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Beyondmedia Education: Women and Prison »

“Beyondmedia’s Women and Prison programming supports formerly incarcerated women and their families to voice their stories through the arts, engaging their issues and experiences to create opportunities for dialogue, healing and community organizing. Since 1998 Beyondmedia has collaborated extensively with formerly incarcerated women and girls to create interdisciplinary, multimedia forums on women and prison. The invisibility of women’s perspectives and experiences in discussions of the growing prison industrial complex constitutes a serious gap, given that the numbers of women in this male oriented system are increasing at an alarming rate. The incarceration of women is linked to a multitude of interconnected issues facing poor women, drug-addicted women, women of color, lesbians, and women in prostitution, including interpersonal and state violence, poverty, racism, reproductive oppression, homophobia, harassment, lack of quality healthcare, homelessness, and more. By making the issues of women prisoners more visible, we expand the analysis and strategies being developed to seriously challenge the criminal justice system and work to end the cycle of crisis it creates for women and their families.”

STOP is a community organization that builds the power of residents on the Southside of Chicago to impact the forces and decisions that affect our lives. We fight for human rights to racial and economic justice through organizing, popular education, and leadership development amongst people most directly affected by issues like gentrification, displacement, incarceration and criminalization of youth of color and health cuts.

For the past five years, STOP has fought back against the war on the poor through tenant, youth and healthcare organizing, action research and education, alliance building, and collaborating with tenant associations, youth and community organizations, and labor unions from around the city and nation. Our accomplishments include stopping the displacement of over 600 low income and working class black residents, bringing immediate redress to human rights violations occuring in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center and stopping the closure of four southside mental health clinics.

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—	STOP - Southside Together Organizing for Power

2. Prison and police accountability activists have generally organized around and conceptualized men of color as the primary victims of state violence. Women prisoners and victims of police brutality have been made invisible by a focus on the war on our brothers and sons. It has failed to consider how women are affected as severely by state violence as men. The plight of women who are raped by INS officers or prison guards, for instance, has not received sufficient attention. In addition, women carry the burden of caring for extended family when family and community members are criminalized and wherehoused. Several organizations have been established to advocate for women prisoners; however, these groups have been frequently marginalized within the mainstream anti-prison movement.

3. The anti-prison movement has not addressed strategies for addressing the rampant forms of violence women face in their everyday lives, including street harassment, sexual harassment at work, rape, and intimate partner abuse. Until these strategies are developed, many women will feel shortchanged by the movement. In addition, by not seeking alliances with the anti-violence movement, the anti-prison movement has sent the message that it is possible to liberate communities without seeking the well-being and safety of women.

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—	…INCITE! …INCITE! - Critical Resistance Statement

[A]n African-American prisoner with mental illness, who had smeared himself with feces was forced into a tub of water so hot that it caused third-degree burns. The skin peeled off parts of his body, and a prison nurse overheard a guard say, “looks like we’re going to have a white boy before this is through.

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—	Jean Casella and James Ridgeway, Case Closed on Supermax Abuses at Pelican Bay « Solitary Watch

The California correctional system in general and Pelican Bay in particular show that abuse flourishes when force is not strictly regulated. In the late 1980′s California Department of Corrections officials designed and built Pelican Bay State Prison to house prisoners they called the “worst of the worst.” Prison officials let the guards know that the standard rules of conduct would not apply at Pelican Bay. What followed were not only individual instances of brutality, but a deliberate practice of using violence and the pain it inflicted as a method to control the behavior of prisoners. Ruling on a constitutional challenge to the excessive use of force at Pelican Bay [Madrid v. Gomez], the federal district court catalogued the unnecessary and excessively violent cell-extractions, the hog-tying of prisoners, the caging of naked prisoners outside for long periods of time in cold and rainy weather and the staff beatings of prisoners. It concluded that violence was used by staff “not only in good faith efforts to restore and maintain order, but also for the very purpose of inflicting punishment and pain.

