Tag Archives: prisons

Why Is This Transgender Teen in Solitary?

by SantoColeman Posted on May 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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There is a 16-year-old transgender girl in an adult prison in Connecticut right now. She isn’t there to serve a sentence. There are no charges against her. Still, she has been there for more than six weeks, with no indication of when she might be released.

Until last week, the girl, whom I’ll call Jane Doe because she is a juvenile, was in solitary confinement in the mental health unit where, according to a letter she wrote, she cried in bed every night. She heard adult inmates crying, screaming, and banging on the walls. A guard observed her day and night, even when she showered or used the toilet. When other inmates caught sight of her, they yelled and made fun of her.

“I feel forgotten and thrown away,” she wrote to the governor of Connecticut from her solitary cell. “As you probably know, these feeling are not new for me. This is the way my life has been going since I was a little kid.”

The state became involved in Jane Doe’s life when she was five, according to her affidavit, because her father was incarcerated and her mom was using crack and heroin. She was born a boy; after she was placed in the care of her extended family, she said, one relative caught her playing with dolls and bashed her head into the wall. She said another relative raped her at age eight, as did others as she grew older. Doe would only allow herself to look like a girl in secret. Around age 11, a relative caught her in the bathroom wearing her dress and lipstick and slapped her, shouting, “You are a boy! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

At 12, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF) became her legal guardian. While in group homes, she says she was sexually assaulted by staffers, and at 15, she became a sex worker and was once locked up for weeks and forced to have sex with “customers” until she escaped. “I wanted to be a little kid again in my mother’s arms and all I wanted was someone to tell me they loved me, that everything would be alright, and that I will never have to live the way I was again.”

Here is how Jane Doe ended up in prison. On January 28, while living at a juvenile facility in Massachusetts—where she was serving a sentence for assault—she allegedly attacked a staff member, biting her, pulling her hair and kicking her in the head. This kind of behavior wasn’t new for Doe. The director of the Connecticut Juvenile Training School, a correctional facility for boys, later testified in court that, since Doe was nine, police have been called 11 times while she was in state facilities. He said she sometimes smeared feces on herself. Another supervisor claimed Doe regularly “exhibited assaultive behaviors,” targeting female staff and other juveniles.

According to Jane Doe’s lawyer, Aaron Romano, the most recent incident was sparked when a male staffer at the Massachusetts facility put Doe in a bear hug restraint from behind. “This is a girl who has been sexually abused,” Romano says. “She is inclined to interpret actions with that view.” DCF declined to comment on the incident, but the female staff member Doe allegedly attacked did not press charges. The male staffer has since been dismissed.

In order to move Doe to an adult prison, DCF cited an obscure statute that allows doing so when it is in the “best interest” of the child. Initially, the state sought to place Doe in a men’s prison, but her lawyers objected and she was sent to a women’s facility. There, she was placed in solitary confinement because under federal law, juveniles cannot be detained “in any institution in which they have contact with adult inmates.”

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Why Is This Transgender Teen in Solitary?

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Watch This Amazing Sesame Street Video About Having a Parent in Prison

by EnriquetaObryan Posted on May 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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More than three percent of children in the United States have a parent behind bars. These kids must travel hundreds of miles to visit their parents, and one in ten will end up incarcerated themselves before adulthood. But despite this reality, only six states have child welfare policies to address the needs of kids with incarcerated parents. Thank goodness for Sesame Street. Last year, the show shed some light on the challenges these kids face through a new initiative: “Little Children, Big Issues: Incarceration.” Watch as Sesame Street characters discuss the difficulties of growing up with a mom or dad in prison:

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Watch This Amazing Sesame Street Video About Having a Parent in Prison

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Report: Solitary Confinement Used to Punish Female Prisoners Who Report Rape

by MilfordMnh Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

When an incarcerated pregnant woman in Illinois slept too long through mealtime, a guard decided to punish her by placing her in solitary confinement. While in isolation, the woman—who had a long history of depression—was denied access to her prenatal vitamins and was not given water for hours. She soon became highly anxious. This is one of the disturbing ways that US prisons treat incarcerated women who are pregnant, transgender, mentally ill, or who report that they are raped, according to a new report published Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Many of the reasons women are placed in isolation are highly subjective, the reports notes: “Because many cases come down to the word of a prisoner against the word of a corrections officer, a guard’s bad day can easily turn into a solitary confinement sentence for a prisoner for retaliatory reasons, such as a prisoner’s filing a grievance.”

