Homeland Security Shakedown in PA Prisons

by dave onion

Last summer numerous inmates held at SCI Greene started hearing word that their letters were arriving opened and taped back shut. Normally prisoners mail is only checked coming in while outgoing mail will leave the prison unopened. When Saleem, a regular contributor to the defenestrator, filed a grievance last June demanding to know why his outgoing mail was being read, he was informed “You were placed on Mail Watch as a result of your own actions. Your continued radical beliefs and involvement with questionable written publications are an issue that is of concern to the security office.” Saleem not only writes for the defenestrator, but for several other publications including Pittsburgh’s New People, and has been active pulling together a number of collaborative writing and organizing efforts all focusing on social justice.

But while a number of other politically active prisoners and political prisoners have also been subjected to mail restrictions and surveillance, Saleem and other politically active prisoners were then additionally hit with cell searches despite their lack of recent write ups or disruptive behavior. The real threat seemed to be the little trickle of light illuminating some of the day to day abuses in US prisons. As Holbrook wrote in a recent letter: “So my mail is/was being monitored because of my activism and ability to articulate a perspective of the D.O.C. in opposition to the image/impression of prisons and prisoners the D.O.C. promotes.”

A personal visit from a higher up in the prison bureaucracy, shed some additional light on the situation: the cell searches hadn’t even been carried out by DOC staff, but by agents going over the heads of the prison admin. Though unconfirmed, several of those who were searched and activists involved in prisoner support feel that it was the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stepping over the prison hierarchy as part of a campaign to crack down on imprisoned radicals.
Some prisoners believe, the DOC is now taking advantage of DHS’ attention toward prisoners to further target “activist” or “political” prisoners. Under national security pretexts the D.O.C. Can further isolate the activist prisoners who are already deeply isolated from the activist movements on the outside. Saleem writes: “The prevention of a connection between prisoners and activists and community/social activists is the objective, not combating terrorism or radicalism.”
Maroon Shoatz, Black Panther Party / BLA political prisoner also at SCI Greene was among those who felt the repression that ensued. In 2006, his cell was searched and most of his belongings confiscated for being “revolutionary material”.

DHS’ presence in prisons seemed to have stepped up when Muslims imprisoned in Colorado’s Supermax facility in Florence were discovered to have exchanged letters with those responsible for the Madrid train bombings. Citing the potential of prisons as breeding grounds for domestic terrorism, mail surveillance shot up and DHS searched cells of politically active prisoners across the country. Working in tandem DHS and the FBI announced plans to flood the prisons with federal snitches, fund “intelligence units” in state prisons, and “train more prison staff to recognize signs that prisoners are turning to extreme propaganda, sharing radical views and attempting to convert other inmates” (USA Today November 11 2006).

That the feds’ definition of radical or extreme is left vague and undefined doesn’t help the matter either. While fundamentalist Muslims responsible for the Madrid bombings and 911 may have been dubbed “radical” doesn’t mean that our people in prison, the revolutionaries and freedom fighters, are in turn “terrorist” or have even the slightest inclination towards violent attacks on random civilians. This of course can’t be said for their jailers, who as an organization prove uncontested even by the like of Al Qaeda in wreaking havoc on lives of civilians from New Orleans to Iraq to Philly.