The CMU - a new political prison

Thank you Jon Booth for sharing this!

Read the full article here on the Huffington Post:

As of May 2009, I have been at USP Marion's "Communication Management Unit," or CMU, for roughly nine months and now is a good time to address the misconceptions (and the silence) regarding this unit. I want to offer a snapshot of my day-to-day life here as well as some analysis of what the existence of CMUs in the federal prison system implies. It is my hope that this article will partially fill the void of information that exists concerning the CMU, will help dispel rumors, and will inspire you to support those of us on the inside fighting the existence of these isolation units -- in the courts and in the realm of public opinion.

It is best to start from the beginning -- or at least where my story and the CMU meet. My transfer here is no different from that of many of the men here who were living at Federal Correctional Institutions (normal prisons) prior to the genesis of the CMUs. On May 12, 2008, on my way back from a decent lunch, I was told to report to "R&D" (receiving and discharge). I was given two boxes and half an hour to pack up my meager possessions. After complying I was placed in the SHU (secure housing unit or "hole") and put on a bus the next day. There was no hearing and no information given to me or my attorneys -- only after a day was I told I was on my way to Marion, Illinois' CMU.

Hearing the term "CMU" made my knees buckle as it drummed up some memory I had of the infamous "control units" at Marion (closed in 1995 and replaced by Florence ADX: the lone Federal "Supermax" prison). Then it hit me. The lawyers, in challenging the application of the terrorist enhancement in my case, made the prescient argument that if I receive the enhancement, the Bureau of Prisons (BoP) would use that to place me in the CMU at FCI Terre Haute, Indiana (at the time just 5 months old). In fact, on the way to FCI Sandstone in August 2007, I not only saw the CMU but met one of its residents while in transit. Let me back up and offer a brief history of the Communication Management Units.

The CMU I reside in, at USP Marion, received its first prisoner in May 2008 and when I arrived, held about 17 men, the majority of whom were Muslim. Currently, the unit has 25, with a capacity of 52 cells. In April 2009, we received seven new people, all of whom were from the CMU at FCI Terre Haute. The unit is overwhelmingly Muslim with 18 men identifying as such. Most, but not all of the prison, have so-called terrorism cases. According to a BoP spokesperson, the unit "will not be limited to inmates convicted of terrorism-related cases through all of the prisoners fit that description." Others have prison disciplinary violation or allegations related to communication and the misuse of telephones etc. Here, almost everyone has a terrorism related case -- whether it is like my case (destruction of property characterized as "domestic terrorism") or conspiracy and "providing material aid" cases.

Before the Marion CMU opened, there was the original CMU, opened in December 2006 at the former death row at FCI Terre Haute. According to early articles, the unit was intended for "second tier terrorism inmates, most of them Arab Muslims and a less restrictive version of the Supermax in Florence, Colorado."

Additionally, BoP Director Harley Lappin, in a July 2008 hearing on the 2009 BoP budget request, said of the CMUs, "A lot of the more serious offenders, terrorists, were housed at ADX Florence. So, we are ramping up two communications management units that are less restrictive but will ensure that all mail and phone calls of the offenders are monitored on a daily basis."

Terre Haute's CMU has 36 men (27 of whom are Muslim) and is roughly comparable to Marion's CMU. The rest of this place focuses on the latter, in which I have resided and of which I have seen firsthand.

You may be curious about just what a CMU actually is. From my correspondence, I can tell that many correspondents do not know much about what goes on here. I hope this can clear up any misperceptions. According to the BoP,

The CMU is [sic] established to house inmates who, due to their current offense of conviction, offense conduct or other verified information, require increased monitoring of communication between inmates and persons in the community in order to protect the safety, security, and orderly operations of Bureau facilities and protect the public...The CMU is a self-contained general population housing unit.

There are, of course, alternate views to the above definition including the belief that the CMUs are Muslim units, a political prisoner unit (similar to the HSU operated by the BoP in the 80's, and a punishment unit.