Solitary confinement, where prisoners are isolated for 22-24 hours a day with greatly reduced human contact and access to sunlight, is common practice in US prisons, but its harmful effects are well-documented. A United Nations torture expert said in 2011 that solitary should never be used on people with mental disabilities, and should never last longer than 15 days. In February, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called for US prisons to stop using solitary confinement on vulnerable populations, including pregnant women. And recently, the Justice Department sued Ohio for placing mentally ill boys in solitary confinement for excessive amounts of time.

According to the ACLU report, guards sometimes use solitary confinement to retaliate against women who report rape by corrections officers. As we reported in 2010, Michelle Ortiz, who was serving one year at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, alleged that she was sexually assaulted multiple times by a guard. When she spoke out, she was allegedly placed in solitary confinement. In another case, a prisoner named Lisa Jaramillo served more than 100 days in solitary confinement for allegedly lying about incidents of sexual assault.

“Women who have been sexually abused by prison guards are…forced to decide between reporting the attack and risking retaliation, or not reporting it and risking further assault,” the report reads. The authors note that the lack of privacy in solitary cells can further victimize women. In solitary, a woman’s attacker can closely watch her sleep, use the toilet, or undress.

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Report: Solitary Confinement Used to Punish Female Prisoners Who Report Rape

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Is This the Beginning of the End for Solitary Confinement?

by abram Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Minors, pregnant women, and the developmentally disabled can no longer be placed in solitary confinement in New York State prisons (barring exceptional circumstances) thanks to an agreement between the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and the New York State Department of Community Corrections (DOCCS) on February 19. The agreement will require the state to develop sentencing guidelines and maximum isolation sentences for the first time, and will make it the largest US prison system to ban the use of disciplinary solitary confinement for minors.


Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.


Interactive: Inside a Solitary Cell


What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind


Documents: 7 Surprising Items That Get Prisoners Thrown Into Solitary


Maps: Solitary Confinement, State by State


VIDEO: Shane Bauer Goes Back Behind Bars at Pelican Bay

See more MoJo coverage of solitary confinement.

The agreement came just days before Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called for the end of the use of solitary for certain vulnerable individuals at a high-profile congressional hearing on Tuesday. The hearing featured testimony from activists, corrections officials, and former inmates, including Orange is the New Black author Piper Kerman, who stated: “Solitary confinement impedes access to important pre-natal and women’s health care services. In fact, pregnant women in solitary confinement often receive no medical care. And yet, pregnant prisoners in America are still sent to the SHU Special Housing Unit.”

New York is not the only state taking steps toward solitary confinement reform. Last week, Colorado Department of Corrections executive director Rick Raemisch, who has committed to lowering Colorado’s solitary confinement rate to less than 3 percent of the state’s prison population, penned a New York Times Op-Ed about his own experience in willing isolation for a night. At an early February meeting of corrections professionals, Mike Dempsey, who runs the Indiana Department of Corrections’ Division of Youth Services, discussed his state’s reduction of juveniles in solitary confinement from 48 beds—with some minors serving 24-month sentences—to 5-10 with a maximum sentence of 24 hours. Earlier this month, California, home to last year’s massive prisoner hunger strike, held a hearing on the use of solitary confinement—though ultimately prison advocates were unsatisfied with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s proposed regulations.

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Is This the Beginning of the End for Solitary Confinement?

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The Right to Vote Is Too Important to Be Denied to Ex-Felons

by Tamera4915 Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Roger Clegg is seriously unhappy about Eric Holder’s call for the restoration of voting rights to felons who have served their sentences:

He conveniently ignores the reason for felon disenfranchisement, namely that if you aren’t willing to follow the law, then you can hardly claim a role in making the law for everyone else, which is what you do when you vote….The right to vote can be restored, but it should be done carefully, on a case-by-case basis, once a person has shown that he or she has really turned over a new leaf. The high recidivism rates that Mr. Holder acknowledges in his speech just show why that new leaf cannot be presumed simply because someone has walked out of prison; he’ll probably be walking back in, alas. A better approach to the re-integration that Mr. Holder wants is to wait some period of time, review the felon’s record and, if he has shown he is now a positive part of his community, then have a formal ceremony — rather like a naturalization ceremony — in which his rights are restored.

