Lead article
November 1998

Prison warehousing and police abuse spotlight decaying U.S. society

D.A. Sheldon

In an unprecedented move, the London-based human rights group, Amnesty International, has strongly criticized the U.S.'s criminal (in)justice system for a variety of abuses, ranging from excessive use of force by police to the inhuman treatment of prisoners. For the first time in its history Amnesty is devoting its resources to a worldwide campaign focused on the U.S. In the past, the group tended to ignore such brutalities under threat of losing funding from U.S. agencies, but with the proliferation of atrocities in this so-called land of the "free" it has been forced by human rights advocates around the world to challenge the system.

U.S. CRIMINAL INJUSTICE

The head of Amnesty International, Perry Sane, has called Texas a "conveyer belt of death" for leading the nation in executions. As of Aug. 24, Texas had executed 11 people this year. Seventy-four people were put to death around the nation in 1997, half of them murdered by state officials in Texas - the highest annual number of executions carried out in the U.S. and Texas since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

In addition to executions becoming a weekly routine, the racial disparity of those subjected to it is evident in the large number of Blacks and Latinos on death row. Prosecutors are more inclined to seek capital punishment convictions against Blacks, especially when the victims are white. There is also a dramatic rise in the number of children and the mentally ill caught up in this system of death.

A prime example is Horace E. Kelly, a Black prisoner convicted in 1984 for the murder of three in Southern California. Kelly, 38, is a severely disturbed individual with an IQ hovering in the 60s. According to testimony and prison logs, he suffers from severe mental illness and is unable to communicate coherently. When asked why he was on death row, he answered, "I'm here to go to college." Yet even with all this, the state of California is planning to use its death machine against Kelly.

The U.S. is one of a few nations in the world that still "legally" kills its youth, even though the United Nations has long condemned it for imposing capital punishment against children. U.S. officials simply turn up their noses to less powerful nations and organizations like the UN.

Another area raised by Amnesty is the treatment of foreigners by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The INS has degraded the notion of "Bring us your hungry, tired, persecuted masses to the land of opportunity" to a draconian approach that says: "If you have no skills that we, the capitalist class, can exploit, then you'll be delivered to a detention facility where our keepers will treat you less than human, at which time we'll hold you until we can legally force you back to your country of origin without regard to the consequences."

The INS has become the nation's largest law enforcement agency, with 12,043 armed agents. INS border patrol units have increased by nearly 2,000 agents in the last three years, the majority being placed on the Mexico-U.S. border. One facility that I wrote about in VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS is the Immigration and Naturalization Service detention facility in Elizabeth, N.J. It has a long history of abusing its prisoners which led to a rebellion there in June 1995.

Since then the facility reopened under new ownership, under the Corrections Corporation of America, a for-profit company known to abuse prisoners in its numerous prisons nationwide. Ninety-four immigrants detained at the facility went on a three-day hunger strike that ended Oct. 2 in a protest against restrictions that have kept them locked up for long periods without the chance for a hearing or appeal.

Each year the number of killings and physical and verbal abuse by local, state and federal police has dramatically increased as the number of "enforcement agents" has grown. According to a June report by the Bureau of Justice, the number of patrol officers grew by 68,000 between 1992 and 1996, now totaling 423,000. The report also found that during this period the number of full-time state and local officers with arrest powers increased by 59,000, to 663,335. The total increase_127,000_is more than the 100,000 new police that the Clinton administration pushed for earlier this decade.

Tens of thousands every year suffer from police abuse. This brutality mostly targets Blacks, Latinos and other people of color. Police brutality is also spilling over into white working-class neighborhoods. Here are some recent incidents:

-- During the weekend of Sept. 26-27, U.S. border patrol agents killed two Mexican immigrants on the border between San Diego and Tijuana. The first shooting happened just north of Colonia Libertad, a neighborhood next to the border. INS agents tried to arrest three people who had crossed the 10-foot high border fence in the hills east of San Ysidro. One man escaped, but agents pulled another to the ground. The third immigrant, 23-year-old Oscar Abel Cordoba Velez from Guadalajara, was coming to the aid of his friend when he was shot in the chest by one of the agents. The next day a 35-year-old immigrant was shot and killed in almost identical circumstances.

-- Marc Fitzsimmons, a Black 28-year-old man, was shot twice in the back by cops from the Los Angeles Police Department. Police officials told the press that Fitzsimmons was welding a butcher knife or some type of meat cleaver and so they were forced to shoot him in the chest. The autopsy showed that the cops lied in their reports.

