Bringing Solitary Confinement to Campuses for the October Month of Resistance
September 29, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In the summer of 2013, the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, Bay Area displayed a life-sized replica of a SHU (Security Housing Unit) cell in downtown San Francisco to build support for the California prisoners' hunger strike that began July 8 of that year. Nearly 4,000 prisoners are kept in solitary confinement in California SHUs, some for decades. Throughout the two days many different kinds of people, including whole families and tourists from around the world, came into the "SHU" cell. Ex-prisoners told of their experience and voiced their support for the hunger strike. Visitors to the "SHU" left with a new understanding of why the prisoners were going on hunger strike and many signed up to help, stay in touch, and took materials to spread the word about the strike. Photo: Special to Revolution
A Stop Mass Incarceration Network organizer from Los Angeles reported that students are organizing many different activities for the October Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. These will be happening on campuses around the country, including at several elite universities. There are plans for panels, teach-ins, protests, walkouts, and creative acts of resistance. At Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Brandeis, Tufts, Suffolk, Rutgers, UCLA, UC Riverside, and University of Southern California, students will be creating a “mock SHU” on campus during the Month of Resistance.
Drawing by a prisoner at Pelican Bay, California SHU depicting a prisoner who was stripped and hog-tied. Photo: Pelican Bay Prison Express
The SHU, or Security Housing Units, are this nation’s dungeons of solitary confinement. Every year 20,000-80,000 prisoners in the United States are put into the SHU and forced to endure dehumanizing conditions tantamount to torture.
If you get put in the SHU you’re locked up in a small, windowless concrete cell for 23 hours a day, without any face-to-face contact with another human being, not even a guard. You may or may not be allowed reading material. You get only one hour outside the cell, by yourself, in a small indoor space. You never see sunlight or a blade of grass. Whenever you leave your cell you’re handcuffed and shackled, hands-to-waist, ankle-to-ankle.
The students at these campuses want to push their peers out of their comfort zone and force them to confront the crimes against humanity that are taking place behind the walls and bring to light the reality of mass incarceration in all its brutality. The students are conducting the actions in highly visible areas of campus, taping off 7’ x 9’ boxes to represent the actual dimensions of a SHU. Twenty-three volunteers spend one hour each confined in the space, the last hour is left open to represent the one hour prisoners are allowed outside the SHU. During previous actions, students have shared what it felt like to be confined for one hour in this small area without interaction with other humans and compared it with the immense torture and dehumanization faced by prisoners who literally spend years and decades in the SHU.
The students are looking for ways to expand these mock-SHU actions and create a bigger impact on campuses. These students' bold and creative actions should be embraced, built upon and spread. The October Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation must be like a giant STOP sign stuck right in the face of American society, day after day, so that it can’t be covered up, whited out, ignored, neutralized, or suppressed.
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.