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Speech developed for ACT '97 Conference at Harvard University
2/28/97 - 3/3/97
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by Bonnie Kerness, American Friends Service Committee



The least controversial observation that one can make about the US criminal justice system is, that is it remarkably ineffective, absurdly expensive, grossly inhumane and riddled with racism. The slaughter of youth of color characterizes many big city police departments. Our sentencing practices have led to the imprisonment of over one and a half million people in State and Federal facilities, with another three and a half million under other forms of social control. It does not come as any surprise that the greatest percentage of people that end up in our prisons are people of color.


For the last 20 years, I have been a human rights advocate in the prison movement. It has become glaringly clear to me that, just as there were economic and political functions of slavery, so are there economic and political functions of prisons. I don't believe it's any accident that the overall crime rate between 1980 and 1990 remained stable, while the imprisonment rate went up 112%. Nor do I believe it's any accident that youth of color are being fed into the prison system through the cooperation of the police and court systems. Depending on geographic location, between 65% and 85% of those the US imprisons are people of color. To me the only thing more startling about the data of who is in prison and for what, is the impotence of the data. Academicians, criminal justice personnel, advocates and people of color all understand that the criminal justice system actually does work--it works perfectly as a matter of both economic and political policy.


Prisons are one of the largest growth industries in the US at this time. We live in an age of automation which does not generate new opportunities for manual work, as technology replaces muscle and nominal skills. Males of color - most of whom were brought here for the express purpose of labor - have now become useless to the economy of automation. Males of color have moved out of a historical state of oppression into one of uselessness in the economic context of this country. They have been discarded as a waste product of the technological revolution, with illegal drugs turning Ghettoized Blacks and Latinos into virtual invalids just as alcohol was introduced to incapacitate the people of the First Nations.


I no longer believe that it is by accident that people who are perceived of as economic liabilities have been turned into a major economic asset - for the young male of color who is worth less than nothing in this current economy is suddenly worth between 30 and 60 thousand dollars a year once trapped in the so-called "justice" system. Nor do I believe it is any accident that this technological revolution has been accompanied by the largest explosion of building prisons in the history of the world. We can't ignore that the expansion of prisons, parole, probation, the court and police systems has resulted in an enormous bureaucracy with many parasitic defenders. The expansion of the prison system in this country has been a boon to everyone from architects, plumbers and electricians to food vendors, all with one thing in common - a gourmet paycheck earned off the backs of males of color. Just like every welfare kid that is processed through the welfare system puts food on the able for innumerable counselors, investigators, clerk typists, administrators, accountants, etc., so now this grown up kid is picked over by guards, counselors, administrators and so on - all so they can send their own kids to college. The vested interest of these bureaucracies is intense and well organized. And with the full cooperation of politicians and the media, the public is being sold a "War on Crime" and a "War on Drugs" as the cure for the constantly hawked, yet non-existent rising rate of crime. It is still incredible to me that this country has entire towns where the sole industry is prisons. The prison system spends $74 billion dollars a year which means that there are a lot of folks getting paid a lot of money for containing mostly folks of color in cages in human warehouses. The criminalization of poverty is a very lucrative business.

Conditions in these warehouses have deteriorated considerably in the past few years to a point where prisons in the '70's have ironically become the "good old days". In the 1970's prison activism from both inside and out was at its height. Prisoner organizers demanded, and in many cases, got positive changes in programs, vocational training, counseling, improved visitation, improved food and medical care and so on. Since that time, the country has undergone a brainwashing resulting in this criminalization of poverty. Public perception and perspectives have been distorted quite deliberately by politicians and the media to the point where the harsher the conditions in prisons, the happier the public seems to be.

