Working
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W
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ki to
t Extend
E t d Democracy
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to
t All 
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Volume
V l
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4, N
4
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b 5
5

May
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M
M 2015
May
2015

BOYCOTT CORPORATIONS THAT
FEED ON PRISONS
By Chris Hedges
ll attempts to reform mass incarceration through the traditional
mechanisms of electoral politics,
the courts and state and federal legislatures are useless. Corporations, which have
turned mass incarceration into a huge revenue stream and which have unchecked political and economic power, have no intention of diminishing their profits. And in a
system where money has replaced the vote,
where corporate lobbyists write legislation
and the laws, where chronic unemployment
and underemployment, along with inadequate public transportation, sever people
in marginal communities from jobs, and
where the courts are a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state, this demands
a sustained, nationwide revolt.
“Organizing boycotts, work stoppages
inside prisons and the refusal by prisoners
and their families to pay into the accounts of
phone companies and commissary companies is the only weapon we have left,” said

A

CONTENTS
Boycott Prison Profiteers .........1
Small Notices ...........................3
UN Banned From US Prisons ..4
Mothers Stage Hunger Strike...5
Can't Live by Bread Alone........7
Little Guantanamo’ Lawsuit......8
S.F. Jail Cons Forced to Fight ..9

Amos Caley, who runs the Interfaith Prison
Coalition, a group formed by prisoners, the
formerly incarcerated, their families and
religious leaders. “Mass incarceration is
the most important civil rights issue of our
day. And it is time for communities of faith
to stand with poor people, mostly of color,
who are unfairly exploited and abused. We
must halt human rights violations against
the poor that grow more pronounced each
year,” Caley said here. He and other prison
reform leaders spoke Saturday at the Elmwood Presbyterian Church.

“All the companies that
use prison labor have to
be boycotted.
“We have to shut down the system,” said
Gale Muhammad, another speaker and the
founder and CEO of Women Who Never
Give Up. “All the companies that use prison labor have to be boycotted. And we can’t
stop there. We have to boycott the vending machines in the prisons and the phone
companies. We have to stop spending our
money. Until we hit them in the pocket they
won’t listen.”
Former prisoners and prisoners’ relatives—suffering along with the incarcerated under the weight of one of the most
exploitative, physically abusive and largest prison systems in the world, frustrated
and enraged by the walls that corporations
have set in place to stymie rational judicial
reform—joined human rights advocates at
the church to organize state and nationwide
boycotts inside and outside prisons. These
boycotts, they said, will be directed against
the private phone, money transfer and com-

missary companies, and against the dozens
of corporations that exploit prison labor.
The boycotts will target food and merchandise vendors, construction companies,
laundry services, uniforms companies,
prison equipment vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor and the array of medieval instruments
used for the physical control of prisoners,
and a host of other contractors that profit
from mass incarceration. The movement
will also call on institutions, especially
churches and universities, to divest from
corporations that use prison labor.
The campaign, led by the Interfaith Prison Coalition, will include a call to pay all
prisoners at least the prevailing minimum
wage of the state in which they are held.
(New Jersey’s minimum wage is $8.38 an
hour.) Wages inside prisons have remained
stagnant and in real terms have declined
over the past three decades. A prisoner in
New Jersey makes, on average, $1.20 for
eight hours of work, or about $28 a month.
Those incarcerated in for-profit prisons
earn as little as 17 cents an hour. Over a
similar period, phone and commissary corporations have increased fees and charges
often by more than 100 percent.
There are nearly 40 states that allow
private corporations to exploit prison labor. And prison administrators throughout
the country are lobbying corporations that
have sweatshops overseas, trying to lure
them into the prisons with guarantees of
even cheaper labor and a total absence of
organizing or coordinated protest.
Corporations currently exploiting prison
labor include Abbott Laboratories, AT&T,
AutoZone, Bank of America, Bayer, Berk-

shire Hathaway, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, the former Chrysler Group, Costco
Wholesale, John Deere, Eddie Bauer, Eli
Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO, GlaxoSmithKline, Glaxo Wellcome,
Hoffmann-La Roche, International Paper,
JanSport, Johnson & Johnson, Kmart,
Koch Industries, Mary Kay, McDonald’s,
Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo,
Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats,
Sarah Lee, Sears, Shell, Sprint, Starbucks,
State Farm Insurance, United Airlines,
UPS, Verizon, Victoria’s Secret, Wal-Mart
and Wendy’s.
Prisons in America are a hugely profitable business. And since profit is the only
language the involved corporations know
how to speak, we will have to speak to
them in the language they understand. In
New Jersey the first boycott will be directed against Global Tel Link, a private phone
company that charges prisoners and their
families exorbitant rates and that has a monopoly. Organizers at the Saturday event,
including Gale Muhammad, called on
prisoners and families to stop paying into
Global Tel Link accounts and boycott the
prison phone service. She urged families
and prisoners to write letters to each other until the company’s phone rates match
those paid by the wider society.
“Prisoner telephone rates in New Jersey
are some of the highest in the country,”
Caley said. “Global Tel Link charges prisoners and their families $4.95 for a 15-minute phone call, which is about two and a
half times the national average for local
inmate calling services.”
Prison phone services are a $1.2-billiona-year industry. Prisoners outside New Jersey are charged by Global Tel Link, which
makes about $500 million a year, as much
as $17 for a 15-minute phone call. A call
of that duration outside a prison would cost
about $2. If a customer deposits $25 into a
Global Tel Link phone account, he or she
must pay an additional service charge of
$6.95. And Global Tel Link is only one of
several large corporations that exploit prisoners and their families. JPay is a corporation that deals in privatized money transfers
to prisoners. It controls money transfers for
about 70 percent of the prison population.
The company charges families that put
money into prisoners’ accounts additional
service fees of as much as 45 percent. JPay
generates more than $50 million a year in
revenue. The Keefer Group, which controls prison commissaries in more than 800
public and private prisons, and which often
2

charges prisoners double what items cost
outside prison walls, makes $41 million a
year in profit. All of these companies have
to be targeted.
It will be a long and hard battle. It will
require tremendous sacrifices from those
who have loved ones who are incarcerated
and from the 2.3 million locked in cages
in the United States’ vast archipelagos of
prisons. It will require those on the outside to boycott corporations that use prison
labor and corporations that gouge prisoners and their families. It will require us to
build networks to support prisoners when
they begin, as they must, to carry out work
stoppages to demand the minimum wage.
Building a movement is our only hope.
Michelle Alexander, the author of “The
New Jim Crow,” is outspoken about the
imperative for organizing to fight back. In
a speech at Union Theological Seminary in
New York City in March she told her audience: “Jesus taught that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. Well, we
have become a nation of stone throwers.
And in this era of mass incarceration it is
not enough to drop your stone. We have to
be willing to catch the stones raining down
on the most vulnerable. And we must be
willing to stand up to the stone throwers
and disarm them.”

