Introduction—The Third World at Home: Political Prisons and Prisoners in the United States

“I have heard people refer to the ‘criminal countenance.’ I never saw one. Any man or woman looks like a criminal behind bars.” —Eugene V. Debs, Walls and Bars, 1927

The government of the United States maintains that there are no political prisoners incarcerated in the country’s penal facilities. The official perspective has perhaps been best expressed by John Clark, warden of the federal “super maximum” prison for men at Marion, Illinois: “While it’s true that some of the inmates held here subscribe strongly to certain ideologies, they are not here because they hold those ideological beliefs. They are here because they have engaged in criminal acts.” Those inclined to accept this convenient self-assessment, even momentarily or in part, should consider the following examples, drawn from the treatment accorded to those broadly defined as belonging to the political left.

Leonard Peltier is a 46-year-old Anishinabé/Lakota man serving consecutive life sentences in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. A member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Peltier was convicted in 1977 of killing two FBI agents during a firefight on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation during the summer of 1975. As Jim Vander Wall explains in this book, it has since been shown through the FBI’s own documents that incomplete and inaccurate ballistics evidence was deliberately presented at trial to “establish Peltier’s guilt.” As early as 1980, Amnesty International concluded that even the most elementary standards of justice required that Peltier receive a new trial. Prosecutor Lynn Crooks has since admitted the government “has no idea” who killed the agents, and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has formally acknowledged that the original case against Peltier no longer exists. Still, the court has declined to reverse Peltier’s conviction, expressly because the problems involved in the case result from a clear pattern of “misconduct on the part of some FBI agents.” To order the matter back to trial would, the judges correctly observe, “impute even more impropriety” to the Bureau, a step they profess themselves “reluctant” to take. The U.S. Supreme Court has twice refused to hear Peltier’s appeals, with no reason stated on either occasion. Peltier remains in prison.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad (Moore) is a former leader of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in New York. In 1973, he was convicted of wounding two police officers during an “ambush attack” staged in 1971. He was sentenced to serve from 25 years to life. On March 22, 1990, he was released from prison and ordered back to trial. The reason? As Bin Wahad explains in his interview with Dan Debo, a judge had finally required the release of FBI documents demonstrating conclusively that the Bureau, the New York City Red Squad, and state prosecutors had collaborated to coerce false testimony against Bin Wahad during his trial. For example, Pauline Joseph, a key government witness, was shown to have initially insisted to investigators that Bin Wahad was not the individual who had fired a machine gun at the policemen. After several months of being held as a “material witness”—all the while being “worked in shifts” by agents, cops, and prosecutors—her story mysteriously changed. In court, she claimed Bin Wahad had “confessed” his deed to her after the fact. The government agencies involved carefully covered up the contradictory statements of Joseph and other witnesses for more than fifteen years. It should be noted before passing on that all of this was acknowledged by the Supreme Court of the State of New York a full year before Bin Wahad was actually freed; he sat in a cage for thirteen additional months while the good judges debated whether the law meant they were “required” to grant him a new trial, or whether retrial wasn’t just an “option” they might decline to exercise.

Herman Bell, Albert “Nuh” Washington, and Anthony “Jalil” Bottom—the so-called “New York Three”—were members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). In 1975, they were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1971 “execution-style murders” of two New York City policemen. Now it has come out that ballistics evidence presented against them at trial was directly contradicted by FBI lab reports. The FBI, police, and prosecutors knew it at the time, but withheld this crucial information from the defense and then suppressed it for more than a decade. And there is more. Even prosecutor Robert Tannenbaum has admitted that a key witness against the three, Ruben Scott, was tortured—wires inserted into his penis, among other atrocities—by New Orleans police to obtain his “cooperation.” Having applied the stick, the government next utilized a carrot, apparently dropping murder charges against Scott in a California cop-killing case in exchange for his testimony against Bell, Washington, and Bottom in New York. Two other important witnesses, Linda Torres and Jackie Tabb, were held in jail as material witnesses for thirteen months and told they would never regain custody of their young children unless they testified to the prosecution’s version of events. Much of this information was also suppressed at trial and during direct appeals. Nonetheless, at present, the three remain in prison.

Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt headed the BPP chapter in Los Angeles during the late sixties. In 1972, he was convicted of the 1968 “Tennis Court Murder,” committed in Santa Monica, of a white schoolteacher named Caroline Olsen. Pratt’s main line of defense was that it was impossible for him to have killed Olsen, given that at the time of her death he was 350 miles away, in Oakland, attending a BPP national leadership meeting. FBI electronic surveillance logs derived from the Bureau’s bugging of Party headquarters, he argued, would prove his point. At trial, FBI representatives lied under oath, denying that any such bugging had occurred. They also denied that they had infiltrated the defense team when, in fact, they had. Pratt was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Years later, when it was proven that the Bureau had indeed bugged the BPP facilities in question, his attorneys once again demanded the relevant logs. As Pratt explains in the interview contained in this volume, the FBI then claimed to have “lost” the crucial material. The California Supreme Court then decided that the prosecution’s having placed informers among Pratt’s lawyers and paralegal staff had rendered “no prejudice” to his defense. As in the Peltier case, Amnesty International has long since concluded that a retrial is necessary if justice is to be served. At present, however, Geronimo Pratt remains in prison after nearly two decades in California, a state in which the average time served on a first-degree murder conviction is 14.5 years. During a 1988 parole hearing, LA Assistant District Attorney Dianne Visanni went before the board to explain why Pratt should not be released. She stated, “He is still a revolutionary man.” In 1991, he was again denied parole—and the California courts again refused to reopen his case—despite the fact that two private investigators have come forward and stated that, nearly a decade ago, while they were involved with a completely different case, they had an opportunity to examine the “missing” FBI surveillance logs and that the documents showed clearly Pratt was in Oakland on the crucial evening.

Mumia Abu-Jamal was once a member of the BPP’s information section in Philadelphia, working on the weekly production of The Black Panther newspaper. After the breakup of the Party, he became a prominent figure in the Philadelphia black community’s talk radio communications, winning several awards for community service and electronic journalism. In this capacity, beginning in 1978, he was able to do much to expose the illegal nature of the Philadelphia police department’s program of harassment against the local MOVE organization. As is covered in my article on Mumia later in the book, this appears to have infuriated the late Philadelphia Mayor (and former police chief) Frank Rizzo. Consequently, Abu-Jamal was arrested and charged with the slaying of a policeman on December 9, 1981, despite the fact that all eyewitnesses described the assailant as looking radically different from the accused (the killer was uniformly described as being short, over 200 pounds, and wearing an Afro hairstyle; Mumia is slender, over six feet tall, weighs 170 pounds, and wears his hair in dreadlocks). At trial, he was denied the right to the attorney of his choice (MOVE leader, John Africa) and was forced to rely mainly on himself, in consultation with an inexperienced public defender. Convicted, he was sentenced to death. As is covered in the article devoted to Abu-Jamal which follows, it appears at present that his appeals have been exhausted and the execution date draws nearer.

Other Variations There are several common denominators among the cases sketched above:

Each man assumed an important political leadership role within his community by opposing the imposition of U.S. socio-economic policy upon it; Consequently, each was specifically targeted for political “neutralization” by the FBI and cooperating state/local police agencies; Each was sent to prison on the basis of evidence which was/is suspicious, to say the least. Variations of any one of these stories might be repeated at least a hundred times over, the absolute minimum number of individuals presently held under similar circumstances in U.S. prisons. Even in situations where those imprisoned may have actually engaged to some extent in the acts attributed to them, there are problems of a highly political nature. These concern questions of double jeopardy, selectivity in application of the law, and disparity in sentencing (vis-à-vis right-wing defendants). Consider the following:

Kazi Touré Kazi Touré is an Afro-American political activist who became very visible during the confrontations concerning the busing of school children in Boston during the late seventies. In February 1982, he was arrested alongside an interstate highway in Massachusetts and charged with firearms violations. Convicted in federal court, he was sentenced to serve six years. He was then hustled into state court and tried a second time for precisely the same offense. Convicted again, he was sentenced to serve four-to-five years, with the state sentence to begin as soon as the federal sentence had expired. Appeals on the basis of obvious double jeopardy have been to no avail.

