Has Barack Obama heard of Pelican Bay, I wonder
On June 30, 2011, I wrote about hell and heaven, of prisons hellish
and heavenly (‘On prisons and death-escape’, Daily News). I wrote about
a hell that had a name and acronym: Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP), a
‘Supermax’ state prison run by the California Department for Corrections
and Rehabilitation, located in Crescent City in Del Norte County’.
Inmates of PBSP are incarcerated in long-term solitary confinement under
conditions of extreme sensory deprivation, I learned and reported. I
wrote also that the law was a creature that has been denied visiting
rights to PBSP.
I wrote about Pelican Bay because I had heard that the inmates were
planning to starve to death. It is a facility, sorry hell, set out in
275 acres. The inmates inhabit hell-cells the size of a small bathroom
in solitary confinement. They don’t see any other human being for 23
hours of the day. They don’t get to see the sky or feel sunlight on
their faces. They don’t see a blade of grass, even. Whenever they do get
to leave their cells, they are handcuffed and shackled, hands-to-waist
and ankle-to-ankle. And so the years pass. Decades, in fact, in certain
cases.
Hunger strike
Well, they’ve had enough of hell. They want death. They’ve been on a
hunger strike since July 1, 2011. Yes, they’d rather die and take their
chances in the hereafter (if such exists).
US President Barack Obama |
What is it all about? We need some context here and Marilyn McMahon,
Attorney-at-Law, provides some. She states that the notorious ‘D
Corridor’ (also known as the ‘short’ corridor) has the highest level of
restricted incarceration in the State of California and among the most
severe conditions in the USA. The harshness is designed to force
prisoners to ‘debrief’, i.e. to provide information about criminal or
prison gang activity of other prisoners. She states that most inmates
are neither members of or associated with prison gangs. ‘Debriefing’
does not lessen death-risk for those who give information or their
families or other prisoners.
Prison gangs
The entirety that is their incarceration amounts to torture,
sanctioned by the silence of those who ought to know better (e.g. Barack
Obama, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice et al). Those who do ‘debrief’, do so
simply to escape isolation units, she says. Armed with this
misinformation, the authorities then validate other prisoners as members
or associates of prison gangs. That’s ‘Justice for all’, a la the Land
of the Free and the Home of the Brave, ladies and gentlemen.
The striking prisoners have five core demands:
* Eliminate group punishments. Instead, practice individual
accountability. When an individual prisoner breaks a rule, the prison
often punishes a whole group of prisoners of the same race. This policy
has been applied to keep prisoners in the SHU indefinitely and to make
conditions increasingly harsh.
* Abolish the debriefing policy and modify active/inactive gang
status criteria.
Pelican Bay State Prison. AP |
* Comply with the recommendations of the US Commission on Safety and
Abuse in Prisons (2006) regarding an end to long-term solitary
confinement. This bipartisan commission specifically recommended to
“make segregation a last resort” and “end conditions of isolation.” Yet
as of May 18, 2011, California kept 3,259 prisoners in Security Housing
Units and hundreds more in Administrative Segregation waiting for a cell
to open up. Some prisoners have been kept in isolation for more than 30
years.
* Provide adequate food. Prisoners report unsanitary conditions and
small quantities of food that do not conform to prison regulations.
There is no accountability or independent quality control of meals.
* Expand and provide constructive programmes and privileges for
indefinite SHU inmates. The hunger strikers are pressing for
opportunities “to engage in self-help treatment, education, religious
and other productive activities...” Currently these opportunities are
routinely denied, even if the prisoners want to pay for correspondence
courses themselves. Examples of privileges the prisoners want are: one
phone call per week, and permission to have sweatsuits and watch caps.
(Often warm clothing is denied, though the cells and exercise cage can
be bitterly cold.) All of the privileges mentioned in the demands are
already allowed at other SuperMax prisons (in the federal prison system
and other states).
Political leadership
Ladies and gentlemen, I am not surprised by all this. We are, after
all, talking about a country where George W. Bush and his partners in
war crimes have got off the hook, possibly because Barack Obama wanted
to purchase an insurance policy with respect to the risk of getting
similarly branded for his adventures in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and
who knows where else (he has a couple more years to go).
The prison authorities, meanwhile, have promised to ‘effect a
comprehensive assessment of its existing policy and procedure’. The
striking prisoners are not biting. Naturally. That’s as vague as one can
get. Meanwhile, McMahon informs us that the principal hunger strikers
have lost 25-35 pounds each.
There are hundreds striking at Pelican Bay and thousands of others
supporting in California’s 32 other prisons. There are support
demonstrations all over the USA, but also in Canada, Australia and
Turkey. You won’t find Channel 4 doing a documentary on all this, that’s
for sure.
We live in harsh times, did I hear someone say? The USA seems to have
lost its way, someone did tell me this morning.
Well, times were always harsh in that country. The USA did not lose
its way. It never had a way worth celebrating. Not since Christopher
Columbus mis-navigated his ship and mis-labelled people, causing a lot
of confusion about Indians, West Indians, Red Indians and so on. It’s
been downhill since then for a lot of people in that country.
It’s a beautiful country and the people are really nice, I agree.
It’s the political leadership that’s the issue. And of course the
system, which includes foreign policy ‘prerogatives’ that sanction
numerous crimes against humanity and domestic mechanisms that are as
pernicious, especially since they are out-of-public-view for the most
part.
Something popped out though. It began in Pelican Bay. It will be
tough thrusting it all back again. I think Barack Obama knows this.
[email protected]
|