Global Tel Link charges
$4.95 for a 15-minute
phone call
“I believe we now find ourselves at a fork
in the road,” she went on. “We can continue
down the road most traveled of business
and politics as usual, the path of reforming our political institutions here and there,
the path Dr. King was determined to leave
behind, or we can choose a different path,
the rocky, dangerous path that comes without a map. It is a path that is beckoning us
again, thanks in large part to the courage
of the young people in Ferguson who stood
up when Michael Brown was shot down. It
inspired thousands of people to wake up,
get up and march here in New York City
and beyond. If we choose this rocky path
there will be no guidebooks, no map, no
instructions. All we will have is our moral
compass and the whispering of our angels
and our ancestors in our ears reminding us
to dig for deeper truths and to speak and to
act with greater courage, reminding us, in
the words of Dr. James Cone, that humanity’s salvation is available only through our
solidarity with the crucified people in our

midst.”
She called on the audience to “speak difficult and unpopular truths,” not to avoid
“the racial dimensions or the profound
moral questions for purposes of expediency” and not to seek “justice on the cheap.”
“We can and we must build a movement,
and not only [about] mass incarceration
and mass deportation, but a broad-based
radical, human rights movement that ends
once and for all our history’s cycle of creating caste-like systems in America, a movement for education, not incarceration, for
jobs, not jails, a movement to end all forms
of legal discrimination against people released from prison, discrimination that
denies them basic human rights to work,
to shelter, to food, a movement for voting rights for all, including those behind
bars … a movement that will end the war
on drugs, once and for all, and shift to a
public health model dealing with drug addiction and drug abuse, a movement that
will stand up to the police unions and transform the police itself from warriors into
peace officers directly accountable to the
communities they serve, a movement that
will ensure that every dollar saved from
ending the wars that have been declared
on poor communities of color, the wars on
crime and drugs, will be invested back into
these communities, the communities most
harmed, meaningful reparations and justice
reinvestment, a movement that abandons
our purely punitive approach to dealing
with violence and violent crimes and embraces a more restorative and rehabilitative
approach … a movement that is rooted in
the dignity and humanity of us all, no matter who we are, where we come from or
what we may have done.”
At Saturday’s gathering in Newark,
among the roughly 100 participants were
leading advocates for prison reform such as
Bonnie Kerness, the director of the American Friends Service Committee Prison
Watch Project; Gale Muhammad; and Larry
Hamm, the chairman of People’s Organization for Progress. There were mothers and
fathers of incarcerated sons and daughters,
former prisoners including Earl Amin, who
was leader of the Black Panthers in Newark and spent 34 years in prison solely for
discussing the possibility of carrying out a
bank robbery, and Ojore Lutalo, who was
in the Black Liberation Army and spent 22
years in solitary confinement in Trenton’s
supermax prison. There was universal and
emphatic agreement that if we do not organize to destroy this country’s system of
Rock!

mass incarceration it will spread like a cancer, destroying more lives, more families
and more communities.
The corporate state seeks to reduce all
workers at home and abroad to the status
of prison labor. Workers are to be so heavily controlled that organizing unions or resistance will become impossible. Benefits,
pensions, overtime are to be abolished.
Workers who are not slavishly submissive
to the will of corporate power will be dismissed. There will be no sick days or paid
vacations. No one will be able to challenge
unsafe and physically difficult working
conditions. And wages will be suppressed
to keep workers in poverty. This is the goal
of corporate power. The 1 million prisoners
employed at substandard wages by corporations inside prisons are, in the eyes of our
corporate masters, the ideal workers. And
those Americans who ignore the plight of
prison labor and refuse to organize against
it will increasingly find prison working
conditions replicated outside prison walls.
Prisons, to swell corporate profits, force
prisoners to pay for basic items including
shoes. Prisoners in New Jersey pay $45
for a pair of basic Reebok shoes—almost
twice the average monthly wage. If a prisoner needs an insulated undergarment or
an extra blanket to ward off the cold at
night he must buy it. Packages from home,
once permitted, have been banned to force
prisoners to buy grossly overpriced items
at the commissary or company-run store.
Some states have begun to charge prisoners
rent. This gouging is burying many prisoners and their families in crippling debt, debt
that prisoners carry when they are released
from prison.
The United States has 2.3 million people
in prison, 25 percent of the world’s prison
population, although we are only 5 percent of the world’s population. We have
increased our prison population by about
700 percent since 1970. Corporations control about 18 percent of federal prisoners
and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. And
corporate prisons account for nearly all
newly built prisons. Nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to corporate-run prisons.
And slavery is legal in prisons under the
13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as punishment for crime
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
Vast sums are at stake. The for-profit
prison industry is worth $70 billion. CorVolume 4, Number 5

