by Chris Hedges
“Neo-slavery
is an integral part of the prison industrial complex.”
Lutalo, once a member of the Black
Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986
while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State
Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary
confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management
control unit, which he called “a prison within a prison.”
“The guards in riot gear would suddenly
wake you up at 1 a.m., force you to strip and make you grab all your things and
move you to another cell just to harass you,” he said when we spoke in Newark.
“They had attack dogs with them that were
trained to go for your genitals. You spent 24 hours alone one day in your cell
and 22 the next. If you do not have a strong sense of purpose you don’t survive
psychologically. Isolation is designed to defeat prisoners mentally, and I saw
a lot of prisoners defeated.”
Lutalo’s letter was Kerness’ first
indication that the U.S. prison system was creating something new – special
detention facilities that under international law are a form of torture. He
wrote to her: “How does one go about articulating desperation to another who is
not desperate? How does one go about articulating the psychological stress of
knowing that people are waiting for me to self-destruct?”
So the intelligence agency turned to the
more effective mechanisms of “sensory disorientation” and “self-inflicted
pain,” McCoy noted. [One example of causing self-inflicted pain is to force a
prisoner to stand without moving or to hold some other stressful bodily
position for a long period.] The combination, government psychologists argued,
would cause victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and accelerate
psychological disintegration.
Sensory disorientation combines extreme
sensory overload with extreme sensory deprivation.
Prolonged isolation is followed by
intense interrogation.
Extreme heat is followed by extreme
cold. Glaring light is followed by total darkness. Loud and sustained noise is followed by silence.
“The fusion of these two techniques,
sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, creates a synergy of physical
and psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the existential
platforms of personal identity,” McCoy wrote.
After hearing from Lutalo, Kerness
became a fierce advocate for him and other prisoners held in isolation units.
She published through her office a survivor’s manual for those held in isolation as well as a booklet titled “Torture in United States Prisons.” And she began to collect
the stories of prisoners held in isolation.
“My food trays have been sprayed with
mace or cleaning agents, … human feces and urine put into them by guards who
deliver trays to my breakfast, lunch, and dinner… ,” a prisoner in isolation in
the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility at Carlisle, Indiana, was quoted as
saying in “Torture in United States Prisons.”
"I ave witnessed sane men of character
become self-mutilators, suffer paranoia, panic attacks, hostile fantasies about
revenge.
One prisoner would swallow packs of AA
batteries, and stick a pencil in his penis. They would cut on themselves to
gain contact with staff nurses or just to draw attention to themselves. These
men made slinging human feces ‘body waste’ daily like it was a recognized
sport. Some would eat it or rub it all over themselves as if it was body
lotion. ... Prisoncrats use a form of restraint, a bed crafted to strap men in
four point Velcro straps.
Both hands to the wrist and both feet to
the ankles and secured. Prisoners have been kept like this for 3-6 hours at a
time.
Most times they would remove all their
clothes. The Special Confinement Unit used [water hoses] on these men also. ...
When prisons become overcrowded, prisoncrats will do forced double bunking.
Over-crowding issues present an
assortment of problems many of which results in violence. ... Prisoncrats will
purposely house a ‘sex offender’ in a cell with prisoners with sole intentions
of having him beaten up or even killed.”
In 1913 Eastern State Penitentiary, in
Philadelphia, discontinued its isolation cages.
Trenton State Prison established a
management control unit, or isolation unit, in 1975 for political prisoners,
mostly black radicals such as Lutalo whom the state wanted to segregate from
the wider prison population.
Those held in the isolation unit were
rarely there because they had violated prison rules; they were there because of
their revolutionary beliefs – beliefs the prison authorities feared might
resonate with other prisoners.
In 1983 the federal prison in Marion,
Illinois, instituted a permanent lockdown, creating, in essence, a prisonwide
“control unit.”
By 1994 the Federal Bureau of Prisons,
using the Marion model, built its maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo.
The use of prolonged isolation and
sensory deprivation exploded. “Special housing units” were formed for the
mentally ill.
“Security threat group management units”
were formed for those accused of gang activity. “Communications management
units” were formed to isolate Muslims labeled as terrorists. Voluntary and
involuntary protective custody units were formed. Administrative segregation
punishment units were formed to isolate prisoners said to be psychologically troubled.