Let’s concede the obvious up front: Released felons are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans, so there’s an obvious partisan motivation on both sides of this debate.

That said, I favor restoring voting rights to felons, and I’m willing to meet Clegg halfway. I’d be OK with waiting some reasonable period of time1 before restoring voting rights, but I think restoration should be the default after that time has elapsed. That is, after, say, five years, you automatically get your voting rights back unless there’s some specific reason you don’t qualify. And those reasons should be very clear and spelled out via statute.

My position here is based on a simple—perhaps simplistic—view of political freedom. I believe that liberal democracies require three minimum rules of law: free speech, the right to a fair trial, and universal suffrage. At the risk of stating the obvious, this doesn’t mean that nothing else is important.2 But I do mean that if you have these three things, then the odds are very strong that you qualify as a free country. Countries that enforce these rights differ considerably on a wide variety of other metrics and still strike us as mostly free. But I can’t think of a country that fails on any of them that we’d consider mostly free.

In other words, I believe the right to vote is on the same level as free speech and fair trials. And no one suggests that released felons should be denied either of those. In fact, they can’t be, because those rights are enshrined in the Constitution. Voting would be on that list too if it weren’t for an accident of history: namely that we adopted democracy a long time ago, when the mere fact of voting at all was a revolutionary idea, let alone the idea of letting everyone vote. But that accident doesn’t make the right to vote any less important.

A probationary period of some kind is probably reasonable. But once you’re released from prison and you’ve finished your parole, you’re assumed to have paid your debt to society. That means you’re innocent until proven guilty, and competent to protect your political interests in the voting booth unless proven otherwise. No free society should assume anything different.3

1What’s reasonable? Let’s just leave that for another day, OK?

2No, really, I mean that. There’s other important stuff. Honest. But these are the big three. Even freedom of religion can vary a lot within liberal democracies, with a minimum floor set by the fact that most religious expression is protected as free speech. Other important rights—including property rights—can largely be protected as long as majorities can freely express their views and freely elect representatives who agree with them.

3This is doubly true in a country like ours, where incarceration is so rampant and so racially unbalanced.

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The Right to Vote Is Too Important to Be Denied to Ex-Felons

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23 Petty Crimes That Have Landed People in Prison for Life Without Parole

by Ivan Nutter Posted on November 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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As of last year, according to a report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 3,200 people were serving life in prison without parole for nonviolent crimes. A close examination of these cases by the ACLU reveals just how petty some of these offenses are. People got life for, among other things…

Possessing a crack pipe
Possessing a bottle cap containing a trace amount of heroin (too minute to be weighed)
Having traces of cocaine in clothes pockets that were invisible to the naked eye but detected in lab tests
Having a single crack rock at home
Possessing 32 grams of marijuana (worth about $380 in California) with intent to distribute
Passing out several grams of LSD at a Grateful Dead show
Acting as a go-between in the sale of $10 worth of marijuana to an undercover cop
Selling a single crack rock
Verbally negotiating another man’s sale of two small pieces of fake crack to an undercover cop

comedy_nose/Flickr

Having a stash of over-the-counter decongestant pills that could be used to make methamphetamine
Attempting to cash a stolen check
Possessing stolen scrap metal (the offender was a junk dealer)—10 valves and one elbow pipe
Possessing stolen wrenches
Siphoning gasoline from a truck
Stealing tools from a shed and a welding machine from a front yard
Shoplifting three belts from a department store
Shoplifting several digital cameras
Shoplifting two jerseys from an athletic store

fanatics.com

Taking a television, circular saw, and power converter from a vacant house
Breaking into a closed liquor store in the middle of the night
Making a drunken threat to a police officer while handcuffed in the back of a patrol car
Being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm
Taking an abusive stepfather’s gun from their shared home

These are not typically first offenses, but nor are they isolated cases. The vast majority (83 percent) of life sentences examined by the ACLU were mandatory, meaning that the presiding judge had no choice but to sentence the defendant to a life behind bars. Mandatory sentences often result from repeat offender laws and draconian sentencing rules such as these federal standards for drug convictions:

Families Against Mandatory Minimums

The data examined by the ACLU comes from the federal prison system and nine state penal systems that responded to open-records requests. This means the true number of nonviolent offenders serving life without parole is higher.

What’s clear, based on the ACLU’s data, is that many nonviolent criminals have been caught up in a dramatic spike in life-without-parole sentences.

