SOLITARY WATCH CONFRONTS TORTURE IN U.S.PRISONS
by Angola 3 News Jun 14th, 2011 11:54 PM While spotlighting the Solitary Watch website, this new interview also focuses on the upcoming hunger strike at the Pelican Bay supermax prison in California (it begins on July 1), and Hugo Pinell, of the San Quentin Six, who has been in continuous solitary even longer than the Angola 3.
(PHOTO: Hugo Pinell, 2001)
A3N: How well do you think both the mainstream and progressive media have covered the issue of solitary confinement in prisons?
SW:
Well, there has actually been some outstanding reporting on this
subject in the mainstream media. Of course there’s dreadful stuff as
well, like the “Lockup” and “Lockdown” TV series. But as far as print
media goes, there are a few of cases where journalism helped spur
grassroots movements against solitary confinement. We are thinking, in
particular, of the investigations by George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer on Tamms supermax in Illinois, by Lance Tapley on Maine State Prison, and by Mary Beth Pfeiffer on suicides in New York’s SHUs. Atul Gawande’s 2009 article in the New Yorker was excellent, as well.
In the progressive media, there’s been some powerful reporting by Anne-Marie Cusac in The Progressive, Jeanne Theoharis in The Nation, and Glenn Greenwald
at Salon. And of course, Mother Jones has been extremely supportive of
Jim’s reporting on the Angola 3 case, and on the broader issue of prison
conditions as well.
The problem we have with media coverage is
that there isn’t nearly enough of it. And it doesn’t get anything close
to the attention it deserves or produce the kind of outrage it should,
considering the fact that this is one of the major domestic human rights
issues of our day. Our impression is that the media—including, to a
lesser extent, the progressive media—is simply reflecting how
effectively prisoners have been marginalized in our society.
A3N: Today,
in the post-9/11 so-called “War on Terror” era, do you think that the
US public supports the use of torture against US prisoners?
SW:
We do think that the public is tolerating the torture of prisoners—some
because they don’t know about it, others because they simply don’t
care. But we’d actually like to turn your question around, because we
believe that a tolerance for the torture of U.S. prisoners helped to
produce a tolerance for the torture of foreign terrorism suspects,
rather than vice versa. The “War on Crime” predates the “War on Terror,”
and places like Pelican Bay and ADX Florence made it that much easier
for Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and Bagram to exist.
To discuss
what produced this tolerance for torture in the first place, we need to
return to the point we made at the beginning of this interview:
Prisoners are today by far the most dehumanized members of our society.
This has been the case to some extent historically, but the
dehumanization has grown more intense since the advent of the War on
Crime, which dates back to the 1960s but really heated up in the 1980s
and 1990s. For at least the last 30 years, politicians from both parties
have been cynically exploiting public fears about crime to win
elections, and the prison population has grown by leaps and bounds with
tacit public approval.
Racism clearly plays a role in all of
this: A highly disproportionate number of prisoners are African
American, and a majority of people today accepts the mass incarceration
and abuse of black prisoners just as a majority once accepted racial
segregation and before that slavery. Again, it comes down to depriving a
certain group of people of their full humanity. Once you do that, it
becomes a lot easier to deprive them of their basic human rights, not to
mention their civil rights.
A3N: Strategically
speaking, how do you think supporters of human rights can best use
media-activism to challenge the powerful forces currently trying to
convince the US public that torture is good policy? What are key points
that we should be making?
SW:
When it comes to solitary confinement, we probably need to emphasize
different key points with different audiences. For those people who
already have a firm opposition to all torture, we simply need to share
information about the nature and widespread use of solitary confinement,
and try to bring this issue out of the shadows and into the public
square. The American Friends Service Committee has shown real leadership on this issue, and more recently the ACLU and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture
have been trying to draw attention to solitary confinement, so that's a
positive development. We need to encourage people to see the torture of
all U.S. prisoners as a human rights issue just as pressing as the
torture of Bradley Manning, or of the captives at Guantanamo or Abu
Ghraib—because torture is torture, and if you believe this, it shouldn’t
matter whether or not the victim has committed a crime.
For
those who think that prisoners are criminals who deserve whatever they
get, we can still emphasize the fact that solitary confinement is not
only cruel, but also costly and counterproductive. It can cost two to
three times as much to keep a prisoner in a supermax, rather than in the
general prison population. And it simply doesn’t “work,” in that it
makes prisoners more likely to re-offend.
A3N: You
have just released the first print edition of Solitary Watch. What are
your future plans for this? Anything else coming up that we should be
looking for?
SW: We launched the print edition,
which includes just a small selection of our stories, because we began
receiving letters from prisoners nearly every day, telling us about
their own situations and asking for information. Prisoners, of course,
do not have Internet access, so we needed to become more than just a web
publication.
In addition, we’re going to be publishing a series of fact sheets
on different aspects of solitary confinement; we’ve just posted the
first one, and there are many more to come. We just began shooting our
first video interviews with some survivors of solitary confinement.
Along with the writings we publish under “Voices from Solitary,” we hope the videos will help provide a forum for a group of people who actually know what it’s like to be buried alive.
(This article was first published by Alternet. Permission is granted to reprint if Alternet is cited as the original source)
--Angola
3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola
3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news
about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which
spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism,
repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and
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