PREFACE

"All persons under any form of detention of imprisonment shall be treated in a humane manner and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person ... Any form of detention of imprisonment and all measures affecting the human rights of a person under any form of detention or imprisonment shall be ordered by, or be subject to the effective control of a judicial or other authority." [ICCPR - Anncx, Principles, 1 and 4]

The American Friends Service Committee has had a Criminal Justice Program in Newark, New Jersey since 1975. We have received thousands of calls and letters of testimony of conditions of imprisonment from family members and prisoners throughout the country. As a result, the AFSC began a project called Prison Watch which monitors human rights abuses in United States prisons. For the past 24 years, I have had the privilege of being a human rights advocate on behalf of the AFSC for US prisoners. This pamphlet is our attempt to share with you some of the voices we hear during our days.

The politics of the systems -- the welfare system, the public school system, the health care system and the criminal justice system -- play a profound role in the lives of the poor in this country. It is hard not to note that the rules and regulations of these systems which affect almost all of us, are created, written, and voted upon by mostly upper class white males whose lives will not be touched by their decisions. Their children do not go to public schools, they do not use public hospitals, they are surely not on welfare, and should they commit a crime, even their prisons are different.

Certainly, in the criminal justice system, the politics of the police, the politics of the courts, politics of the prison system and the politics of the death penalty are a manifestation of the racism and classism which govern so much of the lives of all of us in this country. Every part of the United States criminal justice system falls most heavily on the poor and people of color, including the fact that slavery is still permitted in prisons by the 13th Amendment of the US constitution. Although prison labor is not the focus of this pamphlet, involuntary slavery in prisons is real.

As a result of our New Directions Youth Project, we hear from young people in Newark and other inner cities. They tell us that the police feel like an occupation army as if the inner cities are militarized zones. They feel that the courts are used as feeder systems to filter young blacks and Latinos into prisons where their young bodies are worth a fortune. I've heard people say that the criminal just system doesn't work. I've come to believe exactly the opposite -- that it works perfectly as a matter of both economic and political policy.

Prisons are one of the largest growth industries in the US. We live in an age where young males of color have been 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 the ghettoized poor into invalids just as alcohol was introduced to incapacitate the people of the First Nations.

I don't believe that it is an accident that people who are perceived as economic liabilities have been turned into a major economic asset - for the young male of color who cannot get a job and is, therefore, worth nothing in the country's economy suddenly generates between 30 and 60 thousand dollars a year once trapped in the criminal justice system. Nor do I believe it's an accident that this technological revolution has been accompanied by the largest explosion of building prisons in the history of the world. The expansion of prisons, parole, probation, the court and police systems has resulted in an enormous bureaucracy. This proliferation of the Prison Industrial Complex has been a boon to everyone from architects, plumbers, and electricians to food and medical vendors, all with one thing in common - a pay check earned by keeping human beings in cages. The criminal justice system costs multi-billions of dollars which means that there are a lot of people being paid a lot of money for containing mostly folks of color in cages in human warehouses. The criminalization of poverty is a lucrative business and it seems that we've replaced the social safety net with a dragnet.

Some of the most poignant letters we get are from prisoners writing on behalf of mentally ill prisoners - like the man in California who spread feces over his body. The guards' response to this was to put him in a bath so hot it boiled 30% of the skin off his body. Article I of the United Nations Convention Against Torture prohibits "physical or mental pain and suffering, inflicted to punish, coerce or discriminate for any reason." Practices such as the indefinite use of shackles and other mechanical restraints, and the administration of dangerous chemical treatments, or the practice of extended isolation cannot be justified. These practices put the US in violation of United Nations Treaties and Covenants, which it has signed. For those of us dealing with this kind of oppression on a daily basis, use of the UN Covenants and Treaties has enormous potential because it is international law. For the first time ever, human rights groups such as Amnesty lnternational, the World Organization Against Torture, Human Rights Watch and Prison Watch Internationale have all reported on the persistent and widespread pattern of human rights violations in the US. The American Friends Service committee has been a contributor to each of those reports. Most recently, the United Nations Committee Against Torture cited chain gangs, sexual assault of prisoners, use of electric stun guns and restraint chairs as violations of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

These past years have been full of hundreds and hundreds of calls and complaints of an increasingly disturbing nature from prisoners and their families throughout the United States. Most describe inhumane conditions including cold, filth, callous medical care, extended isolation sometimes lasting over a decade, use of devices of torture, harassment and brutality.

We have received vivid descriptions of four point restraints, restraint hoods, restraint belts, restraint beds, stun grenades, stun guns, stun belts, tethers, waist and leg chains and air tasers.

The use of extended isolation has also been a growing concern for many prison activists, both inside and outside the walls. The reports coming in about the use of devices of torture have largely been from isolation units, which are called control units or supermax prisons, where there are few witnesses. ln New Jersey, prisoner Ojore Lutalo has been held in the Management Control Unit in total isolation since February 4, 1986. He has never received an explanation for this. He is let out for an hour and a half every other day. He has basically been told that he is being kept in sensory deprivation because of what he "could do if he wanted to." Ruchel Magee lived under these conditions in California for more than 20 years. Russell Shoats has been living in various Pennsylvania isolation units for 17 years.

There are thousands of others as well. The monitoring that the American Friends Service Committee has done leads us to believe that an increasingly large percentage of the US prison population