All were established in open violation of the United Nations Convention Against
Torture, the U.N.’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and
the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination.
Kerness calls it “the war at home.” And
she says it is only the latest variation of the long assault on the poor,
especially people of color.
“There are no former Jim Crow systems,”
Kerness said. “The transition from slavery to Black Codes to convict leasing to the Jim Crow laws to the wars on
poverty, veterans, youth and political activism in the 1960s has been a
seamless evolution of political and social incapacitation of poor people of
color. The sophisticated fascism of the practices of stop and frisk, charging
people in inner cities with ‘wandering,’ driving and walking while black, ZIP
code racism—these and many other de facto practices all serve to keep our
prisons full.
In a system where 60 percent of those
who are imprisoned are people of color, where students of color face harsher
punishments in school than their white peers, where 58 percent of African [American] youth … are sent to adult prisons, where women
of color are 69 percent more likely to be imprisoned and where offenders of
color receive longer sentences, the concept of colorblindness doesn’t exist.
The racism around me is palpable.”
“The 1960s, when the last of the Jim
Crow laws were reversed, this whole new set of practices accepted by law
enforcement was designed to continue to feed the money-generating prison
system, which has neo-slavery at its core,” she said.
“Until we deeply recognize that the
system’s bottom line is social control and creating a business from bodies of
color and the poor, nothing can change.”
She noted that more than half of those
in the prison system have never physically harmed another person but that “just
about all of these people have been harmed themselves.” And not only does the
criminal justice sweep up the poor and people of color, but slavery within the
prison system is permitted by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,
which reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment
for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within
the United States. …”This, Kerness said, “is at the core how the labor of slaves was transformed into what people in prison call neo-slavery.” Neo-slavery is an integral part of the prison industrial complex, in which hundreds of thousands of the nation’s prisoners, primarily people of color, are forced to work at involuntary labor for a dollar or less an hour. “If you call the New Jersey Bureau of Tourism you are most likely talking to a prisoner at the Edna Mahan Correctional Institution for Women who is earning 23 cents an hour who has no ability to negotiate working hours or working conditions,” she said.
The bodies of poor, unemployed youths
are worth little on the streets but become valuable commodities once they are
behind bars.
“People have said to me that the
criminal justice system doesn’t work,” Kerness said. “I’ve come to believe
exactly the opposite – that it works perfectly, just as slavery did, as a
matter of economic and political policy.
How is it that a 15-year-old in Newark who the country labels worthless to the economy, who has no hope of getting a job or affording college, can suddenly generate 20,000 to 30,000 dollars a year once trapped in the criminal justice system?
The expansion of prisons, parole,
probation, the court and police systems has resulted in an enormous bureaucracy
which has been a boon to everyone from architects to food vendors – all with
one thing in common, a paycheck earned by keeping human beings in cages. The
criminalization of poverty is a lucrative business, and we have replaced the
social safety net with a dragnet.”
The money is public and the profits are
private.
“Privatization in the prison industrial
complex includes companies, which run prisons for profit while at the same time
gleaning profits from forced labor,” she said. “In the state of New Jersey,
food and medical services are provided by corporations, which have a profit
motive.
One recent explosion of private industry
is the partnering of Corrections Corporation of America with the federal government to detain
close to 1 million undocumented people.
Using public monies to enrich private
citizens is the history of capitalism at its most exploitive.”
Those released from prison are woefully
unprepared for re-entry.
They carry with them the years of trauma
they endured.
They often suffer from the endemic
health problems that come with long incarceration, including hepatitis C,
tuberculosis and HIV.
They often do not have access to
medications upon release to treat their physical and mental illnesses. Finding
work is difficult. They feel alienated and are often estranged from friends and
family.
More than 60 percent end up back in
prison. 
“How do you teach someone to rid
themselves of degradation?” Kerness asked. “How long does it take to teach
people to feel safe, a sense of empowerment in a world where they often come
home emotionally and physically damaged and unemployable?
There are many reasons that ex-prisoners
do not make it – paramount among them is that they are not supposed to
succeed.”
