SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
==
see human rights violations
see mass deport? ICE?
NO LNX
A new low even for MAGA – but they're about to go lower
REUTERS/Rebecca Cook
Sabrina Haake, Raw Story May 05, 2025
Last week, Trump held a campaign-style rally on the campus of Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan. To the delight of his MAGA fans, he trotted out the same personal grievances he’s been serving up since 2015.
Despite achieving fewer legislative accomplishments during his first 100 days than any president since the 1950s, Trump told his adoring crowd that he had “accomplished more in three months than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years.”
If aiding the enemy, defying court orders, and taking a chainsaw to federal services are “accomplishments,” then Trump is accomplished indeed.
MAGA delights in Trump’s cruelty
After his usual braggadocio, Trump pivoted to video recordings of abject cruelty. Behind the podium, Trump displayed large screen videos of the inhumane treatment of helpless migrants he deported to El Salvador's notorious gulag, CECOT. He brayed, still without evidence, “The worst of the worst are being sent to a no-nonsense prison in El Salvador… watch this!”
“This” was a series of video clips showing hundreds of men he has imprisoned without due process, without a hearing, and without credible evidence that they committed any crime. “This” was a video showing men brutally bent over, having their heads shaved bare, and forcibly shoved into concentration camp-style cages that sleep 75 to 80. “This” was Trump priming his already violence-prone base into a bloodthirsty frenzy, as they exploded in raucous approval of his inhumanity, thundering, "USA! USA! USA!"
According to an affidavit from the Human Rights Watch, prisoners held in CECOT are denied communication with the outside, and only appear before courts in online hearings, often in groups of several hundred detainees at the same time. The Salvadoran government calls them “terrorists” who “will never leave” the prison.
El Salvador, governed by a man who controls the media and calls himself a “cool” dictator, denies human rights groups access to its prisons, and allows journalists to visit only under highly staged circumstances. In videos produced during these visits, prison authorities brag about men held in completely dark solitary confinement cells.
Trump’s stochastic violence against judges
Trump also used the rally to showcase his continued attack on judges, whom he called “communist radical left judges,” claiming they are trying to ‘seize his power.’ Nodding to the courts’ inability to enforce their own orders, Trump warned the world: “Nothing will stop me.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio concurs. At least week’s cabinet meeting, to which Trump invited the media, each cabinet member tried to out-flatter the next person by praising Trump. Seated to Trump’s right, Rubio announced that questions regarding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man sent in error to El Salvador — specifically, what steps the White House was taking to facilitate his return — were off limits to the media. “I’ll never tell you that, and you know who else I’ll never tell?” Rubio jeered.
“A judge,” he answered himself, “because the conduct of our foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States.”
Due process is not a matter of foreign policy
Vice President J.D. Vance also describes the rule of law with sarcastic bombast. He has slammed critics, including federal judges, for “weeping over the lack of due process.”
The Fifth Amendment protects all persons, not just US citizens. It guarantees that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law;” it does not say, ‘no citizens.’ Trump, Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Vance act as if they’ve never heard of it, despite its storied American history. Trying to assume the role of the courts in deciding what the law is, they keep declaring, falsely, that their abuse of immigrants is about “foreign policy.” It isn’t. It’s about the US Constitution, the lynchpin of democracy, without which we don’t have one.
After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that Trump must facilitate Garcia’s return from El Salvador, Trump took to social media to turn a legal block into a PR strategy. He wrote that he is “being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court…which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela… If we don’t get these criminals out of our Country, we are not going to have a Country any longer.”
Revealing his complete ignorance of how legal immigration works, he added, “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years. We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do…MAGA!”
It’s as if, despite tanking last year’s border bill just so he could campaign on it, he’s never actually considered that processing immigrants requires paperwork.
VP Vance, who knows better, says it’s up to Trump—and himself— to decide what due process is, and what it requires. “To say the administration must observe “due process” is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors.” No. It isn’t. It’s not up to Vance and Trump’s discretion because the Fifth and 14th Amendments, and well established precedent, mapped out what due process requires — notice, a hearing, and an opportunity to be heard — decades ago.
Trump is a symptom, not a cause
It’s a sick disease of the mind, this urge to oppress others for power, but Trump didn’t invent it. Neither did Hitler, Mao Zedong, or Stalin. It’s been there since we stopped living in tune with the earth, and started living in our heads. It’s our collective fall from grace, a phenomenon worsened exponentially by social media.
Watching our experiment stumble brings deep personal anguish, like watching someone you love destroy themselves. You’d give your own life to help, but they have to save themselves.
