The U.S. tops any other country in the world for its number of prisoners – over 2,300,000. China, by contrast, has roughly 200,000 prisoners. But the U.S. general population is only 330 million, while China’s is 1.4 billion. American prisoners constitute a much larger percentage of the population than those in any other nation. The U.S. has clung to this dubious distinction for decades.
Equaling the Soviet gulag at its height in the 1950s in numbers of prisoners, the U.S. also locks away 61,000 of them in the torture called solitary confinement and 2700 in the terror called death row. These are not the policies and actions of a civilized society. This is barbarism. As long as this continues, any American politician who climbs up on a high horse about government abuse of citizens in another country is a pathetic hypocrite who deserves to be laughed out of public life.
Privatization of prisons has made things worse. Of federal prisoners, 19.1 percent are in private prisons, as are 6.8 percent of those in state prisons. These privately run hellholes turn a profit by jacking up fees for inmates from everything from phone calls to mail to video-conferencing with a lawyer. They also make money by skimping on decent food and proper medicines and have lots of other ingenious ways to squeeze dollars out of their captives. Politically, private prisons are a reactionary force, promoting, naturally, tougher crime laws and longer sentences. Because that’s how they make money – for them, the more prisoners, the better. Private prisons contributed to the 408 percent increase in the U.S. prison population from 1978 to 2014.
Originally, Quakers advanced prisons, as a reform, an alternative to the horrors of corporal and capital punishment. But, as abolitionist Mariame Kaba argues in her new book, We Do This Till We Free Us, prisons became their own kind of nightmare. The introduction quotes Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “We live in the age of human sacrifice.” Prisoners are our human sacrifice: people locked away in tiny cages for decades. In response, Kaba would abolish prisons and the police. She advocates transformative and restorative justice, which would impose consequences on those who harm – such as reparations, public apologies, loss of any position of power or privilege, counseling, etc. – but not destroy them. Kaba writes: “Prison is simply a bad and ineffective way to address violence and crime.”
Unsurprisingly, her prescriptions would necessitate a social and economic revolution, for which Kaba, who is anti-capitalist, has worked for years. “Harm originates from situations dominated by stress, scarcity and oppression,” she writes. “Our punishment system, which is grounded in genocide and slavery and which has continued the functions and themes of those atrocities, can never be made just.”
Like many abolitionists, Kaba drew hope from the George Floyd rebellion last summer and joined those calling for defunding the police. Here’s her list of police “reforms” to be avoided: “1) reforms that allocate more money for the police; 2) reforms advocating for more police; 3) technology-focused reforms; 4) individual dialogues with individual cops funded by tax dollars.” Instead she supports: “1) reparations to victims and families of police violence; 2) decreasing policing and prison funding and redirecting it to other social goods; 3) elected independent civilian police accountability boards with power to investigate, discipline and fire cops and administrators; 4) disarming the police; 5) simplifying dissolving police departments; 6) data transparency (stops, arrests, budgeting, etc.)”
Kaba is against police or prison reform. She does not describe policing as broken, because that reaffirms reform and undercuts abolition. Police kill about 1000 people a year, she notes, but since 2005, there have been only 110 prosecutions of officers who shot people, with convictions in less than 42 cases. But Kaba also notes abolitionists’ successes: removing former Illinois state’s attorney Anita Alvarez; helping to win reparations for torture victims during the reign of “infamous police commander Jon Burge in Chicago – a city that has, over the past two decades, become a hub of abolitionist organizing;” and several campaigns to free women imprisoned for self-defense against sexual abusers.
Women’s right to self-defense against abuse, whether it’s a wife and her husband or a sex worker and a client, is central to Kaba’s thinking. In fact, she titled one chapter, “Organizing to End Sexual Violence Without Prisons.” She describes the abuse survivor’s position thus: “I was hurt. Somebody did it. I want them to know that they did it. I want to see that they have some remorse for having done it.” That’s a far cry from tossing the abuser in a cage for decades, so that by the time he’s free, he’s elderly and unemployable.
But the even deadlier consequence of the current criminal justice approach is that women who defend themselves land in prison. “Prosecuting and incarcerating survivors of violence,” Kaba writes “puts courts and prisons in the same punitive role as their abusers.” Here she reviews several prominent cases, for instance, Cyntoia Brown who, aged 16, “shot and killed Johnny Allen, a 43-year-old Nashville resident who picked her up for sex.” Brown explained she shot him in self-defense. She was “tried as an adult and was convicted of first degree premeditated murder and ‘especially aggravated robbery.’” With concurrent life-sentences, she would have been eligible for parole after 51 years in prison. However, Brown’s case drew much media attention, and she was pardoned. Kaba cites other such cases.
“In 2017, there were 219,000 women in U.S. prisons and jails, most of them poor and of color,” Kaba writes, observing that the incarceration rate for black women is double that for white women. She argues that abuse survivors are systematically punished “for trying to protect themselves and their children,” that it is “hurt people who hurt other people,” and that prison simply should not figure in the equation.
This book recounts terrible stories of women punished for defending themselves, but one, from Florida, presents a very bitter irony: Marissa Alexander fired a warning shot into the air to force her violent husband to back off. For this, she faced 60 years in prison. She would have seemed a likely candidate for Florida’s infamous “stand your ground law” – right? But the judge said no, because she had not demonstrated fear. She was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison. (After three years in prison and two under house arrest, she was released, thanks to a national campaign to free her and to some very effective lawyers.)
One cannot help wondering, had Marissa Alexander been male and white, like George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin – how would the judge have ruled then? Would he have let her go, like the judge who let Zimmerman off? Because apparently, at least in Florida, what’s self-defense for a man is outright attempted murder for a woman.
Following several nationally publicized police killings of unarmed Black Americans in the United States, Eva L., a fitness instructor who identifies as Black, started to experience what she describes as “immense paranoia.” She would often call in sick, because she feared risking an encounter with police upon leaving her house. She also started to second-guess her and her husband’s decision to have children.
“Seeing Black bodies murdered and physical/emotional violence online and on the news” was a trauma she could no longer bear, Eva says. “I was terrified of bringing a child into the world we live in and experience as Black people. I thought not having kids was a truer sign of love than risk them being harmed by this world.”
A recent study sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania — released just before the anniversaries of the deaths of Eric Garner (2014), Michael Brown (2014), John Crawford (2014), and Philando Castile (2016) — found that there could be millions like Eva, for whom these killings have been a mental health trigger.
Research included data from theMapping Police Violence Projectdatabase for police killings between 2013 and 2016 and information from theBehavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Systemof over 103,000 Black Americans. The results indicate that police killings of unarmed Black Americans are having a population-level impact on the mental health of Black Americans.
