Mumia Abu-Jamal, Solitary Confinement and Indefinite Detention USA

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully from nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government… I cannot be silent.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr. [From the speech entitled, Beyond Vietnam – A Time To Break Silence]

“Mumia [Abu-Jamal] may be in solitary, but he is not alone. The PA [Pennsylvania] Department of Corrections holds approximately 2,500 people in solitary confinement on any given day, many of them for years at a time.”

– Human Rights Coalition [January, 2012]

Yet, there’s more.