...

Forward!

Where to from here, then? Does the new President and his Attorney General take issue with segregation? Will Obama view the CMU, as he did with Guantanamo Bay, as a horrible legacy of his predecessor and close it? Many people are hopeful for an outcome like that. On April 7th, 2009, Mr. Obama, while in Turkey, said, "The United States will not make war on Islam," and that he wanted to "extend the hand of friendship to the Muslim world." While that sounds wonderful, what does that look like in concrete terms? Will he actualize that opinion by closing the CMU? Or will he marry the policy of Bush and condone a secret illegal set of political units for Muslims and activists? What of the men here? Will he transfer us back to normal prisons and review the outrageous prosecutions of many of the CMU detainees? If it can be done with (former) Senator Ted Steven's case, it can be done here.

While lawsuits have been filed in both Illinois and Indiana federal courts, what is needed urgently is for these units to be dragged out into the open. I am asking for your help and advocacy in dealing with this injustice and the mindset that allows a CMU to exist. Please pursue the resource section at the end of this article and consider doing something. I apologize for the length of this piece -- it was suggested to me (by people way smarter than myself) that it would be best to start from the beginning and offer as many details as possible. I hope I gave you a clearer idea of what's going on here. Thank you for all your support and love -- your letters are a bright candle in a sea of darkness.

Please don't feed the PRISON MONSTER!

Abolición! Ahora!

From Philly IMC:

Our House Is On Fire, Part 2: Please Don’t Feed the Prison Monster


By David A. Love, BlackCommentator.com

The following is the first part of an ongoing Color of Law series. Click here to listen to my discussion with Mark Thompson on the "Make It Plain" program, Sirius Radio 146, XM 167.

At its worst, America’s criminal justice system represents the place where racism, greed and corruption intersect. At its best, it is inherently flawed, unjust, and unreliable, and little better than its worst.

The engine that drives this injustice system is known as the prison industrial complex. It is the theater in which the nation’s foremost method of social control—and a failed method at that—plays itself out to the detriment of society. Recent events help to underscore just how bad things are:

* First, two Pennsylvania judges were recently convicted for receiving $2.6 million in cash to send 5,000 juveniles, many first-time offenders, to two private detention centers. One judge secured the contracts for the companies, while the other judge filled up the facilities with warm bodies.

* Meanwhile, Judge Sharon Keller, presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, that state’s highest criminal court, is in a heap of trouble. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct initiated impeachment proceedings against Keller for incompetence, violating her duties as a judge and casting public discredit on the court. Now for a state such as Texas, whose justice system boasts an already pitifully low standard of integrity, with defense attorneys allowed to fall asleep during their client’s trial, this is no small potatoes. What did this self-described pro-prosecution judge do? Well, she refused to keep the court open after 5pm when she knew Michael Richard, a death row inmate, sought a last-minute appeal challenging the constitutionality of his punishment (lethal injection). The inmate was unable to file an appeal and was executed.

Also, Keller rejected a new trial for Roy Criner, a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder, even though DNA evidence showed that he did not rape the victim. “We can't give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,” Judge Keller said. “We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important. When witnesses testify, and when jurors return a verdict, they need to know that they can't come back later and change their minds.”
* Finally, a three-judge federal panel recently ruled that California’s state prisons must reduce their inmate population by one-third, or about 57,000 prisoners. The judges found that the level of overcrowding in the state institutions deprives the inmates of adequate healthcare and is unconstitutional.

By itself, any one of these stories shocks the conscience. We would hope that these sordid tales are the exception to the rule. However, these cases reflect a dysfunctional system that is functioning as designed by a dysfunctional society. Allow me to demystify the prison industrial complex and identify the threads that connect the crooked judges in Pennsylvania and Texas, and overcrowded prisons in California.