rections Corporation of America (CCA),
the largest owner of for-profit prisons
and immigration detention facilities in
the country, had revenues of $1.7 billion
in 2013 and profits of $300 million. CCA
holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its
facilities on any one day. Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company
that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States,
was acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs. And,
as in the wider society, while members of
a tiny, oligarchic corporate elite each are
paid tens or even hundreds of millions of
dollars annually, the workers who generate
these profits live in misery.
“It is an abomination that prisoners are
paid 22 cents an hour, $1.20 cents a day,”
Larry Hamm told the Newark meeting.
“Every prisoner should get the minimum
wage of New Jersey, $8.38 per hour.”
He went on. “Even when you come out
[of prison] it moves from slavery to sharecropping because they have these fines and
obligations that they put on people. ... That
is how sharecropping was. That is why a lot
of our great-grandparents and grandparents
couldn’t leave the South. Everything was
owned by the former slave master. If they
bought a plow they ended up in debt over
the plow. If they bought seeds they ended
up in debt over the seeds. They were tied
to the land. Probation is like sharecropping.
You are off the plantation, but you still belong to us. And look at this rapacious, exploitative system where phone companies
make 50 times what a phone call should
cost. And people are charging high commissary fees.
“This is capitalist exploitation, and it
must stop,” Hamm thundered. “But it won’t
stop unless we build a movement to make
it stop. Every organization that calls itself a
civil rights or human rights organization, if
they do not have the plight and condition of
the incarcerated on their agenda they need
to hand in their credentials.”
Last week’s call to launch nationwide
boycotts signals the start of the most important frontal assault yet against the prison-industrial complex. I do not know if it
will succeed. But I do know it is our only
hope. Halting the abuse and exploitation of
the poor inside prisons is not only the most
important civil rights issue of our time, it
promises to be a vital check against a corporate state that, if not dismantled, will imprison us all. ●

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On Jailhouse Lawyers
“…jailhouse lawyers often unwittingly serve the interests of the state
by propagating the illusion of ‘justice’
and ‘equity’ in a system devoted to
neither.” They create “illusions of legal options as pathways to both individual and collective liberation.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal,
JAILHOUSE LAWYERS: Prisoners
Defending Prisoners v. The U.S.A.

3

WHY THE U.S. WON’T LET U.N. LOOK INSIDE ITS PRISONS
Sarah Shourd
fter a half-decade and a mandate
by the U.N. to investigate solitary
confinement practices, U.N. torture rapporteur Juan Mendez had to find a
backdoor into an American jail. Today, his
findings are released in a report.
In 2010, Juan Mendez was appointed
Special Rapporteur on Torture and other
Cruel, Degrading and Inhumane Treatment
by the United Nations. His mandate is wide
in size and scope—to expose and document
torture wherever it exists on the planet today.
Since the beginning of his mandate Mendez has made criticizing the overuse of
solitary confinement a priority. In 2011, he
issued a report stating that 22 or 23 hours a
day alone in a prison cell for more than 15
days at a time can cause permanent, lasting
psychological damage and can constitute
torture.
This problem, he emphasized, is particularly severe in the U.S., where prisoners
are routinely held under such conditions
for months, years and even decades at a
time. Many have never committed a violent crime.
Fast-forward five years. The U.S. government has yet to grant Mendez access to
a single isolation pod in any U.S. prison.
The clock is ticking. Mendez has a mere
20 months left of his term, and he has yet
been able to substantiate his reports with a
firsthand investigation.
“The U.S. was voted into the Human
Rights Council—a position that carries
with it an obligation to cooperate,” he says.
When he speaks, Mendez wears a look of
weary determination befitting of his post.
“I’m disappointed to still be waiting for
the State Department to respond to my request. I’ve been waiting over two years.”
“That fact that he hasn’t received a
response is contemptible,” says Laura
Rovner, legal expert on prison conditions from University of Denver. “It puts
the U.S. in the company of countries like
Syria, Pakistan, and Russia that also have
been unresponsive to requests for country
visits.”
“Given the length of the delay,” Rovner
continues. “You have to wonder about the
reason, whether it’s motivated by concerns
about what the Special Rapporteur will find
inside these prisons.”
Then suddenly, last December, Mendez
was allowed access to California’s Pelican

A

4

Bay State Prison—a facility known for
keeping inmates in isolation indefinitely in
its Security Housing Unit (SHU).
This visit did not come about through
the official channels Mendez had long been
appealing to, however. Instead, he found a
way in to one of the most notorious prisons
in the country through a kind of backdoor.
“I’m disappointed to still be waiting for
the State Department to respond to my request. I’ve been waiting over two years.”
“I was allowed in as an expert,” Mendez
says in his first interview since he toured
Pelican Bay State Prison, “but not wearing
my U.N. hat.”
The request came from the Center for
Constitutional Rights (CCR) and was
approved by California Judge Claudia
Wilken. The visit will facilitate Mendez’s
appearance as an expert witness in court
for a class-action lawsuit, Ashker v. Brown,
challenging prolonged solitary confinement as unconstitutional. Mendez’s report
was submitted to the court on Friday.
During his tour of Pelican Bay State
Prison, Mendez was allowed to traverse its
multilevel pods virtually unencumbered.
Flanked by an entourage of prison guards
and administrators, his first request was
to be taken to the cell of 37-year-old John
Martinez, whom he found kneeling on the
concrete floor.
Struggling to stand on wobbly legs, Martinez greeted Mendez with a huge smile.
“My mom asked you to come see me?” he
asked.
Martinez’s mom is Dolores Canales,
co-founder of California Families Against
Solitary Confinement (CFASC). She has
been at the center of California’s struggle

Art by Michael Russell

to expose the abuse of solitary confinement
since 2013, when the largest prison hunger
strike in American history erupted across
the state—which Martinez immediately
joined.
A self-taught jailhouse lawyer, Martinez spends most of his day where Mendez
found him, kneeling in front of an old-fashioned typewriter resting on the concrete
block that also serves as his bed frame. His
cell is windowless, 8 by 10 feet in diameter,
and he’s only allowed out of it for an hour
a day to exercise in a slightly larger, openceiling cell they call the “dog run.”
“I saw Johnny two weeks after Mendez’s visit,” Canales says, referring to the
15-hour drive she makes once a month for
her three-hour no-contact visit with her son
through thick plexiglass. “His face just lit
up when he told me about it. That’s something I haven’t seen happen very often in
the last 14 years.”
“A lot of journalists get in and just dismiss the whole thing,” Canales continues.
“They see prisoners playing chess in their
cells by calling the moves down the hall
and think, ‘This can’t be that bad.’ They
have no idea what they’re looking at, what
solitary confinement actually does to a
person. Mendez is different, he’s studied
torture for decades—and he’s been there
himself.”
Mendez endured torture as a political
prisoner in Argentina in the 1970s, including periods in solitary confinement. He’s
also seen conditions of isolation in countries around the globe. At Pelican Bay
Mendez was allowed private, non-monitored visits with 11 of the named plaintiffs
of Ashker v. Brown, each of which have
spent between 10 and 29 years in isolation.
“Some have TV, books, a pen and paper,”
Mendez says. “But clearly any mitigating
factors are outweighed by the sheer duration. Isolation should be described in terms
of days, maybe weeks…but never years or
decades.”
Human rights groups estimate that as
many as 80,000 people are kept in solitary
confinement in U.S. prisons on any given
day. This is far more, per capita, than any
other country in the world. Yet the U.S.
government continues to make statements
to the contrary. Just last October a U.S.
spokesperson stood in front of the UN
Committee on Torture stating that “no systematic use of solitary confinement exists
in the United States.”
Rock!

