New York Prison Guards Strike, Denouncing Limits on Solitary Confinement

We speak with Jose Saldaña, director of Release Aging People in Prison, about a wildcat strike by New York prison guards who claim limits on solitary confinement have made their work more dangerous. “The people who are living in a dangerous environment are the incarcerated men and women,” says Saldaña, who notes the strike began the same week murder charges were announced against six of the guards who brutally beat to death handcuffed prisoner Robert Brooks in an attack captured on body-camera video. “The whole world saw it, and they’re questioning: How long has this been going on in the prison system? This illegal strike is to erase that consciousness that’s building,” says Saldaña. We are also joined by anthropologist Orisanmi Burton, who studies prisons and says the proliferation of solitary confinement and other harsh measures is directly linked to political organizing behind bars starting in the late 1960s. “Prisons in the United States are best understood as institutions of low-intensity warfare that masquerade as apolitical instruments of crime control,” says Burton, author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We end today’s show here in New York, where state prison guards are on the second week of a wildcat strike over what they say are unsafe conditions. The National Guard have been called in.

Some say the timing of the strike is curious. It started the same week charges were filed against prison guards at the Marcy Correctional Facility in Utica, New York, who brutally beat to death handcuffed prisoner Robert Brooks in an attack captured on video footage by body cameras. Brooks was Black. All the officers who took turns beating him appear to be white.

Meanwhile, prison officials have responded to the prison guard strike by indefinitely suspending provisions in New York’s HALT Solitary Act, which stands for Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement, which limits solitary confinement to 15 consecutive days or 20 days over a 60-day period.

For more, we’ve got two guests with us. In Washington, D.C., Orisanmi Burton is assistant professor of anthropology at American University, author of a book about the 1971 Attica prison uprising, upstate New York, titled Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. And here in our New York studio is Jose Saldaña, director of Release Aging People in Prison, known as RAPP. He was released from New York state prison in 2018 after 38 years behind bars.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Jose, welcome back to Democracy Now! You’re just back from the state capital here in New York, from Albany.

JOSE SALDAÑA: That’s correct.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the significance of the wildcat strike and how it’s affecting the prisoners.

JOSE SALDAÑA: Well, first of all, you know, for those who don’t know, this is an illegal strike. The correction guards had just finished negotiating a contract a few months ago, and now they are going on strike. And the reason why they are going on strike is because the world saw that video. We call it a lynching. Fourteen to 16 correction prison guards lynched a Black man. And the whole world saw it, and they’re questioning: How long has this been going on in the prison system? So, this illegal strike is to erase that consciousness that’s building. We are building a consciousness to dismantle that type of racial brutality and sexual violence in the prison system that’s been going on for decades. They’re trying to erase that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jose, could you talk about their demand that the reforms around solitary confinement be removed?

JOSE SALDAÑA: Yes. They want the Solitary Confinement Act repealed. And the Solitary Confinement Act does not only restrict them from putting people in the box for decades, actual decades, it also stops them from putting pregnant women in the box, women breast-feeding in the box, people who have mental health problems, people who have physical disabilities, paralyzed people, wheelchair-bound. It prohibits them from putting these people in solitary confinement. They’re trying to repeal that. They’re trying to say that this whole Solitary Confinement Act has made their work dangerous, it has created a dangerous environment. And they actually are trying to erase what we saw in that video. The people who are living in a dangerous environment are the incarcerated men and women.

AMY GOODMAN: Is it true that a prisoner died this week? I’m not talking the one who was beaten to death.

JOSE SALDAÑA: Absolutely. One that has been reported —

AMY GOODMAN: A 61-year-old man?

JOSE SALDAÑA: At least one person has been reported to have died since then.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is after the National Guard —

JOSE SALDAÑA: After the National Guard, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — were moved into these prison facilities.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to bring in Orisanmi Burton, assistant professor of anthropology at American University, author of the Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Could you talk somewhat about the role of correction officers? Especially in your book on Attica, you went back in time, of course, the Attica revolt being one of the biggest in American history in its impact on reforms within the prison system.

