In: SF BayView, December 20, 2012
by Mutope
Dugma
The new
“Security Threat Group Prevention, Identification, and Management Strategy”
will instigate new and more aggressive attacks against prisoners and their
families, friends, associates and communities, who are already being victimized
by our institutionalized racist system and the prison industrial complex. It is
just one of their many policies to persecute prisoners incarcerated in solitary
confinement units. This is comparable to government policies that persecute us
poor citizens in ghettos and barrios.
The
security threat group strategy in itself is a racist policy that will set a new
precedent for attacks against New Afrikans (i.e. Blacks), Mexicans, Latinos,
Asians and poor whites to allow CDCR to implement a classification of our
people and communities. “Security threat group” means one of us can define all
of us, through their validation system.
We are
individuals despite all the hype around this gang validation nonsense. We must
reject the “Security Threat Group Prevention, Identification, and Management
Plan.” It will allow our communities to be further subjugated, persecuted and
openly attacked by overzealous public servants or security guards who operate
like Gestapo against poor citizens of this nation.
And to
those of us held in the prison industrial complex – subjected to physical and
psychological torture in long term isolated solitary confinement units – the
term “threat group” only means that the validation process is being expanded to
where all prisoners based on group validation as a gang can be and will be
subjected to what we already suffer as individuals under the validation
procedures.
Identification
of prisoners will mean what it means now, not only who we are, but who are our
family, friends and associates, and this will not stop. The identification
process investigates our lives by way of other agencies, such as LAPD, OPD,
SFPD, SDPD, Sheriffs etc. This I call profiling of our people and our
communities. Identifying the prisoner as part of a STG – a gang member or
associate – opens up covert and overt investigations of our family, friends and
associates.
This is the
purpose for the identification: making our people and community suspects in
alleged gang activity, subjecting us to harassment, searches and
investigations. It is the pretext used by CDCR to hide their racist intent.
Interdiction
[the subheading of the STG strategy is “California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation’s Proposed Implementation of the Security Threat Group
Identification System and Step Down Program for Gang Interdiction and
Management”], meaning to destroy, cut off or damage, or to prohibit by decree
or authoritarian implementation, will only further familiarize New Afrikans,
Latinos, Mexicans and Asians with what they know all too well: the
authoritarian presence of militarized police inside our communities.
They patrol
our communities as if we’re terrorists. Yet the prisoner will be the
justification for interdiction. Remember, CDCR and Pelican Bay State Prison
officials have already cut us off from our family, friends, associates and
communities, and when we succeed in connecting with them, they use many scare
tactics to destroy, damage or cut these relationships OFF. It’s called
interdiction.
Prevention,
meaning to keep from happening or existing, to hold back, hinder, stop, means
that we prisoners will be suppressed by any means necessary based on flawed
intelligence and through crime initiatives and policies to counter crimes that
have not occurred. For example, prisoners in solitary confinement units are not
allowed “contact visits,” because there is the potential for a crime to be
committed. CDCR’s NO contact visits policy speculates and assumes that
prisoners’ families, friends and associates will be accomplices to criminal
activity. Under CDCR policy, NO kissing, touching etc. is allowed while on a
contact visit to a prisoner in general population.
This is
what they mean when they say prevention: instituting policies that suppress the
growth and development of prisoners and their families, friends, associates and
community, by cutting off whatever crimes that can be committed. But to do this
is to insinuate that all our people are criminals, which reflects an inherently
racist disposition inside the institution of institutionalized racism.
Therefore, we all become suspects or are subjected to policies that limit our
interaction and movement.
Management
means that act or art of control. This is what it’s about: controlling the
obsolete “poor class” prisoners, who are only an extension of the obsolete poor
class of people out in society. By maintaining control over this class of
people, they’re able to utilize intimidating acts or practices against
prisoners toward controlling them.
The death
penalty, long term solitary confinement, assault weapons, prison violence,
prison oppression – all are means of maintaining control. This is how
they manage prisoners.
Plan is a
method for achieving an objective. Therefore, we all are in danger. The STG is
only a new and more aggressive policy that will further subject prisoners to
harsh conditions and the current physical and psychological torture we exist
under now. I basically just interpreted the title of this new policy, which defines
its true purpose and meaning.
