A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
The state of California may soon have to defend the indefensible. A federal judge has allowed inmates at the dreaded Pelican Bay supermax prison to challenge the constitutionality of decades-long terms of solitary confinement. The state will be compelled to prove that it is not in the business of mass torture.
CA Supermax Prisoners Win Right To Sue As A Class Over Torture, Decades-Long Solitary
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
“The ruling will force the state to defend its draconian policies.”
Prisoners held for ten years and more in solitary confinement at California’s infamous Pelican Bay supermax have won the right to challenge – as a class – the constitutionality of their treatment. A federal judge in Oakland has allowed five of the inmates to also represent 500 others who have spent a decade in isolation, as well as 1,100 additional prisoners who are confined in solitary for supposed gang membership. Lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights are handling the class action suit. The question they are posing is simple: Does ten years in solitary – and even longer, for dozens of inmates at Pelican Bay – amount to unconstitutionally cruel and unusual
Nowhere else in the world is solitary confinement practiced on anything like the scale of the United States, where 80,000 men and women total prison populations
Any sane and moral person would agree that solitary confinement for weeks and months, much less years and decades, is a uniquely ghastly form of torture that rips at the essence of what makes us human. It is the ultimate sentence of social death. The Pelican Bay inmates’ lawyers believe the recent ruling will, for the first time, force the State of California to defend its draconian policy on its merits. If 12 years a slave is a horror, how should one describe 12 or 20 years of solitary suffering? And, what do you call the people who enforce and defend such sadistic savagery – men with such hatred for their own species that they would torment fellow humans, endlessly?
“The jailers’ roles are identical to those of the Nazi Gestapo.”
According to the lawsuit two hunger strikes
Under the California criminal justice system, solitary confinement is much more than just a punishment, or a security measure: it is a process. For the 1,100 inmates in solitary at Pelican Bay because of alleged gang associations, the process is designed to turn them into snitches or liars who finger innocent men. Release from solitary is possible only if one admits to gang affiliation and implicates other inmates – who will then be put through the same process. The jailers’ roles are identical to those of the Nazi Gestapo who tortured suspected members of the Resistance until they provided the names of their comrades, or of people they hardly knew, who would then become part of the same torture process.
Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl says he was tortured by his captors in Afghanistan, locked alone in a cage for weeks, maybe a month. In Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the prisoners exchanged for Bergdahl spent the last 12 years, the maximum isolation time allowed at a stretch is 30 days
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .
Some provisions of Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation benefit the masses of Black people, but this legislation is a bare minimum effort to blunt some of the sharpest contradictions of the
Many would-be migrants, like the Garifuna, would love nothing more than to stay in their homes. It’s Washington that’s making it difficult.
Black challenges to white control of African Studies at the 1969 African Studies Association meeting in Montreal exposed the deeply entrenched racism within, and the imperialist leanings of, th
Abayomi Azikiwe of Pan-African News Wire joined Danny Haiphong and Margaret Kimberley to discuss AFRICOM and U.S./NATO imperialist actions on the African continent.
San Francisco Public Defender Manohar Raju spoke to Ann Garrison about why his office is suing San Francisco Superior Court for denying hundreds of Black and Brown people the speedy trial right