Kerness has long been a crusader.
In 1961 at the age of 19 she left New
York to work for a decade in Tennessee in the civil rights struggle, including
a year at Tennessee’s Highlander
Research and Education Center, where Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. trained.
By the 1970s she was involved in housing
campaigns for the poor in New Jersey. She kept running into families that
included incarcerated members. This led her to found Prison Watch.
The letters that pour into her office
are disturbing. Female prisoners routinely complain of being sexually abused by
guards. One prisoner wrote to her office: “That was not part of my sentence to
perform oral sex with officers.”
Other prisoners write on behalf of the
mentally ill who have been left to deteriorate in the prison system. One
California prisoner told of a mentally ill man spreading feces over himself and
the guards then dumping him into a scalding bath that took skin off 30 percent
of his body.
Kerness said the letters she receives
from prisoners collectively present a litany of “inhumane conditions including
cold, filth, callous medical care, extended isolation often lasting years, use
of devices of torture, harassment, brutality and racism.”
Prisoners send her drawings of “four-
and five-point restraints, restraint hoods, restraint belts, restraint beds,
stun grenades, stun guns, stun belts, spit hoods, tethers, and waist and leg
chains.” But the worst torment, prisoners tell her, is the psychological pain
caused by “no touch torture” that included “humiliation, sleep deprivation,
sensory disorientation, extreme light or dark, extreme cold or heat” and
“extended solitary confinement.”
These techniques, she said, are
consciously designed to carry out “a systematic attack on all human stimuli.”
The use of sensory deprivation was
applied by the government to imprisoned radicals in the 1960s including members
of the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence
movement and the American Indian Movement, along with environmentalists,
anti-imperialists and civil rights activists.
It is now used extensively against
Islamic militants, jailhouse lawyers and political prisoners. Many of those
political prisoners were part of radical black underground movements in the
1960s that advocated violence.
Those within the system who attempt to
resist the abuse and mistreatment are dealt with severely. Prisoners in the
overcrowded Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in
Lucasville, Ohio, staged a revolt in 1993 after years of routine beatings,
degrading rituals of public humiliation and the alleged murders of prisoners by
guards.
The some 450 prisoners, who were able to
unite antagonistic prison factions including the Aryan Brotherhood and the
black Gangster Disciples, held out for 11 days.
It was one of the longest prison
rebellions in U.S. history. Nine prisoners and a guard were killed by the
prisoners during the revolt.
The state responded with characteristic
fury. It singled out some 40 prisoners and eventually shipped them to Ohio
State Penitentiary (OSP), a supermax facility outside Youngstown that was
constructed in 1998.
There prisoners are held in solitary
confinement 23 hours a day in 7-by-11-foot cells.
Prisoners at OSP almost never see the
sun or have human contact. Those charged with participating in the
uprising have, in some cases, been held in these punitive conditions at OSP or
other facilities since the 1993 revolt. Five prisoners – Bomani Shakur,
Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb, George Skatzes and Namir Abdul Mateen –
involved in the uprising were charged with murder.
Kerness says the for-profit prison
companies have created an entrepreneurial class like that of the Southern
slaveholders, one “dependent on the poor, and on bodies of color as a source
for income,” and she describes federal and state departments of corrections as
“a state of mind.”
This state of mind, she said in the
interview, “led to Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo and what is going on in
U.S. prisons right this moment.”
As long as profit remains an incentive
to incarcerate human beings and our corporate state abounds in surplus,
redundant labor, there is little chance that the prison system will be
reformed. It is making our corporate overlords wealthy.
Our prisons serve the engine of
corporate capitalism, transferring state money to private corporations.
These corporations will continue to
stymie rational prison reform because the system, however inhumane and unjust,
feeds corporate bank accounts. At its bottom the problem is not race – although
race plays a huge part in incarceration rates – nor is it finally poverty; it
is the predatory nature of corporate capitalism itself.
And until we slay the beast of corporate
capitalism, until we wrest power back from corporations, until we build social
institutions and a system of governance designed not to profit the few but
foster the common good, our prison industry and the horror it perpetuates will
only expand.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for
Truthdig.com.
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a
foreign correspondent for The New York Times.
© 2013
TruthDig.com