According to researchers, the incidents may contribute to 1.7 additional poor mental health days per person every year, or 55 million more poor mental health days every year among Black Americans across the United States. That means the mental health burden for African Americans caused by police killings of unarmed Black victims is nearly as great as the mental health burden associated with diabetes. African Americans have some of thehighest rates of the disease, which contributes annually to 75 million days of poor mental health among them.
African Americansmake up13 percent of the US population but they accounted for 26 percent ofpeople fatally shot by policein 2015 and 2016. While the death of a loved one can be tragic for the family and community of any police-shooting victim regardless of race, the study reveals that there is a deeper trauma for African Americans, related to the victim or not.
Eva started seeing a therapist who diagnosed her as having generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s been two years now, and she admits that her progress toward healing has been slow, yet steady.
Jacob Bor, co-author of the study and assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, says the responses in his social circle to police killings of unarmed Black victims is what interested him in conducting this study. Bor noticed that White people were able to comprehend “the injustice on an intellectual level but did not experience the same level of trauma.”
The study findings confirmed Bor’s personal observations. The research team did not observe spillover mental health effects in White respondents from police killings. It should also be noted that among respondents of either race, there were no spillover effects for police killings of unarmed White people or killings of armed Black people.
The research is essential in considering our own personal experiences, says Bor, adding that the findings speak to the overall “value of different people’s lives.” This society “has a long history of state-sanctioned violence” toward racially marginalized groups, he says.
The mental health sector is only now researching the impact of police brutality, a concern that has affected African Americans for decades. “Clinicians can go through medical school without [gaining] any experience in treating the effects of racism,” Bor says. Studies like his, he adds, can help to create long overdue critical mainstream discussions about the effects of racism on mental health, such as, “How do we in public health, society, and among the clinical and mental health services support people when these incidents occur?” and “Can aprofession dominatedby White providers effectively treat the emotional struggles of ‘living while Black’ in this country?”
According to Bor, these discussions are needed to implement change. “Among many White Americans, there is an empathy gap … and a failure to believe when people of color say ‘this hurts me,’” he says.
Adding to the deficiency of culturally competent therapists, poverty and other formidable socio-economic challenges — also stemming from structural racism — remain steadfast barriers to African Americans accessing mental health care, according to the American Psychological Association.
New York City’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, has also become a passionate advocate for what she describes as a movement for “culturally competent mental health care.”
“When you talk about people of color, who are obviously facing discrimination and legacy of racism and poverty in huge numbers, you are talking about something that is really tough to overcome,” McCray says.
Inadequate care undermines benefits from policies and resources designed to mitigate the burdens of systemic oppression. “Mental illness along with substance abuse disorders are hardship multipliers,” she says. Struggling unsupported with “mental illness can make everything that much harder.”
For example, holding on to affordable housing, staying enrolled in college, and even surviving encounters with law enforcement can be extremely more difficult for those suffering from mental illness or trauma, McCray says. In fact, the mostrecent annual numbersfrom the Washington Post’s database of fatal police-shooting victims indicate that “nearly 1 in 4 of those shot was described as experiencing some form of mental distress at the time of the encounter with police.”
“Mental health is the ultimate intersectional concern,” McCray says. “It is reflected in all of our policies … education, housing, school, relationships.”
In 2015, she and her spouse, Mayor Bill de Blasio, launched Thrive NYC, a $850 million mental healthprogram that incorporates 54 initiatives. Among the program’s several core objectives is the aim to address the stigma around mental illness and increase access to treatment across the city. McCray believes that ThriveNYC’s community focused approach is one of several necessary steps toward reaching historically under served groups.
“Culturally competent care to me is all about trust,” McCray says. “It improves early identification, accessibility, and outcomes.” Also, she says, “People have to be seen.” From her advocacy experience she has observed that “people have to feel that they can turn to someone that they trust.”
Connecting people with the appropriate resources, however, means surmounting many challenges. “There is great deal of work to be done to eliminate the stigma,” McCray says. There is also the matter of affordability and infrastructure. “We’ve never had a well-coordinated mental health system in our country — ever. People who have the money find ways to manage.” She says she wants to fight for everyone to get the resources they need to cope.
Eva recognizes that her path to healing has taken a significant amount of work and support beyond the means of many African Americans. “Access to therapy is a privilege,” she says. “I know that most people can’t afford weekly sessions at $150-plus.” Yet, she adds, “[going through therapy] is the only reason why I’m OK planning for kids at 32.”
Tensions were higher than usual at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Alabama early on the morning of January 30. A couple of days prior, guards had attacked and choked an elderly incarcerated man, Cat Diamond, in the cafeteria under the reportedly false pretense that he had gotten in line for a second meal.
That morning, Robert Earl Council, an incarcerated organizer who is also known as Kinetik Justice, questioned Officer Griffin about the beating, witnesses said. Officer Griffin called for reinforcements and Sgt. “Shakedown” Brown, Sgt. Binder, and Officer Milton liberally maced the area.
They beat Ephan Moore, a Black man who had filed a lawsuit against Sgt. Binder previously, with a meat cleaver, splitting his skull open. Four to five guards stomped Moore while he was unconscious, and then again once he was handcuffed in a wheelchair at the prison’s infirmary.
Witnesses told the Free Alabama Movement, a group organizing against prison slavery and mass incarceration in Alabama, it would be “a miracle” if he survives. His injuries include an orbital and nose fracture, a broken jaw, and two broken hands. He has at least 10 staples in his head, Moore’s cousin told the podcast Abolition Today .
Then, witnesses say the officer unit descended on Kinetik Justice, a well-respected organizer and whistleblower, and beat him with their metal batons as he lay defenseless on the ground. After the attack, at least two other incarcerated people, Wilbert Smith and Detrol Shaw, were badly beaten while the prison was on lockdown.
The aftermath was akin to a scene from a horror film: a tooth, and large puddles and streaks of blood painted across the floor, showing where guards dragged bodies.
Kinetik Justice and Moore were airlifted to the trauma center at UAB Hospital in Birmingham. Worried loved ones staged a protest at the hospital with the demand that officials allow Kinetik Justice’s family in to see him — a demand which has been unmet.
Moore underwent surgery, while Smith and Shaw’s conditions are unknown. Moore and Kinetik Justice have been moved to the Kilby infirmary, where they reportedly are not receiving basic medical care or ice for their wounds.
In a press release, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) said it called on the FBI to assist in an investigation, and claimed that both guards and incarcerated people sustained injuries.
Nikki Davenport, a prison abolitionist with the support coalition known as the Free Alabama Movement Queen Team and a close friend of Kinetik Justice, told Shadowproof that guards had beaten Kinetik before, but this was the worst incident.
“His eyes are glued shut, he has three broken ribs, and his head is busted open in three places,” Nikki said.
“Because he tends to expose the things [ADOC does] that are dehumanizing, they retaliate on him,” she explained. “Whenever they get a chance. And he doesn’t go about it the wrong way. That’s the thing. He follows their policy. They don’t follow their own policy.”