It was no accident that the United States became the nation with the world’s largest prison population, with 2.3 million behind bars, and a total of 7.3 million in jail, prison, parole or probation, or 1 in every 31 adults. America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, and the majority of these are people of color. The most ruthless and repressive totalitarian dictatorship cannot claim such impressive statistics. Public policy, informed by a legacy of Jim Crow racism, the profit motive and obscene, misplaced priorities, explains it all.

The United States has decided to treat prisons as a growth industry. Prisons have become the new company town, in a nation where most of the factory jobs left long ago, casualties of globalization and the race to find the lowest worldwide labor costs. They are built in mostly rural White areas, and over the years these communities courted these prisons, whether state-operated or privatized, for the jobs they promised to bring to these depressed communities.

Every factory requires raw materials. The raw materials for the prison-as-factory are Blacks and Latinos, and poor Whites—uneducated, in many cases illiterate, and unskilled casualties of a system that has programmed their failure through a cradle-to-prison pipeline. The criminalization of youth of color, systemic poverty, failed public schools and the wholesale denial of opportunity is fundamental to this pipeline.

In order to ensure a steady stream of Black, Brown and poor White bodies, these raw materials, into the factory, you must maintain the right policies. So, in the Jim Crow segregated South, the powers that be decided to keep Blacks in their place and eviscerate their political power, to maintain a system of slavery after slavery had been supposedly abolished. Through the Black Codes, the Southern establishment criminalized certain behaviors that were associated with the Black community. Certain offenses such as “mischief,” “insulting gestures” “cruel treatment to animals,” and the “vending of spiritous or intoxicating liquors” applied only to African Americans. In addition, it was illegal for Blacks to cohabit with Whites (which carried a life sentence) or keep firearms. Kangaroo courts were utilized to fill the prisons with Black men, who were farmed out for their labor and summarily, forever, denied the right to vote.

Nowadays, a high-tech Jim Crow has met the information age. In recent decades, the war on drugs has resulted in draconian sentencing, particularly for crack cocaine (a drug associated with poor drug users of color) vs. powdered cocaine. Politicians climb the career ladder through their tough on crime stance, exploiting White fears of Black criminality. Police conduct raids and sweeps in Black and Brown poor communities, rather than the suburbs and posh corporate suites, to find illegal drug activity. Communities of color are punished in the process. Black and Latino men (and increasingly women) are shipped upstate to far-flung prisons in White communities. Their families can visit them only through great personal and financial hardship. In a new twist on the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise (which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the benefit of the Southern states in terms of Congressional apportionment and the distribution of taxes), these prisoners are counted as residents of these rural for census and tax purposes. Yet, they are unable to vote, and in many cases unable to vote after they complete their sentence (about 5.3 million people cannot vote because they have felony convictions, including 13% of all Black men). Meanwhile, the mostly urban communities that raised them are depleted of resources— human, political and economic.

And the lynching of Black men was made cleaner, legitimate and more “respectable” by bringing it into the justice system in the form of state-sponsored executions. Executions, like Texas backwater lynchings, are arbitrary, barbaric and race-based. The defendant typically is a man of color, the underlying crime involves a White victim (80% of the time, according to the Death Penalty Information Center), and the chief prosecutor is White (98% of the time). Like the lynch mob, the administrators of the death penalty system ultimately care little about guilt or innocence. Someone’s got to pay, and anyone will do. When soon-to-be former Judge Keller expressed her sentiments that we can’t give every innocent person a new trial, she was getting at the heart of a criminal justice system that cares everything about finality and little about true justice. And so, new raw materials are constantly required to satisfy the hunger of the prison machine.

