59.-tweaking-armagedon.pdf
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“TWEAKING.ARMAGEDDON”

THE POTENTIAL AND LIMITS, OF CONDITIONS OF CONFINEMENT CAM!

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The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects free speech.
Regulations that permit the government or its employees to discriminate on
the basis of the content of the message cannot be tolerated under the First
‘Amendment!

Further, prisoners retain free speech rights. Thought control, by means
of prohibiting beliefs, would not only be undesireable but impossible". Fact of
confinement and needs of the penal institution impose rational limitations on
prisoner free speech rights", but those restrictions must have a "valid, rational
connection" to "legitimate penological interests" not related to the content of
ideas". Regulations and practices can only be justified when the practice
“furthers an important or substantial government interest unrelated to the.





This means you cannot legally suppress the expression of ideas, Prison
walls do not serve to form a barrier separating prisoners from the protections
of the constitution". Core political speech is most-zealously guarded and there
isa public interest “in having free and unhindered debate on matters of public
importance-the core value of the Free Speech Clause of the First
Amendment."

Thus, exclusion of printed material on the basis of its poltical
perspectiveamount to free speech retaliation and discrimination, which is
illegal”.

Ifyou exclude printed material for an unlawful basis, or if you simply
conjure up a false pretext for its exclusion, you have broken the law. The
prisoner recipient of this mail has cause for bringing a civil rights action
against you and has cause for gaining punitive damages which means money.
You and everyone who permits this action, from your supervisor to the director
of the prison system, may be named in those civil actions, and you may also be
subject to termination from your employment. Because this primer is included
in this mailing, you will not be able to claim you did not know your actions were
illegal.

For these reasons, we ask that you conform to federal law and refrain
from unlawful discrimination against the enclosed materials, permitting mail
service of this literature that objectively meets all legitimate criteria set forth
in prison regulations.

*See inside of back cover for citations of cases referenced here.
“TWEAKING ARMAGEDDON”

The Potential and Limits of
Conditions of Confinement Campaigns
By
Rachel Herzing

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY WAS THE FIRST PRISON BUILT IN THE
UNITED STATES. Opened in 1829, it was born from the work of reformers
including Benjamin Rush, a Quaker who campaigned tirelessly against
corporal and capital punishments, the standard of the day. Rush
particularly opposed public punishments and believed that only through
reflection and tarrying with one’s own conscience could a person be
rehabilitated. Based in part on monastic practices and Quaker principles
that emphasized anonymity, silence, and solitude to reflect on one’s
crimes and repent, the penitentiary was constructed to hold prisoners in
solitary confinement. Prisoners were confined to their cells with only a
brief period each day during which they could exercise in an individual
pen adjacent to the cell. To maintain the principle of anonymity,
prisoners were assigned numbers to replace names, and wore hoods to
hide their faces on the few occasions they were allowed to leave their
cells. In fostering reflection and repentance, prisoners were permitted to
labor or read The Bible, They were denied visitors or contact with the
outside world. Constructed as a reform initiative within the punishment
system, already its

first year of operation the Eastern State Penitentiary’s regime was
challenged by advocates and observers concerned about the long-term
effects of solitary confinement on prisoners’ mental and physical health,





In July 2011, 182 years after Eastern State Penitentiary opened its doors,
prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of Pelican Bay State
Prison in California initiated a hunger strike. Pelican Bay State Prison
‘was opened in 1989 with over 1,000 cells specifically designed to
imprison people in long-term solitary confinement. Pelican Bay was one

Originally printed in Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World
Order Pages 190-195, Vol 41, No. 3

Rachel Herzing is a member of Critical Resistance, a US-based grassroots
organization dedicated to abolishing the prison-industrial complex.
of the first “supermax” prisons in the United States, and its arrival
initiated a trend in constructing prisons explicitly for long-term solitary
confinement, SHU cells are built for sensory deprivation. They have no
windows. Fluorescent lights burn 24 hours a day. The 2011 hunger strike
escalated throughout prisons across the state as a protest against the
policies that determined allocation to the SHU, the length of detention,
the terms under which prisoners would exit, and the conditions of their
confinement.

