In one year, 2005, a record 44 prisoners killed themselves in California alone; 70 percent of those suicides occurred in segregation units
Bret Grote is an investigator and organizer with Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up!, a prisoner rights/prison abolitionist organization based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In the Angola 3 Newsletter, Grote details how HRC/Fed Up! Documented many hundreds of human rights abuses in Pennsylvania's 27 prisons. Their investigations concluded that Pennsylvania is "operating a sophisticated program of torture under an utterly baseless pretext of ˜security,' wherein close to 3,000 people are held in conditions of solitary/control unit confinement each day.
Supermax prisons can also contain death rows where prisoners can spend decades in isolation, torture, with the added torment of impending execution. One obvious example is the highly political case of former Black Panther, journalist and author, Mumia Abu-Jamal, falsely convicted of killing a cop in 1981. Despite hard evidence of innocence, he's still locked up in SCI Green, a Pennsylvania Supermax, after 27 years on death row and the signing of two death warrants.
These conditions are a flagrant violation of article 6 of the U.S. Constitution which affirms that treaty law (i.e. international law) is the "supreme law of the land. Thus, article 10 (3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stipulates that "The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.
Contrary to the lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key rhetoric of politicians, A Zogby poll released in April 2006 found 87 percent of Americans favor rehabilitative services for prisoners as opposed to punishment only.
The Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, a bipartisan national task force, produced a study after a yearlong investigation (2005-2006) that called for ending long-term solitary confinement of prisoners. The report found practically no benefits and plenty of harm " for prisoners and the public.
One of the most egregious cases of prolonged torture is the politically-charged isolation of Hugo Pinell still held in Pelican Bay's SHU after nearly 20 years. For his active resistance back in the 1960s and assault conviction in the San Quentin Six case (1976), my dear friend has spent a total of 40 years in hellholes " 45 of his 64 years in California prisons. (www.hugopinell.org).
"In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, writes Gawande, "ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement " on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a 30-minute drive from my home.
In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
Power to the people!
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