Among the cases reviewed, the vast majority were drug-related:

And most of the nonviolent offenders sentenced to life without parole were racial minorities.

All graphics by Associate Interactive Producer Jaeah Lee

Obviously, housing all of these nonviolent offenders isn’t cheap. On average, for example a single Louisiana inmate serving life without parole costs the state about $500,000. The ACLU estimates reducing existing lifetime sentences of nonviolent offenders to terms commensurate with their crimes would save taxpayers at least $1.8 billion.

In August, Attorney General Eric Holder unveiled a reform package aimed at scaling back the use of mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders. As Dana Liebelson noted:

Under Holder’s new policy, mandatory minimums as they apply to specific quantities of drugs will no longer be used against offenders whose cases do not involve violence, a weapon, and selling to a minor, and they will also not be used against offenders that do not have a “significant criminal history” and ties to a “large-scale” criminal organization.

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23 Petty Crimes That Have Landed People in Prison for Life Without Parole

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6 Things You Might Not Know About Bill de Blasio, New York’s Mayor-in-Waiting

by pa98grv Posted on November 5, 2013

Mother Jones

Come Tuesday night, Bill de Blasio will likely be the first Democratic mayor-elect of New York City in two decades. De Blasio is expected to crush his Republican rival Joe Lhota. Most national attention has focused on the implications of de Blasio’s win for the future of big-city liberalism, contrasting the humble Park Slope public advocate with Wall Street-friendly billionaire Michael Bloomberg. The city’s rich denizens are supposedly quivering with fear that the new Democratic mayor will hit them with a small tax increase to fund universal pre-K, though Gov. Andrew Cuomo is poised to squash any tax hikes from NYC.

Here are several fun facts about de Blasio that you might have missed amid the class warfare.

He was born Warren Wilhelm, Jr.:

De Blasio has a fraught relationship with his deceased father. A navy vet who lost his left leg in World War II, Warren Wilhelm fell prey to McCarthyism in the 1950s. His career as an economist at the Commerce Department derailed when he and his wife were questioned about their views on communism. Wilhelm Sr. later became an alcoholic and de Blasio’s parents divorced. “The pain he caused people, even if he didn’t mean to, just so many people were badly affected,” de Blasio said in an interview with The New York Times. “I think I really was angered by that.” By the end of high school the he had ditched his given name and opted for his childhood nickname Bill and his mother’s maiden name.

He worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign:

De Blasio managed Hillary Clinton’s first run for office, but it ended poorly as the Clintons came to view him as weak and indecisive. Longtime Clinton pal Patti Solis Doyle was brought in from Washington to spearhead the final months of the campaign. Per The New York Times:

Despite having the title, Mr. de Blasio hardly fit the profile of a traditional campaign manager.

While he had a say on all sorts of matters, including finance and personnel, he did not have signoff power on many key issues, and did not enjoy the same access to Mrs. Clinton as other advisers, according to more than two dozen people involved in the race. Then still the first lady, she often relied on a team of White House aides she had known for years.

It doesn’t seem like there are too many hurt feelings, though. Both Hillary and Bill endorsed de Blasio, but not until he’d already secured the Democratic nomination. Hillary also headlined a million-dollar fundraiser for de Blasio in late October.

His was a lefty activist in his 20s:

De Blasio got his start in progressive politics by supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the 1980s:

Mr. de Blasio became an ardent supporter of the Nicaraguan revolutionaries. He helped raise funds for the Sandinistas in New York and subscribed to the party’s newspaper, Barricada, or Barricade. When he was asked at a meeting in 1990 about his goals for society, he said he was an advocate of “democratic socialism.”

He worked as a political organizer at the Quixote Center in Maryland for his first job out of grad school, soliciting donations to send to Nicaragua.

He worked out at his local YMCA during the campaign:

Hard to imagine Bloomberg working up a sweat at the local gym. From New York magazine:

If I needed any further indication that the city is on the verge of a radical change in mayoral style from Bloomberg, who seems as if he were born in a pin-striped suit, there’s the 52-year-old De Blasio himself: He’s just back from his daily workout at the 9th Street Y and wearing a frayed, sweat-soaked blue T-shirt and baggy gray sweatpants.

He was evicted from his first New York apartment:

He moved to SoHo in 1983 but couldn’t stay there since the apartment was an illegal sublet. Perhaps that experience will make him more sympathetic to those city residents who lack affordable housing than New York’s current mayor.

