this experiment. But the rhyme and reason behind the different guerilla groups, not to mention their eventual trajectories, varied not only within each country, but also certainly between countries. Learning about how things played out in a different society, where comrades faced different challenges and opted for different paths, helps reveal what was exceptional and what was perhaps unavoidable here.

Which is a fairly vague way of saying that the RAF’s story, while certainly unique, can be helpful in thinking about the history of revolutionary struggle in other countries, too. Not only in the obvious ways – the parallels between the psychological warfare the movement faced in the FRG and the COINTELPRO dirty tricks in the United States, or the development of isolation-torture on both sides of the Atlantic – but also in terms of the issues grappled with: how a small armed group can intervene in struggles, how it can relate to the aboveground left, the challenges of operating in a society where much of the proletariat has become a labor aristocracy, adopting the ideology of the petit bourgeoisie… these realities have never been specific to any one imperialist society. So we can certainly learn a lot from how our comrades in different countries have dealt with these questions.

5) Is it possible to draw any parallels to armed resistance in North America in the 1970s and 80s?

André: Between the armed resistance on the white left in the US and that in West Germany, certainly. In both cases the armed organizations were based in the youth revolt, the student movement in particular. In both cases, murderous attacks by the state’s military apparatus spurred the movement forward, the Ohnesorg shooting in West Germany and the Kent State and Jackson State shootings in the US. And, of course, in both cases, resistance to US aggression in Vietnam was the fundamental unifying factor at the outset. Likewise, in the 80s there was resurgence of militant armed resistance in both countries around a more diffuse anti-imperialism, addressing developments in the Middle East, Central and South America and Southern Africa.

J Smith: The revolutionary movement in North America was marked by national divisions, between oppressed and oppressor nations that exist within the same countries, and this was obviously not the case in West Germany. While the RAF was oriented around traditional anti-imperialist struggles, their relationship to concrete Third World struggles was really limited to training they received in various Palestinian camps in the 1970s. Their opposition was to imperialism-as-a-system, and their base was clearly in their own society. Questions of how to relate to organizations based in the oppressed nations, and what they needed to do in order to remain accountable to the masses of people who suffer under imperialism – questions that seriously challenged many white armed organizations in North America in the 1970s – seem to have been dealt with on a more abstract level in West Germany. This is not really surprising given that there is no basis for national liberation movements from within the borders of Germany, i.e. no internal colonies or oppressed internal nations.

Because of this, when one compares the RAF to North American groups, for instance the Weather Underground, one can be blinded by the glaring differences of scale and intensity, and (depending on your political sympathies) the RAF either appear as fanatical killers, or else Weather ends up looking like some half-assed bunch of hippy dilettantes. Neither judgment is really fair, though. The young people who first formed the RAF had grown up in a post-fascist society, the teachers and cops and judges and even their parents were often tainted by their personal collusion in the Holocaust, and so for them there was a greater appreciation of what the stakes of struggle might be than one might expect to find amongst most middle class white Americans.

So one ends up with the curious situation that in terms of their seriousness and the means they were willing to use, the West German comrades seem to have much more in common with a group like the Black Liberation Army – i.e. a group based in an oppressed nation – than with a group like Weather, despite the fact that Weather (like the RAF) were facing the challenge of being based in an oppressor nation..

6) Not everyone in the German-speaking world is familiar with the Weather Underground and its tactics. Could you give us a very brief overview of the group and explain why it might look like "half-assed bunch of hippy dilettantes" compared to the RAF?

J. Smith: Weatherman was a faction that took control of the broad-based Students for a Democratic Society – the SDS, the main U.S. antiwar organization – in 1969, and as such pretty much precipitated the SDS’s falling apart. Their founding statement, from which they took their name, was cribbed from a Bob Dylan song: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Based in the student and hippy counterculture of the day, Weather sought to form a white counterpart to revolutionary groups based in the oppressed nations, such as the Black Panther Party. Becoming the Weather Underground Organization, the group established a clandestine mode of existence, and began carrying out armed attacks.

Very early on, though, some comrades putting together bombs intended to be used against a U.S. military dance crossed their wires and ended up blowing themselves up. The trauma of having several members die in such circumstances, while preparing an action that many in the WUO were clearly not comfortable with, led to Weather rejecting “militarism,” meaning attacks against individuals. All would now be limited to attacks causing property damage.