Kinetik Justice has spent a majority of the last five years in solitary confinement. As a former member of the Free Alabama Movement, he played a key role in organizing work strikes in 2016 and 2018. ADOC put him in solitary and beat him for his involvement.
“He’s just a genuinely good person that everybody cares about, like, you won’t really meet anybody across the state of Alabama in the prison system that has anything negative to say,” Nikki said. “He helps everybody that he came across, teaches them to read, teaches them to write, you know, helps them with their legal work, helps them with whatever they needed help with. That’s just him.”
In 2019, Kinetik helped expose and end a tortuous practice at Limestone Correctional Facility known as “bucket detail,” whereby guards shackled incarcerated people to buckets for days on end in cells without running water until they defecated in the bucket several times. He sued Alabama Department of Corrections employees in September, 2020 for alleged retaliation he faced after speaking out against gambling rings run by a captain and sergeant at Limestone.
He was transferred to Donaldson, a facility with a well-doumented culture of horrific violence, sexual assault, and deliberate indifference toward the needs of incarcerated people.
In October 2019, prison guards at that facility beat 35-year old Steven Davis to death. “They beat him so badly his head was misshapen. He looked like an alien, or a monster,” Davis’ mother said. ADOC never provided her with information about the murder beyond a notification that her son was in the hospital.
In June of last year, guards at Donaldson used ‘Cell Buster,” a potent chemical agent, on Darnell McMillian’s cell while he was on suicide watch. An employee said Darnell yelled that he couldn’t breathe. He died shortly after.
Tommy Lee Rutledge, a man who struggled with mental health issues and spent a majority of the last several decades in solitary confinement, was cooked to death in an overheated cell on December 7. Unable to turn down the heat, he died from hyperthermia when his core body temperature rose to 109 degrees.
The most recent round of beatings follows a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) against ADOC on December 9. The DOJ wrote that Alabama “fails to provide adequate protection from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, fails to provide safe and sanitary conditions, and subjects prisoners to excessive force at the hands of prison staff,” in its prisons for men.
Professor Robert Chase, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook and author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners Rights in Postwar America, explained how history is repeating itself. From 1965 to 1995, federal courts found eight of the eleven states of the U.S. South — including in Alabama — as having unconstitutional conditions in prisons, he told Shadowproof.
Incarcerated people organized labor strikes, filed a flurry of civil rights lawsuits throughout this period, and, Chase said, “were susceptible to accelerating levels of targeted violence and brutality meant to silence their public outreach campaign for civil and human rights.”
Alabama’s solution, again, is to spend an estimated $3 billion on two new mega-prisons, a move solidified on February 1, when Governor Kay Ivey signed two 30-year leasing contracts with private prison company CoreCivic.
CoreCivic will construct the prisons and serve as the landlord for the government. Such a “public-private partnership” (sometimes called a ‘P3’) allows Alabama to skirt incurring debt in the short-term, but will be substantially more costly for taxpayers in the end.
Advocacy groups quickly criticized Gov. Ivey’s plan. “The ACLU of Alabama condemns Governor Ivey’s reckless decision to put the state of Alabama into a multi-billion-dollar lease to build new prisons, despite overwhelming opposition from community members and state leaders of both parties,” the organization wrote in a statement.
“Prison construction is not and has never been the answer to the unconstitutional conditions in Alabama prisons, and the Department of Justice said as much when it issued the first report in April 2019.”
Nikki isn’t sure what Kinetik will say about the recent assault, but she thinks he will continue struggling. ADOC, she says, should probably expect yet another lawsuit.
In March 1976, we sat in a cavernous Chicago courtroom while FBI agent Roy Martin Mitchell testified in the federal civil rights case that we and our partners at the People’s Law Office had brought on behalf of the families of slain Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the seven survivors of the murderous pre-dawn Chicago police raid on their West Side apartment.
Thanks to the liberation of FBI documents from the Media, Pennsylvania FBI offices, the revelations of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities and our own hotly contested pretrial battles to uncover the truth about the raid, we had been able to document the local FBI’s central role in setting up the raid as part of the Bureau’s secret and highly illegal COINTELPRO Program. This program had previously targeted Black liberation leaders including Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Elijah Muhammad and the organizations that they led. As the Senate Select Committee would later find in its April 1976 report, the FBI had more recently turned its attention to “destroy[ing] the Black Panther Party.”
Roy Martin Mitchell was an integral member of the Chicago FBI office’s Racial Matters Squad and the control agent for a prized “asset”: informant-provocateur William O’Neal, who was the captain of security of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP). As such, O’Neal had ready access to the local BPP chairman, the dynamic Fred Hampton, who had garnered particular attention from Mitchell, his Racial Matters Squad and the COINTELPRO program.
At the time Mitchell testified, we had documentation of the FBI’s secret role in setting up the raid, including a detailed floor plan of the Hampton apartment — designating the bed on which Hampton would later be slain — that Mitchell and O’Neal had drawn up, and which Mitchell had supplied to the Chicago police raiders and their state’s attorney supervisors, including Cook County State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan, who utilized this invaluable information to execute the murderous pre-dawn raid on December 4, 1969.
We also had obtained two other damning FBI documents: a December 3, 1969, document that claimed the impending raid as a COINTELPRO project, and a post-raid document that set forth the outlines of the conspiracy to cover up the FBI’s involvement in the raid.
Concluding from the Senate report and the liberated media documents that the raid and its coverup had to have been approved and ratified at the highest levels of the Bureau, we had sought, months earlier, to join as defendants in our suit FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Director of Domestic Intelligence William C. Sullivan, and George Moore, who, as boss of the Extremist Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division, had the Black Panther Party directly in his administrative sights. We had also journeyed to Washington to question Sullivan under oath in a pre-trial deposition, but his Department of Justice lawyers thwarted our efforts to probe the Bureau’s knowledge of the raid and COINTELPRO, and our overtly hostile federal trial judge, J. Sam Perry, acted similarly by denying our request for relevant documents and to bring Hoover and his crew on board as defendants.
So it was in March 1976 when Mitchell set about to meticulously slander Hampton and the BPP through the reports of his informant O’Neal. An instinctively cautious witness, Mitchell nonetheless made a crucial mistake, and in the process, revealed that the FBI and its government lawyers had suppressed 200 volumes of FBI files that pertained to Hampton, Clark, O’Neal, the seven survivors of the raid, and the FBI’s cover-up investigation — files that the judge had previously unwittingly ordered produced.
The Court held in no uncertain terms that we had amassed a powerful record of two successive police, prosecutorial and FBI conspiracies.