We also see
that this pilot program is filled with numerous job titles, which is how CDCR
fleeces California taxpayers out of their funds. They create unnecessary
positions that are irrelevant and serve no purpose. If anyone thinks that those
of us held in solitary confinement units need to go through gang management
programs at the ages of 40 to 70-plus years, they are only fooling themselves.
There are
NO gang members or gang bangers in the “short corridor” at Pelican Bay, only
grown men who came into these institutions at very young ages, who have
educated themselves, and who in many cases were never gang members from the get
go. What you have back here are political prisoners, jail house lawyers, strong
minded influential prisoners who understand the games correctional officers and
officials play.
Those of us
who did come into these prisons with a backward mindset do not adhere to that
gang nonsense anymore. It’s crazy to tell us, who’ve been in solitary
confinement units from 10 to 40 years, that we’ve got to go through a “step
down program,” or SDP, in order to get out, when we’ve been held illegally and
subjected to physical and psychological torment throughout our stay in these
torture chambers.
The
validation system is just that. It does not mean you have committed a crime or
broken the law in any way; it only means that you have been profiled or
identified as an alleged “something” by the CDCR under their gang validation
system. So to place you in solitary confinement units and leave you there for
the rest of your natural life on the validation alone is inhumane and criminal
against those prisoners subjected to this fate.
The fact
that we have been here anywhere from five to 40 years for no criminal offenses,
no gang offenses and no violent offenses is based on simply an administrative
placement, where we are validated as gang members and associates and locked up
indefinitely on flawed intelligence. Some of this so-called intelligence is so
ridiculous that one has to wonder, are these intelligent gang officers or a
bunch of professional liars who hide behind the veil of institutionalized
racism.
There is NO
way we prisoners should be held in solitary confinement units, whether Ad-Seg
or SHU, on gang validations, when our average age is anywhere from 40 to 70.
There are NO GANG MEMBERS back here. This CDCR knows quite well.
The pilot
program is described as “a new behavior based system which will serve to
enhance the existing intelligence based validation system.” These words are
important to understand because they basically speak to the re-enforcement of
the existing intelligence-based validation system that places prisoners in
these solitary confinement units on non-behavior placement.
To say
you’re now going to put prisoners – particularly alleged STG prisoners – in
solitary confinement units for their behavior only means that a wider pool of
prisoners will be locked up, because now alleged prison gangs, street gangs,
disruptive groups etc. all fall under the STG identification, interdiction,
prevention and management plan. These are for the most parts groups who could
commit an offense and be given a determinate sentence of anywhere from 90 days
to five years in solitary confinement, but they would be let out when that time
is up.
This is a
just system because it deals with individual accountability. And no one should
be held in solitary confinement indefinitely even if he wants to be there. Now
all these determinate SHU prisoners will fall under this new validation system,
where CDCR officials will utilize the SDP to place people under a STG I and STG
II validation, holding them inside a program that serves no purpose whatsoever,
but to further torment the prisoners. The step down program offers nothing but
harassment to those prisoners inside that program.
The STG-SDP
Pilot Program is lacking any real commitment to letting us out of the solitary
confinement units. There is too much bureaucracy we have to go through, and
this is with the same biased, prejudiced and racist prison guards who have held
us back here for the 22½ years since Pelican Bay State Prison was built,
without adequate clothing, adequate food or educational programs under severe
isolation from our families, friends, associates and other prisoners. No
natural sunlight, no adequate medical care etc.
So why
would CDCR and PBSP do right by us prisoners now? They’re only expanding their
“torture chambers,” and anyone who thinks otherwise is clearly not reading what
CDCR is saying. One thing CDCR is good at is playing psychological games and
tormenting prisoners. We all know this first hand because we’ve seen many go
crazy or insane or mad or loony or mentally ill or catatonic or delusional or
become severely depressed. I’ve seen them all here in Pelican Bay State Prison
Security Housing Units.
People have
to realize that CDCR and PBSP officials have had a lot of success in torturing
prisoners into submitting to their debriefing program that is used to frame and
set up prisoners for this mockery of a system. We continue to reject this pilot
program. It does nothing toward giving us a gateway out of these torture
chambers.
They’re
even saying that NO STG I members who are influential are ever getting out. Who
determines who gets out and who stays? We say nobody deserves to be tortured in
solitary confinement units at the hands of anyone.
One love,
one struggle, in solidarity always,
Mutope
Dugma
