Wages of Rebellion (21 page)

One example of 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 writes.
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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.”
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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 in Carlisle, Indiana, was quoted as saying in “Torture in United States Prisons.”

Prisons are at once hugely expensive and, as Kerness pointed out, hugely profitable. Prisons function in the same way the military-industrial complex functions: 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 reentry. They bear the years of trauma they endured and often suffer from the endemic health problems that come with long incarceration, including hepatitis C, tuberculosis, and HIV.
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Many of them lack access to medications upon release to treat their physical and mental illnesses.
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Finding work is difficult, and they feel alienated and are often estranged from friends and family. More than 60 percent end up back in prison.
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“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 grew up asking different questions. In 1961, at the age of nineteen, 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 other civil rights leaders were trained. By the 1970s, she was involved in housing campaigns for the poor in New Jersey. She kept running into families with incarcerated loved ones. 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,” which includes “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.”

Sensory deprivation is used against Islamic militants, jailhouse lawyers, and the some 150 political prisoners, many part of radical black underground movements in the 1960s that advocated violence. A few, such as Leonard Peltier and Abu-Jamal, are well known, but most have little public visibility—among them are Sundiata Acoli, Mutulu Shakur, Imam Jamil Al-Amin (known as H. Rap Brown when he was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, in the 1960s), Jalil Bottom, Sekou Odinga, Abdul Majid, Tom Manning, and Bill Dunne.

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 beatings, degrading rituals of public humiliation, and the alleged murders of prisoners by guards. Approximately 450 prisoners were able to unite antagonistic prison factions, including the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Gangster
Disciples, and hold out for eleven days by holding guards hostage. It was one of the longest prison rebellions in US history. Nine prisoners and a guard were killed by the prisoners during the revolt.

The state responded with characteristic fury. It singled out about forty prisoners and eventually shipped them to Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP), a supermax facility outside Youngstown.
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There prisoners are held in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day in seven-by-eleven-foot cells. Prisoners at OSP almost never see the sun or have human contact. Some of those charged with participating in the uprising have been held in these punitive conditions at OSP or other facilities since the 1993 revolt. Five prisoners involved in the uprising—Bomani Shakur, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb, George Skatzes, and Namir Abdul Mateen—were charged with murder. They are being held in isolation on death row.
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Kerness said that 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 described 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 Guantánamo, and what is going on in US prisons right this moment.”

As long as profit remains an incentive to incarcerate human beings and our corporate state abounds in superfluous labor, there is little chance that the prison system will be reformed. 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 bottom, the problem is not race, although race plays a huge part in incarceration rates, nor is it ultimately 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 to foster the common good, our prison industry and the horror it perpetuates will only expand.

A
frican American radicals were targeted first. Muslim radicals were targeted next, especially after the attacks of 9/11. Their stories differ little from those of Abu-Jamal or Lutalo.

Syed Fahad Hashmi, a US citizen, is serving a fifteen-year sentence in Guantánamo-like conditions in the supermax ADX (Administrative Maximum) facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. He is isolated in a small cell for twenty-two to twenty-three hours a day. He has only extremely limited contact with his mother, father, and brother, often going weeks without any communication. He was charged by the government with two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaeda and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaeda. He accepted a plea bargain on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism. If he had gone to trial, he would have faced the possibility of a seventy-year sentence.
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The best the US government could offer as evidence of Hashmi’s crimes was that an acquaintance who stayed in his apartment with him in early 2004 while he was a graduate student in London, Junaid Babar, also an American citizen, had raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in his luggage that were to be handed over to a member of al-Qaeda in south Waziristan, Pakistan. Hashmi also allegedly permitted Babar to use his cell phone to contact others who were planning acts of terrorism.
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Babar, who was arrested in 2004 and pled guilty to five counts of material support for al-Qaeda, also faced up to seventy years in prison. But he agreed to serve as a government witness against Hashmi, as well as in other terror trials, in exchange for a reduced sentence.

I doubt that the government was overly concerned about a suitcase full of waterproof socks that were being taken to Pakistan. The reason Hashmi was targeted was because, like the Palestinian activist Dr. Sami Al-Arian, he was fearless and zealous in his defense of those being bombed, shot, terrorized, and killed throughout the Muslim world.
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The government planned to introduce tapes of Hashmi’s political talks while he was a student at Brooklyn College, during which time Hashmi was a member of the New York political group Al Muhajiroun. He made numerous provocative statements, including calling America “the biggest terrorist in the world,” but Al Muhajiroun is not defined by the
government as a terrorist organization. Membership in the group is not illegal. And our complicity in massive acts of state terror is a historical fact.
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Hashmi had a right to express these sentiments. More important, he had a right to expect freedom from persecution and imprisonment because of his opinions.

I spoke to Hashmi’s father, Syed Anwar Hashmi, in June 2011. The elder Hashmi came to the United States from Pakistan when Fahad was three and his other son, Faisal, was four. He worked for more than two decades as an accountant for the city of New York. Anwar came, as most immigrants do, for his children. He believed in America, in its fairness, its chances for opportunity, its freedoms. And then it all crumbled when the state proved as capricious and cruel as the Pakistani dictatorship he had left behind. On the day of his son’s arrest, he said, “my American dream became an American nightmare.”

Three law enforcement officials appeared at his home in Flushing, Queens, on June 6, 2006, to inform him that his son, who had been in London completing a master’s degree in international relations, had been arrested at Heathrow Airport on terrorism charges. Hashmi, after fighting the order for eleven months while in Belmarsh Prison in London, was the first American citizen extradited under the post-9/11 laws. He was taken in May 2007 to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan and placed in solitary confinement. Like so many of those arrested during the Bush years, Hashmi was briefly a poster child in the “war on terror.” His arrest was the top story on the CBS and NBC nightly news programs, which used graphics that read “Terror Trail” and “Web of Terror.”
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