Those who are interested in the expansion of the prison boom, including the corrections officers’ union in California, private prison firms, and others, lobby state legislatures for longer, harsher sentences to keep more people behind bars for longer periods of time. As a result, ruinous policies based on catchy slogans, including three strikes laws, have prevailed. And as the prison population has burgeoned in the process, so too have the state budget allocations for prison spending. A society should be judged for its misplaced priorities when it spends more on incarcerating people than on educating them. But this is where criminal justice policy clashes with economic reality. At a time when states are going bankrupt—unable to pay their state employees, unable to pay tax refunds, or unable to collect the trash—ineffective profligate prison spending is breaking the banks of state governments. And despite the promises of a retributive and punitive legal regime, the war on drugs has been an abysmal failure. Draconian sentencing destroys communities and does not fight crime. America’s attitude towards drugs and drug policy, not to mention a steady supply of guns from the U.S., is wreaking havoc on cartel-ridden Mexico. And as the Obama administration has signaled that the federal government is moving away from the decriminalization of marijuana, California is now considering legalizing marijuana and taxing it to bring in billions of dollars in annual revenue.

One thing is for sure: the current path is bankrupting the United States, both in a moral and economic sense. The prison building madness has run its course, and it is time for it to stop. In a nation that has tried to make a buck from just about everything, including human bondage and the misery of others, America must stop feeding the prison monster.

Part 1 here

On Gaza

By Richard Falk
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian
Territories and Professor Emeritus of International Law, Princeton
University

For eighteen months the entire 1.5 million people of Gaza experienced a
punishing blockade imposed by Israel, and a variety of traumatizing
challenges to the normalcy of daily life. A flicker of hope emerged some
six months ago when an Egyptian arranged truce produced an effective
ceasefire that cut Israeli casualties to zero despite the cross-border
periodic firing of homemade rockets that fell harmlessly on nearby Israeli
territory, and undoubtedly caused anxiety in the border town of Sderot.
During the ceasefire the Hamas leadership in Gaza repeatedly offered to
extend the truce, even proposing a ten-year period and claimed a
receptivity to a political solution based on acceptance of Israel's 1967
borders. Israel ignored these diplomatic initiatives, and failed to carry
out its side of the ceasefire agreement that involved some easing of the
blockade that had been restricting the entry to Gaza of food, medicine,
and fuel to a trickle.

Israel also refused exit permits to students with foreign fellowship
awards and to Gazan journalists and respected NGO representatives. At the
same time, it made it increasingly difficult for journalists to enter, and
I was myself expelled from Israel a couple of weeks ago when I tried to
enter to carry out my UN job of monitoring respect for human rights in
occupied Palestine, that is, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well
as Gaza. Clearly, prior to the current crisis, Israel used its authority
to prevent credible observers from giving accurate and truthful accounts
of the dire humanitarian situation that had been already documented as
producing severe declines in the physical condition and mental health of
the Gazan population, especially noting malnutrition among children and
the absence of treatment facilities for those suffering from a variety of
diseases. The Israeli attacks were directed against a society already in
grave condition after a blockade maintained during the prior 18 months.

As always in relation to the underlying conflict, some facts bearing on
this latest crisis are murky and contested, although the American public
in particular gets 99% of its information filtered through an exceedingly
pro-Israeli media lens. Hamas is blamed for the breakdown of the truce by
its supposed unwillingness to renew it, and by the alleged increased
incidence of rocket attacks. But the reality is more clouded. There was no
substantial rocket fire from Gaza during the ceasefire until Israel
launched an attack last November 4th directed at what it claimed were
Palestinian militants in Gaza, killing several Palestinians. It was at
this point that rocket fire from Gaza intensified. Also, it was Hamas that
on numerous public occasions called for extending the truce, with its
calls never acknowledged, much less acted upon, by Israeli officialdom.
Beyond this, attributing all the rockets to Hamas is not convincing
either. A variety of independent militia groups operate in Gaza, some such
as the Fatah-backed al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade are anti-Hamas, and may even
be sending rockets to provoke or justify Israeli retaliation. It is well
confirmed that when US-supported Fatah controlled Gaza's governing
structure it was unable to stop rocket attacks despite a concerted effort
to do so.