In retrospect, this retreat from “militarism” appears to be a real retreat from political responsibility. The state was not de-escalating, Black and Indigenous comrades were being gunned down on streets across the country, but these self-styled leaders of white youth felt they should reign themselves in, concentrating on purely symbolic bombings and that’s all.

It would be unfair to discount Weather, or write them off as unimportant or uncommitted. Given the incredibly corrupt and privileged society from which these young white communists emerged, their attempt to push things to the next level was certainly laudable. But within the mythology of the sixties, it has been exaggerated. Not hundreds, but thousands of armed political actions were carried out in those years, only a small minority of those by Weather. Within a few years of going under, the leadership was organizing to emerge, to seek amnesty, to become a legal left-wing force – and very quickly thereafter the entire organization was consumed in internecine feuding and factional splits.

7) Books about this have been published in English, most notably "Bringing the War Home" by Jeremy Varon. What do you make of his analysis?

J. Smith: Varon’s book is a very interesting meditation on the morality of political violence, from a liberal progressive point of view. Unfortunately, not only did he do no real original research on the RAF, relying almost solely on the work of Stefan Aust for his facts, but he also managed to let a number of errors slip in. Most are fairly minor – for instance dates or names – but in at least one case, when dealing with the way in which during the 1980s Peter-Jürgen Boock denied responsibility for the part he played in the actions of 1977, Varon does not even realize that Boock was no longer a member of the RAF but rather a state asset at the time! So he concludes that with this state asset’s lies “the RAF reached a new ethical low”, which is really turning things on their head…

But more seriously, Varon’s exploration of the question of political violence is marred by the way in which he excludes the violence of imperialism from his analysis. He judges the guerillas’ violence in terms of the realities existing within West Germany and the United States, comparing it to the State’s counter-measures, but nowhere does he factor in the incredible violence that was (and is!) being done by countries like the United States and Germany around the world. This leads to bizarre assertions, for instance that the U.S. servicemen killed during the RAF’s 1972 May Offensive bore no direct responsibility for U.S. aggression in Vietnam. While Varon is incisive about the “politics of location” – the way in which one’s own personal place in society can distort one’s views of what is happening – he concludes that the emergence of a violent underground was simply the result of activists’ “isolation”, whereas i would argue that the really egregious isolation is that which allowed more privileged activists to ignore the situation of the most oppressed, and thus allowed them to justify to themselves their decision to work “constructively”, within the system.

This bias, one might call it an imperialist bias, leads Varon to present the RAF as a foil to Weather: again and again he points to the former as a case of good people having embarked on an immoral path, while Weather is applauded for their early decision to de-escalate and to pressure other armed groupings to engage in only non-lethal forms of violence. We are left to imagine that without this “ethical” turn, Weather would have ended up “as bad as” the RAF.

8) So far, Tom Vague's "Televisionaries: The Red Army Faction Story" has been the only book in English exclusively dedicated to the RAF. What are your thoughts on this work?

J. Smith: Actually, Vague’s Televisionaries is not the only such book in English– Stefan Aust’s The Baader-Meinhof group: the inside story of a phenomenon, first released in English in 1987, and then re-released again last year, has been the standard “serious” reference work about the RAF until now. Also worth mentioning, Jillian Becker’s 1977 book Hitler’s Children, a counter-insurgency work dripping with right-wing bias and bitterness, remains seen by many as a valid piece of “real crime” reporting. While both these books have a bad rep amongst those who are sympathetic to the guerilla experience, and both are certainly biased against the RAF, they deserve to be mentioned simply because they are the main sources of information that everyone else has drawn on when discussing the RAF.

Indeed, Vague’s book – a very accessible and at-times humorous piece of writing, which originally appeared as a series of articles in the fanzine he produced in the 1980s – draws almost exclusively on Aust’s work for its information. And i should mention that we too, in our book, have relied on Aust for many details, though less heavily and i think with more caution than most others.

9) Your volumes are called a "Documentary History." Is documenting history their only purpose, or do you hope to stimulate debate about armed resistance today? What are the current perspectives of armed struggle in the metropolis?