Yet the government can be shown to have consistently adopted the opposite stance where right-wingers are concerned. For instance, in 1975, when Pine Ridge Sioux tribal president Dick Wilson—a solid ally of the FBI in its campaign to destroy the American Indian Movement—faced serious charges as a result of his ordering a physical assault upon AIM defense attorney Roger Finzel, he was advised to go before a tribal court he controlled, plead guilty, and receive a $45 fine. Justice Department prosecutors then dropped their own charges against Wilson, arguing that to haul him into federal court—where he might have received a lengthy prison sentence if convicted—would represent “a patent breach of the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy.”

Dr. Allen Berkman Dr. Allen Berkman, a founder of the John Brown Anti-Klan League, is presently serving a twelve-year sentence stemming from allegations that he provided medical attention to Marilyn Buck, a Euro-American activist accused of having been wounded during an unsuccessful 1981 attempted expropriation of a Brinks truck in West Nyack, New York. Berkman is the first individual to have been imprisoned on this basis since Dr. Mudd—the physician alleged to have rendered similar services to John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

Insofar as it is dubious at best that only Berkman and Mudd have committed such an “offense” during the course of American history, selectivity in applying the relevant laws is self-evident. Further, as is recounted by Laura Whitehorn in her contribution to this volume, despite the fact that Berkman has been eligible for parole since 1987, is suffering from a potentially terminal case of Hodgkin's Disease, and that co-defendants in a related case entered guilty pleas to charges they would otherwise have contested as part of an agreement by which Berkman was to be released, the government continues to hold him in maximum security confinement.

Susan Rosenberg and Tim Blunk Susan Rosenberg and Tim Blunk are Euro-American activists convicted in 1984 of illegally possessing a quantity of dynamite, none of it fashioned into bombs. Both were sentenced to serve fifty-eight years in federal prisons. Their punishments might be usefully compared to that imposed upon Dennis Malvesi, a right-wing ideologue convicted during the same period of having actually used explosives to bomb a number of abortion clinics across the nation. Malvesi was sentenced to only seven years for his far more serious offenses and was released after only forty-eight months.

Another interesting comparison might be drawn with the punishment meted out to Edward Hefferman, a right-wing “survivalist” convicted in the mid-eighties of possessing 1,000 pounds of dynamite and eighteen fully constructed pipe bombs. He was sentenced to serve from six months to two years and was released after six months. The Rosenberg/Blunk sentences are far and away the heaviest for any possessory offense in the history of federal law. They are also two and a half times the average 1985 sentence imposed for kidnapping, three times the average for second-degree murder, four times the average for bank robbery, nine times the average for felony distribution of narcotics, ten times the average for assault, and sixteen times the average for illegal possession of firearms (a comparable offense).

Linda Evans Linda Evans is a former member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground. In 1985, she was convicted of harboring a fugitive and using false identification to obtain firearms. She was sentenced to serve three years on the fugitive violation and a total of forty-two more on the various weapons charges (all sentences were set to run consecutively, so she was actually required to serve forty-five years).

Tellingly, Evans was sentenced in New Orleans, the same federal jurisdiction in which Louisiana Ku Klux Klan grand dragon Don Black and several associates had been sentenced two years previously. In 1983, Black and his friends were apprehended on a boat loaded with explosives and automatic weapons, departing for the Caribbean nation of Dominica. Their plan was to invade the island, overthrow its government, and establish a new white supremacist regime. For these blatant violations of the Neutrality Act, as well as the same weapons laws over which Linda Evans was imprisoned, the klansmen all received sentences of ten years or less. Black himself was released on parole after only twenty-four months to resume his Klan organizing activities.

Preventive Detention After all is said and done, the government no longer really needs to bother with a trial in order to keep the politically objectionable out of circulation for extended periods. At issue is the so-called “Bail Reform Act of 1984” (18 U.S.C. § 3142), a measure ostensibly designed to allow courts to keep violent criminals—serial killers, known rapists, and the like—from harming anyone else pending trial, conviction, and sentencing.

In actuality, “preventive detention” is now being employed in at least twenty-nine percent of all criminal cases nationally. In approximately half of these, the defendant is ultimately acquitted but has already served the bulk of a sentence prior to trial as if a conviction had occurred. Predictably, the act has seen increasing application against political targets where public safety concerns are either shaky or absent altogether.

