SHU protest - Berkeley

California SHU protests continue: Berkeley November 23

November 23 – The mock-SHU prison control unit was erected in front of the University of California, Berkeley for a day long protest of these torture chambers that exist in prisons across the state of California. This demonstration, along with the week long SHU vigil in downtown San Francisco the first week of November, and the protest November 25 in Sacramento are part of an on-going campaign organized by MIM, the All People’s Coalition, the Barrio Defense Committee, the Uhuru Movement and others. We are working to abolish the Security Housing Units (SHU) in California prisons.

SHU is an acronym for "Security Housing Unit" but it really stands for torture and terrorism. Many prisoners have been confined to the SHU for 5, 10, 15 years or more. Prisoners confined in the SHU, which is based on a sensory deprivation model that CDC knew would have significant psychological consequences on prisoners, receive all their meals in their cells, they are not allowed to participate in training or educational activities, they are not allowed contact visits and they have no phone access. SHU prisoners spend 22 hours a day in a windowless, 6x9 cell and they're shackled and strip searched every time they leave their cell. The exercise "yard" (which is just another concrete cell, only larger) has no exercise equipment and no view of the outside world.

For over 15 years the California Department of Corrections (CDC) has had a practice of placing prisoners in the SHU under the guise that the prisoners are prison gang affiliates or a threat to the safety of others or institutional security. The five California SHU's - Pelican Bay State Prison SHU, Valley State Prison for Women SHU, California State Prison at Corcoran SHU, California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi SHU and Corcoran SATF - are the lynchpin for the CDC's prison system. They are the most brutal prisons in the system and principally target those prisoners who show the most resistance. They are designed to break inmates' spirit.

The Berkeley and Sacramento protests were organized around a meeting November 25 between Senator Polanco and the California Department of Correction along with a few select prisoner advocacy groups. This meeting is to address the demands of the SHU prisoners in Pelican Bay on hunger strike to protest the conditions there. Pelican Bay prisoners have been on hunger strike since October 19. Senator Polanco has expressed support for the striking prisoners but the tone of the meeting is to address making the SHU torture units kinder and gentler rather than recognizing that control units must be abolished. Our protests have gathered more than a thousand petition signatures already, demanding that the SHU be abolished. At the Berkeley protest we added just over 100 additional signatures to the total.

The Berkeley environment was a contrast to the protest in downtown San Francisco in an area with a large concentration of homeless and former prisoners. In Berkeley the crowd was predominantly white and well off. But nonetheless we met a number of former prisoners, several people who had worked in the prisons in CA and knew firsthand the horrible conditions, and many people who knew nothing about the SHU but were eager to sign a petition once we took the time to describe it to them. In addition to the signatures we collected, several people who stopped to sign took copies of the petition to gather more signatures.

We met one former prisoner who received MIM Notes while on the inside. He is currently homeless, a common condition among released prisoners, and organizing homeless people. He took a copy of the petition to gather more signatures. A defense attorney stopped to talk about the conditions in prison, donate money to our work, and sign the petition. Several people working in the prisons also stopped to support the protest. And a number of high school students taking SAT classes at UC Berkeley stopped to sign the petition on their lunch break.

In a classic example of the influence of knowing someone in prison, a MIM activist talked to two young white men about the issue. One of them said that everyone in prison is no good and a criminal and deserves to suffer. The other one said to him "hey, my dad's in prison" and eagerly signed the petition proclaiming how much he would hate to be locked in the SHU. He then convinced his friend to sign as well. At the rate imprisonment is rising in the U.$., the number of people who have been or know someone in prison is reaching far into the population. And this provides a significant base of support for our fight against the criminal injustice system. This is concentrated in the Black and Latino communities which are disproportionately targeted by the criminal injustice system but reaches many whites as well. This explains the higher level of support for the protest in downtown San Francisco relative to the supposedly progressive Berkeley.

Berkeley students riot after football game

The SHU protest was the same day as the big Berkeley vs. Stanford football game leading to even larger than usual crowds on the streets. But these crowds were far from sympathetic to the protest. Many of them walked by commenting "I think torture is good" if they bothered to say anything at all. The time between the start and finish of the game was far better for finding sympathetic passersby to sign the petitions. This leads us to the conclusion that Amerikan sports crowds are not a good target group for prisons organizing work. This is no surprise as the largely white petty bourgeois crowds reflect the interests of mainstream Amerika in general.

At the end of the football game (won by Berkeley), a crowd of thousands rushed the field and, after repeated clashes with police, successfully pushed their way through and tore down the goal post. They then took to the streets, shutting down traffic in their victory march carrying the goal post onto another part of the Berkeley campus. According to a policeman who stopped to ask what was in the mock-SHU, no arrests were made in connection with the crowd at the football field. This tolerance of blatant property destruction and illegal activity demonstrates the unity between the white nation and the criminal injustice system. Blacks and Latinos living in poverty who steal food or other property to feed their family are sent to prison, and crowds of oppressed nation youth demonstrating bring down serious police repression. But white students tearing down a goal post and taking over the streets without a permit results merely in news camera coverage. Media that was uninterested in the SHU protest. As the crowd surged past the mock-SHU we didn't see a single police office anywhere nearby.

The positive side to the football game was the exposure of thousands of fans to the mock-SHU which was in the footpath of most of the crowd. Many were too drunk to stop and read the signs, but as they walked past a number of people did ask what the SHU is or took a flyer. While we don't expect widespread support from this crowd, the sheer numbers mean that at least some of them know people in prison, or will be opposed to the torture in prison.

Prisoners describe conditions

A prisoner in the Corcoran SHU wrote to MIM in November: "I’m incarcerated in a maximum security prison. I am in my cell 23 hours a day, 7 days a week. My only permitted luxury are books. We’re allowed to purchase them from outside bookstores. But I have no income to do so. The library here supplies books, but only novels, which I derive no pleasure from. I prefer books that have intellectual value such as philosophy and other classical literature. Unfortunately they are in absence in the library here so this brings me to you in hopes that you can help me out with a few books." The lack of educational materials is just one aspect of the repression in the SHU.

A prisoner in the Pelican Bay SHU wrote: "These prisoncrats are about to implement another repressive policy: effective Jan 1, 2003 all incoming mail must be written on 81/2 x 11 inch paper, on one side only and incoming letters cannot be longer than 4 pages in length. Handwriting or printing must be legible so the fascist censor can screen all the incoming mail plus we will be able to receive only five letters per week. This bullchet policy will be introduced for 'security reasons.' Yea right. Like all other Pelican Bay policies this one is pure crap. This policy is simply another vehicle of oppression and social control."

The blatant repression of prisoners in the SHU demonstrates the lack of real security concerns and the use of these units, as the Pelican Bay prisoner pointed out, for social control. Join us in this battle against control units in California. Download the petition and flyer and get out on the streets to collect signatures: http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/agitation/prisons.html