[Reposted from last year]

One of the main tenets of African philosophy is the concept of “Ubuntu.” Ubuntu is really the core of what it means to be a human being. It is about being selfless and thinking about others. It is about being a compassionate person and being “connected” to others. It is about understanding that if you hurt others, you really hurt yourself.

One of my touchstones is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I have so much respect for all that he has done and for who he is. Tutu has defined the concept of Ubuntu as the understanding that “a person is a person through other people.” He adds that Ubuntu can best be understood as “me we.” I love that term — “me we.” He has written that the “solitary, isolated human being is a contradiction in terms.” All humanity is interconnected.

This is what is so destructive about prisons. They are about isolating and incapacitating human beings. They are about deliberately severing the “me we” or Ubuntu.

Tutu writes that “those who work to destroy and dehumanize are also victims — victims, usually, of a pervading ethos, be it a political ideology, an economic system, or a distorted religious conviction. Consequently, they are as much dehumanized as those on whom they trample.”

Ubuntu forces us to consider that as we dehumanize others we are actually dehumanizing ourselves in the process. What has happened to our humanity as we imprison masses of people? What has happened to our Ubuntu? Tutu recounts the story of South African minister of police Jimmy Krueger who on hearing of the torture and killing of activist and freedom fighter Steve Biko in prison is reported to have said that his death “leaves me cold.” Tutu writes of this: “You have to ask what has happened to the humanity – the ubuntu — of someone who could speak so callously about the suffering and death of a fellow human being.”

Malusi Mpumlwana was an associate of Biko who as he himself was being tortured by the police looked at his torturers and realized that these were human beings too and that they needed him “to help them recover the humanity they [were] losing.”

Tutu has written that “the only way we can ever be human is together. The only way we can be free is together.”

On the eve of another Thanksgiving, I am grateful that the universe has not diminished my own sense of Ubuntu. I wish the same for you. I will leave you with some final words by Archbishop Tutu and wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving. Prison Culture will be back on Monday.

When we look squarely at injustice and get involved, we actually feel less pain, not more, because we overcome the gnawing guilt and despair that festers under our numbness. We clean the wound — our own and others’ — and it can finally heal. — Desmond Tutu

In 1994, a year before I moved to Chicago, four black teenage boys were accused of a vicious rape and murder. These young men became known as the Englewood Four. This past week, a judge vacated their convictions citing the fact that their “confessions” to the crime had been coerced.

For seventeen years, the men had fought to clear their names. Now they await a decision by the State’s Attorney as to whether they will be re-tried for the crime. This decision to vacate the Englewood Four’s convictions comes on the heels of the release of three other black men who were wrongfully convicted as part of the Dixmoor Five. Once again, in the Dixmoor case, the men had been convicted of the rape and murder of a young woman when they were all juveniles. They allegedly confessed to the crime.

If you are noticing a pattern here, you should. Research suggests that young people are more susceptible to police coercion and therefore more likely to give false confessions when they feel pressured and scared. In their book “True Stories of False Confessions,” Rob Warden and Steven Drizin of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School offer several reasons for false confessions:

1. Brainwashing: interrogators convince the suspect that he or she must have committed the crime during a memory blackout.
2. Child abuse: interrogators persuade a child to confess by exploiting his or her vulnerability and tendency to trust authority.
3. Desperation: a suspect confesses in order to end the exhausting interrogation, believing that he or she can straighten things out later.
4. Inquisition: interrogators convince the suspect that confessing is the only way to avoid a harsh punishment like the death penalty.
5. Mental fragility: interrogators persuade a mentally ill person to confess by exploiting his or her vulnerability and tendency to trust authority.
6. Inference: interrogators take a suspect’s statement as a confession when it was not meant to be.
7. Fabrication: interrogators simply make up a confession if they can’t obtain one.
8. Opportunism: an informant tries to provide information about the crime in exchange for a reward but ends up being persuaded to confess.
9. Pretense: cases when mentally ill people confess to a crime either because they truly believe they committed it or to gain fame.
10. Police force: interrogators use physical abuse to force a confession.

For more information about why innocent people “confess” to crimes that they haven’t committed, the Chicago Tribune published a good article on the subject.