The conditions against which the prisoners were protesting are
remarkably similar to those found in Eastern State Penitentiary nearly
two centuries earlier. The architecture of SHU cells is based on the same
blueprint—halls of eight-by-ten-foot cells radiating from a central
surveillance spine. Imprisoned people continue to be referred to by
numbers rather than names. This is not to maintain anonymity, since
online locator services allow access to a broad range of information
about individual prisoners. Those imprisoned in the SHU are passed food
through slots in otherwise solid cell doors. They are prohibited contact
visits, and most prisoners in Pelican Bay are held a considerable distance
from their loved ones in Southern California—a 12-to-13 hour drive—
which results in infrequent visits. Imprisoned people in the SHU endure
22 and one-half hours per day in solitary confinement, with 90 minutes
for exercise undertaken in isolation in a pen adjoining their cells.







‘There is one significant difference between administrative
segregation in California State Prison’s SHUs and Eastern State
Penitentiary. The average period of solitary confinement in the latter was
‘two to four years, whereas today, in state and federal prisons, the period
is significantly longer, with many held indefinitely. According to the
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR)
statistics, the average SHU sentence is six years. Pelican Bay imprisons
3,500 people, 1,500 of whom are locked in solitary confinement. OF
people imprisoned in the SHU, 544 have served between five and 10
years in solitary; an additional 513 have served more than 10 years, with
78 confined in the SHU for 20 or more years (Small 2011),

Over 2.3 million people are imprisoned in the United States, of
whom approximately 80,000 are held in isolation units— with over
12,000 in California alone. As observers of those imprisoned in Eastern
State Penitentiary noted two centuries ago, isolation has a negative
impact on prisoners” psychological and physical health, Considerable
mental health research and evidence from human rights organizations
demonstrate that sustained and long-term imprisonment in isolation units
is torturous (see, for example, Haney 2003; Kupers 2006). Extended
sentences in SHUs have been associated with increased rates of suicide
and self-mutilation, visual and auditory hallucinations, insomnia,
paranoia, and a host of other symptoms (Haney 2008). Rather than
realizing reformers’ desires for nurturing an individual's “inner light
the Quakers historically referred to it, solitary confinement is used
systemically as additional punishment for those whom prison officials
label “the

worst of the worst” within an already brutalizing system,



People are sent to solitary for a range of reasons, including prison staff
profiling them as gang members (such identification can be simply a
result of the reading materials in a person’s cell or who they greet in the
prison yard); resisting prison guards’ instructions; and attempting to
teach or organize fellow prisoners. For those imprisoned people who
continue to push boundaries, even within isolation units, many prisons
have a punishment unit within their isolation units, Often referred to as
“the hole,” punishment units are comprised of cells with no light, no
beds, no toilets, and no access to personal belongings.

Ultimately, the 2011 California prisoners” hunger strike spread to 13
prisons across the state and was supported by thousands of allies inside
and outside prison walls, including international support. In July 2011, at
the conclusion of the first round of strikes, over 6,600 prisoners had
participated, They resumed the strike in October 2011, with over 12,000
prisoners participating across the state. Some

prisoners remained on strike for months afterward. Their core demands
have remained consistent throughout: an end to group punishment;
abolition of the gang debriefing policy’ and modification of gang status
criteria; an end to long-term solitary confinement; adequate food; and
expanded programming and privileges for indefinite SHU-status
prisoners, including access to a weekly telephone call. On February 2,

1 Prisoners who have been “validated” as gang members by prison officials
may be released from the SHU into the general prison population only if
they “debrief” —renouncing their gang membership and providing
information on other prisoners, especially information linking them to gang
activity
2012, Christian Gomez, in administrative segregation in Corcoran
State Prison, became the first prisoner to die on hunger strike.

Widespread participation in the strike, together with strong organizing by
advocates, prisoners’ loved ones, and community organizations, has
amplified the strikers” voices. Media coverage in newspapers, radio, and
television as well as a dynamic, frequently updated campaign online has
drawn international attention to the prisoners’ circumstances and
demands, Rallies, demonstrations, and weekly vigils have drawn
supporters together. The energy generated by the strike has sparked new
life in the US anti-prison movement, bringing movement elders and
newcomers together. It has established an informed critique of police
anti-gang profiling with sustained efforts to halt the impact of such
profiling on imprisoned people. Additionally, despite continued efforts
by the CDCR to pit prisoners against each other, the strike has forged
solidarity across prisons throughout the system.



