Some quick facts about cocaine and 'crack' and how its use targets Blacks
First off, coca leaf cultivation in South America has been the cornerstone of the Andean region for 4,000 years, and its consumption has been part of the culture since before the Incas. It's commonly used by millions of people there including the cocaleros, or coca farmers, as we in this country use coffee, tea, a glass of wine or just a cold beer.
Besides drinking coca tea, the leaf is chewed to relieve fatigue, suppress appetite, as a communal activity and to offset altitude sickness. The U.S. Embassy in Peru even recommends it for the latter purpose.
Use of cocaine in the U.S. didn't begin in the '60s. It's been around recreationally for nearly 150 years for "whatever ailed you" tonics, in cigarettes, ointments and nasal sprays. Its use was perfectly legal until the federal government classified it as a narcotic, which it is not, in 1914. After that it could only be gotten legally by prescription or illegally from a street dealer.
Cocaine is a powder which in "cooked" form is called "crack." The law treats each very differently. The racist mandatory minimum sentencing laws, established by Congress in 1986, penalize crack users especially harshly.
Defendants convicted of selling 500 grams of powder cocaine vs. 5 grams of crack each receive five year sentences. For 5 kilos of powder and 50 grams of crack, it's a 10-year sentence. That's a 100:1 ratio. Why? Hold on, there's more.
Simple possession of any amount of powder by a first-time offender is a misdemeanor punishable by a max one year sentence. For crack, simple possession is a felony carrying a five-year sentence.
Now to the why. Blacks accounted for 84 percent of convicted crack offenders in 2000, Hispanics 9 percent and whites 6 percent.
For powder, it was Hispanics 50 percent, Blacks 30 percent and whites 18 percent. Now you know. The federal crack laws established 20 years ago were part of the "Reagan revolution" and its racist war against the poor, mainly Blacks.
It was also intended as a defense against those least advantaged poor and mainly Blacks as the Reagan revolution began dismantling the social safety net and transferring wealth to the rich and well-off. That transfer has now been ongoing for 25 years with no end in sight.
The "war on drugs" and its harsh laws, mainly targeting Blacks, were intended to defuse the inevitable pressure that would build among the poor and Black and likely explode again in the streets as it did in the '60s.
Over 2 million people locked in cages is how this nation's leaders address the gross social inequity problem it deliberately created. It's their solution, and it's a national disgrace and outrage.
Torture in U.S. prisons - it's not just at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it's right here in the USA
Surprised? The few who even think about this may be, but even many of them shamefully believe all those locked up deserve the harsh treatment they get. Aren't they sent there to be punished for committing crimes? Did they expect a country club?
Punishment is what they get big time because prisons everywhere are brutal places, and those sent to them have no rights and it shows in how they're treated - routinely. And let's be perfectly clear about the way it is at all U.S. domestic and foreign based prisons and most all other countries' as well: No, it doesn't just happen at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram near Kandahar, Afghanistan; and no, it's not just by a few "rogue elements" or "bad apples."
What goes on is policy, and it comes right from the top, sanctioned and approved. And let's be very clear about one other thing. The real criminals sit in corporate suites and boardrooms or in Capital Hill offices while their victims are locked in cages and subjected to unspeakable abuse and brutal torture with no chance to stop it or receive redress.
Prisons, with few exceptions, are not intended for rehabilitation. They are institutions societies use for vengeance and punishment. The U.S. puts prisoners it "renditions" in the most gruesome hellholes around the world for attempted information extraction by some of the worst physical and psychological tortures the human mind can conceive.
But this essay is about what goes on in U.S. prisons within our borders, and what you'll read below will sound like reports about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Get ready to feel your skin crawl.
Everything we saw on TV months ago about prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib and all that we heard goes on at Guantanamo happens in our state and federal prison system right here at home - and lots more we don't see or hear about. These are the lessons and techniques first devised and used in U.S. based torture prisons and then exported for use in our comparable torture prisons around the world. That's the way things are in all our prisons, and in the language of author Gertrude Stein when she referred to roses: A prison is a prison is a prison.
