Torture and Genocide

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Jamie (38) lives in Mississippi, in what many call the post-racial era. Jim Crow legislation is over, some say. A “Black” man is Head of State.

But Jamie lies on her bed, tired and weak. She needs adequate kidney dialysis treatment because she suffers from kidney failure. She needs medicine. She needs a doctor. But Jamie is still Black in Amerikkka, and although no one, except the colorblind criminal justice system, believes she is guilty of a crime, she lays suffering in a cage.

The shunt in her left arm is painful because Jamie’s mobility is confined to a small space, according to legal analyst, Nancy Lockhart. Jamie was treated with Heparin to prevent the “catheter in her groin” from clotting, but didn’t receive any further medical advice about the “green pus” or “prior bleeding.” Even veterinarians attempt cat talk and dog talk and they certainly inform the guardian about his or her animal’s condition.

According to the information Lockhart obtained, Jamie’s doctors should have followed up after her surgery. Jamie is still waiting. In the meantime, Jamie is unable to “keep anything down,” and the insulin treatment she received in the last week, she doesn’t trust. Why should she? The prison’s “mismanagement of her medications” in the past, Jamie believes, has contributed to her illness. So she continues to suffer – in a cage.

Jamie and her sister Gladys didn’t invade Iraq or kill one Iraqi woman or child or anyone; they don’t supply Israel with hi-tech weaponry to stage massacres in Gaza; they don’t work for a corporation to privatize water or health care; they didn’t receive taxpayer bailout money after swindling masses of American people; they didn’t receive salaries of $42 million dollars last year or any year. But, in 1993, both of these Black women were sentenced to a double life each for an alleged robbery of $11 dollars, a robbery that didn’t happen! Did I mention that Jamie, like her sister Gladys, faces double life in prison? (Read full story at http://[email protected]).

In the U.S., Jamie Scott, prisoner #19197, isn’t seen as a human being! Paul D, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, recognized this unjust spectacle in western civilization. The civilized chained his neck, hands, and feet, but the rooster was free to be Mr. Rooster.

Jamie and her sister aren’t alone.

Cataracts threatened both of Ronald Collazo’s eyes. Incarcerated at SCI-Dallas in Pennsylvania, Collazo was diagnosed in April 2008, and “outside referrals recommended removal of the cataract” in Collazo’s right eye. The PA-DOC “turned down the operation” for treatment on both eyes, writes Bret Grote, investigator and organizer with the prisoner rights/prison abolition organization Human Rights Coalition-Fed Up! (HRC).

Slowly, Collazo is losing his eye sight. As Callazo wrote in a letter to HRC on June 28, 2009:

The “one good eye” policy permits the incarcerated to go “blind in one eye provided the other eye is functional” (my emphasis).

A 65-year old man in “failing health at SCI Dallas,” wrote to HRC from solitary confinement in 2009: —“I am “being denied access to specialists for several different serious health problems, including a heart attack. I am currently being charged unwarranted medical co-pay fees.”— According to Duane Bartholomew, in a letter he wrote to HRC on June 8, 2009, he requested a “sick call” and medical personnel informed him that he was faking his symptoms. Bartholomey was “blamed for causing trouble.”

Bartholomew is told he’s fine! No symptoms of illness!

In addition to the physically ill, the mentally ill rarely have the opportunity to speak with a psychiatrist. As one man reported to HRC, there’s one psychiatrist per 2000 prisoners. The mentally ill housed in prison lose their Z-code “because there is not enough space to keep Z-code inmates in separate cells,” Grote explains.

At SCI-Dallas in Pennsylvania, those incarcerated in its prisons are denied access to their own medical records, according to Grote. “[E]fforts to secure documentation of medical and psychological diagnoses and histories are often refused without cause and are prohibitively expensive. These restrictions, in turn, make it difficult for family members, human rights advocates, and media watchdogs to “verify reports of medical neglect” or wrongful deaths.

And there are deaths. People die in the hole! Who thinks of this kind of punishment for their fellow human beings? Who thinks this kind of punishment is civilized?

Neglect and overcrowding contribute to the medical conditions people experience in prison, but this isn’t the whole story.

Similar to most prison complexes throughout the U.S., SCI Dallas is surrounded by a predominately “white/Euroamerican” population. According to Grote, whites make up 98.4% (2000 census) of the population in Dallas, Pennsylvania and, in Luzerne County where Dallas is located, 96.6% of the population is white. At SCI, 55% of the incarcerated are Black. As Grote states, “the prevailing culture of arbitrary control and repression within the PA DOC coupled with the demographic realities of the incarcerated population are fertile soil for racism” (HRC).

Locked behind cell bars is not enough. The sycamore tree and the spectacle of torture have moved indoors, deep in the hole.

HRC, based in Pittsburgh, focuses its investigations on SCI Dallas in Pennsylvania (one of the 27 correctional facilities in the state). “We focus on SCI Dallas,” Bret Grote told me the other day by phone, “because we want to give a snapshot of what’s its like at one of the 27 prisons in Pennsylvania.” But, as Grote confirmed, from the letters HRC receives from those incarcerated throughout the U.S., it is clear that “acts of State crimes of a vagrant nature” are committed in the name of “security.” However limited HRC’s resources, the organization’s report on “restricted housing units (RHUs) reveals the employment of punishment and neglect is a purposeful means of controlling resistance. “Security” is a ruse to encourage an irrational fear of the Black, the Brown, and the Muslim.

