Feds Create New Political Prisons

Communications Management Units (CMUs), called “Little Guantanamos” by the people incarcerated in them, were created by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in 2006 to restrict prisoners’ ability to communicate with the outside world. The units incarcerate Muslims and environmental activists, and the government has produced no criteria defining how you get into the unit and – more importantly – how you get out.

The Terre Haute, Indiana CMU opened in 2006 and a second CMU opened in Marion, Illinois, in 2008. The CMU initially held Muslim men who were convicted of conspiracy or of sending resources to Iraq in defiance of the pre-war embargo. Perhaps in an attempt to avoid charges of religious and racial persecution, the federal government has also added environmental activists convicted of property crimes or eco-sabotage, but the units are still 90% Muslim by some estimates – and people are still guessing because the government has not released a list of who’s in the CMUs.

The whole point of the CMU appears to be breaking down a person’s connections with the outside world, whether those are connections to family and community or to political movements. Prisoners in the CMUs may only have family and friend non-contact visits through Plexiglas windows. Phone calls are restricted to one 15-minute call per week, which can be reduced to one three-minute call per month by the warden. (The high security Federal ADMAX prison permits 300 minutes of calls per month.) All communication by phone or during visits must be in English and all phone calls and visits are live monitored. Mail must be written in English, and all outgoing and incoming mail is read and copied by staff. While attorney-client privilege is still supposed to exist, lawyers for men in the CMUs have reported having their mail opened and monitored.

So how do you get into the CMU and how do you get out? Nobody knows. In 2006, BOP proposed rules to create the unit in compliance with the Administrative Procedures Act. During the public comment period, the ACLU and other organizations raised serious constitutional objections to the units. BOP’s rules were not adopted, but the Terre Haute unit opened anyway at the end of the year citing the basis for its existence as reflecting “national policy.” Once in, there are no steps or policies that allow you to earn your way out.

Right now, these are just two units out of hundreds of prisons across the country, but we must remember that control units (Intensive Management Units, Security Housing Units, etc.) started out as one unit in the federal system, and the first people incarcerated in them were members of political groups. Now prisons in every state have their own version of the control unit, and thousands of people across the country are kept in extreme isolation for months and years.

Source: Democracy Now, greenisthenewred.com