The move towards removing any semblance of human comfort in prisons is taking hold and it is a rare day that I don't get a collect call from some hellhole in the county with a report of a new atrocity. Most of my work centers on the growing use of isolation/sensory deprivation cages which were originally called control units. The use of sensory deprivation as a form of behavior modification began as an experiment with the political prisoners of this country - members of the Black Panther Party, members of the Puerto Rican Independentistas, the American Indian Movement, white members of the Plowshares movement, members of the Black liberation Army. They then began using isolation for Islamic militants,, jailhouse lawyers and prison activists who suddenly found themselves being removed from general population and being placed in isolation. Most of these prisoners were never charged with any infraction at all. They were told that this was not a punishment but an administrative decision. In other words people are placed there for who they are or for what they believe. In the control units there is no entrance criteria and no exit criteria which means that the prison administration has a frightening amount of discretion as to how long people remain in this tortured state. One New Afrikan prisoner with whom I work has been held in the control unit in New Jersey for 11 years. The former warden of Marion Penitentiary has been openly quoted as saying that the purpose of a control unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and society at large.

We are now seeing the expansion of this experiment in solitary confinement manifest in the building of supermax prisons all over the country at a rate that is mind boggling. These are entire prisons devoted to forcing people to live in complete isolation. You cannot see or hear another human being unless or until the administration decides you can. Perhaps the fastest growing population to find themselves living in enforced solitude are the youth of color who are in prison as a result of the recent passing of racist crack laws. Most of these youngsters have received unconscionably long sentences. As a consequence of their anger at this, they tend to commit real or imagined infractions shortly after their imprisonment, which results in Departments od Correction all over the country placing them in sensory deprivation units. There is no way for me to articulate the horror of endless sensory deprivation. Picture living in a human cage about the size of a bathroom. You are placed in this cage in a human warehouse where you will eat, sleep, wash, read, think, and take care of bodily functions. You are there 24 hours a day, day in and day out, year in and year out with no end. The prisoners say that the silence is eerie. There is a steel door between you and the rest of the world. You may be allowed out once every other day for an hour and a half in a concrete yard. You may be allowed one 15 minute call a day and that call is monitered. In some of the units you get one call every three months. Your mail and reading material is censored. If for some reason you have to leave your cage, you are strip searched which often includes a pointedly humiliating anal probe. You are shackled around your waist and handcuffed. You are entirely under the control of prison guards who carry long, black clubs they refer to as "nigger beaters". You remain constantly on the alert for your own mental and physical deterioration. In a letter from one of these brothers, he asks me "how does one go about articulating desperation to another who is not desperate. How does one go about articulating the psychological stress of knowing that people are waiting for me to self destruct?" There is no question in my mind that this is an acute form of torture that is being done with deliberation. Sensory deprivation and isolation are brainwashing techniques. This is no accident.


The world of control units and supermax prisons is a world in which isolation and segregation for long and indefinite periods of time has led to a psychological brutality of ugly proportion. The expanded use of these units has led Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the World Organization Against Torture USA to cite the United States with their concerns. The use of isolation in this country breaks United Nations Covenant Against Torture and the United Nations Covenant for the Treatment of Prisoners, both of which the United States has signed.


One of the conditions that hasn't changed at all throughout my years of monitoring prisons has been the brutality. I don't think it is possible to hold such power over another human being and retain one's humanity. I get reports on a daily basis of beatings, cells extractions, hosings, and worse - the most horrible kind of treatment that one human being can inflict upon another. In one isolation unit in California, a prisoner was treated to a "bath" by guards in which 30% of his skin was boiled off him. Guards all over the country have been found to be members of extremist right wing organizations. Certainly they and the police unions throughout the country are a driving force for the building of isolation prisons. The isolation units and prisons not only provide a safe working environment, they also provide less public places for much of the torment to occur.


In the past five years or so, we are also monitoring the rapid rise of the mentally ill being held in isolation/sensory deprivation. Many of the mentally ill find themselves in prisons throughout the US as a result of not being able to either comprehend or adhere to societal rules. They don't do much better once in prison. I've received some of the most heartbreaking letters from them telling stories of hog-tying, four point restraints, and sexual torture for food and cigarettes.


If we dig deeper into such practices, the political function they serve is inescapable. Police, the courts and the prison system all serve as social control mechanisms. The economic function they serve is equally as chlling. America is enchanted with this form of neo-slavery.