The Center on Wrongful Convictions suggests that one way to prevent false confessions would be electronically record all police interrogations. This seems like a no-brainer to me. Yet there has been sustained and furious resistance to this in cases other than homicide. If the police have nothing to hide, they should welcome the scrutiny. If they have nothing to hide…

In Chicago, the city of the Burge Police Torture Cases, we are not under the illusion that we should trust law enforcement. In our case, we must VERIFY before we can trust. The 100 African-American men and women who were systematically tortured by police between 1972 and 1991 demand this of us.

P.S. I want to make a pitch for a great project that I am involved with. If you are an artist, educator, organizer, or concerned citizen, I invite you to submit a proposal to the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials project. The deadline for submissions is December 10th. You do not have to be a resident of Chicago to submit your ideas.

P.P.S. I think that it is appropriate to post this spoken word piece by Bassey Ikpi about Amadou Diallo.

This publication about the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 is not intended to be a curriculum guide, but a brief primer for educators and organizers. It includes a timeline of events (with primary sources); testimonies from Attica prisoners; poetry by Attica prisoners; sample activities for youth; and other suggested resources.

We do not claim to have addressed all of the complexity of the rebellion in this short document. This is by no means intended to be the definitive word about the context and meaning(s) of the rebellion. We simply offer this resource as another in the long line of publications that have been produced about the Attica uprising. We do so knowing that we will omit a lot important information. This is unavoidable.

We had been looking for exactly this type of resource to foster our own popular education efforts and activism on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Attica rebellion. We didn’t find anything that quite worked so we took it upon ourselves to create what would be useful for us. A core value of ours is to share information with others in order to facilitate movement-building to eradicate incarceration. As such, we share this resource with you.

This primer was produced by organizers and educators rather than by historians. While we tried to be objective, we are not neutral. We state this unabashedly and honestly. We sincerely hope that this material is useful to you if you plan to discuss the Attica uprising with your students, community members, and others. We encourage others in the future to add to our collective knowledge about the Attica Rebellion and its legacy.

Finally, we invite you to freely reproduce and distribute this primer. We ask that it be disseminated at no cost and that Project NIA be acknowledged as producing this resource. We love hearing from folks about how they have used our resources so make sure to drop us a line at projectnia@hotmail.com.

Download the Attica Prison Uprising Short Primer Here

Download the Attica Prison Uprising 101 Illustrations Appedix Here

Special thanks to the following people who contributed to making this primer a reality…

Caitlin Seidler has once again lent her considerable talents to designing and laying out this resource. Caitlin’s commitment to social justice is unrivaled and she has our deepest gratitude.

Lewis Wallace has been integral to the development of our work at Project NIA. He is a terrific organizer who is committed to the abolishment of prisons. We would like to thank Lewis for all of his contributions to this project.

Katy Groves is a fierce advocate and ally to youth in conflict with the law. She is tireless in the struggle for criminal legal reform. Our thanks to Katy for her incredible illustrations.

Finally, this primer is dedicated to the memory of all who died at Attica, we will not forget.

Note: Please join us for a series of events about the Attica Prison Uprising this September.

P.S. Look out [in the next couple of weeks] for an Attica Prison Uprising Zine that we are creating along with our friends Lewis Wallace and Micah Bazant specifically for an upcoming event in September. It will be available for downloading.

A big part of what keeps me posting on a regular basis is the feedback that I get from readers. I also love it when I get questions that make me think or lead me to do more research. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about corporal punishment and torture in early U.S. penitentiaries. It got a very big response judging from the number of views that it has amassed so far. I’m not sure why so many people seem interested in this aspect of prisons and frankly I do not want to think too deeply about it. I hope it is because people are deeply disturbed by these images and ideas. I want this to be true.

Anyway, a reader asked if I had any examples of the media of the time (19th century) inveighing against prison torture practices. In fact, I do. I have an original article from Harper’s Weekly dated December 18, 1958 titled “Torture and Homicide in an American State Prison.” I purchased the original article as a collector’s item mainly because of the illustrations that are included. I dug it out of storage earlier this week and will quote some of it below to illustrate how some media outlets covered prison torture in the 19th and early 20th centuries:

“We now present a far more fearful picture of the mismanagement of our public institutions for the confinement and correction of criminals. On 2nd inst. a convict named More, imprisoned in the State Prison at Auburn, was showered to death by prison officials. The circumstances of the case are simply as follows:

The convict, More, was a negro. He is certified to have been a man of naturally pleasant temper, but violent when crossed. On 1st inst. he was said to have been in a bad humor; he was seen, or is said to have been seen, to sharpen a knife, and to mutter threats against someone; on the strength of which he was, on 2nd inst. seized by several keepers or deputy-keepers of the State Prison, and by them dragged toward the shower-bath. Like most negroes, he entertained a lively fear of cold. He knew that the water of the shower-bath would be very cold indeed; and, after vainly appealing to the feelings of his captors to release him, he broke away from them and fled — be it remarked — to the shop where he was in the habit of working. At the door of the shop a convict arrested him; a keeper and his assistants swiftly followed: he was dragged by main force, and after many violent struggles, to the shower-bath; all the water that was in the tank — amounting to from three to five barrels, the quantity is uncertain — was showered upon him in spite of his piteous cries; a few minutes after his release from the bath he fell prostrate, was carried to his cell, and died in five minutes.

It is the homicide which we this week illustrate. The use of the shower-bath as a means of coercing criminals into submission to the orders of prison authorities began to be general about the year 1845. In that year a convict at the Auburn State Prison was whipped by order of competent authority, and died under the lash. The public indignation which was aroused by the event led to the abolition of whipping as a punishment in the prisons of the State of New York. It was preserved in other States, as, for instance, in Connecticut, in which State Prison wardens are authorized to this day to administer stripes — not over ten in number — to refractory prisoners. But in New York the cat was disused, and the shower-bath reigned in its stead.”

The article goes on for several pages to describe how the shower-bath works and to underscore several other forms of punishment that prisoners are subjected to at Auburn Prison. The expose also relies on research by leading experts about the physical and psychological effects of being subjected to the shower-bath. The article is definitely of its time as it distinguishes between whites who are believed to better be able to withstand the torture of the shower-bath and blacks who are seen as constitutionally unable to endure the practice. If you are interested in the history of American prisons, the article is worth reading and I am sure that it can be accessed through any library.

Below is an image of the shower-bath apparatus:

The article ends with these words:

“An inquest has been held on the body of the negro. Eight men composed the jury, six of whom are said to have been prison contractors. They refused to allow the prison physician to deliver his evidence, as he wished; and found the absurd verdict that the man’s death had been ‘hastened’ by the use of the shower-bath. It is clear that if any notice is to be taken of this poor convict’s death the District Attorney must move in the matter. It remains to be seen whether he will do so; or whether the civilization of the State of New York is to be disgraced by the torture and homicide, by State officials, of a poor convict in a State prison.”

In case you were confused or needed a reminder, it is impossible to overstate how horrible life for Blacks in the U.S. was for most of the past 400 years. I collect a lot of memorabilia about the Black experience in the U.S. and my latest find is a document from 1801 salvaged from town meeting minutes that documents the punishment for two black women in Rhode Island.

Whereas Sally Gibbs now confined in the Bridewell having returned to this Town to dwell after having been removed to Smithfield as being her place of her last legal settlement without the liberty so to from this Council whereby the said Sally Gibbs has incurred the penalty of Seven Dollars and in case of inability to pay the same is liable to be publicly whipped. Resolved therefore that the (crossed out) ——————– said Sally Gibbs be subjected to that payment of the said fine of Seven Dollars and that in default of her paying the same that she be publicly whipped fifteen stripes on her naked back between the hours of four and five of the clock in the afternoon of this Day and conducted thereafter without the limits of this Town and that the Clerk be and he is hereby directed to issue a Warrant for the above purpose accordingly forthwith.

Warrant Alexander this day.

** the reference to “the Bridewell” means that she was in jail.

bottom half: in full:
Whereas Deborah Barry a Black Woman, a transient person has neglected to depart as expected and who it is represented is still residing here, resolved therefore that she be apprehended and removed with her young child by the name of Charles to Warren in the County of Bristol adjudged to be her place of last legal settlement and that the Clerk make out a Warrant forthwith for her removal with her said Child Accordingly……….. NB Warrant issued …Henry Alexander

Note: As if on cue, Julianne Hing’s article published in Colorlines today underscores a history of the criminalization of black women (particuarly mothers).

Here’s another poem about the Attica Prison Revolt from the edited volume titled “Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica.”