He’s not a Yankees fan:

In fact, he roots for the Bronx Bombers’ despised rival, the Boston Red Sox. De Blasio must be feeling confident heading into the election, since he couldn’t help himself from bragging about the Red Sox’s World Series success, even when he campaigned in the Bronx.

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6 Things You Might Not Know About Bill de Blasio, New York’s Mayor-in-Waiting

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Court Orders Release of Dying Prisoner After 41 Years in Solitary, But Louisiana Plans to Appeal

by vserko45 Posted on October 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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Earlier today, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana overturned the murder conviction of the dying prisoner Herman Wallace, ordering that the state “immediately release Mr. Wallace from custody.” But the state is appealing the decision.

Wallace is one of two members of the so-called Angola 3 who, along with Albert Woodfox, has been held in solitary confinement for more than 41 years. This summer, Wallace was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. He was taken off chemotherapy in September, and currently resides in a prison medical facility. The state’s reluctance to set free an aging and gravely ill prisoner highlights some of the issues covered by James Ridgeway in his award-winning story “The Other Death Sentence,” an article that chronicles the graying of America’s prison population, and the associated costs, both moral and financial.


Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.


Interactive: Inside a Solitary Cell


What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind


Documents: 7 Surprising Items That Get Prisoners Thrown Into Solitary


Maps: Solitary Confinement, State by State


VIDEO: Shane Bauer Goes Back Behind Bars at Pelican Bay

See more MoJo coverage of solitary confinement.

Here’s some background on the Angola 3, from Ridgeway’s own extensive coverage of their saga.

Convicted of armed robbery, the men were sent to Angola in 1971. Wallace and Woodfox were Black Panthers, and they began organizing to improve conditions at the prison, which did not win them points with the prison administration. In 1972 they were prosecuted and convicted for the murder of a prison guard named Brent Miller. They have been fighting the conviction ever since, pointing out (PDF) that one of the eyewitnesses was legally blind and the other was a known prison snitch who was rewarded for his testimony.

After the murder, the two—along with a third inmate named Robert King—were put in solitary, where they have remained ever since. (King was released in 2001, after 29 years in solitary, when his conviction in a separate prison murder was overturned.) Several years ago, Wallace and Woodfox were transferred to separate prisons, but they are still held in solitary.

The Times Picayune reports that Baton Rouge District Attorney’s office is now in the process of filing an appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court, and will also be asking for a stay of Herman’s release. Maria Hinds, a personal advocate who’s been closely involved in Wallace’s case since 2008, says that for now, the warden at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Facility, where Wallace is being held, has refused to release him, and that Wallace’s lawyers have filed a motion for contempt of court against the warden for violating a court order.

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Court Orders Release of Dying Prisoner After 41 Years in Solitary, But Louisiana Plans to Appeal

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"If You Note Me Drifting or Grammatical Errors…I’ve Not Eaten in 35 Days"

by PierresHood Posted on August 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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On July 8, 30,000 California prisoners went on a hunger strike to protest the treatment of those who are kept in extended solitary confinement. Even the slightest evidence of gang affiliation—such as possessing a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince—can land prisoners in the short corridor isolation unit (a.k.a. the SHU, or “the hole”), where they are confined to tiny windowless cells for 23 hours a day, denied many provisions and visitors, and often kept apart from other inmates. Hundreds of prisoners have been in the hole for a decade or more. (Read our hunger strike explainer for more.)

What follows are excerpts of letters from the hole by a leader of the prison strike who was eventually hospitalized after nearly starving to death. The group Legal Services For Inmates With Children provided the letters to Mother Jones on the condition that the prisoner’s name be withheld. He is a self-identified member of the New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalist Collective Think Tank, and an alleged member of the Black Guerilla Family, a prison gang. He resides in the SHU of the California State Prison, Corcoran. These excerpts are lightly edited for clarity and brevity, and are organized according to the date of the events being described.

July 11 — They came to me and Zah’s cell and told us they were moving all “strike leaders” (us and 7 others) out of the 4B1L C-Sections short corridor isolation unit to an undisclosed location on 4A yard. After an initial discussion, we all refused. Warden Gipson’s immediate reaction was to order a mass cell extraction of all of us—an attempt to provoke a violent confrontation with peaceful protestors, which would have occurred with serious injuries or casualties to people on both sides. Enough prisoners came to the consensus that maintaining the peaceful posture of this protest was our primary concern, so we agreed to move.