Filiberto Ojeda Rios Filiberto Ojeda Rios, a leader of the Puerto Rican independence organization Los Macheteros, was captured during a massive FBI sweep of the island in August 1985, ostensibly seeking those who had accomplished the 1983 expropriation of more than $7 million from a Wells Fargo vault in Connecticut. When armed agents stormed, unidentified and unannounced, into his home, Ojeda Rios responded by shooting one of them. Although there was no claim that the Wells Fargo robbery had occurred for motives of personal profit—indeed, the government readily admitted the money went to underwrite political activities—Ojeda and several other independentistas were charged with RICO conspiracy.

Ojeda was also charged with attempting to murder the FBI agent wounded during the assault on his home. Then, without making any showing that he represented a tangible threat to the well-being of the general public, prosecutors were able to have him placed in preventive detention pending trial. There he remained, despite serious health problems, for nearly five years until he was acquitted by a jury—on the basis of having acted in self-defense—in the attempted murder case.

Laura Whitehorn and Joe Doherty: Cases of Political Imprisonment Laura Whitehorn, one of the defendants in the Resistance Conspiracy case, was held in preventive detention for three years starting in May 1985. She was arrested by FBI agents at her home for possessing two unregistered firearms and a set of false identity papers. In May 1988, she was also charged under the Seditious Conspiracy statute for allegedly holding politically "impure thoughts." Importantly, Whitehorn was never charged with committing a specific violent act. Even if she had been proven to have carried out the four bombings attributed to her “conspiracy” (all of which took place in empty federal buildings), the government never demonstrated how this would pose a significant threat to the general public. Had she been acquitted by a jury—a possibility if the case had gone to trial—she, like Ojeda, would have already served a lengthy sentence for no reason. Furthermore, she was arbitrarily prevented from engaging in legal political organizing, which seemed to be the very reason she was deemed "dangerous" by the authorities.

Joe Doherty, a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), was arrested in 1981 in connection with a deadly ambush on a British military patrol. During his trial, Doherty and seven other IRA members escaped from jail. He was later arrested in New York in mid-1983 and held for extradition to Northern Ireland. However, a federal judge ruled that Doherty fell under the political exemption clause of the U.S./British extradition treaty. Judge John E. Sprizzo concluded that if Doherty were to be deported, it would have to be to a non-British jurisdiction, such as Ireland, or he might qualify for political refugee status in the U.S. This legal finding was not acceptable to the Reagan administration, and the subsequent Bush administration. The U.S. government arranged for Doherty’s detention while it appealed for an opinion that would demand his deportation to England. After four appeals, the government succeeded in February 1992. When compared to former members of Somoza’s national guard, wanted in Sandinista Nicaragua for crimes such as mass murder and torture, Doherty's treatment appears particularly harsh.

The Demographics of U.S. Prisons A notable pattern in many of the cases mentioned, including the stories of Adolfo Matos, Hanif Shabazz Bey, Alicia Rodriguez, and others, is the overwhelming representation of people of color. Most Euroamericans involved in these cases are linked to the liberation struggles of non-white populations. This is reflective of the broader composition of the U.S. prison population today.

The rate of imprisonment in the U.S. has escalated over the past decade. In 1983, there were fewer than 200 incarcerated individuals per 100,000 of the population. By 1990, this rate had risen to 263 per 100,000 and was continuing to increase. The U.S. stands as an outlier in the industrialized world in terms of its incarceration rate, with countries like Austria, West Germany, and England having far lower imprisonment rates. Even authoritarian Third World countries like Cuba and Libya have lower rates than the U.S. At present, U.S. prison rates dwarf those of its closest client states, such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and South Korea. The government, not wanting to be outdone by these nations, has made it a “national objective” to double the number of prison beds available in the U.S. by the year 1999, a move which, if achieved, would imprison at least 530 of every 100,000 citizens—four times the rate of the next closest industrialized nation.

While these statistics pertain primarily to prisons, they do not account for the growing number of people held in local jails, private detention centers, or under electronic surveillance. This suggests that the U.S. may soon have an incarceration rate of 1,500 per 100,000, a level far surpassing that of any other nation.

This trend disproportionately impacts people of color. By 1980, African Americans made up 11 percent of the U.S. population but represented 44 percent of the prison population. By 1990, this figure had surpassed 50 percent. Black men are six times more likely to be imprisoned than white men, and one in four African American males will experience incarceration in their lifetime. The situation for American Indian men is even more dire, with one in every 3.5 incarcerated. The incarceration rates for Latino populations are also rising, with the number and proportion of women of color in prison growing sharply as well. These disparities are compounded by the fact that people of color receive sentences that are, on average, 30 percent harsher than those of Euroamericans for similar offenses, and they are 25 percent less likely to be granted parole.