The government rushed Mitchell off the stand with the judge’s blessing, and, over the next two months, its lawyers produced (several files at a time), the 200 volumes of documents. The files contained a great deal of information relevant to our claims of FBI conspiracy, but the FBI and its government lawyers, perhaps hoping to stave off the inevitable, saved the smoking gun for last: a pair of documents to and from the Bureau in Washington and the Chicago office that were buried in O’Neal’s personnel file and which requested and obtained for O’Neal a $300 bonus for furnishing “a detailed floor plan of the apartment” that “subsequently proved to be of tremendous value” and “was not available from any other source.”
Incredibly, Judge Perry shrugged off the damning government misconduct, refused to grant a mistrial and forced us to continue with the trial as we attempted to read and digest the deluge of documents that we were receiving on a daily basis.
The trial lurched forward for another 15 months, making it the longest civil trial in federal court history. Both of us spent time in the federal lockup for protesting the outrageous rulings of the judge and the blatant misconduct of the defense. After the jury heard 18 months of damning evidence, the judge absolved not only Mitchell, O’Neal and their Chicago bosses, but also State’s Attorney Hanrahan and the 14 raiding cops who fired more than 90 bullets from a machine gun, a rifle, shotguns and handguns at the sleeping Panthers by entering a directed verdict in their favor.
Despite its relevance and our repeated discovery requests, the FBI and its lawyers never produced Mitchell’s personnel file as part of the 200 volumes, nor were we permitted to recall Mitchell to the witness stand in order to question him about the O’Neal bonus document and whether he had also been rewarded for his central role in setting up the raid and subsequently keeping the FBI’s role under wraps.
Thankfully, the litigation did not end with Judge Perry’s baseless and vindictive ruling. We appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which rendered a landmark 70-page opinion on April 23, 1979. The Court of Appeals granted us a new trial, ordered a hearing on the government’s misconduct and absolved us of our contempt citations. The Court held in no uncertain terms that we had amassed a powerful record of two successive police, prosecutorial and FBI conspiracies.
The first conspiracy, which was grounded in the COINTELPRO program and featured Mitchell and O’Neal’s central roles, encompassed the planning of the raid and the raid itself, and was designed, as the Court found, “to subvert and eliminate the Black Panther Party and its members, thereby suppressing … a vital, radical black political organization.” The second conspiracy, which included the post-raid coverup and legal harassment of the plaintiffs, was, as the Court further stated, “intended to frustrate any redress the Plaintiffs might seek and, more importantly, to conceal the true character of the pre-raid and raid activities of the defendants involved in the first conspiracy.”
The newly released file provides the first direct documentation that Sullivan, Moore and even Hoover ratified, celebrated and rewarded O’Neal and Mitchell’s integral roles in the Hampton raid.
We successfully withstood the defendants’ attempt to have the U.S. Supreme Court overturn the Court of Appeals’ decision, and the case was returned to another federal judge for retrial. We pressed for additional FBI documents to join Hoover and Sullivan (both of whom were deceased), as well as Moore and several other high-ranking FBI and Department of Justice officials as defendants, and pursued the misconduct hearing. In order to avoid judicial condemnation of their suppression of the FBI files and, as it later turns out, discovery of additional documentation of the FBI’s role in the raid, the government joined with Cook County and the City of Chicago to settle our case for what was, at that time, the largest police violence settlement in federal court history.
At that point, in 1983, after 13 years of litigation, it seemed as if the historical record was complete and the true narrative of the raid established: Chicago police officers, under the command of the Cook County state’s attorney, and at the behest of the FBI and its COINTELPRO program, targeted BPP leader Fred Hampton, and assassinated him while he lay asleep as part of a murderous pre-dawn raid during which the police fired more than 90 shots that also killed Panther Mark Clark and left several other survivors badly wounded.
And so stood that record, until December 4, 2020, 51 years after the raid, when historian and writer Aaron Leonard received from the FBI a redacted copy of Mitchell’s personnel file in response to his 2015 Freedom of Information Act request.
Involvement of Hoover and FBI Officials
The newly released file, containing several hundred pages of FBI memos and reports, provides substantial evidence that would have contributed significantly to our examination of Mitchell and his Chicago supervisors. It also provides the first direct documentation that Sullivan, Moore and even Hoover were aware of Mitchell and O’Neal’s Black Panther activities; that they ratified, celebrated and rewarded O’Neal and Mitchell’s integral roles in the Hampton raid; and that they were involved in the early stages of the cover-up of the FBI’s involvement. Here is some of the key information contained in the documents:
On June 27, 1969, in apparent recognition of O’Neal’s role in a June 1969 FBI raid of the Chicago BPP offices, Hoover commended Mitchell’s “very capable manner in which [he] performed in a matter of intense interest to the Bureau in the racial field … and for his “effective, skillful guidance of a confidential source who furnished valuable information.”
On November 24, 1969, only days after O’Neal and Mitchell drew up the Hampton floor plan and initiated Mitchell’s plan to convince the Chicago Police Department to execute the raid, Chicago Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Marlin Johnson, who was a defendant in our suit, sent a memo to Hoover’s desk cataloging O’Neal’s important BPP-related activities, and recommending O’Neal for an incentive bonus. O’Neal’s activities are deleted from the document.
On December 2, 1969, while the actual planning for the raid was in its final stages, Bureau Extremist Division Chief George Moore sent a memo to Bureau Director of Domestic Intelligence William Sullivan recommending that Mitchell receive an incentive award for “outstanding performance in the development of a highly productive informant in the Black Panther Party.”
On December 4, 1969, only hours after the pre-dawn raid, the Bureau’s administrative division concurred with Sullivan, Moore and Johnson that the “performance of SA Mitchell in developing and guiding informant merits incentive award” in the amount of $200.
On December 5, 1969, SAC Marlin Johnson “advised informant” (O’Neal) about an unknown topic; the remainder of this paragraph was redacted from the document, but it seems likely that it was to inform O’Neal that Johnson would be recommending him for a $300 bonus. Neither Johnson nor O’Neal ever admitted in sworn testimony that they met or had any discussion with each other on December 5 or any other time.
On December 10, 1969, a memo sent from the personal desk of J. Edgar Hoover to SA Mitchell reads: “I am certainly pleased to commend you and to advise you that I have approved an incentive award in the amount of $200 for your outstanding services in a matter of considerable interest to the FBI in the racial field.… Through your aggressiveness and skill in handling a valuable source he is able to furnish information of great importance to the bureau in this vital area of our operations. I want you to know of my appreciation of your exemplary efforts.”
On December 24, 1969, Mitchell sent an evaluation of O’Neal to Hoover stating, “He has been instrumental in the Chicago Office’s success in handling the Bureau’s interests regarding an extremist party in the nationalist field.”
On November 6, 1970, Hoover provided Mitchell with another $200 incentive award for his handling of O’Neal, stating: “The manner in which you have developed and handled a source of information of great importance to the Bureau in the racial field is certainly commendable.… A great deal of the information which has been furnished by this individual has been of material assistance to the FBI in fulfilling its responsibilities.”