They opened our tray slot and told us to “cuff up.” Captain Smith of the I.G.I. Institutional Gang Investigators came through the yard gate and stated to us: “The warden ordered that all of you ‘strike leaders’ be put on 4A yard to isolate you.” I responded: “We’re housed in the short corridor isolation unit already—isn’t that it’s purpose?” And he responded, “Well, apparently you’re not isolated enough.”

We’re all now housed in 4A3R—a debriefer’s block. They’ve isolated us in a block full of snitches, rats, state agents, informants and unprincipled elements of every description.

With all of the cells they could have moved Zah and I into, they’ve moved us into a cell with “FUCK YOU NIGGERS” written in big black ink print over the cell door and window, so that’s the first thing we see every morning we wake up. No one can tell me that that was not intentional.

July 21 — Today is the 14th day we haven’t eaten and my thinking’s kind of fuzzy. I was 223 lbs in June and Zah was 178. We’ve both lost over 10 pounds thus far.

I’m tired, and I’m sluggish—but other than a little light-headedness I’m holding up well, as is Zah. They have me, Zah, Micah, Sneaky, Yuri Estrada, Stomper, Popey, and 4 of our Northern Mexican brothers all stuck in C-Section around all these rats. I.G.I. said they would move us back when the protest is over. They really did fuck over our property—most of the other guys still haven’t been given more of their stuff and they lost almost $100 of my books, which I’m appealing now. I’ll be alright—such is the nature of sacrifice.

It is only through the exercise of the First Amendment to protest government when its laws are unjust, immoral, and inhumane have such crimes against humanity been abolished.

July 30 — This is the 23rd day I’ve not eaten. I was 235 on 7/7 and 204 on 7/26, a loss of 31 lbs.

They started giving Zah and me B-complex, thiamine, and a multivitamin yesterday to delay organ damage or failure (at this point). I do feel a little better, less dizziness, though I’m still light-headed and weak. This pain in my right side has intensified considerably—but my pain threshold is extraordinarily high—I can handle it.

I’m sure that you heard about how they’ve written us up for hunger striking. In classic authoritarian fashion, they seek to mask this crime of maintaining a domestic torture program by charging us with the “crime” of protesting this inhumane practice and couching it in the terms “gang activity.” This is no different than what slave owners sought to do to abolitionists and runaway slaves in that epoch.

We’re unwilling to start eating again—no matter what Pelican Bay and Sacramento decide—unless they rescind these 115s disciplinary write-ups and return these soldiers property (after they return us to 4B1L; we’re still trapped in this rat block full of debriefers and informants).

If I had the ability, I’d hound, embarrass, and shame mainstream news agencies relentlessly for their utter failure to honestly report on this program of torture CDCR is running or our protest to it.

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"If You Note Me Drifting or Grammatical Errors…I’ve Not Eaten in 35 Days"

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“You’re a Sacrifice”: An Open Letter to Edward Snowden

by jatadamod8 Posted on July 18, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Dear Edward Snowden,

Billions of us, from prime ministers to hackers, are watching a live espionage movie in which you are the protagonist and perhaps the sacrifice. Your way forward is clear to no one, least of all, I’m sure, you.

I fear for you; I think of you with a heavy heart. I imagine hiding you like Anne Frank. I imagine Hollywood movie magic in which a young lookalike would swap places with you and let you flee to safety—if there is any safety in this world of extreme rendition and extrajudicial execution by the government that you and I were born under and that you, until recently, served. I fear you may pay, if not with your death, with your life—with a life that can have no conventional outcome anytime soon, if ever. “Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,” you told us, and they are trying to stop you instead.

I am moved by your choice of our future over yours, the world over yourself. You know what few do nowadays: that the self is not the same as self-interest. You are someone who is smart enough, idealistic enough, bold enough to know that living with yourself in a system of utter corruption would destroy that self as an ideal, as something worth being. Doing what you’ve done, on the other hand, would give you a self you could live with, even if it gave you nowhere to live or no life. Which is to say, you have become a hero.

Pity the country that requires a hero, Bertolt Brecht once remarked, but pity the heroes too. They are the other homeless, the people who don’t fit in. They are the ones who see the hardest work and do it, and pay the price we charge those who do what we can’t or won’t. If the old stories were about heroes who saved us from others, modern heroes—Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi—endeavored to save us from ourselves, from our own governments and systems of power.