Socio-Economic Factors Behind Incarceration The reasons behind this growing racial disparity in incarceration are deeply tied to socio-economic conditions. American Indians, despite holding a significant portion of the nation’s natural resources, remain among the poorest populations in the U.S. The gulf between their potential wealth and their actual poverty fuels a cycle of systemic exploitation that benefits the U.S. elite.

Similarly, African Americans in impoverished urban areas such as Harlem or the South Bronx face levels of poverty so severe that their life expectancy is comparable to that of people in much poorer countries. Latino communities in the U.S. also endure similar struggles, particularly among migrant farm workers and inner-city residents. Since 1970, conditions for these populations have worsened due to the declining position of the U.S. in the global economy. This trend reflects the U.S.'s broader strategy of maintaining economic dominance through the exploitation of both domestic “internal colonies” of non-whites and its international neo-colonial practices.

The relationship between this dynamic and the U.S. prison system is clear. Historically, oppressive conditions in colonized countries have led to acts of survival, such as theft or resistance, which have been criminalized. Similarly, the U.S. criminalizes actions by its own impoverished populations, especially people of color, who are forced into desperate circumstances by systemic inequality. This process, which has involved the development of repressive social and legal structures, is not unlike the strategies used by colonial powers to maintain control over their territories.

The Repression of Internal Colonies The U.S. has developed its own internal system of control, which includes expanding the prison-industrial complex and increasing the militarization of law enforcement to address the perceived “threats” posed by its domestic “natives.” These practices reflect the same dynamics at play in its foreign policies, where oppressive regimes are supported to maintain stability for the U.S. elite. However, the government presents this as a service to the population, claiming that the “war on crime” (often framed as the “war on drugs”) is necessary to protect the public.

This narrative, often used by politicians like Ronald Reagan and George Bush, obscures the fact that the government itself has played a major role in fostering the very problems it now seeks to control, such as the importation and distribution of narcotics. The U.S. government’s approach to crime, particularly in communities of color, reflects a broader trend of increasing repression that mirrors the colonial tactics used globally. The repression of these populations is framed as a response to a “drug epidemic” or “gang violence,” even though these problems have been exacerbated by the very policies designed to eliminate them.As a justification for rampant draconianism, it is behind the Orwellian facade of ‘Drug Wars’ that an effectively limitless incarceration of otherwise targeted domestic groups is intended to occur.

Evidence of this trend can be found, not only in the planned rapid expansion of U.S. detention capacities to unprecedented levels, but also in incipient legislation like the new Omnibus Crime Bill (S. 1241), known as the "Violent Crime Control Act of 1991." Passed by the Senate on July 7 (by a vote of 71 to 26), and by the House on October 22 (305 to 118), this "get tough" amalgamation of extraordinarily reactionary measures will:

"Authorize the death penalty for about fifty federal crimes… limit appeals by condemned prisoners effectively gutting rights to habeas corpus relief for everyone else as well;" Relax rules on the use of illegally seized evidence thus voiding another constitutional protection; Authorize more money for federal state and local law enforcement." In the latter connection, even as a lingering recession undercuts the ability of both unemployed and working Americans to sustain themselves, and as ongoing record federal budget deficits "force" ever-deeper cuts in spending for such things as education and social welfare programs, more than $345 million—in addition to the billions of tax dollars already lavished upon them—is appropriated by the bill to "reinforce and expand federal law enforcement initiatives" devoted to "combatting drug importation, sales, and use."

For instance, slightly over $100 million in additional funding is allocated to underwrite the activities of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), an entity long considered to be one of the worst abusers of citizen rights in the U.S. Another $98 million supplement is allocated to the FBI, another prime violator of civil rights, to beef up its surveillance, infiltration, and other "anti-drug efforts" vis-a-vis the population at large. The U.S. Marshals Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), and Immigration and Naturalization Service each receive smaller supplements—$10 million, $15 million, and $20 million respectively—to "enhance" their "normal" activities with regard to "drug-related offenses." The Justice Department receives an additional $45 million to prosecute the anticipated upsurge in the number of citizens arrested, and federal courts are provided a supplement of $20 million to hire additional personnel to process the greatly increased volume of cases expected to result. Finally, in an afterthought provision tacked on at the very end, a meager $12 million is allocated to hire attorneys to defend citizens from the new $330 million police and judicial offensive directed against them. Such priorities speak loudly to anyone who cares to listen.

