lives in some form of extended enforced isolation. The prisoners tell us that the silence is eerie and that the conditions of confinement are torture. Picture yourself living in a cage the size of your bathroom for 15 years. You are placed in a literal human warehouse where you will stay 24 hours a day, day in and day out, year in and year out. In the more progressive units, you may be allowed into a bare concrete yard for exercise twice a week. Mail and reading material are censored. When you 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 guards who carry long, black clubs they refer to as "nigger beaters."

Right now, the latest explosion filling the isolation cages include youth of color imprisoned as a result of the racist crack-cocaine laws. And of all the people that I've seen in these units over the years, these youngsters are the most ill prepared for the torment of endless isolation. Current efforts to expand the solitary confinement population involve the alleged spread of gang problems in US prisons. While most of us working for prisoner rights know gangs exist in prisons, we also know this problem is sometimes created and enhanced by prison authorities. In New Jersey, the Department of Corrections recently built a 720 bed gang unit -- supermax style. I have been monitoring New Jersey's prisons for 24 years. Although New Jersey has prison gangs, it has never had a gang problem. This trend is being repeated throughout the country, resulting in the increased building of supermax prisons. In these gang prisons called Security Threat Group Management Units, prisoners are called upon to renounce their "gang" membership -- which for some of us is reminiscent of the witch-hunts which went on during the McCarthy investigations in this country in the 1950's. For instance, in a national survey produced under a grant by the Department of Justice, "Native Americans" are listed as a prison gang in the State of Minnesota.

Corrections personnel have told me that the national-wide move to expand the use of isolation is fostered by the guard unions. These unions are contributing heavily to the political campaigns of law and order candidates. Guards reportedly feel that these types of sensory deprivation units provide a safe working environment. I believe that isolation units also provide them with a place in which to engage in unwitnessed torture.

Add to all of this the United Nations Treaty positions on the racially biased death penalty, physical and sexual abuse of women in prisons, abuse of the mentally ill, abuse of prison labor, people dying under privatized medical care, violation of children's rights and shocking treatment of people being held in INS detention orders and your picture of US violations human rights continues. All of these practices go on daily and they all fly in the face of at least a dozen and a half of the International and regional human rights Treaties and Covenants to which the US is a signatory.

In recent years, the US government has been justifiably critical of the practice of some foreign governments, such as China, of using the prison population as a source of forced, under-paid laborers. What is not so widely understood is that similar practices occur in the US under conditions that amount to prohibited forced labor. At a prison facility in Texas, for instance, employers of prisoners include a circuit board assembler, an eyeglass manufacturer and a maker of valves and fittings. At least two of these companies have closed their factories and now rent factory space in the prisons for $1.00 per year. Once again, these practices violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Against Torture, The International Covenant on Civil and Political rights and the Standards Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.

Many of us trace the development of control units to the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement when many activists found themselves in US prisons. Sensory deprivation as a form of behavior modification was used extensively with imprisoned members of the Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army formations, Puerto Rican independentistas, members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and white radicals. In later years we found jailhouse lawyers, Islamic militants and prisoner activists placed in extended isolation. It is no surprise that Ojore, Ruchell and Russell Maroon Shoats are all connected in some way to either the Panther or BLA formations. In 1978, Andrew Young who was the US Ambassador to the United Nations, noted the existence of US political prisoners. With the exception of the recently released Puerto Rican political prisoners, those folks are still in prisons throughout the country over 25 years later.

There is no way to look into any aspect of the prison or the wider criminal justice system in the US without being slapped in the face with the racism and white supremacy that prisoners of color endure. There is often little hesitation on the part of Departments of Corrections to acknowledge that guards who are Klan members are active in prisons. Prison systems in the United States now hold almost 2 million people, a proportionately larger amount than any other country in the world. The United States contains 5% of the world's population, and holds 25% of the world's prison population. Between 65 and 85 percent of those the US imprisons are people of color. On any given day one out of four Black males is under some form of social control.

The folks in prison are mostly poor and working class who need jobs and education. United States prisons also serve as housing for vast numbers of the mentally ill, just as they serve to hold a huge drug dependent population which desperately needs treatment. Prison issues are race and class issues. The crippling of our poor, of our young people of color in US prisons is expanding, and none of this is about the rate of crime -- which has dropped dramatically. It is about capitalism and it is about racism. It is about a culture of greed and a culture which fears the joy of diversity.

I believe oppression is a condition common to all of us who are without the power to make the decisions that govern the political, economic and social life of this country. We are victims of an ideology of inhumanity on which this country was built. I have come to believe that the politics of the police, the politics of the courts, the politics of the prison system and the politics of the death penalty are the politics of social control. I believe that this affects every one of us in ways that are a call to activism. None of us in this room owns the means of production in this country anymore than does the homeless person on the streets.

Twenty-four years ago if you had interviewed me I would have fought any implication of torture in the United States. I would have fought the notion of US political prisoners. I would have fought any notion of a prison system that looks suspiciously like the system of slavery.

If we dig deeper into the US practices, the political function that they serve is inescapable. Police, the courts, the prison system and the death penalty all serve as social control mechanisms. The economic function they serve is equally as chilling. Many people with whom we work believe that prisons are a form of neo slavery.