In October 2012, the Short Corridor Collective, the multiracial group of
strike leaders imprisoned in Pelican Bay that initiated the 2011 hunger
strikes, authored an agreement to end hostilities between racial groups in
California prisons and jails. The agreement was circulated widely inside
and outside prison walls and was understood as an extension of the
campaign initiated through the hunger strike.

The statement further called on imprisoned people throughout the prison
and jail systems to set aside their differences and to use diplomatic
means to settle disputes.



Although the primary focus of the strike has been on isolation units, the
breadth of prisoner participation has served as a reminder of the poor
conditions in which all prisoners are held. This was consistent with the
recent US Supreme Court ruling that compelled the CDCR to reduce the
state prison population by at least 33,000 prisoners due to lawsuits
regarding unconstitutionally poor physical and mental health care for
prisoners*, This came after years in which the system languished

under federal receivership for the same reasons’. The ruling was a

2 The California adult prison system, which was designed to hold about
80,000 prisoners, currently holds about 156,000 people. The court required
the CDCR to reduce its population to 137.5% of design capacity.

3. Brown v. Plata Opinion of the Court (p. 11); text of the decision can be
found online through a
decisive victory for lawyers and advocates who had supported lawsuits
against the prison system, in some cases for over 20 years. News of the
ruling was quickly transmitted throughout California’s prisons, igniting
false hope for many prisoners that they might be released,

‘The 2011 California prisoner hunger strikes were the largest US prisoner
strikes in a generation. They breathed new life into a movement weary
from the steady onslaught of killings, disappearances, and humiliations
directed at imprisoned people in prisons, jails, detention centers, and
locked psychiatric facilities. They forged solidarity across prisons, races,
and similar divides constructed and exploited by prison officials. They
compelled the CDCR to draft revised policies regarding gang
identification and management and prompted state congressional
hearings on solitary confinement. These are substantial victories in an era
in which little headway has been made in challenging and dismantling
the prison-industrial complex. This focus on the conditions of
imprisonment brought hunger strikers into close resonance with a
diversity of people internationally. Even for those who maintain that
prisons are essential and that punishment within prisons should be harsh,
revelations that prisoners have been denied human contact, access to
mental and physical health care, and a decent, nutritious diet have had a
significant impact. The realization that prisoners were being imprisoned
for decades in a space no larger than an average parking space, with rare
glimpses of sunlight, generated substantial support for the strikers.

Since the 2011 strike, conditions have not improved significantly for the
people imprisoned in solitary confinement in the California prison
system, Despite claims that it would revisit its policies on gang,
validation and placement in the SHU, the CDCR expanded its gang
categories and made no meaningful changes to its SHU policies. Because
of the CDCR’s lack of progress in addressing concerns about the
conditions of long-term solitary confinement, California prisoners
initiated a new round of hunger strikes and work stoppages on July 8,
2013.

‘Campaigns aimed at improving conditions of confinement have been a
mainstay in prison reform throughout the contemporary history of
imprisonment. These campaigns are important because of the reforms
they achieve—visitation rights, dietary changes, access to education, and





Google search,
appropriate healtheare—and also because they illuminate the inhumane,
deleterious environments in which prisoners are warehoused. Improved
conditions allow imprisoned people to resist that inhumanity more
effectively and vigorously, challenging the systems and regimes in which
they are confined. They also make it possible to stay alive while living in
acage. These are significant, life-or-death advances.

‘A focus on conditions of confinement, however, also has the potential to
limit possibilities for change. It can further entrench the popularly held
assumption that imprisonment is a necessary evil. Inevitably, it can lend
support to a liberal-reformist agenda proposing that if specific violations
or abuses are addressed, prisons have the potential to function as
positive, useful institutions. Consequently, reformers regularly describe
the prison-industrial complex as a broken system. Far from being broken,
however, the prison-industrial complex is actually efficient at fulfilling
its designed objectives—to control, cage, and disappear specific
segments of the population. Making small corrections to the system, in a
phrase used by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, is akin to “tweaking Armageddon”
(Gilmore 2004). Efforts to reform or improve the destructive, often fatal
machine that is the prison-industrial complex may run the risk of
exceptionalizing or isolating negative elements of the system, while
normalizing its overall operation and underwriting its future. Focusing
solely on the policing practice of racial profiling, for example, deflects
attention from the actual function of policing in the maintenance of racial
hierarchies. Similarly, granting winter caps (headgear) to SHU prisoners
“obscures the destructive force of imprisonment and its contribution to the
social, and occasionally physical, death of those from the most racially,
socially, and economically marginalized communities within US society.