Official concern that there may well be a substantial—and growing—number of people listening, and perhaps prepared at long last to act upon what they hear, is amply reflected in a number of explicitly political provisions of the Omnibus Crime Bill, each of them designed to "combat terrorism" (the present euphemism encompassing any sort of meaningful political opposition). For example, the FBI is allotted another $25 million supplement to augment its ongoing and highly-secret "counter-terrorism" operation; yet another $25 million is provided so that the Bureau may accelerate its training and equipping of local police forces to participate in such activities. For its part, the BATF receives an additional $2.5 million with which to assist the FBI in tracking down those who might possess governmentally-proscribed weaponry that could afford them a fighting chance to defend themselves against the resulting SWAT capabilities of the country’s "law enforcement establishment." The death penalty is prescribed for a dozen categories of "terrorist activity," a whole new category of behavior dubbed "economic terrorism" is created (complete with an "Economic Terrorism Task Force"), and the prison sentences associated with a whole range of "terrorist offenses" are increased dramatically.

Political Prisoners, Political Prisons This takes us back to the matter of political prisoners in the U.S. As should be apparent from the preceding, both the form and function of prisons within the present social context are extremely politicized. In this sense, virtually all prisoners might be accurately viewed as "politicals." A useful distinction may nonetheless be drawn. On the one hand, there are multitudes who engage in often desperate acts intended simply to vent their legitimate rage at the sorry social status assigned them or to better their deprived material position (however slightly and transiently). On the other hand, there is a far smaller group whose "criminal conduct" is motivated by a desire, and often guided by a theory, to transform the social order into something more positive for the oppressed, less profitable for the oppressor. The former might rightly be called "social prisoners." The latter are properly defined as political prisoners. The greatest fear of the élite is always that the latter will be able to galvanize the resentment and inchoate rebelliousness of the former into a coherent force for social change. They recognize clearly that the greater the degree of social oppression, the greater the potential for this to happen. Consequently, in times such as these, "politicals" are viewed as being far more dangerous than mere "criminals" and are therefore usually treated much more harshly.

Throughout the Third World, the means the U.S. has employed to cope with this problem has been the development of effective counter-insurgency programs, complete with specialized military/police units and prison facilities for political prisoners. The same methods have become increasingly pronounced in the U.S. over the past quarter-century, beginning at least as early as the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Programs) launched against the Communist Party, USA, in 1954, expanded to target the Puerto Rican independence movement and Socialist Workers Party from at least as early as 1960, expanded again to include operations against the black liberation movement and "new left" from 1965 onward, escalated against the American Indian Movement during the mid-70s, and continuing through the formation of the so-called "Joint Terrorist Task Force" (JTTF) interlock between the FBI and state/local police units by the end of the latter decade. Today, the JTTF apparatus has been largely perfected and exists on a fully national basis. Its effects, which are focused exclusively upon curtailment of "political deviance," will be greatly amplified by implementation of the Omnibus Crime Bill.

In terms of prisons, the recent experiment within a "High Security Unit" (HSU) at the Lexington, Kentucky federal facility for women should prove instructive. There, Susan Rosenberg, Silvia Baraldini, and independentista Alejandrina Torres were held for nearly three years in isolated sensory deprivation cells thirty feet below ground. As Rosenberg and Mary O'Melveny explain in their respective essays, the entire environment was painted white, with fluorescent lights shining twenty-four hours per day. The women, two of whom are lesbians, were routinely strip-searched by male guards. Even attorneys representing the women sometimes found it difficult to obtain permission to meet with them. In another article included in this volume, psychologist Richard Korn, retained by the ACLU to investigate what was happening at Lexington, concluded that the HSU was designed to "force ideological conversion" upon prisoners or, alternatively, "reduce them to psychological jelly" prone to killing themselves. Cogent comparisons have, as Mike Ryan demonstrates in his contribution to the material which follows, been drawn between the Lexington HSU and the "death wing" of the political prison at Stammheim, West Germany, where Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and dozens of other members of the Red Army Faction have been murdered or committed suicide since 1977. Amnesty International (AI) protested that the Lexington model violated all minimum international standards for the treatment of prisoners, and the federal government eventually closed it down. But it did so only because it had completed construction of a much larger facility, comparable to Lexington in many ways, but intended to eventually accommodate "several hundred" women within the federal men’s prison at Marianna, Florida.