André: Certainly, if there is to be a debate about armed resistance in the metropole at this juncture, the experience of the RAF is one that warrants examination. It is my personal perspective, however, that there are two essential factors that must be in place before armed resistance can be seriously considered: there must be a mass movement in which the armed activity can have some meaningful resonance, and there must be some clear objective served by this armed activity in the context of such a movement. I think that there’s a lot of movement-building and theoretical work needed before any practical consideration of armed resistance would make sense.

J Smith: The books are documentary histories in that they are primarily a collection of documents, writings by the RAF guerillas themselves. For myself, an important goal in publishing these documents is to simply allow comrades to understand who these people were, these comrades who certainly belong to our tradition (the revolutionary left), but who not only acted but also thought in terms very different from those that most leftists today would ever consider.

As for armed resistance, it will happen, whether one approves of it or not, and it will happen regardless of whether people know about the RAF or other past experiments in that direction. But i think that much can be gained from studying previous efforts, that perhaps some errors may be avoided, or at least mitigated. Here in North America, there has been an unfortunate tendency amongst those of us who are sympathetic to the idea of armed politics, and that is to not discuss the errors that were made by comrades operating on that terrain in the past. Blaming every defeat on the State and COINTELPRO really does a disservice to the revs of tomorrow, and is also pretty patronizing towards those who did put their lives and freedom on the line during the past wave of struggle. One of the advantages of looking at an armed organization in another society is that it allows us to examine some of the physics peculiar to this form of struggle in a more impartial light, without the ego and defensiveness that can often mark such conversations closer to home.

10) Why are you so sure that armed resistance will happen? Do you think this is true for North America as well? Is there a big difference between the situation in Canada and the one in the US?

J. Smith: What i suppose you are asking about is left-wing armed resistance – after all, since 2001 the world political scene has been focussed on the effects and potentials of armed struggle from other quarters. But from the left, we have only sporadic efforts – i.e. what is happening in Greece at the moment – but nothing of the scale or ambition of what occurred during the last cycle of struggle. Even when France was burning in 2005, there was no group able to back up their public statements of solidarity with that kind of action – and that was unfortunate.

History may not repeat itself, so seeing the exact same kinds of groups as the RAF re-emerge is unlikely. But the key contradiction remains – a system which condemns billions around the world to live one kind of life, full of misery, danger, and material want – while elevating a small minority to positions of comfort and wealth unheralded in human history. The contrast between “what could be” and “what is” just keeps on growing, and it galls.

Certainly, this contradiction cries out for change. Eventually – hopefully sooner rather than later – revolutionary movements will emerge as an answer to this cry. And some people will be frustrated by the limitations of those movements, so they will engage in covert, illegal, and violent acts. One does not have to go out on a limb to say this – it’s not that i am trying to be teleological, it’s just that capitalism is going to oblige and stick around until something gets rid of it, and i don’t see any other contenders.

Now this is not to say that armed struggle will always be the most appropriate or correct strategy. i think it will emerge regardless. But i must also say that i can imagine many situations in which it would be correct, where it would advance the struggle and be a healthy thing for our movements. When comrades are deported to countries where their lives are in danger, do circumstances not cry out for some kind of retaliation? When police attack picket lines, and workers are abandoned by the trade unions, doesn’t that put sabotage on the agenda? When women find the state unwilling and unable to reign in the male violence it engenders, doesn’t that beg certain questions that legality and non-violence cannot answer?

These are general observations, not limited to any one country.

If you are asking about specific initiatives in the United States and Canada, for years there has been nothing from the left but sporadic, one-off, non-violent symbolic attacks. More telling still, these attacks have not been carried out by organizations, but by ad hoc groups, or else by individuals operating under the aegis of some broad symbolic name. The Earth Liberation Front attacks of the 1990s, which led to the Green Scare arrests of the past years, are probably the best example of this. Or here in Montreal last year, some people torched a bunch of police cars. Good initiatives, but essentially non-violent, symbolic, and not necessitating any kind of clandestine structures – and without clandestine structures, there is only so much you can do.