For activists and organizers, campaigns focusing on conditions of
confinement give momentum to the push for changes to the system while
amplifying the humanity of imprisoned people. Giving names and faces
to the harsh treatment and inhumane conditions in which prisoners are
confined, these campaigns chip away at the system yet fall short of
fundamentally questioning its legitimacy. Alternatively, campaigns to
eliminate the system as a whole are often represented and criticized as
idealistic and inconsiderate of the environments imprisoned people
endure every day. What prison abolition campaigns generate, however,
the ability to make demands based on what is necessary rather than what
is presented as possible. They develop the political space to confront an




inherently inhumane system with the clear long-term objective of its
elimination,

In part, the 201! prisoner hunger strike solidarity campaigns succeeded
because of the skillful combination of conerete demands made by SHU
prisoners and a broader questioning of the rationale for imprisonment.
‘The strikes provided a springboard to challenge the legitimacy of
imprisonment used by the state as a weapon to respond to crises of
poverty, racism, homelessness, and similar social

inequities. They raised public debate in the media and in communities
‘across the state and framed the inhumane conditions of confinement as
an issue of wider social responsibility. The strikes and their attendant
solidarity campaigns serve as examples of how abolitionists and
reformers can join forces rather than operate at cross purposes.

The last two centuries of imprisonment provide clear evidence that
claims for a “healthy prison” are untenable. No change to the discrete
‘workings of the system can create health and well-being for those in its
cross hairs. The means that make it increasingly possible for imprisoned
people to be sufficiently strong must be supported to enable their
resistance within prison walls, while simultaneously campaigning to
erode the assumption that prisons are necessary institutions. Only by
investing in meaningful education and employment, in programs that
address interpersonal harm, substance abuse, and social conflict, and by
promoting healthy, stable living environments will a world without
imprisonment become a reality.
REFERENCES,

Center for Constitutional Rights
nd. Pelican Bay statement, At
http./ccrjustice org newsroom/press-releases/center=



ba:

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson
2004 Speech delivered at the “Revolution Will Not Be
Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex”
conference. University of California, Santa Barbara,
April 30 to May 1

Haney, Craig
2003 “Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and
“Supermax’ Confinement.” Crime & Delinquency
49 (January): 124-56.
2008 “A Culture of Harm: Taming the Dynamics of
Cruelty in Supermax Prisons.”
Criminal Justice and Behavior





5: 956-84.

Kupers, Terry A.
2006 “How to Create Madness in Prison.” In Humane
Prisons, edited by David Jones, 47-58. Oxford, UK:
Radcliffe Publishing.

Small, Julie
2011 “Under Scrutiny, Pelican Bay Prison Officials Say
They Target Only Gang Leaders.” KPPC and NPR,
August 23. At www.scprorginews/201 1/08/23
/28382/pelican-bay-prison-officials-say-they-lock-


CASE CITATIONS FROM INSIDE FRONT COVER

i, Reagan v. Time, Inc,, 468 U.S. 641, 648-49, 104 SCt 3262
(1984). "[T]he fact that society may find speech offensive is
not sufficient reason for suppressing it. indeed, ifit is the
speakers! opinion that gives offense, that consequence is a
reason for according it constitutional protection." Hustler.
Magazine, Inc v. Falwell, 495 US 45, 46, 108 SCt 876, 882. The
government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply
because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,
us. hman, 496 US 310, 319, 110 SCt 2404 (1990). "[A]bove
all else, the First Amendment means that government has no
power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas,
its subject matter, or its content." Police Dept. of Chicago v.
Mosley, 408 US 92, 95, 92 SCt 2286, 2290 (1972).







ii, Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners Labor Union, 433 US
119, 97 SCt 2532 (1977)

iii, Pell v. Procunier, 417 US 817, 822, 94 SCt 2800, 2804
(1974)

iv, Tumer v. Safely, 482 US 78, 107 SCt 2245 (1987)
v, Turner, supra
vi, Turner, supra

vii, Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 US 563, 573, 88
‘SCt 1731 (1968).

viii, Abu-Jamal v. Price, 154 F3d 128 (3rd Cir., 1998); Xv.
Blatter, 175 F3d 378 (6th Cir. 1999)




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