AI has entered similar protests concerning another U.S. replication of the Stammheim model, the aforementioned federal prison at Marion. Prisoners in this facility have been "locked down"—isolated in their cells 22.5 hours a day—since 1983. Often, as Bill Dunne and others recount at length, they are strapped to concrete slabs, euphemistically called "bunks," for days on end. Beatings by guards are routine. Mail and reading material are strictly censored. Contact visits with relatives and friends are forbidden. No official will say with precision why a prisoner is sent to Marion; even less will authorities articulate what a prisoner must do to get out, once confined there. Tellingly, almost every "heavy" male political prisoner ushered into the federal system over the past decade—including two Silo Plowshares pacifists labeled as "terrorists" by the FBI—and a number from state prisons as well, have been placed in Marion for some length of time. Far from responding to the complaints of AI and other human rights organizations in this regard, the government has set out to build a second such facility in Colorado and to clone off "control units" based on the lessons learned at Marion for incorporation into other federal prisons. Simultaneously, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons is engaged in a thriving business giving tours and otherwise explaining to officials of various state prison systems "how the job gets done."

The specter looms. All official denials to the contrary notwithstanding, the U.S. is not only holding a significant group of political prisoners—as the interviews, articles, and personal statements offered by a number of them in this volume will readily attest—every indicator suggests it intends to increase the numbers of such prisoners markedly in coming years. The signs are also strong that this is so because the government’s forecast for the short-run future shows worsening socio-economic conditions for people of color—and probably appreciable segments of the Euroamerican population as well—generating vastly increased numbers of social prisoners. This, in turn, is expected to produce a rapid sharpening of political struggle which will fill new facilities designed both for the politically conscious, and for those deemed most likely to become so. What is at hand is fascism of the real rather than metaphorical or "friendly" sort. The state is preparing for what it perceives must lie ahead. For the most part, its opposition is not.

Cages of Steel is produced in the hope of making a useful contribution to changing this last circumstance. While it purports to be neither perfect nor definitive, the book does seek to extend what its editors and contributors believe is a range of incisive analysis on the topics of political prisons and prisoners in the United States (and, to a certain extent, of prisons and prisoners more generally), with the idea that provision of such information can help forge a broad-based, viable, and effective popular resistance to the rapidly consolidating American police state, before it is truly too late to bring it to heel. In this, every participant—all of us, whether political prisoners and prisoners of war inside the walls, or allies and supporters on the outside—must begin by escalating the level of struggle against the malignant power of the U.S. state.

We say this without hesitancy or equivocation, sharing as we do the sentiments expressed by Frederick Douglass in 1858: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are those who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters. ... The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will." The time in which it was possible to avoid shouldering responsibility in this regard has long since passed. To put the matter most simply and directly, if the realities of proliferating political police, political prisons, and political prisoners don’t become central preoccupations of a lot more people in the very near future, there’s not going to be much of a future for anyone. The time for action is at hand.

Quoted from Jackie Lyden, “Marion Prison: Inside the Lockdown,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio Broadcast, October 28, 1986.

For detailed information on the legal proceedings affecting Peltier, see Jim Messerschmidt, The Trial of Leonard Peltier, 3rd edition (Boston: South End Press, 1990). The Amnesty International report is entitled Proposal for a Commission of Inquiry into the Effects of Domestic Intelligence Activities on Criminal Trials in the United States of America (New York, 1980); it covers not only Peltier, but AIM member Dick Marshall and Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt.

Evidence in Bin Wahad’s case was so clumsily handled that its obviousness even came to “trouble” establishment apologists like Kenneth O'Reilly; see his treatment of the matter in “Racial Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (New York: The Free Press, 1989).

For prosecutorial admissions, albeit they weren’t exactly intended as such, see Robert Tannenbaum and Philip Rosenberg, Badge of the Assassin (New York: E.P. Dutton Publishers, 1979).

For the most current information, see the briefing paper disseminated by the International Committee to Free Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) entitled “Ex-Black Panther Wants a New Trial” (Oakland, CA, March 1991).

