On prisons (hellish and heavenly) and death-escape

Between February 27, 1992 and March 17, 1992, I lived in two separate heavens. One was in Wadduwa and the other in Longdon Place.  I was not only served heavenly meals but my parents were allowed to bring me equally heavenly food.  I just sat around talking with my heavenly co-residents.  Whenever I felt like it, I read. I had a library.  There was poetry, short stories and novels, in English and Sinhala.  I read newspapers.  There were heavenly toilets too.   
 

Four days in one heaven and fifteen in another is a lot of divinity.  It’s an experience of a lifetime and as such one that I am happy not to want to live through again. I am just not that greedy. 

I remembered my heavenly residencies quite by chance this morning.  As happens often, we are reminded of what are called small mercies (in my case there was nothing ‘small’ about it, though) when confronted with the less fortunate and indeed the miserable.  Life does not give equally and heaven comes in slices corresponding to the dimensions of lived hells.

I realized this morning that there are all kinds of hells.  Years ago I was told that the shortest distance from heaven to hell was a few blocks, i.e. from Bunker Hill to Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles; the former being the paradisiacal business-center and the latter the hell into which the homeless had been systematically herded by closing down one by one homeless shelters elsewhere.  I had to be taken from heaven to hell in Los Angeles, for that city has been so planned that those who get to Bunker Hill can’t find their way to Skid Row and even if some outsider strayed into that above-earth place, bum-proof benches and visible surveillance equipment scared them away. 

I’ve seen Skid Row.  It’s hell.  This morning, however, I got to know of a different hell which is also located in the same state, California. It is a large hell, i.e. larger than Skid Row, but more containing and controllable, I suppose. This hell is located in 275 acres and made for the ‘worst of the worst’; in other words those who are so bad that they don’t deserve to wait for assigning of afterlife residence. 

Hell cannot be so big, I told myself.  It was not. Within these 275 acres are windowless concrete cells the size of a small bathroom, I found out.  I felt better immediately, after all hell should be hell and nothing less.  These hell-cells are occupied or rather they are people who are made to occupy them.  There are no cell-mates in hell and that made a hell of a lot of sense to me.  Hell-inmates in this place don’t get to see anyone face to face for 23 hours of the day.  There’s no sunlight in hell. Not a blade of grass. When hell-inmates are de-celled, one hour a day if they are lucky, they are handcuffed and shackled, hands-to-waist, ankle-to-ankle. They spend years and years in these hell-cells. 

This hell has a name and an acronym: Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP) is ‘a “supermax” state prison run by the California Department for Corrections and Rehabilitation, located in Crescent City in Del Norte County’ where the baddies are ‘incarcerated in long-term solitary confinement under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation’.  The Law, I found, was a creature that has been denied visiting rights to PBSP.

I hear that the inmates are planning to starve to death, which, all things considered seems the prison-break strategy that is most likely to succeed. That might be the shortest cut to heaven, or even a more livable hell, hopefully something like Skid Row.  The point is, getting into this SHU (Security Housing Unit) is easy. Getting out is nearly impossible.  

There are all kinds of hells, I found. Some are a tight-fit, literally. Some are vast open spaces.  Even as I write, the Unites States of America and other NATO powers are dropping massive bombs and firing missiles to obtain regime-change in Libya, a country that possesses the largest oil reserves in Africa and the 9^th largest in the world. Two-thirds of the people in the USA oppose this illegal offensive which cannot be justified any longer as an operation to protect civilians, given the vast number of civilians being killed by the ‘protectors). That country’s infrastructure is being systematically destroyed. If ever there comes a rebuilding time in a possible post-Gaddafi Libya, there is no doubt that there will be lucrative reconstruction contracts for Halliburton, Exxon/Mobil and other western corporations and banks. 

The people being bombed in Libya don’t need to exercise the hunger strike option of exiting hell.  I am not sure if they should be or are relieved.  All I know is that incarceration has dimensions.

‘To the fish in the net

a single drop of water,

to the guitarist

whose hands were cut off

a pick,

lip-red

to the heart that said ‘no’

to a love that will not return,

and

to the incarcerated

a sliver of sky.’

I know that the bleeding-heart human rights advocates who think fit to lecture us on matters such as human rights, incarceration, prisoner rights, due process etc., are not ignorant of the prison-industrial complex that is the heartbeat of North American prosperity.  We all have places we really want to visit (and re-visit) before we die.  I am willing to wager that the Pelican Bay State Prison is not on the must-see lists of the likes of Barack Obama, Susan Rice, Navi Pillai, David Miliband, Bernard Kouchner, Louis Arbour, Hillary Clinton and Gordon Weiss.

Almost two decades ago, I spent close to 3 weeks in two different heavens: the Wadduwa Police Station and in the headquarters of a counter-insurgency facility down Longdon Place, Colombo 7.  These are heavens I am not too keen on revisiting.  I am sure, however, that those seeking death-relief in the Pelican Bay State Prison, would not hesitate to obtain permanent residency in either place if given the choice. 