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—	Prison Law Office Director Donald Specter, in testimony before the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons Case Closed on Supermax Abuses at Pelican Bay « Solitary Watch

Solitary and indefinite detention are two different things and are devastating when combined. Isolation has a powerful impact on the mind, especially when coupled with incommunicado detention as in GTMO. Everything outside the four walls is quickly forgotten. With no mental stimulation the mind becomes confused and dull. That state of mind is an advantage to interrogators who manipulate every aspect of your environment. They create a new world reality. Time ceases to exist. Talking becomes difficult, so when conversations do take place, you cannot form words or think. Even when hostility is not present such as during a visit with a lawyer or International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visit, coherent sentences become elusive and huge mental blanks become common, as though you are forgetting the very act of speaking.

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—	David Hicks is an Australian national who is now free after spending 6 years at Guantanamo Bay. Former Detainee Describes Solitary Confinement at Guantanamo « Solitary Watch

TAMMS YEAR TEN » Our day of prayer and atonement »

My name is Mustafa Afrika. I am a prisoner at Tamms Supermax prison. I write to you on behalf of the men at Tamms to not only express a gesture of thankfulness…but also to inform your organization of a simultaneous event that will be occurring at the Tamms prison on April 28, the day hearings are scheduled with the Illinois House Prison Reform committee concerning Tamms.

As a symbol of unity and protracted support from us on the inside, it has been agreed that on the date of April 28 the prisoners of Tamms will embark on a course of non-activity–meaning none of us will take showers, yard or any other forms of non-essential activity. We also will observe a day of total silence as well as personal atonement in addition to many of us fasting. This is not so much an act of outward focus as it is one of inward introspection. We feel that with so many freedom fighters and progressive individuals making a significant effort on our behalf, the least we can do is raise a clenched fist salute of solidarity from within the belly of the beast so you all know that we are still alive and fighting, more invigorated than ever!…

For a long time it seemed as if the monotony of oppression and psychological warfare by the administration of the Tamms Supermax had begun to dull and enervate the spirits of many. Through the collective efforts of the people we are witnessing a revivication of encouragement and hope amongst ourselves…

Let the entire collective know that “we” are standing fully behind the people struggling for us. May the creator continue to sustain you in your efforts and may justice and righteousness light up the darkened abyss of oppression and denigration. All power to the people. Uhuru sasa! (”Freedom now” in Swahili.) Comrade, Mustafa Afrika

—Mustafa Afrika (in Tamms since 2005)

“Supermax Subscriptions is a collaboration between Temporary Services, artist Sarah Ross and the Tamms Poetry Committee to purchase magazines for supermax prisoners. Participants use their extra frequent flyer miles to purchase the magazines. We are trying to use the surplus from people who have the opportunity to travel great distances to help benefit those who never leave their cell.”

TAMMS YEAR TEN » Supermax Subscriptions

Tamms is nothing less than hell, everything we know as human beings have been taken away. No contact with each other, and in our cell 23 hours a day. It’s like we don’t matter to anyone anymore. Our country is trying to stand on other country. But is mistreating their own. What happen to second chances? They place us in the living hell and tell us to better ourselves as human beings. And those who do change and better themselves like me is still being judge on the past. I can’t understand how society can set back and allowed the system to treat us less than animal. They make it seem like prisoner is out of control. But the reality is they create most of the problems. Because they feel they can mentally, verbally and physical abuse you and you shouldn’t have response. We have feeling and is still human being. I strongly believe Tamms should be closed down.

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—	Jerome (in Tamms since 2001) TAMMS YEAR TEN » Testimony

THE C-MAX UNIT WAS said to have been designed to house the IDOC’s ‘worst of the worst’ in an effort to help state authorities re-gain control of their prison system. This couldn’t be further from the truth because most of us have been sent here based merely on the fact that we have mental illnesses or in retaliation for filing lawsuits, grievances, or past disciplinary histories…This facility functions more as a mental institution than a prison of rehabilitation and it serves no penalogical purpose other than to warehouse prisoners. As the duration of our isolation drags on and the degree of our conditions of confinement deteriorate you begin to see the psychological effect that this place has on us. We know that we will spend all day in these cells with absolutely nothing constructive to do with our time and we do not know if we will ever leave here. This knowledge overwhelms many of us and it leads many of us to insanity, causing attempted suicide, suicide, body mutilation, hanging, eating and throwing feces, and other extreme acts.

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—	JOE (in Tamms since 2002) TAMMS YEAR TEN » Testimony