-- During the Million Youth March in New York City in September, cops in riot gear rushed the crowd using pepper spray, night sticks and other instruments of torture.

Meanwhile, for those within prison and jail the use of electrical instruments of torture like stun belts has also become a constant feature. The "remote electronically activated technology" (REAct) stun belt is used by prison officials and police departments. When activated the belt shocks its wearer for eight seconds with three to four milliamps and 50,000 volts of continuous stun power. It causes a painful blast, knocking most of its victims to the floor where they shake uncontrollably for as long as 15 minutes. The belt can cause self-defecation, permanent twitching, nerve damage, memory loss, vomiting and even death! This device has been a favorite tool of criminal judges who force jail detainees to wear the belt during court proceedings. If they are "unruly," like speaking out loud, the judge can order the jailer to activate the belt.

There is also the growth of "chain gangs," which for the last couple of years have grown back into a fad of prisoncrats. With the return of this long-discredited practice, our society has taken a step backwards that human rights groups like Amnesty International could no longer ignore.

GROWTH OF PRISON SYSTEM

I have been personally involved in the criminal (in)justice system since I was 10 years old. I was shipped around through the Alabama Department of Youth Services like a piece of trash. My only "crime" was that my parents neglected me and I was not "under control," as state juvenile authorities put it. With all the conditions I had to put up with, the chance of me surviving once I was released into the streets in 1988 were slim. With the lack of opportunities for youth_especially those of color_and the "morals" of today's society and criminalization of the nation's youth, I can see why more and more people under the age of 18 are going to prison.

At the same time as there is growing juvenile incarceration, the number of women prisoners is mushrooming. Women are the fastest growing sector of the U.S. prison population. The number of women prisoners is already over 100,000. Reports of sexual abuse of women prisoners is growing dramatically.

The total number subjected to this repressive criminal injustice system system today is 5.7 million_nearly one out of every 35 adults in the U.S. This includes a record 3.9 million men and women on probation or parole, another 600,000 in jail facilities and 1.2 million in prison.

More Blacks are now in prison than whites. Black people are incarcerated at a rate eight times higher than whites. This clearly proves that racist inequality is riding high in U.S. capitalist society. Along with keeping people of color down, more and more Blacks, Latinos and other minorities are being arrested, prosecuted, and receiving longer sentences for the same convictions as whites. This is the residue of centuries of slavery and other forms of oppression which lie deep in this corrupt system.

At the same time, the private sector has jumped into the frying pan at an explosive rate, proposing to build more prison space at a discount to state and federal bureaucracies. In the last three months four states have either accepted proposals or are opening new privately run prison facilities. These include:

-- Montana: Corrections Corporation of America won a $25 million contract to build the state's first private prison.

-- New Mexico: Wackenhut Corrections Corporation is opening a 1,200 bed prison in Lee county.

-- Georgia: A private prison in Folkston has just transferred 50 prisoners to the state's first privately run prison which, when filled, will hold 1,600 men.

-- South Carolina: Alabama-based Just Care plans to open the nation's first private prison hospital in Columbia. The 326-bed facility will treat prisoners from Georgia and the Carolinas.

These are a few of the new private prisons coming on line. With profits to be made comes greater mistreatment of prisoners. In the hunt to increase profits such places will offer even less rehab programming, food, and medical care. The use of slave labor in these warehouses will increase dramatically as the companies seek to squeeze more profit off the backs of its "rented" slaves. This goes along with greater physical and verbal abuse, since private-sector guards and personnel are trained and paid less than state employees.

PRISONER STRUGGLES AND PHILOSOPHY

Support for the prisoners' struggle is an important factor in the fight against the capitalist system. We need a Marxist-Humanist philosophy to fully understand and oppose the imperialist forces which are using the criminal injustice system as a means to control this nation's populace.

As I said in VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS, "The first and main objective of prison administrators is to maintain emotional, mental and physical suppression by systematically dehumanizing prisoners." These intimidating controls apply also to those on the outside, as working people find themselves in dire situations of day to day survival. With the world economic downturn sure to have an impact on the workers here in the U.S., the rise in disturbances against the system can be expected to grow. At the same time, so will the brutal control measures used by the ruling class to maintain its interests.

We therefore need a new class challenge from below as a development toward liberation and freedom from oppression and exploitation. VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS is a tool for getting the working class, especially those of color, to become a part of the prisoners' struggle. It is one way we are helping ourselves and our fellow comrades in America's dungeons of oppression.

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