This article was first published on July 30, 2011 in the Daily News

See also, 'Has Barack Obama heard of Pelican Bay State Prison, I wonder'

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer.  Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com. Twitter: malindasene

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Has Barack Obama heard of Pelican Bay, I wonder

On June 30, 2011, I wrote about hell and heaven, of prisons hellish and heavenly (‘On prisons and death-escape’, Daily News). I wrote about a hell that had a name and acronym: Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP), a “Supermax” state prison run by the California Department for Corrections and Rehabilitation, located in Crescent City in Del Norte County’. Inmates of PBSP are incarcerated in long-term solitary confinement under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation, I learned and reported. I wrote also that the law was a creature that has been denied visiting rights to PBSP.

I wrote about Pelican Bay because I had heard that the inmates were planning to starve to death. It is a facility, sorry hell, set out in 275 acres. The inmates inhabit hell-cells the size of a small bathroom in solitary confinement. They don’t see any other human being for 23 hours of the day. They don’t get to see the sky or feel sunlight on their faces. They don’t see a blade of grass, even. Whenever they do get to leave their cells, they are handcuffed and shackled, hands-to-waist and ankle-to-ankle. And so the years pass. Decades, in fact, in certain cases.

Well, they’ve had enough of hell. They want death. They’ve been on a hunger strike since July 1, 2011. Yes, they’d rather die and take their chances in the hereafter (if such exists).

What is it all about?  We need some context here and Marilyn McMahon, Attorney at Law, provides some. She states that the notorious ‘D Corridor’ (also known as the ‘short’ corridor) has the highest level of restricted incarceration in the State of California and among the most severe conditions in the USA. The harshness is designed to force prisoners to ‘debrief’, i.e. to provide information about criminal or prison gang activity of other prisoners. She states that most inmates are neither members of or associated with prison gangs. ‘Debriefing’ does not lessen death-risk for those who give information or their families or other prisoners. The entirety that is their incarceration amounts to torture, sanctioned by the silence of those who ought to know better (e.g. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice et al).  Those who do ‘debrief’, do so simply to escape isolation units, she says.  Armed with this misinformation, the authorities then validate other prisoners as members or associates of prison gangs. That’s ‘Justice for all’, a la the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, ladies and gentlemen.

The striking prisoners have five core demands:

1. Eliminate group punishments. Instead, practice individual accountability. When an individual prisoner breaks a rule, the prison often punishes a whole group of prisoners of the same race. This policy has been applied to keep prisoners in the SHU indefinitely and to make conditions increasingly harsh.
2. Abolish the debriefing policy and modify active/inactive gang status criteria.
3. Comply with the recommendations of the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons (2006) regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement. This bipartisan commission specifically recommended to "make segregation a last resort" and "end conditions of isolation." Yet as of May 18, 2011, California kept 3,259 prisoners in Security Housing Units and hundreds more in Administrative Segregation waiting for a cell to open up. Some prisoners have been kept in isolation for more than thirty years.
4. Provide adequate food. Prisoners report unsanitary conditions and small quantities of food that do not conform to prison regulations. There is no accountability or independent quality control of meals.
5. Expand and provide constructive programs and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates. The hunger strikers are pressing for opportunities “to engage in self-help treatment, education, religious and other productive activities..." Currently these opportunities are routinely denied, even if the prisoners want to pay for correspondence courses themselves. Examples of privileges the prisoners want are: one phone call per week, and permission to have sweatsuits and watch caps. (Often warm clothing is denied, though the cells and exercise cage can be bitterly cold.) All of the privileges mentioned in the demands are already allowed at other SuperMax prisons (in the federal prison system and other states).

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not surprised by all this. We are, after all, talking about a country where George W. Bush and his partners in war crimes have got off the hook, possibly because Barack Obama wanted to purchase an insurance policy with respect to the risk of getting similarly branded for his adventures in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and who knows where else (he has a couple more years to go).

The prison authorities, meanwhile, have promised to ‘effect a comprehensive assessment of its existing policy and procedure’. The striking prisoners are not biting. Naturally. That’s as vague as one can get. Meanwhile, McMohan informs us that the principal hunger strikers have lost 25-35 pounds each. There are hundreds striking at Pelican Bay and thousands of others supporting in California’s 32 other prisons. There are support demonstrations all over the USA, but also in Canada, Australia and Turkey. You won’t find Channel 4 doing a documentary on all this, that’s for sure.

We live in harsh times, did I hear someone say? The USA seems to have lost its way, someone did tell me this morning. Well, times were always harsh in that country. The USA did not lose its way. It never had a way worth celebrating. Not since Christopher Columbus mis-navigated his ship and mis-labelled people, causing a lot of confusion about Indians, West Indians, Red Indians and so on. It’s been downhill since then for a lot of people in that country.  It’s a beautiful country and the people are really nice, I agree. It’s the political leadership that sucks. And of course the system, which includes foreign policy ‘prerogatives’ that sanction numerous crimes against humanity and domestic mechanisms that are as pernicious, especially since they are out-of-public-view for the most part.

Something popped out though. It began in Pelican Bay. It will be tough thrusting it all back again. I think Barack Obama knows this.

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