“In judging other countries the State Department has regularly treated the use of
prolonged solitary confinement as a violation,” says Rovner. “We like to see ourselves as an indispensible force for human
rights. Yet solitary confinement conditions
in this country are inconsistent with international standards.”
The State Department was contacted for
comment on this story but failed to reply.
“When someone is covered with blood
and has broken bones,” Mendez continues, “we don’t say, ‘Oh, that’s not torture,
they’ll heal eventually.’ It’s the psychological aspect that we accept as cruelty.”
One of the plaintiffs, Fernando Bermudez, has spent the last 33 years of his life in
solitary confinement. He was “validated”
as a gang associate and is therefore serving an indefinite sentence in Pelican Bay’s
SHU. Roughly a thousand others are in the
same position. The majority did not commit a violent act to get there.
“For a legitimate reason, like attacking
another inmate or a guard, short periods in
isolation can be acceptable,” says Mendez.
“But you can’t claim someone is part of a
gang because they have a drawing that celebrates black or Mexican culture.”
“Somebody made a decision to put them
in the SHU and to keep them there,” Mendez continues. “The only way for them to
end their punishment is to debrief, which
means telling on others. That’s textbookdefinition coercion.”
“All of these factors combined amount
to more than just cruel and unusual punishment,” concludes Mendez. “There’s no
doubt in my mind this is torture.”
Canales is hopeful that Mendez’s findings, in conjunction with CCR’s lawsuit
slated to begin in December 2015, at the
very least will force change in California’s
Department of Corrections’ policy.
“My son and 30 thousand others risked
their lives on hunger strike so we could get
to this point,” she says. “But we can’t work
toward a solution until they admit there’s a
problem.”
“These findings won’t be easy to brush
off,” Canales continues. “That’s why the
State Department hasn’t let Mendez in in
the first place.”
“My mandate is not over and I haven’t
given up,” Mendez says. “I’m still waiting
to be listened to.” ●
http://www.thedailybeast.com/
articles/2015/03/16/the-u-s-won-t-letthe-u-n-look-at-prisons-to-investigatesolitary-confinement.html
Volume 4, Number 5

DOZENS OF MOTHERS STAGE
HUNGER STRIKE AT IMMIGRANT
DETENTION CENTER IN TEXAS
‘We want freedom for our
children. It’s not right to continue to detain us.’

By Nadia Prupis, staff writer, 4-2-2015
bout 40 women being held at the
privately-run Karnes Family Detention Center in southern Texas
launched a hunger strike this week to demand their release and the release of their
families, vowing on Tuesday not to eat,
work, or use the services at the facility until
they are freed.
Nearly 80 women being held at the center, many of whom are said to be asylum
seekers from Honduras, El Salvador, and
Guatemala, signed a letter stating that they
have all been refused bond despite having
established a credible fear of violence if
they are sent back to Central America—a
key factor in the U.S. government’s process
for screening detained immigrants to allow
them amnesty.
“We deserve to be treated with some
dignity and that our rights, to the immigration process, are respected,” the letter
reads. “You should know that this is just
the beginning and we will not stop [the
hunger strike] until we achieve our goals.
This strike will continue until each of us is
freed.”
The letter also states that many of the
children held in the camp are losing weight
and that their “health is deteriorating.”
Many of the families have been detained
for as long as 10 months.
One woman, 26-year old Honduran
mother Kenia Galeano, decried the center’s
treatment of the families in a phone interview with McClatchy on Tuesday. “We’re
many mothers, not just me,” she said. “We
want freedom for our children. It’s not right
to continue to detain us.”
Galeano, who shares a room with three
other mothers and their children, also said
that her two-year-old son has become depressed and lost weight due to the culturally inappropriate food.
According to the letter, some of the mothers were also left behind in the detention
center, while their children were granted
bond. “We have come to this country, with
our children, seeking refugee status and we
are being treated like delinquents,” the letter reads. “We are not delinquents nor do
we pose any threat to this country.”

A

“This strike will continue until each of
us is freed.”
Karnes, which is run by the private corrections company GEO Group, has come
under fire in the past for its treatment of
the children who are detained there, with
reports of weight loss and forced separation
from their mothers, but the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department has denied those allegations.
ICE also claimed it was unaware of
any residents actually participating in the
strike, saying in a statement on Wednesday
that the agency “fully respects the rights of
all people to voice their opinion without
interference, and all detainees, including
those in family residential facilities such as
Karnes, are permitted to do so.”
It also said it was investigating claims
that members of a nonprofit advocacy
group encouraged the women to take part
in the hunger strike—a charge which activists deny.
Cristina Parker, immigration programs
director at the Texas-based immigrant
rights group Grassroots Leadership, told
the Guardian on Tuesday, “This is something that has been rippling through the
centre almost since it opened. I don’t believe at all that they were coached into doing this.”
According to Parker, the center is now
blocking access to internet and telephone
facilities for all of its detainees, regardless
of whether they are participating in the
hunger strike.
At least two women who signed the letter were also placed into isolation with
their children in Karnes’s clinic, leading
about half of those who initially pledged to
take part in the hunger strike to drop out,
according to the Refugee and Immigrant
Center for Education and Legal Services.
Johana De Leon, a legal assistant with
the nonprofit, told McClatchy that other
mothers were warned they could lose custody of their children if they participated.
In addition to its mistreatment of children, Karnes has also been accused of
sexual misconduct by guards and denial of
critical medical care for detainees, among
other charges. The Department of Homeland Security inspector general reported in
February that there was no evidence to support the allegations. ●
5

WE CANNOT LIVE BY BREAD ALONE: TEXAS ABUSES
PRISONERS WITH DENIED FOOD, BREAD AND WATER
DIETS
By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson
ood is routinely used by US prison
officials to summarily punish, torture, abuse and retaliate against prisoners. This happens with especial frequency in administrative segregation (solitary
confinement) where prisoners are confined
inside locked cells all day every day, and
must have all meals delivered by guards.
Under such circumstances we remain at
guards’ total mercy ‘to eat or not to eat’.
In the segregation unit of the Texas prison — Clements Unit — where I am confined, guards frequently refuse (or “jack”)
prisoners’ meals, especially mentally ill
prisoners, starving them for days to weeks
on end, and longer.