Sept. 13
By Christopher Sutherland

Let the drums roll
Give the first command
That puts us in the ground

R-E-A-D-Y!

We stiffen our shoulders
Hold our heads up high
Let the world take note
That proud, black men
Are here about to die

A-A-A-I-M!

If our actions
Cause brothers and sisters to unite
As we die,
In their fighting spirits we live.
So let the drums roll
And damn that final order that us in
The ground…
F-I-R-E!

Christopher Sutherland – Multi-talented (poet, musician) and eyes that appear to pierce the soul – an early standout in the group sessions.

For those interested in a short primer on some of what happened 40 years ago, here is a short clip (under 10 minutes) from the documentary “Disturbing the Universe” about the lawyer William Kunstler who served as an observer and negotiator at Attica during the revolt.

Note: If you are in the Chicago area any time between September 6-8, you are invited to a photographic exhibition about the Attica Rebellion that will be taking place at Mess Hall, 6932 N. Glenwood Ave. In particular, we will be having a reception and reading on September 8th from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Attica Rebellion. All are invited.

We throw around the words solitary confinement in a very cavalier way in the U.S. Thanks to efforts like Solitary Watch public awareness is being raised about the brutality and torture of solitary confinement. This is a good thing. Today there is an excellent Op-Ed by Colin Dayan in the New York Times about the plight of prisoners at Pelican Bay and also about their resistance through hunger strikes. Yet I find something missing in our consideration of isolation in prison. We need to hear more of the voices of those who have experienced this torture.

A prisoner named Ahmad Al Aswadu wrote an essay titled “A Black View of Prison” in the April-May 1971 issue of the Black Scholar. In his essay, he describes the experience of living in the “hole” while incarcerated. Here is some of what he wrote:

The “Hole” (called such because its locality is usually under the prison’s first floor) is solitary confinement. One could stay in the hole for a week or a lifetime depending upon his color and attitude. It is here in the hole that men are made and broken at the same time. It is here that the previous threat of getting “hurt” can realize itself all too quickly. And it is here that the seeds of Black Consciousness have been cultivated in the minds of many black men.

It is very difficult for a layman such as I to describe the atmosphere of the hole but I shall try. I believe that the very first thing that the brother notices about the hole is the desolateness and the feeling of utter aloneness. The first time that I was sent to the hole I felt as if my soul had deserted me. I don’t believe that I had ever experienced such a feeling of intense emptiness in my life before then. I had been sent to the hole to have my attitude changed, because, as they stated, it was not conducive to “good order.” A brother had just been murdered by the guards who worked in the hole, and rather than go through that type of thing, I pretended to be institutionalized. Fortunately, my stay only lasted fourteen days and I was returned to the general inmate population.

Life in the hole is epitomized by one big question mark. Uncertainty is the order of the day. Your visitors are turned around at the gate when they come to see you. The food quantity and quality is drastically reduced to the level of subsistence. You might get a shower and you might not — depending upon whether or not the guard’s wife was good to him the night before. I believe that it is the hole that is the most memorable aspect of the prison experience. They are all the same, and yet they are totally different from one another.

Today, Critical Resistance is hosting a national conference call about the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike. All of the relevant details are below:

Monday, July 18th
6pm EST/ 5pm CST/ 4pm MST/ 3pm PST
toll-free call in number: 1(800)868-1837 (new number)
participant code: 62435226

The clouds were low
when the sun rose that day.
For the white folks were coming
to lay some black brothers away.

From eight surrounding counties,
the white folks came,
with 12 hundred locks
and some brand new chains.

The word was kill niggers,
kill all you can.
For they don’t have the right
to live like men.

Then up in the sky
appeared a big green bird.
And from inside came
these few words.

“Put your hands on your heads
and you won’t get hurt,
lie on your bellies,
put your face in the dirt.”

Then from a distance
came a black brother’s cry.
“I’m a man, white folks,
and like a man I’ll die.”

This poem was written by Isaiah Hawkins who was a prisoner at Attica. He was a member of the prison liaison committee who worked for the betterment of all inmates’ conditions. He wrote the poem as a member of a poetry workshop that was intended as a rehabilitative measure for Attica. A series of 8 week poetry workshops began on May 24, 1972 and was run by Celes Tisdale who was a member of the Buffalo Black Drama workshop. Mr. Tisdale selected some of the poems from the workshops and published a pamphlet titled “Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica.” This is where I found Mr. Hawkins’s affecting poem. He was released soon after the workshop began.