What this background suggests strongly is that Israel launched its
devastating attacks, starting on December 27, not simply to stop the
rockets or in retaliation, but also for a series of unacknowledged
reasons. It was evident for several weeks prior to the Israeli attacks
that the Israeli military and political leaders were preparing the public
for large-scale military operations against the Hamas. The timing of the
attacks seemed prompted by a series of considerations: most of all, the
interest of political contenders, the Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in demonstrating their toughness prior to
national elections scheduled for February, but now possibly postponed
until military operations cease. Such Israeli shows of force have been a
feature of past Israeli election campaigns, and on this occasion
especially, the current government was being successfully challenged by
Israel's notoriously militarist politician, Benjamin Netanyahu, for its
supposed failures to uphold security. Reinforcing these electoral
motivations was the little concealed pressure from the Israeli military
commanders to seize the opportunity in Gaza to erase the memories of their
failure to destroy Hezbollah in the devastating Lebanon War of 2006 that
both tarnished Israel's reputation as a military power and led to
widespread international condemnation of Israel for the heavy bombardment
of undefended Lebanese villages, disproportionate force, and extensive use
of cluster bombs against heavily populated areas.

Respected and conservative Israeli commentators go further. For instance,
the prominent historian, Benny Morris writing in the New York Times a few
days ago, relates the campaign in Gaza to a deeper set of forebodings in
Israel that he compares to the dark mood of the public that preceded the
1967 War when Israelis felt deeply threatened by Arab mobilizations on
their borders. Morris insists that despite Israeli prosperity of recent
years, and relative security, several factors have led Israel to act
boldly in Gaza: the perceived continuing refusal of the Arab world to
accept the existence of Israel as an established reality; the inflammatory
threats voiced by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad together with Iran's supposed push
to acquire nuclear weapons, the fading memory of the Holocaust combined
with growing sympathy in the West with the Palestinian plight, and the
radicalization of political movements on Israel's borders in the form of
Hezbollah and Hamas. In effect, Morris argues that Israel is trying via
the crushing of Hamas in Gaza to send a wider message to the region that
it will stop at nothing to uphold its claims of sovereignty and security.

There are two conclusions that emerge: the people of Gaza are being
severely victimized for reasons remote from the rockets and border
security concerns, but seemingly to improve election prospects of current
leaders now facing defeat, and to warn others in the region that Israel
will use overwhelming force whenever its interests are at stake.

That such a human catastrophe can happen with minimal outside interference
also shows the weakness of international law and the United Nations, as
well as the geopolitical priorities of the important players. The passive
support of the United States government for whatever Israel does is again
the critical factor, as it was in 2006 when it launched its aggressive war
against Lebanon. What is less evident is that the main Arab neighbors,
Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, with their extreme hostility toward Hamas
that is viewed as backed by Iran, their main regional rival, were also
willing to stand aside while Gaza was being so brutally attacked, with
some Arab diplomats even blaming the attacks on Palestinian disunity or on
the refusal of Hamas to accept the leadership of Mamoud Abbas, President
of the Palestinian Authority.

The people of Gaza are victims of geopolitics at its inhumane worst:
producing what Israel itself calls a 'total war' against an essentially
defenseless society that lacks any defensive military capability
whatsoever and is completely vulnerable to Israeli attacks mounted by F-16
bombers and Apache helicopters. What this also means is that the flagrant
violation of international humanitarian law, as set forth in the Geneva
Conventions, is quietly set aside while the carnage continues and the
bodies pile up. It additionally means that the UN is once more revealed to
be impotent when its main members deprive it of the political will to
protect a people subject to unlawful uses of force on a large scale.
Finally, this means that the public can shriek and march all over the
world, but that the killing will go on as if nothing is happening. The
picture being painted day by day in Gaza is one that begs for renewed
commitment to international law and the authority of the UN Charter,
starting here in the United States, especially with a new leadership that
promised its citizens change, including a less militarist approach to
diplomatic leadership.