A minority of Americans- 23%- approve of what Trump is doing and would loudly cheer “USA!!” at videos of human suffering. These are the same people who used to applaud public lynchings; before that, they salivated at public stonings, witch burnings and Caligula’s public displays of torture. It seems they will always be with us; the only positive is that there are far more of us than there are of them.
ALSO READ: Trump is a troll – but this 'ugly' selfie demands a damning response
Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are or have been published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News, State Affairs, and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-lashes-out-with-a-dangerous-lie-at-the-federal-judge-overseeing-roger-stones-case/
no lnx
Trump lashes out with a dangerous lie at the federal judge overseeing Roger Stone’s case
President Donald J. Trump waves as he disembarks Marine One at Joint Base Andrews, Md. Thursday, Jan. 9, 2020, and is escorted to Air Force One by U.S. Air Force personnel. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
Written by Cody Fenwick February 12, 2020
President Donald Trump lashed out Tuesday night at Amy Berman Jackson, a federal judge who has overseen several key cases that arose from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. She is currently presiding over the case against longtime Trump friend Roger Stone, who is due to be sentenced soon after being found guilty of lying to Congress and attempting to impede its Russia investigation.
In response to a tweet naming Jackson, Trump tweeted: “Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure? How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!”
Judge Jackson did send Manafort to prison ahead of his trial in the summer of 2018, finding that he had violated the terms of his release. But judges do not determine the conditions prisoners are kept in; those decisions are made by the prisons and jails that house inmates.
And despite his lawyer’s claims that Manafort was in solitary confinement, prosecutors described his conditions as far more accommodative than is usually imagined when the term is invoked. As Vox reported, a filing from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team said his conditions included:
Manafort “is not confined to a cell”
Between 8:30 am and 10 pm, Manafort “has access to a separate workroom at the jail to meet with his attorneys and legal team”
He has “his own bathroom and shower facility”
He has “his own personal telephone,” which he can use more than 12 hours a day
Those calls are limited to 15 minutes each, but when they cut off, he can just call the person back immediately
He’s made nearly 300 phone calls in the last three weeks
He has a personal laptop he can use in his unit to review materials and prepare for his trial
He was provided an extension cord to let him use his laptop in either his unit or his workroom
He’s not allowed to send emails, but he “has developed a workaround” for even that — his legal team brings in a laptop, he drafts the emails on that laptop, and they send them out after they leave.
He’s being treated like a “VIP,” according to his own account on a monitored phone call.
Jackson noted at one hearing that Manafort was later moved to another jail in Alexandria, Virginia, because of his team’s complaints. CNN explained:
She said Manafort “realized the tactic had backfired immediately.” He was in a self-contained (“VIP”) suite in Northern Neck, Jackson added.
“I’m not going to split hairs over whether the word solitary was accurate because he had a room of his own,” Jackson said.
What Manafort’s detention quarters looks like now: Now he’s in protective confinement, not technically solitary. He has a window, radio, newspapers and view of TV. He’s released for a few hours a day to walk around and be with other people
“Mr. Manafort, I don’t want to belittle or minimize the discomforts of prison for you. It’s hard on everyone, young and old, rich or poor,” she said.
In short, Trump’s attack on Jackson was a lie.
It was also extremely dangerous. Jackson’s high-profile cases have already left her vulnerable to public threats; Stone himself posted a disturbing image of the judge ahead of his trial. And Trump’s efforts to attack a judge online are at least an order of magnitude worse. His fans have been known to target the subjects of his public rebukes before, most notably in the case of Cesar Sayoc, who sent pipe bombs to Trump’s perceived enemies. The fact that he is tossing out such inflammatory attacks ahead of his friend’s sentencing in another extreme assault on the rule of law.
Cody Fenwick is a senior editor at AlterNet. He writes about politics, media and science. Follow him on Twitter @codytfenwick.
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Over the past several years experts across the spectrum have raised red flags about the conditions immigrants face while in DHS custody. Fox News figures repeatedly dismissed and mocked those concerns -- and now a new watchdog report proves that the experts were correct all along.
A report from the DHS inspector general found that immigrants face “unsafe and unhealthy conditions” in violation of ICE standards. Some issues include expired food, raw food contamination, moldy or dilapidated bathrooms, and segregation practices that violate standards and “infringe on detainee rights.”