Last year I received a copy of a memorandum written hy the Investigative Service Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison, a control unit prison in California. In it they are reviewing a prisoners central file and they comment that "this memorandum refers to the subjects correspondence with Bonnie Kerness who acts as a mail drop for prisoners and militant organizations throughout the United States". They go on to say that "the Prison News Service, organized by Bonnie Kerness has since been identified as the news letter for the Black Guerilla Family..." That memo goes on for 3 pages with its mistruths and distortions, my point being if we don't do something now, they can be coming for any one of us who dissents politically. The politics of the police, the politics of the courts, and the politics of the prison system is the politics of social control and I believe it affects every one of us in ways that are a call to action.


Prisons reilect both the structure of society and the nature of the struggle against that structure. The wall of silence that has been built around prisons and prisoners has got to be broken down. The adage that if we are not part of the solution, then we are part of the problem rings especially true when talking about activism on prison issues. Inside prisoner activists need outside eyes, ears and hearts. I have the privilege that much of my work is suggested by prisoner activists and I am hear to bring you their message of need. We need organizers of campus and community groups, letter writers, people who will become part of a nation-wide emergency response network for telephone calls, faxes and letters when we protest conditions, treatment and brutality. There are groups working against the racist death penalty, groups working on behalf of political prisoners, groups such as the National Campaign to Stop Control Unit Prisons--all of which need assistance. We need to expand the level of popular understanding of what is happening in this country's prisons and make it relevant to the lives of everyone that we know and touch. The folks in prison are mostly the poor and the working class who need jobs and education. Prison issues are class issues and until prison organizers and outside organizers begin opposition on a more serious and protracted level, prison administrators don't even have to respond to our complaints. The American Friends Service Committee and the National Campaign are seeking to expand the base of young organizers. We have helped start about half a dozen campus groups throughout the country. This summer the National Campaign hopes to host a training for young organizers in Chicago. I also know that there are opportunities for internships available through a number of progressive organizations.


I've brought material on control units, the impact of isolation and other prison related issues. I know that there are enough activists here together so that we can find a place for every one of us to contribute to the social change that must take place in this country. Strugggle is a protracted commitment that I urge you to make. Rafael Cancel Miranda, who was a Puerto Rican political prisoner for 25 years in the US has admonished those of us who know about prison conditions. He said that we "cannot feel bad or sad. We must DO something!". The insidious crippling mostly of our poor young people of color in the prisons is expanding and none of this is about the rate of crime. It is about capitalism, it is about racism, it is about standing together in fighting the poison that drips from the American culture which is the culture of greed, the culture of no-values, and the culture which fears the joy of diversity. I genuinely hope that this gathering will reflect and foment the activism which is so necessary for us to make changes for a humane, non-racist and equitable society.


I want to close with a reading of one of Assata Shakur's poems which speaks of the indominatable spirit of some of the prisoner human rights activists with whom I've had the privilege to work.



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"No One Can Stop The Rain"



Watch, the grass is growing.

Watch, but don't make it obvious.

Let your eyes roam casually, but watch!

In any prison yard, you can see it - growing.

In the cracks, in the crevices, between the steel and the

concrete, out of the dead gray dust, the bravest blades

of grass shoot up, bold and full of life.

Watch. the grass is growing. It is growing thiough the cracks.

The guards say grass is against the Law.

Grass is contraband in prison.

The guards say that the grass is insolent.

It is uppity grass, radical grass, militant grass, terronst grass,
they call it weeds.

Nasty weeds, nigga weeds, dirty, spic, savage indian, wetback,
pinko, commie weeds - subversive!

And so the guards try to wipe out the grass.

They yank it from its roots.

They poison it with drugs.

They maul it,

They rake it.

Blades of grass have been found hanging in cells, covered with
bruises. "apparent suicides".

The guards say that the "GRASS IS UNAUTHORIZED"

"DO NOT LET THE GRASS GROW".

You can spy on the grass. You can lock up the grass.

You can mow it down, temporarily.

But you will never keep it from growing.

Watch, the grass is beautiful.

The guards try to mow it down, but it keeps on growing.

The grass grows into a poem.

The grass grows into a song.

The grass paints itself across the canvas of life.

And the picture is clear and the lyrics are true,
and the haunting voices sing so sweet and strong

that the people hear the grass from far away.
And the people start to dance, and the people start to sing,
and the song is freedom.
Watch, the grass is growing.


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