I came late to the Casey Anthony case. I have avoided any comment over the past week since a jury of her peers issued a not guilty verdict. I am not going to focus on the rightness or wrongness of the verdict in this post. Though I do find the people standing outside the courthouse with signs yelling baby killer to be pathetic. The thing that I care about in this case is that the defendant’s lawyer, Jose Baez, took his opportunity in the spotlight to make a compelling statement against the death penalty:

“I think that this case is a perfect example of why the death penalty does not work and why we all need to stop and look and think twice about a country that decides to kill its own citizens. Murder’s not right no matter who does it, whether it’s a ritual killing or someone becoming a victim in a drive by shooting. It’s disgusting and I think, if this case gets any attention, it should focus on that issue, that we need to stop trying to kill our own people.”

What’s your best guess as to whether Mr. Baez’s statement jumpstarted a national conversation about the death penalty in America? I’ll give you three guesses. Since this was the lead attorney’s first statement immediately after the verdict was handed down, you would have thought that the media and the public would have at least pretended to discuss the death penalty. You would of course be wrong. Alas the substance of his words only garnered cursory coverage and scant public comment. Why is this?

The answer, I think, is that Americans are particularly wired to support “rough justice.” I don’t know where this comes from but I just know that it is. In writing about the electric chair at Indiana State Prison, Etheridge Knight (1970) muses about the condemned man:

“I wonder if he realizes that he has become some kind of sacrificial lamb, soon to be strapped onto a weird altar/throne so that the blood lust of a barbaric society will be quenched. I wonder if he knows that even if he does not die in the Chair he will still have served his purpose. Because when the newspaper headlines gloated: MAN SENTENCED TO DIE IN ELECTRIC CHAIR — That somewhere in the dark/bright regions of this society’s mind it projected his death, walked the last mile with him, and licked its lips as he died in eye-bulging agony. So the question of capital punishment is merely rhetorical. It was never meant to deter crime, and the people who are pro-capital punishment on those grounds are hypocritical liars. No matter how sophisticated their argument, they are — in their souls — “eye-for-an-eye” fundamentalists.”

There seems to be something in the DNA of the country that makes us susceptible to accepting state-sanctioned killing of our people. It is hard not to become despondent about our fellow citizens when we focus on the people outside the courthouse in Florida who still insist that Ms. Anthony deserves to die. Yet… We learned just this week that my state of Illinois has officially closed down its death row. This came after a long and sustained campaign against the death penalty led by people like my friend Alice Kim and many others. Their efforts show that it is possible to persuade our legislators and the general public about the injustice and inhumanity of the death penalty. We have to hold both realities in our heads at once. On the one hand, many Americans seem to be “eye-for-an-eye” fundamentalists as Knight puts it and yet we also know that another (perhaps smaller) group of people are calling us to our better angels. In honor of those who continue to struggle to eradicate capital punishment in the U.S., I want to share an image from my photographic collection. These are negatives depicting a protest against an execution at San Quentin in 1960. La lucha continua!

Back in May, a group of us released a terrific zine called the Prison Industrial Complex Is. The zine was illustrated by Billy Dee and created with the Chicago PIC Teaching Collective. I am proud to say that the zine has found its way to England, New Zealand, South Africa and all around the U.S. that we know of. All of us at the Collective are super proud of that. I thought that I would take the occasion of the 4th of July commemoration to share some of my absolutely favorite illustrations with you. You can find a free PDF copy of the zine HERE. Please share it with others who you think would be interested. You can click on the images below to enlarge them.

“The Prison Industrial Complex is built on the belief that some lives are worth more than others.”

“The Prison Industrial Complex tears families apart.”

“The Prison Industrial Complex takes a foothold in your underfunded public school when counselors are replaced with cops.”

“The Prison Industrial Complex is the new industry in town when all the old factories close down.”

“The Prison Industrial Complex targets people from certain neighborhoods, especially poor people, people of color, young people, and LGBTQ people.”

“The Prison Industrial Complex criminalizes immigrants.”

“The Prison Industrial Complex imprisons more black men today than were slaves in 1850.”