Here in Canada things are more advanced in the Indigenous nations, where a tradition of armed resistance continues, and shows itself every couple of years in the latest confrontation with the state. But this is not at all the same thing as urban guerilla warfare, it is more along the lines of community self-defense, the establishment of no-go areas, etc., and often serves primarily as a bargaining chip to keep the state’s violence in check.

11) You are also planning volumes on the Second of June Movement and the Revolutionary Cells. How do you see these movements in comparison to the RAF? Why did you choose to work on the three groups in this order?

André: In these three armed groups and Rote Zora, which we will also deal with, you find the entire spectrum of New Left politics represented: the 2JM representing countercultural anarchism, the RZ and Rote Zora representing the autonomist impulse, with Rote Zora bringing a feminist subtlety to the table, and the RAF falling closest to an anti-Stalinist Marxist-Leninism. The order isn’t terribly important, but as it is, we will be dealing with the groups in the order they arose historically.

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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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J. Sakai: Notes Toward an Understanding of Capitalist Crisis & Theory

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J. Sakai has contributed a text looking at Marx's thought in light of the current economic crisis, asking some tentative questions of what it all might mean in terms of strategy, and things to come.

You can check it out on the Kersplebedeb site: Notes Toward an Understanding of Capitalist Crisis & Theory.

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Wednesday: Use Your Phone to Support Jalil and Herman!

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The following from the kind folks at the Anarchist Black Cross Federation:

WEDNESDAY is Phone for Parole Day for Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim!


Call NY Governor David A. Paterson between 9AM and 1pm Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday November 5th.

518-474-8390

Urge him to sign the amended Executive agreements which will allow NY inmates Herman Bell (#2318931) and Jalil Muntaqim (s/n Anthony Bottom/ #2311826) to return to New York State to attend their rightful parole hearings. We're calling him every Wednesday morning of '08 until he signs off on the transfer.

On November 4th, people across the US will be in the poll booths choosing between state leaders. On Wednesday the 5th, take the opportunity to call on some officials to give a couple of freedom fighters, men who struggle for visions bigger than Obama's or McCain's, a chance to attend a parole hearing.

The transfer of SF8 defendants Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim from the San Francisco County Jail back to New York State for their rightful parole hearings has been blocked by both state governors for weeks and NYS now wants to deny this right for good. This comes despite previous agreements in the courtroom between the California State prosecutors, the presiding judge and, of course, the brothers and their attorneys.

Judge Philip Moscone signed an order in May allowing Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim to return to New York State for their parole hearings. All parties agreed at that time that the move would be temporary; Herman and Jalil waived their rights to fight extradition back to California. This vindictive and mean-spirited procedural obstacle was immediately challenged by defense attorneys. Strong arguments were made to guarantee Herman and Jalil's right to "pursue their liberty interests" and have parole hearings. Both have served over 35 years in prison as model prisoners. Both were targeted originally by COINTELPRO as members of the Black Panther Party.

New York Attorney Bob Boyle argued in a declaration to the San Francisco Court that if the men remain in California, "they would be denied their parole hearing for years." In a subsequent interview, he also said: The state waited 35 years to bring these spurious criminal charges. Now these charges are being used to deny these men parole hearings to which they are entitled. Whatever concerns the government has can be overcome by a simple modification of the extradition order. All Herman and Jalil are asking for is an opportunity to attend their hearings.

In Solidarity,
THE ANARCHIST BLACK CROSS FEDERATION
ABCF.net
contact- nycabc[at]riseup[dot]net


Background. . . .

Free the San Francisco Eight!
freethesf8.org

Eight former Black community activists - Black Panthers and others - were arrested January 23rd in California, New York and Florida on charges related to the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. Similar charges were thrown out after it was revealed that police used torture to extract confessions when some of these same men were arrested in New Orleans in 1973.

Richard Brown, Richard O'Neal, Ray Boudreaux, and Hank Jones were arrested in California. Francisco Torres was arrested in Queens, New York. Harold Taylor was arrested in Florida. Two men charged - Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim - have been held as political prisoners for over 30 years in New York State prisons. A ninth man -- Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth - is still being sought. The men were charged with the murder of Sgt. John Young and conspiracy that encompasses numerous acts between 1968 and 1973.