Other credible reports have show similar horrors. News outlets have also reported that solitary confinement is misused at various facilities, that ICE has deported former service members inappropriately, and that doctors have concerns about DHS practices and the conditions under which it keeps undocumented patients, including “shackling patients to beds and not permitting them to use restrooms.” Additionally, 24 immigrants have died in ICE custody during the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the acting DHS secretary is asking for the law to be changed to allow ICE to detain immigrants even longer.
None of this makes it to Fox News. Instead, Fox figures have rigorously defended the conditions at these facilities:
- Fox host Laura Ingraham claimed detention centers holding migrant children separated from their parents are “essentially summer camps” or “basically boarding schools.”
- Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy chided those criticizing the Trump administration for putting children in cages, telling viewers to “keep in mind, this is a great big warehouse facility where they built walls out of chain link fences.”
- Former Border Patrol chief and acting ICE director Mark Morgan told Tucker Carlson that the agency “should be applauded” for its policy of housing children in cages.
- A Fox & Friends regular asserted that detention centers “are not dog kennels” because “they’ve got cable from Central America.”
==
**Homeland Security Whistleblower Goes Public About ICE Abuse of Solitary Confinement**
Maryam Saleh, Spencer Woodman
Ellen Gallagher’s yearslong effort to draw attention to ICE’s use of solitary confinement was met with a maze of bureaucratic indirection and indifference.
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aa man just release after 30 yr angola 3?
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Chelsea Manning has sacrificed everything twice
Few can endure the mental anguish of solitary confinement, or what prisons more insidiously refer to as “administrative segregation.” Fewer still can endure multiple stretches of “ad seg” occurring months…
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https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-august-22-2018/
90's overcrowding (3 strikes?) led to fights, sor Marion-ization of prisons.
According to Terry Kupers, a culture of punishment and impunity pervades solitary confinement facilities around the U.S. Because many inmates in solitary suffer from serious mental illness, they can respond to escalating punishments in ways that invite more — and more brutal — punitive measures. Kupers discusses what can be done to promote, rather than undermine, inmates’ emotional stability and prospects for rehabilitation.
Terry Kupers, Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish ItUniversity of California Press, 2017
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https://www.freedomunited.org/
omg
Being detained is punishment but being forced to work for the benefit of a private corporation is against international law. This is what is happening at the Otay Mesa immigration detention center in California, run by $1.7bn company CoreCivic. Since launching our campaign, rather than hearing messages that their practices will change,shocking new cases of forced labor have emerged.
Join our call and tell CoreCivic this is unacceptable.
Five asylum-seekers detained at Otay Mesa brought a legal case against CoreCivic for forcing them to work, ironically under their “Voluntary Work Program.” They allege that CoreCivic secured their labor by threatening them with solitary confinement, byrevoking family visitation rights, and by withholding mail delivery.
Since we learnt of that case and launched our campaign, new even more shockingallegations have emerged. A victim of trafficking for sexual exploitation, who on escaping contacted US authorities, rather than getting the support she needed, was detained in a CoreCivic detention center in Texas and forced to work for $1 a day.
Just last month a wide-ranging new case was brought against CoreCivic on behalf of all civil immigration detainees who performed forced, uncompensated work for CoreCivic.
Tell CoreCivic it’s time to change.
We should be amazed that this company, contracted by the US government, faces such wide-ranging allegations of forced labor and has failed to act. Sadly, it is much less surprising in this deeply disturbing ‘zero tolerance’ climate towards immigration, which has already seen nearly 2,000 children separated from their parents.[1] However, this does not dampen our outrage.
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"detainees began to work in the kitchen just so they could eat more…one detainee lost 68 lbs. Their ‘volunteering’ involved literally working for food.”:{1:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:
Immigrants detained in a private prison in San Diego allege that they have been subjected to forced labor and threatened with solitary confinement or restricted visitation rights if they refused to work.:{2:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:
The complainants say the company that owns the prison, CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison companies in the US, pays at most $1.50 per day, and sometimes nothing at all, for their work as kitchen staff, janitors, barbers and in various other roles.
But reports of forced labor are not isolated to immigration detention centers. In Oklahoma, offenders sentenced to rehabilitation end up forced into labor on chicken farms, without any recourse or access to an actual recovery program.:{3:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: Prisoners in California are forced into labor and made to risk their lives fighting the state’s wildfires for a dollar an hour or less.:{4:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:
Forced labor in prisons is not an immigration issue, it’s an American one, replicated worldwide.
