November 8, 2012  by Solitary Watch Guest Author Lance Tapley

In 1986 Ojore Lutalo, a black revolutionary in the Trenton State Prison — now the New Jersey State Prison — wrote to Bonnie Kerness’s American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) office in Newark. His letter described the extreme isolation and other brutalities in the prison’s Management Control Unit, which he called a “prison within a prison.”

“I could not believe what he was telling me” about the MCU, she says. She reacted by becoming “this lunatic white lady” calling New Jersey corrections officials about Lutalo.

Kerness immediately went to work trying to stop MCU guards from harassing prisoners by waking them at 1 a.m. to make them strip in front of snarling dogs leaping for their genitals — to arbitrarily have them switch cells. She got this practice stopped.

Lutalo’s letter also began to open her eyes to the torture of solitary confinement, which in the mid-1980s was just starting to spread across the country as a mass penological practice. Coordinator of the AFSC’s national Prison Watch Project, Kerness had worked on prison issues since the mid-1970s. Now she became an anti-solitary-confinement activist. In 2012, she has been one longer and more consistently than, possibly, anyone else.

Recorded 9-2-12

CDCR Increases Isolation for California Prisoner Hunger Strikers

Families of hunger strikers were denied visits this past weekend, as the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR) continues to crackdown on the hunger strike.

Before the strike resumed Under-Secretary of CDCR Operations, Scott Kernan, threatened an escalation of violence on hunger strikers. Since lawyers from the prisoner’s legal & mediation team have been banned from communicating with hunger strikers last week,rs pose a threat to CDCR’s security, denied visits are an added punishment that increase family members of hunger strikers have also been denied visits. While the CDCR claims families and lawyers pose a threat to CDCR’s security, denied visits are an added punishment that increase isolation for hunger strikers in an attempt to break the strike and conceal retaliation.

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The new issue of Turning the Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research &
Education, Volume 24 Number 3, July-September 2011, is now out from
Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART).
PDFs will be available on-line at <http://www.antiracist.org>www**
.antiracist.org <http://www.antiracist.org>

The latest issue includes the latest compilation of "Rumors," a blotter of
recent on-the-street anti-racist and anti-fascist actions, as well as an
exchange of views generated by the antifa confrontation with the NSM in
Pemberto, NJ, including "Off the Nazis!...But How?" from 'the Brigade' in
Bring the Ruckus, and a "Response" by Jerry Bellow. These address the
interconnection between public organizing and potentially illegal