The main difference between San Quentin and Abu Ghraib is their location. What goes on at both and all others includes savage beatings by prison guards, attacks by fierce dogs that inflict real bites, severe shocking with cattle prods and 50,000-volt emitting taser electro-shock guns often used multiple times that make the victim shake for hours after being struck and can also kill and often do. There are assaults by toxic chemicals like pepper spray strong enough to inflict severe pain, second degree burns, temporary blindness and even death in a vulnerable victim. And all this happens at times with prisoners stripped naked, including brutal rapes by guards, other prisoners and much more.
A courageous woman activist imprisoned for several months for her actions told me the case of a woman she saw stripped naked in her cell and then bound suspended in spread-eagle form on her prison bars and left there for hours to suffer. The experience devastated her and nearly killed her. And she was another activist being punished for her courageous acts.
Hard to believe? You'd better believe it, because it goes on every day in all prisons routinely throughout the country - acts of deliberate barbarity and sadism, so severe they can and do kill and often leave their victims an emotional shell when they don't.
Whenever you hear reports about prisoners committing suicide, you'd better think hard about it. It's most likely they were murdered by prison guards and reported as suicide.
It may be from repeated taser shocks, from being beaten to death so savagely every rib in their body was broken or just from a body giving out from repeated and brutal maltreatment over a long period with nothing more to look forward to but more of the same.
How many can endure the worst of that? No one in a civilized country should ever have to. And no civilized person should believe they had it coming.
How international law treats torture
International law is explicit and long-standing forbidding the use of any form of torture and inhumane or degrading treatment under any circumstances. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlawed it in 1948. The Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949 banned any form of "physical or mental coercion" and affirmed that detainees must at all times be treated humanely.
The European Convention followed in 1950. Then, in 1984, the U.N. Convention Against Torture became the first binding international instrument dealing exclusively with the issue of banning torture in any form for any reason. And let's be clear on what's meant by torture and inhumane treatment. It includes punching a prisoner or detainee in the mouth or kicking him or her in the stomach or butt.
Except for the non-binding "Universal Declaration," all the others are binding international law, and the U.S. is a signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention and the U.N. Convention. And hold on, there's more.
The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a criminal offense for U.S. military personnel and U.S. nationals to commit war crimes to include cruel treatment and torture covered under the Fourth Geneva Convention. And virtually every human rights organization is on the record banning all kinds of torture anywhere for any reason.
A brief diversion on torture overseas
I must include some important information about one type of torture that may be only going on overseas - for now. Although the U.S. is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture, it's routinely ignored and violated them with impunity in U.S. prisons and abroad. Further, the CIA's use of psychological torture was exempted in the U.N. Convention.
With cover from that exemption, Professor Alfred McCoy's new book, "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War of Terror," exposes the CIA's secret efforts to develop new forms of torture over that period. He explained how they conducted intensive research to crack the code of human consciousness and through much trial and error came up with devastating psychological and self-inflicting torture techniques - from sensory disorientation or severely painful tortures like forced continuous standing for 24-48 hours.
The CIA experiments continue now at Guantanamo and other overseas hellhole torture prisons. But two new techniques have been added - cultural sensitivity and individual fears and phobias.
This four-fold assault on the human psyche is now being used against prisoners held in overseas prisons, and the detainees affected, most picked up randomly and guilty of no offense, are being used as human "lab rats" in a gruesome, vile and clearly illegal and immoral experiment to devise the most effective psychological techniques to break down a human subject - to break a human being so totally it's near impossible to recover.
I could find no information on whether these experiments are now being conducted in U.S. domestic prisons. But that doesn't mean they're not. They may be happening here, but we don't know about them.
But the key point is this. Once the use of torture in all forms gains currency, it's inevitable it will spread everywhere.
And let's be very clear on one other point. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the so-called McCain Anti-Torture Amendment, passed in December last year is so full of loopholes and offsets by other legislation that it's worthless and will do nothing to stop the tortures explained above.