The United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, housing 25% of the world’s prisoners but only 5% of the global population, and spends more than $80 billion a year. Incarceration rates in the United States have increased by 700% in the last four decades, even though crime has dramatically decreased.:{5:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: Among those incarcerated, more than 60% are people of color. And Black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men.:{6:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:
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http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/uncovering-americas-secret-prisons-here-home
Nettle Guantanamos. This is the phrase that some are using to describe prisons known as communications management units, CMUs, highly secretive and dubious of legality. And they're right here in the United States. And an estimated 70 people might be held there. CMUs, largely unknown to the general public and media, are rarely granted access. Well, one journalist was recently able to get inside one of them in Marion, Illinois. And he joins us now to share what he saw. Will Potter is an investigative journalist and TED senior fellow, and author of the book Green Is The New Red: An Insider's Account of Social Movements under Siege.
Watch: Interview with The Real News Network. Full transcript below:
PERIES: So Will, I guess on everyone's minds is how did you manage to get inside the prison? And of course, once you got inside, what did you see?
POTTER: Well, journalists are not allowed in CMUs. But I had been writing about one prisoner in particular for quite some time. From the day of his arrest I'd followed him all the way through the legal process, up through his conviction. And so I was able to able to visit Daniel McGowan, who's an environmentalist who is in the CMU, as a friend. And I was quite surprised by that, even, because I'd uncovered evidence that the counterterrorism unit had been monitoring my work and speeches about CMUs and writing about CMUs that I had done. But I quickly found out how that happened. And it's because Daniel was told that if I asked any questions or if I reported about our visit that he would be punished for my work. And when I arrived at the prison I was reminded of the fact that I was not allowed to ask him any questions. Nevertheless, it was an important insight into how CMUs operate, and an opportunity to see this from a perspective that other journalists have not been able to.
PERIES: And what does one have to do to be relegated to one of these prisons? How is the process determined?
POTTER: That's exactly the problem, is that we don't know. Even considering lawsuits that are pending right now, we still don't have clear answers to that question. All the prisoners I've talked to were transferred to the CMU without any warning. They were just notified in the middle of the night or early morning, and then sent off to this secretive unit without explanation. When they asked for some opportunity to appeal their designation, or some explanation for what has happened and why they're there, they were either ignored or answered in very simplistic terms, and not really elaborated. For some of them it was clearly because of their political beliefs. We found out through legal proceedings and open records requests that the government sent some people to CMUs because of their, quote, anti-government and anti-corporate views. For other prisoners I think it is quite clearly because of their race and religion. The majority of prisoners in CMUs are Muslim, and many of them have connections to very dubious terrorism prosecutions that involve FBI informants and potential entrapment, even. So that's really the breakdown of these prison units right now.
PERIES: And the communications management units, why are they called that?
POTTER: I think that's a really good point. As a writer and someone who is very careful about language, I admire the creativity and how benign that title is, of communications management unit. It sounds very straightforward. And it almost gives the perception that other prisoners do not have their communications managed. That's simply not the case, though. Every communication with every prisoner in a federal prison is monitored. It's received by prison officials. The letters are reviewed. Phone calls can be reviewed. All visitation is monitored. The question then is why are some prisoners singled out for much harsher treatment? And like I said, we don't have a good answer to that. But we've begun to see some of the government's rationale. And that really boils down to their political beliefs.
PERIES: And the other curious term behind all of this is the term 'inspirational significance'. What does that mean, and how are prisoners classified as such?
POTTER: So as I was saying, the CMUs were opened secretly, and in many people's opinion, illegally. They didn't go through any administrative oversight. And only until years later did we start seeing some language describing what these prison units are supposed to do. And the government described them as facilities for prisoners with, quote, inspirational significance. And I think that's a very, again, very benign and quite brilliant way of describing what I think in any other environment would be considered political prisons for political prisoners. People are sent to the CMU because of their race and their religion and their political beliefs. In Daniel McGowan's case, for instance, I think he clearly has inspirational significance in relation to the social movements that he advocates for on environmental issues, on conservation, on climate change and things like that. And all of this, his writings about this while imprisoned, ended up in counterterrorism unit files and were used as evidence of why he should be imprisoned in a CMU.
PERIES: And tell us a little bit more about his case. How did he end up in this classified prison?
POTTER: So Daniel McGowan, like all the other prisoners in CMUs, has been convicted of crimes. In his case he was convicted of participating in two arsons in the name of the Earth Liberation Front, which is a clandestine group which has used property destruction in the name of defending the environment. But like all the other prisoners in the CMUs, or I should say almost all the prisoners, he had no disciplinary violations, and he had no communications violations. He was previously at a low-security prison. In other words, he didn't have anything on his record prior to going to prison or after being incarcerated that would reflect this need for heightened security measures, which I think makes it even more clear of being singled out because of his political beliefs.