On December 11, 1970, the Chicago FBI office sent a teletype to the FBI director marked “urgent,” which was initialed in Washington by George Moore, and discussed a redacted FBI agent’s (most likely Mitchell’s) potential testimony before a special state grand jury that was investigating the raid. At this point, O’Neal, Mitchell and the FBI’s role in the raid was still highly secret, and the teletype instructed that “any information dealing with [redacted]” — most likely the FBI’s role — “not to be touched upon” and “if any questions were asked in this area, [the redacted witness] is to immediately leave.”
While the official COINTELPRO program was terminated soon after it was discovered, government attacks on today’s radical movements have continued and intensified.
As lawyers who were deeply involved in the Hampton litigation for 13 years, we view these documents as vehicles that would have opened up new avenues of questioning, led us to additional documents to pursue, deepened our proof of the assassination and cover-up conspiracies, and provided compelling proof that the highest level of Bureau officials, including Hoover, were partners in the conspiracies. As historians who have extensively written and lectured on the assassination, we welcome this unexpected trove of documents as further proof that the search for past truths continues into the future. We hope to assist Aaron Leonard — who has previously chronicled FBI surveillance and harassment of other 20th-century leftists — in his efforts to compel the FBI to reveal the redactions in the Mitchell files, and the pursuit of the secrets that still remain ensconced in the bowels of the FBI files will continue.
This search for historical truths about the government’s repressive tactics and programs continues to be of crucial importance to this day. While the official COINTELPRO program was terminated soon after it was discovered, government attacks on today’s radical movements have continued and intensified. The use of private security forces such as TigerSwan at Standing Rock; the utilization of more sophisticated spying and military technology (including drones, sound canons and concussion grenades) in Ferguson, Missouri; the targeting of the Movement for Black Lives as “terrorists” under the heading “Black Identity Extremists”; and the nationwide violent and coordinated law enforcement attacks on peaceful Black-led demonstrations in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as the most recent government-inspired white supremacist Capitol breach all demonstrate not only that the government’s repression mechanisms are alive and well, but also that law enforcement continues to be closely aligned with the emboldened forces of the violent and racist far right. The cold-blooded assassination of Fred Hampton provides an ongoing and detailed lesson about the illegal and violent lengths to which the government will resort to in its efforts to destroy social movements and young leaders of color when they pose a threat to its white supremacist power and control.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the invaluable work of Aaron Leonard, whose dogged pursuit of the Roy Martin Mitchell file uncovered the newly produced FBI documents detailed above.
Law enforcement officers from around the country attended and supported last week’s rally in support of President Trump that sparked a riot.
Police in the United States are more likely to use force against left-wing protesters than they are against right-wing protesters, according to new data analyzed by The Guardian, corroborating observations repeatedlymadeby the left.
The Guardian’s analysis showed that police used force at 4.7 percent of left-wing protests versus 1.4 percent of right-wing protests — 511 left-wing protests and 33 right-wing. When looking at protests that didn’t involve looting or vandalism, the disparity grew: Police were about 3.5 times more likely to use force at left-wing protests than right-wing protests, 1.8 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.
The report also found that police were more than doubly likely to intervene or break up a left-wing protest than a right-wing one, using tactics like arrests. A similar analysis of the same data by FiveThirtyEight found the same thing.
These analyses can potentially explain why the violent Donald Trump-inspired mob was able to overcome Capitol Police on January 6, as former president Barack Obama tweeted last week.
For those who are wondering why so much attention has been focused on the response of the Capitol Police to the Trump-inspired riots, here’s a data-driven article that provides some useful frame of reference. https://t.co/MAdlWGRd23
“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently” than the Trump loyalists at the Capitol, Joe Biden said in a speech on January 7.
Following the attack, right-wing outlets have been reporting misinformation about the disparity between the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests from last year and last week’s attempted coup.
The graphic is part of a larger push by the right to downplay the violent attempted coup on January 6, despite the demonization of BLM protests; Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said that impeaching Trump for his role in the coup is just “cancel culture”; many Republicans have been calling for “unity” to distract from the issue at hand; RedState published an article claiming that the coup simply didn’t happen.
The report on the disparity between the police responses to left- versus right-wing protests further underlines the disparity with the political responses to recent events — as The New Republic notes, “Republicans Want Impunity, Not Unity.” And while, as some have argued, the Trump militants were successful in intimidating members of Congress, many in the BLM movement are still fighting for justice.
On Thursday, the New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced a lawsuit against the New York City police department for excessive police force against BLM protesters last summer.
“[The Attorney General’s office] found that the NYPD arrested or detained hundreds of protesters, legal observers, medics and others without legal justification,” she said in a press conference. “In total, we found over 155 incidents of officers using excessive and unreasonable force against protesters.” James’s office’s findings line up with the data on the policing disparities from Thursday.
Call from the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM) for the creation of a network of self-defense groups. Our communities are under attack. We have fought and defended ourselves against a complex, multi-faceted and growing onslaught from the forces of white supremacy and capitalism. As the United States continues its descent into a failed state and a… Read Full Article
Two officers with an FBI task force showed up at the home of a Michigan state senator’s chief of staff and aggressively questioned her about a draft bill she had discussed on a private legislative Zoom call. The bill would limit the use of tear gas by police against protesters.
The incident happened in Southfield, a suburb north of Detroit, on October 29, days before the presidential election and less than a month after the FBI had foiled a terror plot by far-right violent extremists to kidnap Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and seize control of the Capitol building. The men, an FBI special agent and a local police officer assigned to the task force, knocked on the door of Katie Reiter, chief of staff to state Sen. Rosemary Bayer, a Democrat. They told her that they had received a “report” about an online conversation she had participated in from her home 10 days earlier, in which she had discussed “the use of tear gas during the election,” Reiter told The Intercept. They then pressed her to answer questions about the bill’s substance and timing even after she had told them what her job was and repeatedly warned that the content of the draft legislation was confidential.
“He was very unpleasant,” Reiter said of the special agent, who stood close to her without wearing a mask and combatively asked questions while refusing to answer hers. “I said, ‘Well, you know who I work for, right? And what I do for a living?’” she recalled. “Because I figured they would have Googled before they came to my house. He said, ‘No, we have no idea who you are.’”
Reiter had discussed the proposed ban on tear gas on a private 90-minute Zoom call with Bayer and a handful of other staffers on October 19, part of a package of proposed legislation drafted in response to the George Floyd protests last summer. She believes she might have discussed the election as well, possibly strategizing about whether to introduce the draft bill before or after the November vote. But the conversation was a routine work call — and the FBI’s visit and insistent questioning raised alarming questions about how and why the legislative discussion warranted police scrutiny.
