At Louisiana's Angola prison
Demand end to dungeon conditions
By Marina Drummer
An unprecedented rally took place Dec. 7 at the gates of
Angola prison in Louisiana. It was to protest the conditions in
which prisoners are held at notorious Camp J, Angola's extreme
punishment unit. Supporters from all over the country, ranging
in age from 9 to 70, attended the peaceful gathering.
Robert King Wilkerson, who spent over 30 years behind
Angola's gates before being freed in February, and Chui Clark,
a former prisoner who spent over a decade in the Camp J unit,
rallied the crowd to protest prison living conditions and the
sham review board process.
The rally was organized by the National Coalition to Free
the Angola Three. It came in response to atrocities reported in
daily dispatches that Angola Three political prisoner Herman
Wallace has been filing from the dungeon in Camp J.
Several hundred of the 5,000 prisoners in the Louisiana
State Penitentiary in Angola are held in solitary confinement.
They are locked in their cells for 23-and-a-half hours a day
with no access to work, education, social or religious
activities. All meals are taken in their cells. Visiting is
very limited; there is rarely contact.
Inmates are subjected to medical and physical neglect, and
guard harassment and assault, in an environment of boredom
punctuated by violence and madness.
Wallace has been subject to increased retaliation since
March. That's when a state magistrate approved the furtherance
of an American Civil Liberties Union civil lawsuit challenging
the state's violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, which bans cruel and unusual punishment.
Since that time, Wallace has been set up three times by
guards and placed in the dungeon for weeks on end. Interviews
with other inmates, and reports on conditions that he has
managed to send from the dungeon, chronicle a horrific pattern
of guard violence and abuse along with administrative
corruption and irresponsibility.
All prisoners at Angola, but particularly those in Camp J,
are suffering increased punishment at the hands of a prison
administration bent on silencing voices of dissent and
reform.
The Camp J program was meant to administer a more "humane"
form of discipline to inmates. But that has been subverted. It
has become the weapon of choice against inmates targeted for
retaliation by all from the lowliest guard to top prison
officials. The Camp J system has been used with impunity for
years, especially against inmates who dare protest the
conditions there.
Guards wield absolute power
The larger, more significant problem is the guards' absolute
power to throw prisoners into the punishment camp for months
and--unbelievably--years on end, based solely on their word.
The inmates are poor, mostly African-American men who are
powerless to do anything about it.
Conditions at Camp J frequently surpass some of the
human-rights violations related with horror by U.S. officials
describing prisons in other countries.
In a desperate effort to stop word about prison conditions
in Angola from reaching the outside world, Warden Burl Cain has
been instituting new, unconstitutional restrictions and
punishments. The latest tactic is a memo stating that all
prisoners whose names appear on a website are subject to having
their outgoing mail, as well as all legal correspondence and
phone calls, checked.
Cain is also threatening limit the number of postage stamps
prisoners can buy. As phone charges from Angola are exorbitant,
this would effectively silence prisoners inside the 18,000-acre
plantation.
Herman Wallace explains in his letters: "I'm sending you
this information in case you can use it as I'm trying to expose
the torture going on back here and the best way to do it is to
get others to speak out about what has been done to them. I'm
talking frame-ups, beatings, four-point restraints, gas shot in
the face of inmates-all without provocation; abuse of
punishment to keep Camp J a housing unit, simply because there
is no place else to house these men. The frame-ups are
sanctioned by the warden because there's no place to send these
men."
A growing stream of inmates who have been freed on new
evidence, including DNA testing, attests to the fact that aside
from the obvious racial and economic targeting that feeds the
prison system, many of these prisoners are innocent of all
charges except being a poor person of color. Guilty or
innocent, these are human beings who deserve better treatment
than to be left in four-point restraints in paper gowns for
days at a time, forced to urinate and defecate on themselves;
or to be beaten and gassed; to have their glasses ripped from
their faces and crushed, their property ripped up and strewn
about.
The growing prison-industrial com plex makes no bones about
being all about punishment, but where is the line between
punishment and torture?
Readers who want to express concern over the activities at
Angola can write Sen. Donald Cravins of the Louisiana Black
Legislative Caucus and head of the Senate Judiciary committee
that has jurisdiction over the Department of Corrections:
Sen. Donald Cravins, 200 West Pine St., Lafayeet, LA 70501;
websen@legis.state.la.us.
The writer is from the National Coalition to Free the
Angola Three.
Reprinted from the Dec. 19, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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