The death penalty - the "heart of darkness" of our criminal-injustice system
Life in prison is a living hell as all the victims know who've been there or those of us who've read about it in detail as I have. Being there is like being in one of the five levels of Dante's hell, where those consigned to spend eternity are doomed to eternal punishment.
All prisons are hellholes. But for those prisoners with any hope of release one day, the second lowest level of Dante's hell is any of the so-called "supermax" prisons. They're supposedly intended to house society's most dangerous, incorrigibly violent inmates, but many sent there aren't that at all - like the many political prisoners consigned that fate because the state wishes to bury them alive and keep them isolated.
The prisoners in these "special" hellholes are a small but growing percent of the total prison population. Those in them spend their waking and sleeping hours locked in small, often windowless cells for long sentences of many years.
They're deprived of all contact with other inmates and only allowed out for brief periods a few times a week for showers and some solitary exercise in a small, enclosed space. They're deprived of all mental stimulation from human contact, recreation or education and are nearly always shackled hands and feet and escorted by armed guards whenever they leave their cells.
Prisoners who've endured this torture, come out and spoken publicly about it have described it to be like living in a tomb. And the state-inflicted misery they've been subjected to often results in a host of severe emotional problems, including insanity. Try locking yourself in your bathroom with a little plain food and water for 24 hours, if you can stand it, and see how you feel. Then multiply that by 20 or more years.
The state and federally sponsored murder factories known as "death rows" are, without a doubt, the lowest and worst level of Dante's hell. Dante might have written his words, "Abandon every hope, all ye who enter," for the abandoned souls sent to these barbaric death factories. They only look different than Auschwitz. Those entering never come out - except the few lucky ones DNA evidence exonerates.
As of April 2005, there were 3,452 on death row in the 37 states with the death penalty, including 36 in federal prisons and seven held by the U.S. military. The vast majority of them are poor or disadvantaged, and their racial breakdown is as follows: 45.5 percent white, 41.7 percent Black, 10.4 percent Hispanic, 1.2 percent Asian, 1.2 percent American Indian and .5 percent unknown. Nearly all of them, 98.5 percent, are male.
Most civilized countries have no death penalty, and in the Global North only the U.S. and Japan still do. Japan is very selective in who it executes, unlike the U.S. with its assembly line-like killing operations. The Japanese have executed about 50 inmates in the last dozen years and about an equal number now await execution. Many opponents of the death penalty call these "final solution" acts institutionalized, state-sponsored, ritualistic acts of torture-murder.
They say "torture" because often the prisoner is so hated that their executioners "deliberately" try to inflict pain during the process of killing them. And while that alone is inhumane and barbaric enough, all too often the accused is innocent, often the state knows it, and they're still put to death.
Most often these are people of color, most likely Black, poor and unable to afford a proper defense. They become victims of a system not based on justice but on vengeance, along with the belief by elected officials that being "tough on crime" is a good vote getter.
The case of Stan Tookie Williams, as much as anyone, stands out for its barbarity and gross injustice. Stan was a co-founder of the Crips street gang as a teenager in South Central Los Angeles in 1969. He was convicted and sentenced to death for multiple murders he said he never committed - I believe him - but never got a proper defense to prove it. Even later when evidence became known that might have exonerated him, he was never given a chance to prove his innocence.
Over a dozen years before his execution in California, Stan changed his life, became an anti-gang activist while on death row and renounced his former gang affiliation. He co-wrote children's books, worked to convince youths not to join gangs and wrote one of the most compelling books on prison life I ever read, called "Life in Prison." He did it to show readers what prison life is really like in plain, stark language. He pulled no punches. Anyone reading it will know that prison is no place any human being wants to be.
For his work in prison, Stan received multiple Nobel Peace Prize nominations, in 2004 a feature film called "Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story" was made about his life, and as his execution date approached, a mass effort I was part of was launched to urge an uncaring and hostile Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency. Fat chance.
Thousands joined the effort, including celebrities, politicians, Nobel laureates and Pacifica Radio, especially its very special, bold and courageous KPFA weekday news and information program Flashpoints Radio, the best program of its kind anywhere.