While Reiter says the two officers refused to answer any questions about how they became aware of her private meeting, she noted that an appliance repairman was in a nearby room at the time of the call and might have overheard the conversation and alerted the authorities. “I don’t think it can be ruled out,” she said.
A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment on the record, as did a spokesperson for Zoom. Regardless of how the FBI came to know of the call, civil rights advocates argued it was highly inappropriate for the agents to interrogate an elected official’s aide about legislative matters.
Mike German, a former FBI special agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, noted that there are severe restrictions on the FBI’s political activities, including any investigative effort that might impact an election or legislation. “Certainly if there was any intention to intimidate staffers in their deliberations about legislation, that would be highly problematic,” he told The Intercept. “And the police officers or task force officers should have recognized that as soon as the witness said that she was a staffer discussing legislation.”
German also noted that the incident was indicative of a long-standing problem with the FBI’s war on terror-era policy to investigate every tip it receives, no matter how implausible or far-fetched — an effort that he says wastes resources while putting civil liberties at risk and hindering the FBI’s ability to pursue the most credible threats.
“For our safety, we put fire alarms in every building, but we also make it against the law to pull them if there isn’t a fire, because we recognize that responding to false alarms dulls the response time,” he said. “And yet the security apparatus we’ve created post-9/11 creates a massive amount of false alarms.”
View of the FBI building in Detroit.
Photo: Google Maps
False Alarms
Reiter had been in bed when she was woken up by loud pounding on her door and voices yelling “Police!” at around 8 a.m. She threw on a bathrobe and answered the door, where two plainclothes officers first identified themselves as police and then as FBI. Reiter did not recognize their badges, so she went inside to get dressed and called her sister, who lives nearby, her husband, father, and local police, whom she asked to come over. “I didn’t really know if these were FBI agents or not,” she told The Intercept. “I was afraid to open my door.”
When Southfield police arrived at the home and confirmed the agents were indeed with the FBI, Reiter asked them to stay. (She later obtained a police report, shared with The Intercept, confirming that police remained on the scene, at a distance, for the duration of the FBI’s visit. The agents claimed they had been at Reiter’s home a day earlier but found no one there, which she says is unlikely as her husband was working from home that day.) Over the next 10 minutes, they then grilled Reiter, skeptically pressing her about her Zoom conversation and pushing back against her answers as if they didn’t believe her. When she told them about the proposed legislation, they insisted on knowing what it would say, whether it would be formally introduced, and when. When she repeated that this information was confidential business of the state legislature, the agent who had been conducting most of the questioning told her it would have to go in his report, she said.
“Once I said who I was and who I worked for, and moreover, what the meeting was about, the interrogation should have ended,” Reiter told The Intercept. “If they didn’t believe me about the tear gas legislation, they could have easily asked to talk with the senator rather than continue to question me. … It certainly didn’t take that much time for me to tell them who I was and what the Zoom meeting was about. The rest of the questioning was focused on the legislation. To this day, I don’t know why.”
Before the officers left, and at Reiter’s insistence, one of them gave her his business card. The other officer, who said he had no card with him, scribbled his name in the back. The men were Jeff Whipple, a police officer with the Birmingham Police Department and member of the FBI’s financial crimes task force for metro Detroit, and FBI Special Agent Dave Jacobs. The FBI runs dozens of task forces across the country, in which agents from the bureau partner with a host of local and state police agencies to tackle a variety of law enforcement issues, from financial crimes to terrorism. It’s unclear why an investigation into remarks about the use of tear gas would have fallen under the aegis of this particular task force, which typically pursues fraud and other financial crimes.
The presence of local police on FBI task forces, particularly joint terrorism task forces or JTTFs, has long been a controversial issue. Some cities have pulled their officers from these partnerships because the civil rights protections the FBI is required to observe are more lenient compared to those of local police departments. And there have been problematic instances of FBI task forces inappropriately intervening in local political matters. In 2012, for instance, members of a Nevada JTTF aggressively interrogated Native American residents and others who had spoken at a public town hall in opposition to bear hunting, German said.
In the Michigan case, it was notable that local police officers on an FBI task force would seek to investigate legislation that would restrict their own departments’ ability to use tear gas against protesters. “I would imagine that with any sort of legislative effort to restrict the use of tear gas by police officers, local police would have an interest in that legislation,” said German. “It certainly raises questions.”
Reached by phone, Whipple declined to comment, while Jacobs did not return a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Birmingham Police Department, Whipple’s employer, wrote in an email to The Intercept that the officer is assigned full time to the task force and referred questions to the FBI. “The incident you are referring to is a federal matter,” the spokesperson wrote.
State Sen. Rosemary Bayer pictured working on her laptop.
Photo: Rosemary Bayer Caucus Page
Fear and Intimidation
Following the FBI’s visit, Reiter filed a public records request with the city of Southfield seeking more information about the encounter. City officials denied most of her request. One document she received cited a number of exemptions to public records laws, including one indicating that fulfilling her request might help “identify or provide means of identifying an informant.”
State Sen. Rosemary Bayer, who worked as a software engineer before being elected in 2019, was disturbed by the FBI’s visit to her staffer and alarmed about how the bureau might have learned about the subject of their Zoom call. Bayer said that her immediate concern was whether “they hacked into the meeting,” she told The Intercept, or whether the visit was intended “to cause fear and intimidation.”
“The whole thing feels political, like they were either trying to intimidate a Democratic office before the election or intimidate people working on the side of Black Lives Matter,” she later wrote in an email. “It all feels so Iron Curtain (or maybe J. Edgar Hoover) — men pounding on the door in the dark hours of the morning, incorrectly identifying themselves, purposely intimidating people just to scare them. To keep them from — protesting? Teaching about implicit bias?”
There isn’t any evidence that Zoom provided the FBI or any other law enforcement agency with information about the October virtual meeting, or that any such law enforcement agency somehow has real-time access to the contents of meetings on the platform. But regardless of how the FBI task force learned about the Zoom call, the incident offers a jarring reminder that the degree of privacy and confidentiality afforded by in-person meetings is impossible to achieve through streaming video calls.
The incident offers a reminder that the degree of privacy and confidentiality afforded by in-person meetings is impossible to achieve through streaming video calls.
Bayer explained that before the Covid-19 pandemic, a meeting like this one would have been a closed-door affair in Bayer’s Senate office. She believes that she or other staff on the Zoom call may have talked about “dropping” the tear gas bill before the election, using lawmakers’ shorthand for introducing legislation; the combination of words might have sounded like a threat to an uninformed eavesdropper. She added that the incident had an immediate chilling effect on the work of her staff. “The whole team is intimidated,” she said. “As soon as somebody says something that might be misconstrued, everybody stops … ‘No, don’t say that!’ We’re all trying to eliminate the word ‘drop’ from our lexicon.”