The rest of us so often sacrifice that self and those ideals to fit in, to be part of a cannibal system, a system that eats souls and defiles truths and serves only power. Or we negotiate quietly to maintain an uneasy distance from it and then go about our own business. Though in my world quite a few of us strike our small blows against empire, you, young man, you were situated where you could run a dagger through the dragon’s eye, and that dragon is writhing in agony now; in that agony it has lost its magic: an arrangement whereby it remains invisible while making the rest of us ever more naked to its glaring eye.

Private Eyes and Public Rights
Privacy is a kind of power as well as a right, one that public librarians fought to protect against the Bush administration and the PATRIOT Act and that online companies violate in every way that’s profitable and expedient. Our lack of privacy, their monstrous privacy—even their invasion of our privacy must, by law, remain classified—is what you made visible. The agony of a monster with nowhere to stand—you are accused of spying on the spies, of invading the privacy of their invasion of privacy—is a truly curious thing. And it is changing the world. Europe and South America are in an uproar, and attempts to contain you and your damage are putting out fire with gasoline.

You yourself said it so well on July 12th:

“A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates. It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice—that it must be seen to be done.”

They say you, like Bradley Manning, gave secrets to their enemies. It’s clear who those enemies are: you, me, us. It was clear on September 12, 2001, that the Bush administration feared the American people more than al-Qaeda. Not much has changed on that front since, and this almost infinitely broad information harvest criminalizes all of us. This metadata—the patterns and connections of communications rather than their content—is particularly useful, as my friend Chris Carlsson pointed out, at mapping the clusters of communications behind popular movements, uprisings, political organizing: in other words, those moments when civil society rises to shape history, to make a better future in the open world of the streets and squares.

The goal of gathering all this metadata, Chris speculates, “is to be able to identify where the ‘hubs’ are, who the people are who sit at key points in networks, helping pass news and messages along, but especially, who the people are who spread ideas and information from one network of people to the next, who help connect small networks into larger ones, and thus facilitate the unpredictable and rapid spread of dissent when it appears.”

Metadata can map the circulatory system of civil society, toward what ends you can certainly imagine. When governments fear their people you can be sure they are not serving their people. This has always been the minefield of patriotism: loyalty to our government often means hostility to our country and vice-versa. Edward Snowden, loyalist to country, you have made this clear as day.

Those who demonize you show, as David Bromwich pointed out in a fine essay in the London Review of Books, their submission to the power you exposed. Who stood where, he writes,

“was an infallible marker of the anti-authoritarian instinct against the authoritarian. What was distressing and impossible to predict was the evidence of the way the last few years have worn deep channels of authoritarian acceptance in the mind of the liberal establishment. Every public figure who is psychologically identified with the ways of power in America has condemned Snowden as a traitor, or deplored his actions as merely those of a criminal, someone about whom the judgment ‘he must be prosecuted’ obviates any further judgment and any need for thought.”

You said, “I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.” Who you are is fascinating, but what you’ve exposed is what matters. It is upending the world. It is damaging Washington’s relations with many Latin American and some European countries, with Russia and China as well as with its own people—those, at least, who bother to read or listen to the news and care about what they find there. “Edward Snowden Single-Handedly Forces Tech Companies To Come Forward With Government Data Request Stats,” said a headline in Forbes. Your act is rearranging our world. How much no one yet knows.

What You Love
What’s striking about your words on video, Edward Snowden, the ones I hear as your young, pale, thoughtful face speaks with clarity and incisiveness in response to Glenn Greenwald’s questions, is that you’re not talking much about what you hate, though it’s clear that you hate the secret network you were part of. You hate it because it poisons what you love. You told us, “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions… but I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.” You love our world, our country—not its government, clearly, but its old ideals and living idealists, its possibilities, its dreamers, and its dreams (not the stale, stuffed American dream of individual affluence, but the other dreams of a better world for all of us, a world of principle).

You told us where we now live and that you refuse to live there anymore:

“I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under. America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”

Which is to say you acted from love, from all the things the new surveillance state imperils: privacy, democracy, accountability, decency, honor. The rest of us, what would we do for love?

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“You’re a Sacrifice”: An Open Letter to Edward Snowden

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