PERIES: And how did you manage to convince the prison authorities to allow you as a friend into the prison if he's under such surveillance, as far as his communications is concerned?
POTTER: I was--it didn't take any convincing on my part. I mean, I just submitted my request, just as any visitor would. It didn't take any convincing on Daniel's part, either, which is quite surprising. It was approved, really, without any fanfare until, like I said, McGowan was told that if I wrote anything about our visit he would be punished. And then when I arrived I was told they knew all about my work, they knew about interviews on Democracy Now! and in places like that, and that if I asked him any questions the visit would be immediately terminated.
PERIES: And how many of these kinds of prisons are there, and also answer whether--why these are in Indiana and Illinois.
POTTER: There are two CMUs that we know about. One is in Marion, Illinois and the other is in Terre Haute, Indiana. They both exist within larger federal prisons. So they are really prisons within prisons. They were opened, as I was saying before, without any oversight or accountability. There are similar facilities, such as in Carswell, the prison in Texas for women, but that are not being called communications management unit but seem to restrict prisoners in similar ways. And really, the story is still emerging on that, of how--what the government's plans are. If there will be additional CMUs. There's a move to make these facilities permanent now rather than experimental. And we don't know how that's going to play out.
PERIES: And the restrictive nature for the media is something that's written, or did you, did anyone tell you as a journalist you're not allowed to enter this prison? And if so, why?
POTTER: Yeah. It's communicated in several ways. It's through some of the procedural moves that I mentioned about going through the official process now to make these facilities permanent. It's also been communicated and exposed through a lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is taking on the case of Daniel McGowan and others, and advocating for prisoners within the CMU. And as part of that they've obtained, must be thousands of pages of documents through the discovery process, which I was able to use in my presentation with TED to an extent as well. And also through direct communication to me, when I was there at the facility.
PERIES: Right. And you say many of these prisoners are Muslim. Is there any reason to believe that any of these prisoners, Muslim or otherwise, are any security threat to us in the U.S.?
POTTER: No, not at all. I mean, I think that really speaks to the discriminatory nature of these prison units, is that spectre and that fear, that outright racist stereotyping, is being used to create this fear of this community that frankly doesn't exist. The Muslim community that is imprisoned in the CMUs are not the Zacarias Moussaouis of the world. They're not the 9/11 hijackers, they're not anything like that. They're people like [Yasin Arif] who is an imam from upstate New York who was asked to bear witness to a loan, and it turned out one of the people that he was, that was involved in that loan, was an undercover FBI agent who was trying to entrap someone else in a fake attack. And Arif didn't know anything about it. So it was really a manufactured plot that Arif found himself wrapped up in, and as a result of that ended up eventually in the CMU. Those are the types of cases that we're talking about here....
==
cold dark cell w/o 11 yo child, trauma
immigr moms in solitary for hunger strike, w/ kids; paid 3$/day, ice cream is 350, color bedspread syndrome kpfa 4/17
For the second time this spring, mothers held in a southern Texas privately-run immigrant detention center with their children have staged a hunger strike and work stoppage to protest their inhumane conditions of confinement and demand immediate release for themselves and their families.
Ten mothers detained at Karnes Detention Camp began the peaceful protest on Tuesday, vowing to eat only one meal per day until their demands are met, Mohammad Abdollahi, advocacy director for the San Antonio-based Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (Raices), told Common Dreams Wednesday morning.
The women's demands echo those issued by dozens of mothers who staged a similar peaceful protest at the facility in late March and early April to coincide with the Easter holiday.
The hunger strike launched on Tuesday aims high in the chain of command, calling forImmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Sarah Saldaña to reverse course from the Obama administration's controversial policy of detaining families seeking asylum, and instead, grant the strikers parole and release.
The women say the situation is urgent.
They report harrowing conditions at the prison, which has a capacity of 532 but is slated to expand to more than double its current beds. People held there are compensated just $3 a day for working to run the facility, denied their rights to meet with legal aid workers, forced to drink water contaminated by fracking waste, and their children are suffering ill health and psychological effects related to their incarceration, according to a letter sent toColorlines.
Women have alleged sexual abuse and assault from prison guards and staff, prompting community protests outside the facility.
Abdollahi, who is involved in direct support, compared the facility to an internment camp: "The conditions are absolutely horrendous. Parents are not allowed to be parents, to decide what their kids eat, how many times their diapers have changed. They have to ask permission for milk to nurse their children with."