Reiter said that the FBI’s visit left her confused and fearful. “It has impacted my sleep, it has caused me quite a bit of anxiety,” she said. “And it has certainly impacted how we talk. I try not to let it, I’ll just be like, ‘No, we’re going to talk about this.’ But it’s in my mind all the time.”
“It is our job to talk about these issues, it is our job to talk about how can we be keeping our constituents safe, how can we be addressing violence in our community,” said Rosie Jones, who works for Michigan’s Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich and was alerted to the FBI’s visit by Reiter. “To not feel comfortable and talk about those things prevents us from doing our job.”
The incident came at a time of heightened tensions for Michigan legislators, after prosecutors announced terrorism, conspiracy, and weapons charges against 13 men who had plotted to storm the state Capitol building and instigate a “civil war.” Six of the men had also repeatedly met to plan the abduction of the Michigan governor, Whitmer, a frequent target of President Donald Trump’s attacks. And at least two of those arrested had participated in a rally by armed protesters outside the state Capitol earlier in the year, demonstrating against measures aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus. The FBI’s visit to Reiter seemed particularly misplaced in light of those very real threats to the safety of legislators, she noted. “I work for the people who actually were threatened,” Reiter recalls telling the FBI agent who was interrogating her as if she had been the one posing a threat.
As protests against police brutality rocked the country after the killing of George Floyd, the FBI has devoted considerable resources to targeting Black Lives Matter protesters and anti-fascistactivists, even though far-right extremist groups have long posed the greatest threat of violence.
But thanks to the post-9/11 exhortation of “If you see something, say something,” the FBI receives an enormous number of tips that it has committed to pursue no matter how absurd.
“These agents have to do hundreds, thousands of these nonsense interviews even if the allegation itself is ridiculous,” said German, the former FBI special agent, noting that task forces regularly assign less experienced agents to these interviews. “It really becomes a game of intimidation, where I’m going to look you in the eye, and make an accusation against you based on this threat I received, and see how you respond.”
“This methodology of intimidation is not necessarily effective for getting at the truth,” he added. “But it’s more obviously inappropriate when the person you’re targeting with such an approach is involved in the democratic system that the FBI is sworn to protect.”
Occupied Muscogee Creek / Cherokee / Yuchi / Choctaw / Shawnee / Chickasaw land – As of Jan. 1, 2021, incarcerated workers in Alabama’s odious prison system are on strike! Led by the Free Alabama Movement, incarcerated workers throughout the state of Alabama have put down their work tools and refused to go to work from now until Jan. 31.
The inhumane conditions of Alabama Department of Corrections, their negligence around COVID-19, and their implementation of video visitation equipment in prisons that ADOC claims is “due to COVID,” but is really a front for eliminating in-person visitation, has contributed further to the psychological warfare against everyone incarcerated in Alabama prisons and has fueled this strike.
“Some of us wear masks even in our beds, but it feels futile,” said Sarah Jo Pender, incarcerated at the Rockville Correctional Facility, one of Indiana’s three women’s prisons. “There is little to do except watch the infection spread and wait my turn to suffer.” These measures did not prevent Pender and six of the 14 women in her cell from contracting COVID-19. They were not alone: As of December 18, the prison had tested 1,050 women; 302 (nearly 29 percent) tested positive.
And the impacts of incarceration-related COVID outbreaks extend beyond the jail walls: Guards and others traveling in and out of prisons have contributed to community spread. A new report by the Prison Policy Initiative estimated that, in the summer alone, prisons and jails contributed to more than half a million, or roughly 13 percent of, additional COVID-19 cases nationwide.
From the start of the pandemic, public health and medical officials warned that incarcerated people were uniquely vulnerable to COVID and its most severe complications. Many people enter prison with a raft of preexisting health conditions. Inside the prison, they are unable to physically distance from each other or adhere to other Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, such as frequent hand washing, using alcohol-based sanitizers or wearing masks. Many prisons did not issue masks for weeks, forcing incarcerated people to risk sanctions when they improvised masks from other pieces of clothing.
Experts’ predictions quickly came true as several jails and prisons emerged as the nation’s top hotspots. Family members and advocates, ranging from prison reformers to prison abolitionists, demanded decarceration, or the mass release of people from jails and prisons, to stem the spread.
The response varied from state to state and even county to county, but some jails and prisons did make real population reductions. Now, as a far worse second wave washes over the country, some jurisdictions are beginning to reverse their reductions.
“There is little to do except watch the infection spread and wait my turn to suffer.”
The response also varied among prison systems. Federal prisons decreased their populations by less than 20,000 — from 175,315 in March 2020 to 156,968 in August. Even these 20,000 releases are not all responses to COVID. Nazgol Ghandnoosh, senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project, noted that it is unknown what percentage were those already scheduled for release regardless of the pandemic. It is also unknown how these numbers are affected by a reduced intake of people from jails during the pandemic. In addition, as reported earlier, many people continue to languish in federal prisons across the country despite memos from then-Attorney General William Barr directing that people vulnerable to COVID complications be released from prison to home confinement.
On the state level, nearly 53,000 people were released from state prisons between December 31, 2019, and May 1, 2020. Again, it is not known how many of these numbers are from COVID-based early release and how many would have been released regardless. California’s prison system has boasted that it has reduced its prison population by 22,148 since March 11, largely by expediting the release of those scheduled to leave prison within months.
These decreases are not necessarily extraordinary, noted Ghandnoosh, especially when examined in the context of the roughly 600,000 people typically released from prisons annually.
Furthermore, population reductions have not been enough to stem the spread. California’s prisons remain at 105 percent capacity; of its 92,170 prisoners, 5,343 have active COVID cases and 93 have died. New York’s prisons reported 120 new cases in early December, bringing its total to 1,959 cases among its 35,353 state prisoners.
As the pandemic drags on and the threat of COVID transmission becomes a normalized reality, incarceration reductions are reversing. From March to July, the majority of 514 jails surveyed by the Prison Policy Initiative had reduced the number of people behind bars by an average of 26 percent. Since July, however, 77 percent of these same jails saw increases in their populations, a trend, says the Prison Policy Initiative, “suggesting that the early reforms instituted to mitigate COVID-19 have largely been abandoned.” Some, such as the jails in Cook County, Illinois, and Jefferson, Louisiana, have managed to slightly surpass their pre-pandemic (February) populations. Others have seen dramatic increases — St. Lucie, Florida, for example jailed 808 people in February; throughout the pandemic, it has steadily increased its jail population to 1,332 people as of December 4.
“Our rooms are fenced-in cubicles with 14 to 16 women per room,” she explained. “We live in bunk beds separated by three feet. Every 136 women share two bathrooms.”
State prison populations are also beginning to climb again. North Dakota’s prison population, which decreased by 19 percent between January and May 2020, is starting to inch up. From October 8 to November 19, the state increased its prison population by 3 percent. By Halloween, its prisons saw a surge in COVID: 66 of its 600 incarcerated people as well as 21 of approximately 200 staff members tested positive.