F

No Deterrence to Guards Abusing
Food
“Jacking” meals occurs so regularly that
most segregated Texas prisoners have been,
or expect to be, at some point denied meals.
And whether the victimized prisoner is ‘respected’ by his peers and guards afterward
is determined by how he in turn reacts.
The expected reaction is for the ‘jacked’
prisoner to “run the team,” that is, at the
first opportunity, to act out in some manner that will require a team of five or more
guards to dress out in full body riot armor
and forcibly invade his cell and restrain,
and more often than not, beat him. The process is formally called a “cell extraction”
or “cell entry.” The teams of guards who
perform the cell extractions are suited up
in body armor, gas masks, etc. exactly as
police were seen dressed out in their militaristic occupation of Ferguson, Missouri to
suppress public protest of the police murder of Michael Brown.
To “get his respect” the prisoner is expected to go through with the entire cell
extraction process, which consits of his
being sprayed multiple times with gas, and
the team of guards then opening the cell
door and rushing in, tackling and/or beating him to the floor, handcuffing him from
behind and then beating him further as he
is held down defenseless, which entails sly
or open punches, kicks, choking, slamming
his head against the concrete floor or steel
fixtures inside the cell, gouging his eyes,
squeezing his testicles, bending his fingers backs, etc. Often guards conceal small
6

weapons on their persons and use them to
stab, cut or jab the prisoner.
The beatings are typically carried out
under cover of a supervising ranking guard
yelling repeatedly for the subdued prisoner
to “stop resisting!” This is done for effect
and to make it seem that the prisoner is
being combative and the guards are struggling to control him.[1] This is a standard
game which police also play as cover for
beating, tasering, and also shooting people.
It is such common practice with so-called
‘law enforcement’ officials, that I’m confident most every prisoner in Amerika who
has witnessed or endured even a few cell
extractions, and most civilians who’ve witnessed or suffered beatings at the hands of
the police, will attest to it.
Most prisoners are intelligently unwilling
to suffer the compounded abuse of ‘running
the team’ on top of having been jacked for
their meal. However, if the jacked prisoner
doesn’t run the team he becomes the target
of ridicule by others as being a “bitch”,
“ho”, etc. and is disparaged as weak, and
is thus likely to be jacked yet again and ostracized to a greater or lesser degree. It is
largely to avoid ridicule and attendant victimization that many prisoners are induced
to run the team, and thereby save face. This
is all a cultural reaction that officials have
conditioned prisoners to adopt to our own
disadvantage, which I’ll explain.
Officials have taught prisoners over the
years to resort to ‘running teams’ because,
unless a prisoner employs uncommon tac-

tical ingenuity, he can almost never come
out on top of such odds, even if he be in the
best physical shape. And because guards
enjoy a complete tactical advantage and
almost invariably subdue the isolated prisoner quickly and suffer no injuries in the
process, cell extractions bolster their sense
of invulnerability, and embolden them to
abuse us in the absence of fear of harm
to themselves or other consequences. So
by racking up repeated ‘wins’, the guards,
while outnumbered by us at least ten-toone, enjoy the highest morale; the overall
segregated prisoner body, by resisting them
in a manner that ensures and results in routine ‘losses’, is left demoralized and submissive to mistreatment. [2]
Because of the relative advantage that
segregated confinement presents to guards,
one finds that it is those most inclined to
sadism and cowardly abuse that choose to
work in segregation units and super-maximum security prisons. Moreover, even
the courts have long admitted that poor
salaries and training render guards “more
vulnerable to the corrupting influence of
unchecked authority than most people.” [3]
Also, prisoners are conditioned to fear
injuring guards in turn, under administrative threat of criminal prosecution if they
do, which means an extended prison term,
often an aggravated sentence, which might
result in spending one’s entire life in prison.
And in the final event, officials use instances of our running teams or responding
to abuse with physical self-defense and deterence to villainize us as being belligerent,
assaultive, etc. painting a completely onesided picture of events and making their
own abusive violence appear only a measured and professional response to dangerous and out-of-control criminals, [4] rather
than their acting under cover of absolute
power to inflict compounded abuses on a
completely disadvantaged, disempowered
and isolated segment of the community.
Which brings me back to the issue of officials using their monopoly on our access
to food as a form of abuse.
The Legality of Restricted Prison
Diets
Texas prison officials subject prisoners
to bread and water diets, even though by
law and human necessity we cannot live
Rock!

by bread alone. [5] Furthermore, the basis
upon which restricted diets are imposed are
also forbidden by law.
Prison officials may lawfully impose retricted diets on prisoners temporarily and
only in response to, and to control, foodrelated misbehavior. Such restrictions may
not be used as punishment. [6] And even
still, restricted diets must provide adequate
nutrition, which a bread and water diet does
not.
But here is a recent example of the abusive impunity of prison officials, in this
case the wholesale use of illegal bread and
water food restrictions as arbitrary punishment, even when prisoners have done nothing wrong.
Bread and Water to Deter Prisoner
Witnesses
I’ve had several articles published about
abuses at this Clements Unit, which quote
or reference prisoner witnesses who communicated their accounts to me via written
notes which I have quoted from. Numerous
Clements Unit officials have stated to me
that they’ve read my critical articles online.
In response, administrators have tried to
discourage our passing notes between ourselves and have explicitly threatened witnesses.
On February 19, 2015, Michael Gruver,
the Clements Unit major who oversees the
prison’s segregation unit, claimed to have
been monitoring surveillance cameras
mounted in the pod I’m housed in, and allegedly observed numerous prisoners passing items between cells.
In turn Gruver ordered a guard, Joshua Brandl, who was then leaving to go
home—it was shift change—to write disciplinary charges on several prisoners. Gruver specifically directed Brandl to fabricate
the charges to say fourteen prisoners had
manipulated the locking mechanisms on
the handcuff ports on their cell doors and
opened them. Brandl wrote the charges.
Additionally, Gruver had each of the
fourteen prisoners put on food restriction,
although none were alleged to have committed any food-related misconduct. All
fourteen prisoners remained on food restrictions for five days.
On food restriction a prisoner is given
only a “food loaf” three times per day, delivered in a paper sack. At Clements Unit
the food loaf is nothing but a greasy novelsized block of corn bread with little else in
it. The restricted prisoner must drink only
water from the sink in his cell. Therefore,
Volume 4, Number 5