These conditions are "very harmful and detrimental," Abdollahi added, because a majority of people in the prison are fleeing violence.
Delmi Cruz is a 37-year-old mother and asylum-seeker from Honduras who has been detained at the facility with her 11-year-old son for over six months. "It’s very hard here, the food isn’t adequate, it’s awful, horrible...the children who eat it become sick," Cruz toldthe Guardian, according to an article published Tuesday. "My son has horrible stomach pain and is still very sick."
Cruz is participating in the hunger strike despite what she described as retaliation from guards for her part in the earlier protest, when she was placed in the medical unit's solitary confinement along with her son.
Abdollahi said there are signs this punishment is beginning again: "Cruz called us frightened on Tuesday, saying that women are being called to medical and there has been retaliation."
Bob Libal, executive director of the advocacy organization Grassroots Leadership, toldCommon Dreams that the women on hunger strike are victims of the Obama administration's harsh policies towards people who seek asylum in the United States.
"Between 2009 and 2014, the policy was not to detain asylum-seeking families," said Libal. "This was after a very controversial policy during the Bush administration of locking up families. Many groups were involved in organizing and legislative efforts to end the practice of detaining families, and in 2009, the Obama administration said it was ending this practice."
"However," Libal added, "last summer after the increase in the number of refugee kids made the news, the administration reversed course."
Amid this political climate, the Karnes facility was opened by ICE last summer under orders from the Department of Homeland Security to detain asylum-seekers at the border, rather than grant them bond.
GEO Group, the private company that runs the prison, has faced numerous accusations of abuse, medical neglect, violence, and civil rights violations, including hundreds of lawsuits, at its prisons and mental health facilities around the world. A report released on Wednesday by Grassroots Leadership reveals that GEO Group, along with other private prison corporations, has aggressively lobbied for harsher immigration policies.
Outside the Karnes prison, people across the country are mobilizing to defend the people impacted by these policies.
Supporters of the hunger strike are making phone calls to ICE, signing petitions, and even planning solidarity vigils and fasts, said Abdollahi, adding, "These women are desperate to get out."
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http://www.apa.org/action/careers/communities/craig-haney.aspx**
“There are few, if any, forms of imprisonment that appear to produce so much psychological trauma as isolation. There’s very little doubt in psychology that enforced isolation is psychologically harmful.”
The Psychological Effects of Incarceration
Psychologist Craig Haney, PhD, studies the use and impact of solitary confinement on inmates in super-maximum security, or “supermax,” prisons.
“There’s very little doubt in psychology that enforced isolation is psychologically harmful and for some people will be very damaging,” says Haney, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Despite the shared perspective many psychologists have about the dangers of isolation and social exclusion, less research has been done into the psychological impact of enforced solitary confinement. Haney’s goal is to get the data in order to evaluate whether such confinement is harmful, how much damage it can inflict and who is most susceptible.
Studying the Supermax
Haney has inspected many supermax prisons across the U.S., conducting systematic psychological assessments of nearly 1,000 inmates in solitary confinement. In addition to conducting observations and face-to-face interviews with inmates, mental health staff and correctional staff, he has performed an extensive literature review of personal accounts and prison documents relating to the operation of confinement units.
Through his research, Haney has found little evidence to support claims that prisoners or prison systems benefit from solitary confinement. Even those prisoners deemed to be the worst offenders don’t require such extreme isolation and deprivation. Many, he argues, are placed in supermax conditions not for what they have done but on the basis of a prison official’s judgment that they are dangerous, disruptive or a threat. Often, he says, they can and should be handled differently.
Solitary Confinement and Social Deprivation
“There are few, if any, forms of imprisonment that appear to produce so much psychological trauma as isolation,” Haney says. “For many prisoners, the absence of regular, normal interpersonal contact creates a pervasive feeling of unreality.”
Haney’s research found that among the population of inmates in supermax prisons, there is a higher rate of mental illness than the general prisoner population. Some inmates entered the prison system with existing mental health problems, while others show signs of mental illness that emerged after confinement. He assessed 400 randomly selected inmates to determine if they were experiencing symptoms of psychological distress or demonstrating isolation-related psychopathological symptoms. More than half of the assessed inmates experienced 11 of the 12 recognized signs of psychological distress. Approximately two out of three of those interviewed reported having anxiety attacks and feeling on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Some inmates also reported more extreme symptoms, such as depression and suicidal thoughts.1
His research showed that even in the correctional system, people need human interaction to be healthy psychologically.