SCI Dallas is a medium prison where the population is mixed: non-violent and wrongfully-convicted people are placed among those charged with rape or murder. After the 1989 uprising, the State Senate Judiciary recommended the separation of non-violent incarcerated from those convicted of violent crimes, but the recommendations were ignored. Think Clinton’s role as a “law and order” man, and Bush II’s “War on Terrorism”! Legalized torture is the U.S.—s domestic and foreign policy.

Despite the State Senate Judiciary recommendations, despite HRC/Fed Up!—s report containing “7 eyewitness accounts and over 100 additional complaints regarding comparable human rights violations – including guard incitement to suicide, abuse of the mentally ill, death threats, and unbearable living conditions in the solitary confinement units (HRC, http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/fedup),” more prisons were erected. The “restricted housing units,” (RHUs), Grote told me, became the site of punishment for those prisoners, predominately Black and Brown, who complain about their treatment behind bars! Writes Grote at HRC’s website, race is a dominant factor determining who is singled out for placement in solitary confinement or subjected to the most intense human rights violations, and should therefore be understood as an underlying factor in both the policies of mass incarceration that generate overcrowding and subsequent violations detailed in this report.

In the phone conversation, Grote explained that the majority of 3,000 prisoners held in (RHUs) at SCI Dallas are those who resist these human rights violations and who file suit against the prison administration.

Connecticut prison activist, Sky Keyes, whose website (Malcolm-Che.com) also receives letters from prisoners, agrees that the criminal justice system is determined to repress resistance. “Any kind of resistance the people put up there,” Keyes told me, results “in people getting raped.” In isolation, “guards have a field day with you.”

It’s no surprise that these often corporate-operated State prisons, Supermax and ICE detention sites resemble the corporate-operated prisons in Gitmo or Bagram – all housing predominantly Black, Brown, and Muslim populations. These corporate-operated hell holes demand that human beings remain in their cells 23 out of 24 hours where, as Grote told me, “they are extremely isolated and health treatment is virtually non-existent.” —“Exercise “privileges” are granted 5-days per week when prisoners are taken to little cubicles of space enclosed by chain-link fencing and resembling dog kennels” (Grote, interviewed by Angola News 3, “Confronting Human Rights Abuses in US Prisons”).

Black and Brown young men need not apply as workers in Amerikkka! Enslaved, inexpensive laborers, yes – but not workers! The gains of the Civil Rights movement determined this outcome. As a result, social relations in these spaces reflect the reality of race relations in the U.S. Social relations disrupted, they are daily corrupted and allowed to corrode all semblance of humanity. The encounter of guards and incarcerated resembles the meeting of two pit bulls. Any wonder “dog fighting” in Amerikkka is the business of free market patriots. The corrosion of social relations re-enforces the logic of the market (the selling of “law and order” and the building of prisons), which, in turn, supports the genocidal program waged against people of color and the ultimate moral failure and social collapse of the minority rulers.

Any wonder people held in prisons throughout the U.S. equate their time in prison as a form of torture, cruel and inhumane treatment, too often resulting in the physical and mental death of human beings, Black, Brown, Muslim people – one cell at a time. Blacks, Native Americans, Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians, encircled by whiteness, encircled by foreign as in alien, inhumane occupiers, corporate profiteers, indifference and a colorblind narrative permitting the masters of death to exterminate life with impunity. “Racial indifference and blindness – far more than racial hostility – form the sturdy foundation for all racial caste systems,” writes Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. “The sense among those left behind that society no longer has use for them, and that the government now aims simply to get rid of them, reflects a reality that many of us who claim to care prefer to avoid simply by changing channels.”

Suicide or genocide! What does it matter to the U.S. Empire if Black Americans and other people of color are encaged, suffer, and eventually die? One way or the other, capitalism survives ultimately for the robber barons.

Jamie, back to the wall, a moldy wall, was awakened by Assistant Warden Holman on April 19, 2010. It seems the administration doesn’t appreciate what it’s found on the Internet, regarding the incarceration of the Scott Sisters. Evelyn Rosco, the mother of Jamie and Gladys Scott, is using the Internet to inform people about her daughters” unjust incarceration. Recently, Ms. Rosco has sent out updates regarding Jamie’s health. Apparently, there’s to be no intervention of truth once the “law and order” narrative deemed Jamie and Gladys “criminals.” Asst. Warden Holman didn’t want Jamie informing her mother about the health hazards of living in a cell where there’s mold on the wall from leaky sewage.

Since the administration came to visit her, Jamie pointed to the mold and the sewage “coming up out of the toilets.” She pointed to spiders that have taken up residents in the unit.

Asst. Warden Holman ordered Jamie to clean the walls! This woman is ill and has one useable arm! (Think Jamie Scott was thinking about Mr. Rooster?)

Jamie told the asst. warden – No. No! Enough! Not only would she refuse to clean the fifth but her mother would continue to let the world know the truth! And if she (Jamie) dies, she told the asst. warden, he “would never hear the last of her mother.”

Asst. Warden Holman then turned to the other women in the unit, but these women, too, refused to see themselves as less than human.