food restriction at this unit is literally a
bread and water diet.
Almost none of the fourteen food-restricted prisoners were able to eat the food
loaf for more than a day, and most went
the entire five days refusing to eat it at all
because it is so unappetizing and wrecks
havoc on one’s digestive system.
Actually the “food loaf” recipe is supposed to contain a variety of ingredients
from the regular menu, blended together
and baked into a ‘loaf’ which can be eaten
without utensils, also an instant beverage
is to accompany the loaf. This to ‘control’
the misuse of food, utensils, etc., although
this is not how loaf meals are prepared at
Clements Unit. When complaints are made
officials simply lie and claim the proper ingredients are included.
Several days after Brandl wrote the
false disciplinary charges, he apparently
returned to work with a heavy conscience
and admitted he was concerned that several
of the prisoners he lied on might retaliate
against him. He came to our pod, at which
point I called him to my cell door and asked
why he’d fabricated reports on the others.
All fourteen prisoners were served with the
disciplinary charges written by Brandl on
February 25. Brandl replied that Gruver ordered him to do it, but that he would tell the
truth at the disciplinary hearings, that he’d
in fact never observed the prisoners open
the cuff ports on their cell doors but was
told by Gruver to fabricate the reports saying he had.
Brandl honored his word and all the disciplinary charges were withdrawn before
any hearings were conducted, but not before all fourteen prisoners were made to
suffer a bread and water diet for five days,
all as part of an administrative backlash and
group punishment for prisoners bearing
witness to witnessed and suffered abuse.
Meal Jacked as I Wrote Article
As an example of how regularly prisoners’ meals are arbitrarily taken by guards, at
the very time that I was writing this article,
a guard, Abraham Dolleh, refused the prisoner housed in the cell directly across from
me—Jeffrey Sylvan #1649281— his lunch
meal, (this occurred on March 9, 2015).
Dolleh “jacked” Sylvan’s lunch because
as he was coming toward Sylvan’s cell
serving lunch, Dolleh called another prisoner several vulgar names. When he got to
Sylvan’s cell, Sylvan, thinking the guard
was cursing him because Sylvan had been
talking loudly to another prisoner, asked
Dolleh who he was talking to. Dolleh re-

sponded by then cursing Sylvan and then
refused to give him his lunch tray although
Dolleh had already unlocked and opened
the cuff port on Sylvan’s cell door in preparation for serving him his meal.
When Dolleh vulgarly told Sylvan he
wasn’t going to give him his lunch and to
back away from the cell door so he could
lock the port back without any danger of
Sylvan making physical contact with him,
Sylvan then stuck his arm out the slot to
prevent its being closed and demanded his
meal.
In turn Dolleh took out his portable canister of OC gas and stated to Sylvan to
move back or he’d say Sylvan was attempting to cut himself with a razor blade and
would thereupon empty the canister of gas
on him [7]. Sylvan then backed away from
the door and Dolleh closed the port cursing
Sylvan and refusing his lunch.
Conclusion
Today the entire world is bearing witness
to an ongoing pattern of exposures of, and
mass protests against, murders by Amerikan police of unarmed people of color and
militaristic occupation and terrorism of our
communities, which has gone on for decades. This sudden visibility has occurred
not because the government nor mainstream media exposed it. It came about because members of the victimized communities exposed it themselves using social
media outlets to make an end run around
the government and press, who otherwise
whitewashed, denied, and concealed these
realities, often behind perpetuating racist
criminal stereotypes against these communities.
Recall also that just prior to the police
murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri this past summer and the militaristic police response to the community’s
righteous protests, which prompted this
exposure, politicians and the media were
loudly proclaiming that Amerika had finally risen above its racism and become
a “post-racial society”. The whole world
now knows that was all a lie. But remember, we prisoners do not have access to video recording technologies not social media.
So our suffering goes largely unknown to
not just the world, but even our own communities.
This is why we must devise ways to
expose the darkest recesses of Amerika’s
lawless law-enforcement system, namely
its prisons. And it must be realized that
the prisons and the tortures, brutalities and
7

abuses occurring within their hidden confines are an extension of and organically
linked to the federal, state, and local police
that are the very forces targeting the poor
and people of color for selective mass imprisonment in Amerika.
Dare to struggle. Dare to win!
All power to the people!

3.
4.

ENDNOTES AND ADDITIONAL
COMMENTS:
1. Medical staff and guards tend to downplay any injuries suffered by the prisoner and dismiss them as the result of the
prisoner himself being combative and/or
falling and striking a hard surface inside
the cell during the cell extraction.
2. This culture which plays on male prisoners’ masculine sensitivities works to
the guards’ benefit and the prisoners’
disadvantage by inducing prisoners to
‘fight’ the guards from a position of pitting their weaknesses against the guards’
strengths. I often point this out to my
peers, and illustrate the point with a revelation I heard made by a US military
commander during 2003, as he boasted
to the media how easily US forces took
Iraq’s capitol city, Baghdad, during the
illegal imperialist Iraq invasion that year.
The officer told how US military intelligence forces had studied Iraqi culture
and thereby developed a profile of its
military-aged males. From this the US
learned that Iraqi males (like most males
in patriarchal societies) are highly sensitive about their masculinity. This was
turned to the Iraqi’s disadvantage. At
first, the commander said, US attempts
to enter Baghdad were quickly and
soundly repelled by Iraqi defenders firing on them from concealed places and
planting IEDs. Unless the hidden Iraqis
could be induced to come out into the
open and fight face-to-face, they would
keep the advantage and the city could not
be taken. So, what the US did was make
gradual incursions into the city in armored formations with a megaphone on
top of the tanks. From the megaphones
they blared over and over in Arabic that
only women hide from their opponents,
and that “real men” meet and fight their
opponents face-to-face. The commander
laughingly recounted how in response to
such taunts, the hidden fighters gave up
their advantage and rushed out of buildings and other hiding places in droves
harmlessly firing at the tanks and ar8

5.