Harold Taylor and John Bowman (recently deceased) as well as Ruben Scott (thought to be a government witness) were first charged in 1975. But a judge tossed out the charges, finding that Taylor and his two co-defendants made statements after police in New Orleans tortured them for several days employing electric shock, cattle prods, beatings, sensory deprivation, plastic bags and hot, wet blankets for asphyxiation. Such "evidence" is neither credible nor legal.

Herman Bell, 59, of Mississippi, a political prisoner since 1973. Cointelpro's "pattern of manipulation and lies, continuing into the present, indicates something more than the ordinary corruption and racism of everyday law enforcement. It can be understood only in terms of the power of the political movement that [we] were part of, and the intensity of the government's efforts to destroy that movement and to disillusion and intimidate future generations of young activists." Write to him - 2318931, 850 Bryant Street, San Francisco CA 94103.

Jalil Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom), 55, of San Francisco, a political prisoner in New York since 1978. "The United States does not recognize the existence of political prisoners. To do so would give credence to the fact of the level of repression and oppression, and have to recognize the fact that people resist racist oppression in the United States, and therefore, legitimize the existence of not only the individuals who are incarcerated or have been captured, but also legitimize those movements of which they are a part." Write to him - 2311826, 850 Bryant Street, San Francisco CA 94103.

More on the New York 3 (Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim) at http://www.abcf.net/prisoners/ny3.htm

You can also read more about the New York 3 case on the Kersplebedeb website here.

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Prisoners of New Orleans need your help now (Hurricane Gustav)!

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The following from Critical Resistance:

To All CR members, Allies, and Comrades of New Orleans,

Prisoners and Families of New Orleans needs your help immediately!
If you haven't heard already Hurricane Gustav is headed for New Orleans
and is predicted to be a category 3 hurricane, the same as Hurricane Katrina. There will possibly be a mandate for all people (outside of prisons and jails) of New Orleans to evacuate starting tomorrow August 29th, the three year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It is predicted that hurricane Gustav will pose great flooding potential regardless of its category rating, the levee that broke by elected official's decisions during Hurricane Katrina has not been fixed to it's potential, or replaced.

The over crowding Orleans Parish Prison, located in New Orleans, holds 2, 500 prisoners (this count is not certain, due to lack of information given to the public.) Although not official, we have information that the Prisoners of Orleans Parish Prison will be evacuating to Angola Prison and Hunt Prison in the next coming days and are also prisons that can be affected by Hurricane Gustav due to overcrowding.

During Hurricane Katrina there were prisoners able to evacuate and others who remained locked in their cells with a minimal chance of survival. Prisoners were left in flooded cells, with no food, and had minimal ventilation, to say the least. Family members, of prisoners who were held at Orleans Parish Prison, are still in the fight to locate their loved ones who had been evacuated to other prisons during Katrina. Due to the flooding, lack of organization and care from New Orleans Department of Corrections and elected officials, prisoner's records were also missing. As a result, prisoner's constitutional rights have been violated.
This abuse can not happen again!

What will happen to the prisoners of Orleans Parish Prison located in New Orleans this time?

Critical Resistance (CR) is demanding that the elected officials of New Orleans will not create the same devastating wrongs as they did to the prisoners of Orleans Parish Prison during hurricane Katrina.

1. we demand a full and safe evacuation of all prisoners
2. we demand to know what the evacuation plan for prisoners is
3. we demand to see a public document about that plan immediately
4. we demand information about how we can find people after an evacuation

We are urging every member, ally and comrade of New Orleans across the country, to make atleast one call to:

Sheriff Malrin Gusman: 504.827.8505
(James Carter's secretary said "Orleans Parish Prison is Gusman's prison")
James Carter: 504.658.1030
(Criminal Justice Council Member who is able to put pressure on the sheriff even if they say they can't)
You can also send an email: JCarter@cityofno.com
please put in your email subject: How will you protect prisoners this time?

Please call as many times as you can to put pressure on them and let them know our demands and it is their job to be accountable to us!!!!!!!!

For further information from us please contact Critical Resistance New Orleans:
Mayaba: 917.385.5472 or mayaba@criticalresistance.org
Koolblack: 504.813.4714 or koolblack@criticalresistance.org

(If you can't get through due to evacuation please contact: pilar@criticalresistance.org for further information)

In solidarity,
Critical Resistance

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