“It borders on being common sense, but it is common sense with empirical research to support it,” Haney says. “So much of what we do and who we are is rooted in a social context. When people experience extreme isolation and social exclusion, they suffer.”
1For example, see: Haney, C. “Mental health issues in long-term solitary and ‘supermax’ confinement.” Crime and Delinquency, 49 (1), 124 – 156. Retrieved from http://www.supermaxed.com/NewSupermaxMaterials/Haney-MentalHealthIssues.pdf
Social Psychology
Social psychologists are interested in all aspects of personality and social interaction, exploring the influence of interpersonal, intergroup and intragroup relationships on human behavior.
Learn more about the science of social psychology
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ucsc Professor Craig Haney will present a lecture entitled "Think Different: Why Everything We’ve Been Taught About Crime is Wrong and What We Need to Do About It."
Professor Haney will describe the political and media misrepresentations of the nature and causes of crime in our society and their consequences in helping to fuel a very expensive and misguided set of crime control policies over the last several decades.
He will present the results of extensive research—his own and that of a number of others—demonstrating the developmental and social contextual origins of criminal behavior, including the impact of childhood risk factors, trauma, and maltreatment as well as economic inequality and neighborhood disadvantage on life trajectories.
Indeed, there is now an entire science of “life course criminology” that stands in direct opposition to the simplistic model of “free will” upon which much criminal law and prison policy continues to be based.
Haney will conclude by proposing an alternative, truly preventive model of crime control that stems directly from this fundamentally different understanding of the nature of criminality.
Published on Nov 17, 2012
From early research with Stanley Milgram and Stanford's Prison Study to more current research into why humans behave the way they do, UCSC professor Craig Haney joins Moving Forward host Ann J. Simonton to discuss his work in this field. They also discuss Capital Punishment and his book, Death by Design. Let Media Watch know what you think of this program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__BNd1ZFe_A
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No one has documented the long-term psychological damage of incarceration in the United States more than UC Santa Cruz psychology professor Craig Haney.
Haney, who holds psychology and law degrees, has spent his entire career watching prison populations grow while probing the psychology of imprisonment and the causes of violent crime. He has interviewed thousands of prisoners, many on death row or in solitary confinement in the nation’s growing stable of “supermax” prisons.
Haney has been selected to deliver the 49th annual Faculty Research Lecture scheduled for Tuesday, April 7, 2015, at 7 p.m. at the Music Recital Hall on the UC Santa Cruz campus. The lecture is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and a reception will immediately follow.
Haney's lecture is titled "PrisonWorld: How Mass Incarceration Transformed U.S. Prisons, Impacted Prisoners, and Changed American Society.” The faculty research lecturer is selected each year by UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate.
Since the "war on drugs" in the early 1970s, U.S. prison numbers grew to account for 25 percent of all the world's prisoners even though the nation amounts to only 5 percent of the world's population. Haney has witnessed firsthand the profound transformation that has taken place in the American prison system, during a period that has been termed the “era of mass incarceration.” Since the publication of his 2006 book,Reforming Punishment, he has continued to document and assess conditions of confinement in many of the country’s harshest and most severe prisons.
During his lecture, Haney will illustrate and analyze his findings about the effects of the transformation of U.S. prison policies and conditions, including the rise of supermax prisons such as Pelican Bay in far northwestern California, and discuss the impact on prisoners most directly affected by it.
For decades, Haney, who joined UC Santa Cruz in 1977, has warned that surging prison populations and deteriorating conditions are a dangerous combination. “We need to remember that the overwhelming majority of prisoners will be released one day,” he says. “It should matter to all of us what state of mind they are in when they rejoin free society.”
In 1971, as a graduate student working with Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University, Haney took part in and documented the infamous Stanford Prison experiment that simulated incarceration with students randomly selected to be guards and prisoners.
Haney’s research hasn’t been limited to scholarly papers in obscure journals. Thursday, (March 26) Haney took part in the Bipartisan Summit on Criminal Justice Reform in Washington, D.C. joining advocates and analysts across the political spectrum to address the American criminal justice system and potential reforms.
Haney has testified before the U.S. Senate and the California Legislature. His testimony in a 1999 federal court case challenging the constitutionality of supermax conditions led to a landmark decision in Texas. Another landmark ruling, this time in California, ordered the state to drastically reduce its prison population. The United States Supreme Court cited Haney’s analysis and trial testimony in upholding the order.
He was named to a National Academy of Sciences panel of leading scholars and experts on corrections to study the causes and consequences of high rates of incarceration in the U.S. The panel’s report last year was a damning indictment of the growth of incarceration.