6.

7.

mored vehicles, only to be mowed down
in turn by the vehicles’ heavy machine
guns. The city’s defenders were thereby
eliminated and the US and allied forces
quickly took Baghdad.
Landman v. Peyton, 370 F. 2d 135, 140
(4th cir. 1966)
As I’ve demonstrated in numerous past
articles on Amerika’s abusive prisons,
the guards and administrators are the
ones who perpetuate all sorts of criminal
acts in their abuses of prisoners, and indeed commit federal crimes every time
they violate a prisoner’s constitutional
rights as their abuses described herein
do. See 18 United States Code, Section
242. It is only, as with the murderous
police in society they are afforded de
facto immunity from prosecution by
merit of being so-called law enforcement officers. The system protects and
insulates its own.
A bread and water diet is unconstitutional. See, Jenkins v. Werger, 564 F.
Supp. 806, 808-09 (1983); Landman v.
Royster, 333 F Supp. 621, 647 (1971).
Food restrictions must be used only to
control the behaviors for which they
were designed. LeMaire v. Maass, 745 F.
Supp. 623, 635-36 (1990), vacated and
remanded on other grounds, 12 F. 3rd
1444, 1456 (1993).
I discuss the practice of guards at this
unit using fabricated claims that prisoners have acted in self harm or suicide attempts, to speciously justify assaulting
them with OC gas and taking all their
property, usually against prisoners they
dislike or who anger them. See Kevin

Art by Mark Makinson

“Rashid” Johnson. “Prison Assisted Suicide - The Texas Way.” The full article
can be read at rashidmod.com ●

JUDGE RULES
AGAINST CONS
IN 'LITTLE
GUANTANAMO’
LAWSUIT

I

n late March a federal judge ruled
against inmates who had challenged
highly restrictive federal prison units,
dealing a severe blow to their five-year attempt to close what are sometimes called
Little Guantanamos.
For years, advocates have complained
about the special prison wings set up in
the wake of 9/11 called “communication
management units.” The units restrict prisoners’ links to the outside world, severely
limiting phone time and barring contact
with visitors.
At first, most prisoners in the special
wings were Muslims. Today, the inmates
are more diverse.
In her opinion for the U.S. District Court
for the District of Columbia, Judge Barbara
Rothstein wrote that the Bureau of Prisons’
units do not violate inmates’ rights because
the additional restrictions are “limited in
nature” compared to ordinary prison units,
and are far better than solitary confinement.
She granted the government’s motion for
summary judgment in the case.
“In short, except where communication
is concerned, (communication management units) function like a general population unit,” Rothstein said.
Former prisoners like Daniel McGowan
disagree. Sentenced to seven years for arson as a result of his actions with the Earth
Liberation Front, McGowan was one of the
few non-Muslim prisoners placed in the
units.
For McGowan, the difference between a
regular federal prison and one of the CMUs
was like night and day. The CMU left him
feeling isolated and placed a deep strain on
his marriage. He was originally a plaintiff
in the lawsuit, but he was dismissed from
the case after he was released from prison.
Rothstein’s ruling “ignores the reality of
what these prisoners are living through,”
said Rachel Meeropol, an attorney at the
Center for Constitutional Rights who argued for the prisoners.
Rock!

“We know that maintaining contact with
one’s family and one’s loved ones is the
single most important aspect of rehabilitation,” she said.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers had argued that
while federal prisoners typically spend
only about a week in solitary confinement,
stints in the CMUs can last years. Unlike
prisoners in solitary confinement, CMU
prisoners are allowed to leave their cells.
But their phone calls to the outside world
are limited and heavily monitored.
The lawyers also alleged that the government used arbitrary and faulty procedures
to place prisoners in the special units, although Rothstein did not address that claim.
Meeropol said the plaintiffs will decide
soon whether to appeal the decision. “We’ll
be considering all of our options,” she said.
In the meantime, she said she is heartened at least that the Bureau of Prisons
has loosened some of the restrictions since
their lawsuit was filed in 2010.
“Just the light that litigation has shown
on the unit has resulted in some significant
changes that we’re proud of, even though
we’re experiencing this current setback,”
she said. “Prisoners are now moved out of
the unit regularly. A normal stay is probably a year and a half, compared to prisoners who spent four or five years there.”
Whatever the fate of the larger litigation
against the special units, McGowan is still
pursuing his own separate claim against
the federal prison system. After McGowan
wrote a blog entry for The Huffington Post
in 2013 about the conditions in the CMUs,
federal marshals picked him up from a
halfway house and threw him in jail.
Only after the frantic efforts of his lawyers was McGowan released. His lawsuit
over retaliation, filed in September, continues. ●
http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/2015/03/16/prisoners-littleguantanamo_n_6881774.html

SF JAIL INMATES
FORCED TO
FIGHT, PUBLIC
DEFENDER SAYS
By Vivian Ho, Mar 26, 2015
an Francisco sheriff’s deputies arranged and gambled on battles between County Jail inmates, forcing
one to train for the fights and telling them