See Ric Kahn, “Fed Excesses: Going Too Far to Get the Ohio 7,” The Boston Phoenix, July 8, 1988.

Concerning the assault on Finzel and federal handling of the charges against Dick Wilson, see Rex Weyler, Blood of the Land: The U.S. Government and Corporate War Against the American Indian Movement (New York: Everest House Publishers, 1982), pp. 172-173.

See Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 306-312.

These matters are detailed in “Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss for Government Misconduct,” U.S. v. Whitehorn, et al., Crim. No. 88-145-05 (HHG), United States Court for the District of Columbia, January 3, 1989, p. 55. The government never attempted to rebut defense contentions on such matters.

Covered in ibid., p. 56.

For the latest information on Baraldini’s status, see the briefing paper disseminated by the Free Silvia Committee entitled “Free Silvia Baraldini!” (San Francisco, October 1991).

See Dennis Bailey, “Underground,” The Boston Globe Magazine, March 26, 1989.

For analysis of the charges, see Anonymous, “Ohio 7 Minus 2: On Trial for Seditious Conspiracy,” The Insurgent, September 1989.

“Three Cleared of Seditious Conspiracy,” New York Times, November 28, 1989.

See Susie Day, “Resistance Conspiracy Trial,” Z Magazine, September 1989.

A politically garbled, but nonetheless informationally useful study of the case and its context may be found in Ronald Fernandez, Los Macheteros: The Wells Fargo Robbery and the Violent Struggle for Puerto Rican Independence (New York: Prentice-Hall Press, 1987).

See “Filiberto is Free!” La Patria Radical, vol. 2, no. 2, September 1989.

See Susie Day, “Political Prisoners: Guilty Until Proven Innocent,” Sojourner, February 1989.

The author has encountered little printed information on Doherty and/or his case. Perhaps the best available, or at least the most accessible, will be found in the biographical sketch included in Can’t Jail the Spirit, 2nd Edition (Chicago: E1 Coqui Publishers, 1990).

Most of this data is taken from Douglas Spaulding, “End the Marion Lockdown: Why We Need to Build an Effective Prison Movement in this Country,” New Studies on the Left, vol. XIV, nos. 1-2, Spring-Summer 1989. He is relying, in part, on Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1987 (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Washington, D.C., 1988) and Margaret Calahan, Historical Correction Statistics in the United States, 1850-1984 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1986).

See generally, James Austin and Aaron McVey, The NCCD Prison Population Forecast: The Growing Imprisonment of America (San Francisco: National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 1988).

See generally, Jim Murphy, A Question of Race (Albany, NY: Center for Justice Education, 1988).

Detailed assessments of each area of consideration will be found in M. Annette Jaimes, (ed.), The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1992).

See, for example, Maning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1982 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1984).

An excellent analysis of this structural reality in Central and South America, and U.S. involvement in creating it, will be found in A. J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). More broadly, see Edward Herman, The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda (Boston: South End Press, 1982).

There are a number of good recent studies of this phenomenon. Perhaps the best for our purposes here is Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1990).

For a sound assessment of conditions at the outset of the use of such terms during the onset of the current police buildup, see Lyn Cooper, et al., The Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of U.S. Police (Berkeley: Center for Research on Social Justice, 1975).

For analysis, see Alfred W. McCoy, with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), and Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Also see Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991).

Such rhetoric is standard fare during the consolidation of any codified structure of legalistic repression. See Otto Kirchheimer, Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. I: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

See The COINTELPRO Papers, op. cit.

The Lexington experiment has been linked to earlier government efforts in the same connection, best described by John Marks in his The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate’’: The CIA and Mind Control (New York: Norton Paperbacks, (revised edition 1991). See William A. Reuben and Carlos Norman, “Brainwashing in America? The Women of Lexington Prison,” The Nation, June 27, 1989.

The AI report is titled The High Security Unit, Lexington Federal Prison, Kentucky (AI Index: AMR 51/34/88).

The AI report is titled Allegations of Inmate Treatment at Marion Prison, Illinois, USA (AI Index: AMR 51/261/87).

This is building on an already very bad situation. See Lennox S. Hinds, Illusions of Justice: Human Rights Violations in the United States (Iowa City: Iowa School of Social Work, Iowa State University, 1978).

The term accrues from Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (Boston: South End Press, 1982).