It was all in "vein," so to speak. Clemency was denied, and Stan was put to death by lethal injection on Dec. 13, 2005, as thousands protested outside the infamous San Quentin State Prison.
Stan's death was not easy or painless. It took repeated needle insertions in a process that took nearly 30 minutes of great inflicted pain to complete.
Stan's suffering at the end was not an exception. It's common practice, and, as mentioned above, is deliberately inflicted by a sadistic staff.
As such, even for a prisoner being executed, this is a flagrant violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution that prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment." But who cares, and who will act to prevent it when it's inflicted on a condemned Black man and on the day the state murders him.
The profitable business of running a gulag
The for-profit side of running a gulag began to explode during the Reagan years when incarceration rates began increasing dramatically. Along with a growing private prison industry - a small slice of the prison pie still largely a public enterprise - a vast array of private businesses wanted a piece of the action and got it. These include architectural and construction companies, food service contractors, and suppliers of all sorts of equipment, hardware, steel doors, razor wire, communications systems, and health care and medical supplies.
There's also a big need for uniforms and assorted weapons, including dangerous products to restrain prisoners, like chemical sprays that can injure and cause severe pain, second degree burns, temporary blindness or worse and taser electro-shock guns that emit 50,000 volts of electricity, enough to flatten an all-pro NFL lineman in peak form, and that can and have killed as many as 167 victims through January 2006.
And there's loads more. The care and feeding of a couple of million humans takes a lot of supplying to keep the system going. Add it all up, and it's big business - and it gets bigger with every new prison and the inmates to fill them. Not to worry. Unlike oil, there's no chance of running out of bodies.
The big players in this growing industry are the private companies that run the hellholes. And the ones they run are even more hellish than the public ones. Private, publicly owned corporations with shareholders and Wall Street to please always need a growing revenue and profit stream and strict cost control to maximize the bottom line.
That means understaffing, low pay for poorly trained staff, poor and unsafe conditions, little or no life-enhancing or self-help programs like educational opportunities or counseling services to rehabilitate those in need, like illicit drug users, and even worse medical care than the third world kind in the publicly run system. Why bother? They all cost money, reduce profits and constrain shareholder equity.
Private contractors can also exploit prisoners as de facto chattel. They're not obliged to pay wages or benefits and can take full advantage of all those bodies free of charge. Why would they ever pass that up? It's one more revenue and profit stream.
The private side of running prisons is still a small part of the total. But it's growing, and as it does, its darker side may just get darker. Unlike most businesses, quality control is not one of their concerns.
If humans suffer to enhance the bottom line, who will care? In running a gulag, you just gotta keep 'em under control, locked in cages, and if you use, abuse and lose some along the way, there's plenty more supply to fill the available beds.
That's how it works in a nation that commodifies its masses and exploits them. It's what happens in this modern era when social conditions deteriorate enough to produce what Franklin Roosevelt spoke about in the Great Depression years of the 1930s when he said, "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."
It's not that bad yet, but we're heading in that direction. As discussed above, it produces a restive population the state chooses to lock up in lieu of providing vital social services to satisfy essential needs.
The result is the U.S. gulag, the shame of the nation. Future historians and others will judge us by the character of our social conscience, especially how we treat our least advantaged and most needy.
They'll also judge us by our system of justice and the prisons within it which reflect that conscience. The honest ones won't be kind.
The great Russian 19th Century novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky once remarked that he measured the quality of a society by the quality of its prisons. He might have added by its quantity as well.
The evidence shows a nation moving from a republic to tyranny
The evidence on our criminal injustice system and the prisons within it alone shows a nation moving from a republic to tyranny. It's not much different from what happened in ancient Rome when it passed from a republic to an empire under the rule of its emperor Augustus Caesar after Julius ignored his "Ides of March" warning and ended his reign the hard way in the Roman Senate.
Our prison system alone is a stark symbol and reminder of a society based on militarism and imperial conquest abroad, the shredding of our civil liberties at home, and the dismantling of our social contract obligation along with the transfer of wealth to the privileged and powerful. It reflects a nation descending into the hell of tyranny and despotism that threatens to become worse and affect us all except those at the top.