In recent years, policy makers have begun to take notice. In August 2013, reversing years of tough political rhetoric in Washington, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder declared that levels of incarceration at federal, state and local levels had become both "ineffective and unsustainable.”
"We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer country," he said.
In January, New York City officials said they would eliminate the use of solitary confinement for all inmates age 21 and younger at the notorious Rikers Island prison.
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Andy Stepanian is one of the kindest humans I’ve ever met.
An activist publicist, Andy draws attention to Americans imprisoned for their beliefs. He is straitlaced and gentle, and the only time he ever declined to buy me dinner was when I offended his veganism by eating chicken fingers. But Andy is also a felon. As one of the SHAC7, he spent three years locked in a cage for urging people to employ militant protest techniques against the animal-testing corporation Huntingdon Life Sciences. He spent his last six months in prison in a Communications Management Unit (CMU).
CMUs exist to cut off prisoners from the outside world. The prisoners’ every word is recorded. They are strip-searched before and after each visit from loved ones (in case they write messages on their body). Letters are severely restricted; phone calls are limited to two 15-minute calls a week. CMU prisoners may spend decades without hugging their wives or children.
Like Guantanamo Bay, the CMU is a child of the war on terror. In 2006 and 2008, respectively, the Bureau of Prisons, under the directorship of Harley Lappin, created two secret units: one in Terre Haute, IN, and the other in Marion, IL. The bureau’s stated purpose was “ Limited Communication for Terrorist Inmates.” But as at Guantanamo, Muslims were the real targets. Muslims make up roughly 70 percent of the prisoners in CMUs but only 6 percent of the federal prison population. The CMUs are part of a philosophy that makes Muslim synonymous with terrorist, that views “terrorists” as both contagious and superhuman—so dangerous that they must be subject to ultimate control.
Andy was the rare white CMU prisoner. Guards told him he was there as a “balancer.” CMUs are another reflection of the double standard to which the United States holds Muslims. Acts of speech, travel or association that would be A-OK for a Christian are enough to get a Muslim branded a terrorist.....
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/chilling-reason-our-government-wants-erase-these-americans-history
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http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/3/6/part_2_angela_davis_on_solitary
tx officers ~ b/c makes more violent; NY no juv.
http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/the-hole/story/the-hole/ immigrants
An inmate in Illinois has been in solitary confinement since July for possessing “copious amounts of Anarchist publications” and “handwritten Anarchist related essays,” according to prison documents.
Mark “Migs” Neiweem is a prisoner at the maximum security Pontiac Correctional Center who, in addition to the publications and his writings about the prison industrial complex, was also found in possession of anarchist symbols including a “Circle A” and “Circle E” (the latter, which stands for equality, is described in prison reports as representing “class warfare, the 99%”).
“I’ve been doing this work since 1979 and I can’t think of another case where someone has gotten a disciplinary report for something so obviously political as this,” said Alan Mills, who is Neiweem’s lawyer and a professor at Northwestern University…
Read my full story at VICE.
Welcome Home, Daniel McGowan
Earth Liberation Front prisoner Daniel McGowan has been released from the Communications Management Unit and is back in New York City.
Daniel McGowan Back in Jail Days After Writing About His Secretive Prison Unit for Huffington Post
Daniel McGowan has been sent back to prison days after writing about Communications Management Units in the Huffington Post.
Environmentalist Tim DeChristopherwas moved into the Special Housing Unit of FCI Herlong last month, and placed in isolation — a practice that human rights groups have decried ascruel and inhumane treatment and tantamount to torture. After thousands of supporters called the Bureau of Prisons and members of Congress, DeChristopher was released from “the hole.” But the question remains: Why was a non-violent prisoner, with no disciplinary history, sent there?
According to DeChristopher’s support crew, “Tim was informed by Lieutenant Weirich that he was being moved to the SHU because an unidentified Congressman had called from Washington DC, complaining of an email that Tim had sent to a friend.”
In this email, DeChristopher said he was distressed to learn that a major donor to his defense fund was planning on moving jobs overseas. He said he would send a letter to the owners explaining his concerns, and that “this letter will include a threat to wage a campaign against them if they don’t reverse course and keep the plants open.”
In other words: a member of Congress sought retribution for a non-violent activist promising to protest a corporate supporter.
There’s no shortage of politicians who might be concerned aboutDeChristopher’s effective advocacy. So here’s an idea: Call your members of Congress and ask them directly if they requested that Tim DeChristopher be placed isolation. Watch this video to learn more…