Not just Guantanamo:Exposing Torture and Abuse in Pennsylvania’s Prison

When most of us think of torture in the U.S., we envision people trapped in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, forced into black hoods and waterboarded. But the frightening truth is that torture is far more pervasive than Bush’s latest imperial quest. You don’t need to travel to outsourced detention centers in foreign countries. In fact, torture might be happening at the Supermax prison on the outskirts of your Pennsylvania town.

The Human Rights Coalition – FedUp! Chapter has been addressing abuses in high-level security prisons in Pennsylvania since the fall of 2007, and Virginia since 2005. Based in Pittsburgh, we are an unpaid group of concerned citizens, people in prison and their loved ones. We are dedicated to upholding the rights of prisoners through providing resources and support, exposing injustices, and building relationships with people in prison and their advocates.

Again and again, throughout the years, families of prisoners and prisoners themselves have told us horrifying stories of abuse—beatings by officers, medical neglect and patterns of racist intimidation—and we realized they had no way to seek justice when prison staff hurt them or violated their rights. The grievance system, the state-sanctioned procedure by which prisoners file complaints, is flawed and corrupt, and that’s why the main outlet prisoners have for their stories of abuse is most often outside supporters. As a result, we have begun a project—a database that we are calling the “Abuse Logs.” The Abuse Logs documents and summarizes complaints received from prisoners, family members or advocates about human rights violations by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PADOC).

The bulk of these logs currently come from prisoners in SCI-Fayette. The logs don’t represent the full spectrum of atrocities in SCI-Fayette, let alone in all the prisons of Pennsylvania. But with your help, that will change. We want all supporters and advocates for prisoners to record the abuses they hear and send them to us, so we can create a central database that will show how widespread and under-reported these violations are.

We realize we are only receiving one side of the story. However, because prison staff has the ability to cover their tracks; because they are the ones in positions of power; because prisoners are always assumed guilty, and because we are inundated with so many complaints, we know a pattern of violence and abuse exists. We hope the Abuse Logs will generate critical exposure of the brutal, oppressive, and life-threatening conditions existing inside Pennsylvania’s expanding system of punishment. In addition we are offering these logs as a shared database for our allies to utilize for their own purposes. Let us be the oversight committee that we have been begging the state to provide all these years.

Abuses perpetrated by PADOC staff against prisoners are illegal under international law, violating the following international agreements:

• The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

• Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners

• The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination

• The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

• Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Given the existence of this systemic pattern of dehumanization, PADOC and state officials’ failure to address—let alone remedy—the widespread abuse amounts to intentional sanctioning of torture inside prisons within the state’s jurisdiction.

The overwhelming majority of complaints received by HRC-Fed Up! come from people in solitary confinement. Conditions of solitary confinement, according to the American Friends Service Committee, include:

• 23-hour lockdown behind a solid steel door

• isolation from human interaction

• frequent threat and occurrence of physical torture via prolonged placement in punitive restraint devices

• assault, often with chemical weapons

• mental torture via sensory deprivation and disorienting temperature and light fluctuations, along with rampant psychological neglect

• sexual intimidation and assault.

The punitive nature of solitary confinement conforms to the legal definition of torture articulated by the U.N. Convention Against Torture: “Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining…information or a confession, punishing him/her…or intimidating or coercing him/her.”

Development of the Abuse Logs will further enable us to build relationships with and provide critical support for prisoners, families, and communities most severely impacted by policies of mass incarceration; provide a human rights framework for popular education and agitation that can be applied to other aspects of our social, economic, and political systems; expose the criminal nature/structure of the PADOC and state executive branch, forcing legislators to fight for the implementation of human rights and international law or reveal themselves as conscious collaborators in crimes of the state.

The daily violations of prisoners’ rights are part of a larger trend in Pennsylvania’s prisons that includes the alleged ‘suicides’ at SCI Smithfield; Prison Health Services, the for-profit corporation that makes money by denying inmates healthcare and has left a trail of corpses and lawsuits in its wake around the country; Pennsylvania’s number of juveniles serving life-sentences, the highest ratio in the world; political prisoners—most notably Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Move 8—incarcerated in the state system; and other relevant features of criminal behavior within Pennsylvania’s DOC.

We have no illusions that the U.S. government will ever obey its own laws. For this reason we deliver our demands to those targeted by policies of mass incarceration and other systems of oppression, as these sectors of society alone are situated to struggle for fundamental political transformation and social liberation.

It is apparent to the HRC, the prisoners and their family members we are in contact with, that shrinking the penal system—less cops, less prisons, freeing prisoners, creating more court diversion programs, slashing corrections budgets, among other such measures—along with reversing its punitive logic to a transformative, humanist one constitutes a viable program for ending the conditions that enable abuse. We also realize that focusing on prisons alone is not enough. The crisis inside U.S. prisons reflects the greater illness of a society made sick by a capitalist system that assigns profits a higher value than the health of society.

In addition to creating the Abuse Logs, the HRC is pushing for two policy demands that we believe will most effectively curtail human rights violations in Pennsylvania’s prisons:

1. Immediate Abolition of Solitary Confinement: Whatever name given to the practice of solitary confinement—control units, administrative custody, restricted housing unit, special management unit, lockdown, etc.—the end result is a predictable, premeditated violation of fundamental human rights.

2. State-level restructuring of the prison system based on International Human Rights Law: Given the U.S. government’s refusal to abide by international law, we are calling on the people of Pennsylvania to restructure our society based around principles of human rights.

In closing, we want to encourage those who will read the Abuse Logs to allow themselves to be nourished by a healthy, constructive, and defiant rage that will be satisfied with nothing less than the abolition of these houses of oppression.

With Conviction in Our Hearts,

We Are FedUp!

Human Rights Coalition—Fed Up! Chapter --5125 Penn Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15224

hrcfedup@gmail.com 412-361-3022 xt.4 http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/fedup/

To file a Pennsylvania abuse report online please go to the Emergency Response Network’s website http://emergencyresponse.cc and click the grievance log link. Otherwise please contact the above info.