ORISANMI BURTON: Yes. Well, the role of the guards is really to enforce domination. And Jose was exactly right in talking about the role of solitary confinement in all of this. Of course, a repeal of the HALT Act is really the primary demand of the guards. And this is a legacy of Attica. So, in the wake of the Attica rebellion, we saw nationally the proliferation of solitary confinement and the extension of the lengths of time to which people were subjected to solitary confinement. And this was really an effort to assert control and domination over the prison population. People might be aware of this popular narrative that solitary confinement is about confining the worst of the worst. But you just heard from Jose the different categories of people that the HALT Act was designed to prevent from being put into solitary confinement.

And there’s also a pronounced political dimension to the use of solitary confinement. So, for instance, in the 1980s, the warden of the Marion control unit, which is a supermax prison in Illinois, said that the purpose of the Marion solitary confinement unit is to control revolutionary attitudes within the prison system and within the society at large. And so, part of this is the use of the prison as a form of counterrevolution. And the guards are really in place to enforce that dominance and to ensure that prisons remain quiet. And for the most part, people don’t hear about it, but because this video was released, people have no choice but to be faced with the kinds of violence that happen all the time in prisons.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor, if you could talk about — and you talk a lot about this in your book — what you think needs to happen now, the whole issue of abolition versus reforms as the legacy of what happened after Attica? And explain what happened then.

ORISANMI BURTON: Right. So, I mean, the dominant narrative of Attica is that it’s a four-day rebellion that unfolded largely within Attica prison and that the demands were primarily oriented towards improving prison conditions. I don’t think that that’s wrong. I just think that it’s incomplete. My book shows that Attica was a protracted struggle that lasted for at least 13 months, that it traversed multiple prisons, and that it was revolutionary and abolitionist in its politics, that it was informed by anti-colonial movements unfolding throughout the world and that it had material links to those movements.

Part of the response to Attica was massive repression and violence, as many of your viewers will know. But the focus on the intense violence waged by the state often obscures the extent to which reforms were used as a counterinsurgency method designed to suppress political consciousness and suppress activism. And so, one of those reforms was the proliferation of solitary confinement, as I just mentioned. Other reforms were just the proliferation of prisons in general, which were used as a method to separate out more prisoners so that they couldn’t organize.

But, importantly, the proliferation of prisons was also used as a way to market prison growth and development to white rural populations whose economies had been ravaged by deindustrialization. So it was a way to sort of shore up support for rural white workers who had very few other employment options, especially in light of the fact that during the repression at Attica, the New York state assault force that went in to suppress the rebellion also killed several of the guards, 10 guards. And so, the building of prisons became a marketing tool to try to build support for prison development among rural white populations. And much of this is what we’re dealing with now in terms of the — some of the demands and conversations around what’s happening with the strike have to do with animosity around the recent closure of prisons that has been unfolding in New York over the past decade.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mentioned earlier solitary confinement used as a means of political repression of revolutionary movements. Could you talk about what your book found in terms of Attica specifically, the level of political activism that occurred in the prisons? I know when I was in the Young Lords back in the ’70s, we actually had members in Attica as part of the Inmates Liberation Front. But the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, many other political groups, Republic of New Afrika, had membership and developed membership in Attica and other prisons, as well.

ORISANMI BURTON: Absolutely. And the Inmates Liberation Front is discussed in my book. I mean, part of what I want people to understand is that prisons in the United States are best understood as institutions of low-intensity warfare that masquerade as apolitical instruments of crime control. And so, part of what we see in the late 1960s is the use of prisons to repress and contain and neutralize political activism on the outside, groups like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, as you just mentioned.

But, in fact, what happens is that the strategy backfires. And prisons, in fact, become schools of revolutionary political education. And these groups, in fact, proliferate in the prisons. And that politicization interacts with the intense repression that these groups were facing, which gives rise to these different forms of rebellion that emerge all throughout the prisons. Attica happened to be one of the most brutal prisons in New York state and, in fact, in the country, where many of the most political and most intellectual, most charismatic people were transferred and repressed. And it turned into a tinderbox.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Burton, that’s where the wildcat prison guard strike is. Jose Saldaña, we just have 20 seconds. What you’re calling for?

JOSE SALDAÑA: This is to say that they have engaged in illegal activity, and they will continue to escalate that illegality. We are building a movement to dismantle this racial brutality. But in the meantime, we have to get people out of that brutal system. We have legislation, elder parole, fair and timely, second look at. These legislations will help relieve people out of these systems of brutal oppression and unite them back to their families.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Jose Saldaña, director of RAPP, and Orisanmi Burton, author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. He’s also professor of anthropology at American University. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.