S

Volume 4, Number 5

to lie if they needed medical attention, the
city’s public defender said Thursday.
Since the beginning of March, at least
four deputies at County Jail No. 4 at 850
Bryant St. threatened inmates with violence or withheld food if they did not fight
each other, gladiator-style, for the entertainment of the deputies, Public Defender
Jeff Adachi said.
Adachi said the ringleader in these fights
was Deputy Scott Neu, who was accused in
2006 of forcing inmates to perform sexual
acts on him. That case was settled out of
court.
“I don’t know why he does it, but I just
feel like he gets a kick out of it because I
just see the look on his face,” said Ricardo
Palikiko Garcia, one of the inmates who
said he was forced to fight. “It looks like it
brings him joy by doing this, while we’re
suffering by what he’s doing.”
An attorney for the San Francisco Deputy Sheriff’s Association, the union representing the deputies, called the allegations
“exaggerated,” and said the fighting was
“little more than horseplay.”
But in a recorded conversation with
Adachi, Garcia described a predatory atmosphere of fear and retribution in which
deputies would knock over his tray and
force him to gamble for his food.
Garcia, who is in custody on drug and
gun possession charges, said that earlier
this month he was twice forced to fight another inmate, Stanley Harris, to the point
where his ribs may have been fractured and
he could not sleep on his side because of
the pain.
Adachi said the four deputies involved
were Neu,
Eugene Jones,
Clifford
Chibaand Evan Staehely. All four have
been placed on paid administrative leave.
“They took me down to the hallway and
told me to fight another inmate, which was
Stanley, and told me if I didn’t fight that I
would basically get beat up by themselves,
by Deputy Neu,” Garcia said. “And he told
me he was going to Mace me and cuff me
if I didn’t.”
‘Anything goes’
Neu told Garcia and Harris that if they
required medical attention, they were to lie
and say they fell off a bunk, Garcia said.
“And he told me anything goes,” he said.
“Just don’t punch the face, so no one can
basically see the marks. But anything goes,
other than the face.”
Garcia said that at 5 feet 9 and 150
pounds, he was the smallest man in the pod
while Harris, at 6 feet and 350 pounds, was

the biggest.
During the first fight, which took place in
a part of a hallway that was blocked from
view, Neu appeared to have been betting on
Harris, Garcia said, who tapped out after
the smaller man got him in a headlock.
“Deputy Neu told Stanley he would be
coming on Saturday, the following day, to
take him to work out and to basically train
him,” Garcia said. “And he also told everyone that was there that there will be a round
two and he does not like to lose money.”
Rape threat alleged
Harris, in another recorded conversation with Adachi, said Neu once made him
do 200 push-ups within an hour as part of
“training.” As he did his push-ups, Neu
threatened to anally rape him, telling him
“he’ll take my cheeks,” Harris said.
During other sessions of forced exercise,
Neu also told him “he wanted to go a round
with me,” taking off his belt and shirt to try
and fight with Harris.
“This is sadistic behavior,” Adachi said.
“This is something that goes beyond any
sense of common decency.”
The public defender’s office hired a private investigator to look into the claims
after learning of the allegations this month
and the attorneys were going to wait until
their clients were safe and out of the jail
before they came forward with the allegations. But they received word that another
fight was planned for next week, Adachi
said.
In a report compiled by private investigator Barry Simon, Harris and Garcia said
the deputies — Neu in particular — threatened to take them off their kitchen jobs or
send them to a jail where more dangerous
inmates were housed.
Witness to gambling
Another inmate, Jonathan Christopher,
witnessed one of the fights between Harris and Garcia. He said Neu had a habit of
making inmates gamble against him for
their basic benefits of food and clean laundry. He carried red dice and a deck of cards
with him for this reason, but even if they
won, he would sometimes take their items
anyway, giving them to other inmates as
payoffs.
Harris said Neu had a tattoo on his right
arm and lower leg reading, “850 Mob,”
possibly in connection to the jail’s location
at 850 Bryant St.
Harry Stern, an attorney for the deputies
union, slammed what he called Adachi’s
“cursory sham investigation.”
“The hypocrisy of Adachi engaging in
9

trial by one-sided press conference cannot go unchallenged: He has done a cursory sham investigation by interviewing a
few inmates over a scant two days rather
than having the decency to request a serious impartial investigation,” Stern said in a
statement. “It is unfortunate that Mr. Adachi didn’t initiate a formal complaint that
would have been investigated thoroughly
by the appropriate agencies. The investigators would have had the opportunity to
interview witnesses, including the accused
deputies, and look for physical evidence.”
Some inmates working with Adachi have
exaggerated a rather benign situation, Stern
said.
“A deputy may have encouraged one inmate to work out. The deputy may have also
allowed two inmates to wrestle in order to
settle a dispute about who was stronger,”
he added. “The ‘wrestling’ was essentially
little more than horseplay. There was no
betting. The inmates were never forced to
work out. They were never forced to fight.”
A permissive culture
The fight allegations came to light after
Garcia’s father asked his son’s attorney to
help. Deputy Public Defender Scott Grant
spoke to his client and learned Garcia had
been forced to fight another inmate, who

also was represented by the public defender’s office, Adachi said.
Matt Gonzalez, the public defender’s
chief attorney, said the reported abuse indicates that there is a deeper, ongoing problem within the Sheriff’s Department.
“These acts cannot occur without the implicit acceptance of otherwise law-abiding
deputies,” Gonzalez said. “It is impossible
for just two or three or even four deputies
to commandeer the jail and stage fights
without other deputies being aware of it.”
Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who was at
Adachi’s news conference, said he was
“extremely disturbed” when Adachi called
him about the allegations Thursday morning. The department’s internal affairs unit
has begun an investigation and the sheriff
is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to
conduct an independent investigation into
the allegations.
He echoed Gonzalez’s concerns about
a culture problem in his department. “I do
not accept any kind of culture within our
county jail system that would resort to such
barbaric or unlawful activity as these deputies have demonstrated,” he said.
Though Harris and Garcia told Adachi
they wanted to stay where they were so
they could work in the kitchen, Mirkarimi

said they had been transferred to another
San Francisco jail “for their protection.”
Meanwhile, Police Chief Greg Suhr said
he received the report from Adachi and that
his department will be investigating to see
if there is any criminal wrongdoing.
The allegations “are egregious enough
that I forwarded them on (to the special investigations division),” he said.
District Attorney George Gascón called
the allegations “deplorable.”
“Common sense indicates that such conduct does not occur without the knowledge
of numerous people,” he said in a statement. “These allegations require an independent and thorough investigation into
the practices and supervision of the San
Francisco Sheriff’s Department.”
‘Sick, sick conduct’
The sexual assault lawsuits against Neu
were settled out of court, said Adante
Pointer, the attorney who represented a female inmate in that case. In addition to the
woman, Neu was accused of forcing two
transgender inmates to perform sexual acts
on him.
“It was sick, sick conduct,” Pointer said.
“I am surprised he was even still in the position to be with inmates unsupervised.” ●

Ed Mead, Publisher
Rock Newsletter
P.O. Box 47439
Seattle, WA 98146

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