Prison intakes, previously halted in many states to prevent COVID exposure, have restarted. Each new arrival brings the potential for COVID to enter — and explode throughout the prison. New arrivals are supposed to undergo 14 days of quarantine before mixing with the general population, but this is not always the case. In New York, for instance, when prison officials first converted Adirondack Correctional Facility into a prison for men ages 65 and older, men reported not being tested or quarantined upon arrival.
Quarantine also didn’t stop COVID from exploding at Rockville, the Indiana prison where Sarah Jo Pender is incarcerated. “Our rooms are fenced-in cubicles with 14 to 16 women per room,” she explained. “We live in bunk beds separated by three feet. Every 136 women share two bathrooms.”
Rockville did not experience a COVID outbreak in the spring or summer. That changed in the fall when a few women tested positive. In response, the prison quarantined the women and their roommates in the prison gym. Then, a mental health counselor tested positive. The prison quarantined the counselor’s patients in the prison’s education building. The patients’ roommates were locked in their rooms to quarantine. “The administration requires masks to be worn when we exit our rooms, but since we are locked in our rooms all together, that really doesn’t seem like an effective tactic to prevent contagion,” Pender said.
In addition, all 136 women in one housing unit share two bathrooms. The prison continued to allow the quarantined women to use the same bathrooms as the women who were not under quarantine. Cases began to rise exponentially. “Two cooks and a food line worker tested positive,” recalled Pender. “Then a maintenance worker. Then several women in one room. Now, over half the prison is quarantined.” Still, testing was not universal. Only those who exhibit symptoms and report these symptoms to medical staff were tested.
As of December 8, 225 (nearly 24 percent) of the prison’s 954 women tested were positive. “Now,” reported Pender, “when a person tests positive, the policy is to lock the door, confining the sick person(s) together with her roommates.” She noted that, in one room, 11 of 14 women tested positive. All 14 were locked in the room under isolation. “The other three are simply shut in there and fervently praying for protection.” Similarly, when Pender and six of her roommates tested positive, the five who did not were not moved from their shared cell.
In an email to Truthout, David Bursten, chief communications officer for the Indiana Department of Correction, stated that those found to have symptoms or were exposed to a known COVID-19 person are immediately tested and screened by medical staff and receive care as needed.
“The women who get sick after being quarantined do not report their symptoms, because if they do, and test positive, then the 14-day period starts over for the whole room.”
In response to Pender’s allegations, Bursten wrote, “For prisons that have dormitory-style housing, other dorms or spaces may be used for separation if available and appropriate. In some instances, incarcerated individuals who test positive have been temporarily housed with those who are negative while we have readied additional space at the facility in order to separate them. That is why we require that they wear face coverings, socially distance and practice frequent hand washing.”
“I tested positive on the 10th. Here it is, 11 days later, and neither me nor any of the dozens of women who tested positive on this section of the dorm were separated,” Pender reminded Truthout on December 21. “116 of 136 they locked in our rooms, the sick with the healthy. Four went to the infirmary. The other 16 are in one room where no one was tested, and no one reported symptoms.”
Now, the prison has started to isolate those who newly test positive into the gym, then lock down their roommates. But, added Pender, those roommates are not tested unless they exhibit symptoms.
Pender has lost her sense of smell and, with very few exceptions, says everything tastes like cardboard and mudpies. She also has an intermittent fever, headaches, extreme fatigue and brain fog. Her roommates have varying degrees of the same symptoms.
Furthermore, Pender believes the number of COVID cases are higher than those reported. “The women who get sick after being quarantined do not report their symptoms, because if they do, and test positive, then the 14-day period starts over for the whole room. So there are a LOT of unreported positive cases here.”
Continued Incarceration Leads to Greater Exposure in Surrounding Communities
The failure to meaningfully decarcerate jails and prisons has also led to increased cases in the community as staff travel between work and their home communities on a daily basis.
Between California, Florida and Texas, mass incarceration contributed to a quarter million new COVID cases from May 1 to August 1.
Between California, Florida and Texas, mass incarceration contributed to a quarter million new COVID cases — or 20 percent of new cases in these states — from May 1 to August 1. Despite its much-touted release of 22,148 people from prisons, the Prison Policy Initiative estimated that California’s incarceration alone contributed 113,969 COVID cases (or 291 cases per 100,000 residents).
In Indiana, where Pender and many other women wear their masks to bed in a desperate bid to avoid COVID, the state’s insistence on keeping people in prison led to 6,879 additional cases (or nearly 104 per 100,000 residents). In Parke County, where Rockville is located, 28 percent of residents tested positive. (Twenty percent of Rockville staff also tested positive.)
In Michigan, mass incarceration led to an additional 4,787 COVID cases (or 48 per 100,000 residents) throughout the state.
That was what prompted residents of Adrian, Michigan, the town where the Gus Harrison prison is located, to join family members and advocates during their December 11 protest demanding the release of aging and medically vulnerable people.
Residents of Adrian, Michigan, join family members and advocates demand the release of aging and medically vulnerable people on December 11, 2020.Courtesy of Victoria Law
“They were worried,” Shawanna Vaughn, the rally organizer and director of Silent Cry, a nonprofit addressing the traumas of incarceration, told Truthout. “They thought that if people inside are infected, then they’ll be infected too. I explained that if incarcerated people get COVID, it comes from the staff so their community is already at risk.”
At the rally, advocates also learned that the men who had spoken out about COVID conditions had been placed in solitary confinement, a punitive form of isolation. After the rally, Vaughn spoke with others inside the prison. “They were excited,” she told Truthout. “Even though that [retaliation] is happening, nothing [advocacy-wise] was happening before.”
Now, she said, “People are asking, ‘What do we do now? Where do we go from here?’” Quoting Assata Shakur, she added, “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
That’s not the mood among the women at Rockville. “The prison has essentially thrown up their hands and walked away from the problem for the moment,” said Pender. “I am sure that they are working on a better solution (at least, we hope so), but in the meantime, we see our neighbor get sick and we start worrying. Then they test positive, and we literally become trapped in the room with them. It’s like something out of a horror movie. In the beginning, I used to flippantly say that when the COVID finally comes here, the prison will just let us all get sick and die. I thought that I was just being dramatic, but it might have been more prescient than I know.”
dialogues with individual cops funded by tax dollars.” Instead she supports: “1) reparations to victims and families of police violence; 2) decreasing policing and prison funding and redirecting it to other social goods; 3) elected independent civilian police accountability boards with power to investigate, discipline and fire cops and administrators; 4) disarming the police; 5) simplifying dissolving police departments; 6) data transparency (stops, arrests, budgeting, etc.)”
Residents of Adrian, Michigan, join family members and advocates demand the release of aging and medically vulnerable people on December 11, 2020.