We've created the monster of a national security police state, run by the new Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to control a growing restive population that will likely grow larger.
It will include many more of us as those in need grow in numbers and new demons are easily found, targeted and moved to prison cells to maintain absolute control. That's how it works in all tyrannical states, even ones claiming to be democracies like ours but which, in fact, are not.
It happened in ancient Rome and in more modern times in Nazi Germany after Hitler was appointed chancellor and ended the Weimar Republic. He called his party the National Socialist German Workers Party - the term Nazi is the short form for National Socialist with a "zi" on the end - but his constituents were the German industrialists and militarists and his ideology was fascist and racist. It wasn't long before he removed his many enemies and tried to create a state for the privileged and Aryan pure.
The immortal words of Pastor Martin Niemoller explained it and warn us now: He said they first came for the Jews, then the communists, then the trade unionists, and each time he didn't speak out because he wasn't one of them - until there was no one left and they came for him, and there was no one to speak out to help him.
This essay only addresses the mass incarceration of the most vulnerable among us. I've discussed the other issues in other writings and intend to write solely about our war on immigrants in a future article.
But unless we heed Pastor Niemoller's warning, one day, sooner than we think, they'll come for us, and who'll be left to help. Based on the evidence I've presented, we already have a society out of control with a reckless rogue administration, a "go-along" Congress and "friendly" courts leading us along the road to hell.
The U.S. prison system is its metaphor and clear warning and reflects a repressive state based on harsh and unjust Patriot Act laws that are close to being supplemented by a racist, fascist-style immigration bill passed by the House, the so-called Sensenbrenner anti-immigration bill, which is now being considered in the Senate. Its provisions that criminalize undocumented immigrants - targeted at those of color - and at all those compassionate enough to help them are right out of the bowels of Nazi hell.
It may pass and likely be followed by even more repressive laws that target you and me unless we're one of the privileged. So far, the targets are mostly those on the bottom rungs of society - people of color, including immigrants and Muslims. But also in the line of fire is anyone of influence, including Muslim academics falsely labeled terrorists, daring to speak out and oppose state policy.
How long will it be before it gets even worse and no one is safe?
Few people know the president has now given himself the sole power to designate anyone he chooses for any reason he decides as a bad guy - incredibly in that language. Going even further, in January 2006, George Bush claimed the right to govern as a "Unitary Executive" with the power to abrogate the separation of powers doctrine, bypass the Congress and courts and act as he chooses to "protect national security."
This simply means that if he decides to ignore the law, he'll govern by presidential edict, usurping the right of dictatorial power with no constraint. If he's ever brazen enough to do it - and don't believe he won't be - and isn't stopped, he'll have "crossed the Rubicon" and turned the country into a full-blown totalitarian state, and the ball game is over for all of us. We're already all in the queue as potential prey, and we'd better understand we're moving up in it fast.
Unless Bush-Cheney and those around them are stopped, they'll come for us one day, and then it'll be too late. It makes a shameless mockery of any notion that all citizens, rich and poor, are entitled to the sacred rights and protections guaranteed us by the Constitution. Only the privileged and powerful get that right today, not the rest of us.
And if you're Black and poor, an undocumented immigrant or a Muslim of color, our latest public enemy No. 1, you have no rights at all. Step right up - they've assigned you a number too, and you'd better keep a bag packed.
We've come a long way in our 230-year history, but, except for brief periods of relief and redress, it's been pretty much downhill. If that's "the American way," it's time we retool and find a new path to follow, one based on social, political and economic justice, of caring about all others instead of using and abusing them for the benefit of a privileged few.
We may not have much time left, so we'd better wake up and move fast. If we keep watching Fox News, reading the New York Times, listening to NPR and then running to the mall, we're doomed to meet the same fate as all other nations who followed the road we now travel. It's the road to hell, and ours isn't even paved with good intentions.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog at
http://www.sjlendman.blogspot.com/. This story previously appeared at
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m21544&l=i&size=1&hd=0.
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