solitary because of my "associations and beliefs." Knowing what your enemy's goals are helps you a lot in resisting giving ground. In my case, on days when I felt (and was) particularly abused and mistreated, I could always find hope and strength in feeling it was an honor to be held in conditions of control - in the way Chairman Mao meant it in that old quote we used to love so much about it being a good thing to be hated by the enemy.

Finally, one thing about control units is that, since their goal is to dehumanize, to destroy one's personality, each individual kind of needs to design her/his own program for survival, based in her/his identity and sense of what makes each of us human. How one person expresses and controls rage is not necessarily right for another - for example, for some people, keep busy is important for others, maybe stillness and inward thought is important. What resources - internal and external - each prisoner has available make a big difference, too. (One reason why activist groups are so important!)

Finally, really, I do believe that every one who has spent time in prison, double for control units, suffers physical if not also mental damage. Having this recognized - say, by the international antitorture forces - helps. I think it was Stuart Grassian who observed that the women in the LexHSU developed illnesses as a result of the unit. When I read that, it helped me understand the damage to my own health that resulted or was exacerbated by the control unit time.

Venceremos!

P.S. Have you been able to see the comet? It's gorgeous! Every morning I get up at 5 to go to a window in our unit from which I can see it; now in the evening we can see it before we're locked in. Every time I look at it I think of all those in the control units who are robbed of this incredible experience.

Laura Whitehorn
California

Goals & Methods of Control Units
Eight Survival Strategies

Introduction: Security Housing Units or Control Units are generally based on the "Stammhein Model" perfected by West Germany during the early 1970's. The purpose was unabashedly political, as is demonstrated in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons official criteria for incarceration: "(A) prisoner's past or present affiliation, association or membership in an organization which attempts to disrupt or overthrow the government of the U.S. or whose published ideology includes advocating law violations in order to free prisoners."

The object was to invoke in prisoners a sense of being totally at the mercy of and dependent upon their keepers, In the polite language of the John Howard Association: "Through a year or more of sensory and psychological deprivation, prisoners are stripped of their individual identities in order that compliant behavior patterns can be implanted, a process of mortification and depersonalization."

The techniques involved have been described by Amnesty International in the chart given below. As early as 1962, Dr. Edgar Schein described the methodology at issue rather more straightforwardly in an address to all federal maximum security prison wardens in Washington D.C.: "In order to produce marked changes in behavior, it is necessary to weaken, undermine, or remove supports for old attitudes. I would like you to think of brainwashing not in terms of ... ethics and morals, but in terms of the deliberate changing of human behavior by a group of men who have relatively complete control over the environment in which the captives live ... [These changes can be induced by] isolation, sensory deprivation, segregation of leaders, spying, tricking men into signing written statements which are then shown to others, placing individuals whose will power has been severely weakened into a living situation with others more advanced in thought reform, character invalidation, humiliation, sleeplessness, rewarding subservience, and fear."