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Invisible bodies
January 3, 2013
What are the effects of long-term incarceration on prisoners? In a country where mass incarceration has become the norm, what responsibilities do the state and the community have to prisoners and to protecting some of their most basic freedoms – access to health and freedom from torture being chief among them?
How CDCr scams California taxpayers
January 1, 2013
For the past 40 years, prisoners have been removed off general population due to being validated as alleged prison gang members or associates. This is the sole reason for our placement: not behavior. CDCr started this indefinite lockup in the mid- to late 70s and soon realized that there was an economic incentive for labeling prisoners as a threat to the safety and security of the institution.
If only you could see our beat up and emaciated bodies
December 30, 2012
Since the last hunger strike, the administration via the “Office of Corruptional Security” has instituted documented military torture tactics here at Pelican Bay State Prison in order to create hostile living conditions and attempt to turn prisoners on each other. But many of us have seen these tactics before, so we know how to deal with it.
Political prisoner Khalfani Malik Khaldun puts the Indiana prison system on trial
December 29, 2012
Since Dec. 13, 1994, Indiana political prisoner Khalfani Malik Khaldun has been held in control units, i.e. administrative segregation or isolation. It began when police and prison investigators manufactured a murder charge against him after a guard was stabbed and killed. Brother Khalfani is a Muslim and New Afrikan revolutionary educator who professes a strong sense of radical politics and culture.
Report from the Pelican Bay SHU Short Corridor Representatives: Continued ignoring of Five Core Demands could prompt resumption of peaceful protest
December 28, 2012
It has been more than 13 months since we agreed to suspend our non-violent, peaceful protest hunger strike actions in response to CDCR’s top administrators’ admissions that all of our Five Core Demands were reasonable and would be responded to via substantively meaningful changes to the policies and practices at issue. This has NOT HAPPENED.
Nobody deserves to be tortured: a response to CDCR’s STG-SDP plan
December 20, 2012
The new “Security Threat Group Prevention, Identification, and Management Strategy” will instigate new and more aggressive attacks against prisoners and their families, friends, associates and communities, who are already being victimized by our institutionalized racist system and the prison industrial complex. It is just one of their many policies to persecute prisoners incarcerated in solitary confinement units.
Update from Calipatria ASU: It’s a big difference here
November 24, 2012
Things have been very mellow and tranquil here at Calipatria ASU. There hasn’t been any tension or bullsh-t with the staff or anything. Everybody got their TVs and cable installed recently and things have actually progressed. It will never be complete until the validation process is fixed and isolation has ended but there have been some real positive changes.
The Bay View has been my strength
November 23, 2012
After 12 years I have finally made it to a halfway house. Through my entire struggle behind the walls, your paper has played a major part in my political and cultural awareness. I could not have done it without you. My mission is to become a success story by giving recidivism a black eye and preventing these younger brothers from contributing to genocide as I once did when I was young and unpoliticized.
‘Settle your quarrels’: Update on End to Hostilities, prisoners’ demands, hunger strike
November 18, 2012
It’s vital that the End to Hostilities holds for all races and groups. We call on prisoners nationwide to draft up their own demands, tailored to their own individual institutional needs, to be served on CDCR and their prison wardens – I would get started on them now. We are giving CDCR a deadline to meet all of the demands, or else we are going to resume our peaceful hunger strike and work stoppage starting on July 8, 2013. All U.S. prisoners are asked to pick up the flag of solidarity and join us.
California leaders call on Gov. Brown to grant demands of prisoners in solitary confinement
November 14, 2012
Arbitrary and indefinite solitary confinement is an absolute assault on humankind and a barbarity the likes of which cannot be tolerated. We hold the utmost respect for those prisoners who from the depths of Solitary Confinement throughout California risked their lives to be heard. We heard them and now we ask that you do the same.
California’s cruelest prisons
November 1, 2012
It is well established that solitary confinement is cruel and psychologically damaging. Many of the SHU’s indefinite residents haven’t even broken prison rules. They are there because the California Department of Corrections claims they are connected to prison gangs. Such arbitrariness and cruelty has no place in a constitutional democracy. California should reexamine this practice.
End of hostilities holds in prisons statewide and spreads to the streets
November 1, 2012
Whether committing to end hostilities is called a “peace treaty” or “unity,” what’s starting to grow is a powerful force of strong minded individuals – in prisons statewide and on the streets – putting aside their differences with one another and standing up against the system to take back what’s rightfully theirs as human beings: their human rights!
The vortex of dementia
October 29, 2012
The prison system and the SHU is not going to shut down anytime soon. So we will have to be more realistic and pragmatic in our approach to addressing the mental health of prisoners. We can start off as prisoners by pledging we’ll not become collaborators with the CDCR in their endeavor to assault our sanity!
They circle like vultures
October 27, 2012
The new draft Step Down Program allows for any CO (correctional officer) or staff member to have any prisoner placed in SHU for anything they deem necessary, citing safety and security and public safety, even without any disciplinary action. Many of us have seen first hand the abusive nature of sadistic, racist and misogynistic CO staff who fabricate information to “break” prisoners.
Pelican Bay Human Rights Movement Bulletin: File your complaint
October 27, 2012
We are illegally being held in the SHU and Ad-Seg while being subjected to sensory deprivation, both physical and psychological torture, inadequate health care and isolation. PBSP and CDCR officials are refusing to comply with CDCR official policy. It is necessary we prisoners get more involved with our destiny.
Don’t let the torturer define torture
October 23, 2012
You cannot bury thousands of human beings under conditions that amount to torture – and you cannot leave it up to the torturer to establish the criteria for what constitutes torture. They never see anything wrong with what they do even when violating the law and the humanity of people. The STG policy makes it easier for CDCR to confine us to their dungeons.
California rises to prisoners’ challenge to end racial hostilities
October 14, 2012
“The idea of this agreement going around is a positive start to a new beginning for all inmates. If we could maintain this valuable peace treaty within the prison system, why not work on spreading the word outside the prison walls so that we may put an end to the gang violence and work on becoming a bigger force?” writes a prisoner in the Pelican Bay SHU. And in a large rally outside the LA County Jail, youth called for a “parallel cease fire in the streets” to correspond to the end of hostilities inside the prisons. Prisoners need this news. Please copy and mail this story to a prisoner.
Ammiano decries Gov. Brown’s veto of media access to prisoners
October 1, 2012
Assemblymember Tom Ammiano decried Gov. Jerry Brown’s veto yesterday of legislation that would have returned openness to California’s prison system. Ammiano’s bill, AB 1270, would have restored, not expanded as noted in the veto message, media access to the level that existed in 1996 when the CDC clamped down on the press’ ability to interview specific prisoners.
Solitary confinement policies in California revised again, as inmate leaders promote end to racial hostilities
September 26, 2012
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has recently circulated a memo regarding the most recent revised edition of its Step Down Program (SDP) and Security Threat Group (STG) Program proposal. The revised policies come one year after a series of statewide hunger strikes by inmates in the Security Housing Units (SHU) in Pelican Bay and other California state prisons.
My bogus validation and torture at Calipatria ASU
September 25, 2012
Gualberto Lopez and German Cabrera, both in the Administrative Segregation Unit (ASU) at Calipatria State Prison as “alleged associates of a prison gang,” write about the inhumane, torturous treatment in segregation, Institutional Gang Investigators and the corrupt validation process, as well as the targeting of Mexicans/Latinos/Hispanics.