Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty-(rafflaw)- Weekend Contributor
If you were like me, you may never have heard the term “Communications Management Units” before. They are basically a section of a prison where certain prisoners are housed with limited or no access to communications or family visitations. The reason very little was known about the CMU’s is that when they first were initiated at prisons in Indiana and Illinois, their existence was kept from the public.
“The units opened almost in secret in 2006 and 2008. Critics say they flouted federal law by not publishing the proposed rule and opening up a period for public comment.” Readers Supported News If a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights had not been filed in 2010, we may never have known much about these abusive tactics in our domestic prison system. Maybe the harshest aspect of being sent to the CMU was the realization that you may never know why you were sent there or how you could get out of it.
Just what kind of treatment do prisoners in these CMU’s deal with? “Prisoners get two 15-minute phone calls a week. When their family and friends travel for their two 4-hour visits a month, they are not allowed to touch each other. No hugs. No arms around shoulders. Just a phone call on two sides of a thick plastic window. The conversation is monitored by guards, who could stop it at any moment if inmates speak in a language other than English, use hand signals, or break another one of the many visiting rules.
“It is soul-crushing,” said Daniel McGowan, who spent nearly four years in the two CMU units. When McGowan served his time in 2007 for his role in two arsons with the Earth Liberation Front, inmates were only allowed one 15-minute call a week and four hours of visiting a month. “You feel very removed from things, even the society of the prison. Things like playing softball, doing something productive, all of that is impossible in the CMU.”
Documents released by the Center for Constitutional Rights this week shed new light on how inmates who have often broken no rules are arbitrarily transferred to the cells, known as “Communication Management Units”, sometimes for years at a time. Prisoners are given incomplete or inaccurate information as to why they’ve been moved, CCR found, and have almost no way to substantively protest their placement. ” Readers Supported News
At first glance, some may consider that treatment normal for a prisoner at a maximum security prison. However, all prisoners are supposed to have rights to know why they are being taken out of the general population. The residents of these CMU’s were not given accurate reasons why they ended up in a CMU and it seems that the Bureau of Prisons has still not written clear guidelines that can be enforced on a system wide basis.
“But depositions and internal prison memos show that officials used widely differing criteria for who should be sent there. One prison official testified that it was “very vague,” but that she thought “significant leadership abilities, high education and technical background and blatant disregard for government” were all qualities that might warrant limiting an inmate’s communications.
McGowan, who was given a terrorism enhancement, had served roughly 9 months of his sentence at a low-security prison in Minnesota when he was transferred to the CMU in Marion, Illinois.
“You have been identified as a member and a leader in the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, groups considered domestic terrorist organizations,” read the single-page notice he received five days into his time at Marion. “Your contact with persons in the community requires heightened control and review.” Readers Supported News
In the early 1970’s, I had the opportunity to “visit” Marion Federal Prison in Marion, Illinois. At that time it was a maximum security facility that housed many inmates formerly held at Alcatraz. When I was there the inmate population had many restrictions, but if they followed the rules they were allowed to contact the public and have regular visitations. It was a scary place and I can’t imagine how those men would have reacted if the CMU’s were in place then. Since 2010, Marion Federal Prison has been designated as a medium security prison.
As a country that is supposed to be based on the rule of law, shouldn’t everyone be upset when prisoners rights are curtailed and they are not offered any meaningful process to appeal any denigration of those rights? The lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2010 has uncovered some interesting information on the lack of uniformity and lack of legitimate reasons for a prisoner being assigned to a CPU.
“But the documents revealed today show that the BOP did not draft criteria for designating prisoners to the facilities until 2009 and that, even then, different offices within the BOP, each of which plays a role in the designation process, have a different understanding of the criteria. Other documents reveal that the reasons provided to CMU prisoners for their designation were incomplete, inaccurate, and sometimes even false. Discovery in the case also shows that prisoners were told they could earn their way out of the CMU by completing 18 months with clear conduct, but upon meeting that goal, their requests for transfer out of the CMU were repeatedly denied without explanation. Other documents show political speech was used as a factor in CMU designation. The documents made public today also show that 60 percent of CMU prisoners are Muslim, though Muslims comprise only six percent of the federal prisoner population.
‘ “The documents revealed today show that CMU prisoners have been denied due process at every step, from designation to review,” said CCR Senior Staff Attorney Alexis Agathocleous. “The CMUs impose harsh restrictions on prisoners, including a ban on even momentarily hugging their families. Meanwhile, the BOP has denied hundreds of prisoners, who are mostly Muslim, the opportunity to understand or rebut the rationale for their placement, or a meaningful review process to earn their way out, …” ‘ Center for Constitutional Rights
The rule of law and the need for due process seem to have escaped the purview of the Bureau of Prisons. Without the knowledge of why these prisoners were kept in these restrictive units, they had no chance of challenging the designation or “earning” a way back to the general population. Since these CMU’s were created in 2006 and 2008, is their conceptual beginnings based on the Gitmo idea of incarceration?
If the Bureau of Prisons can keep anyone locked away from family and the public without having to go through any due process, any prisoner for good or bad reasons could be shut out from the usual helpful connection to family and friends in the outside world. “Several studies suggest that regular visits from family members significantly decrease the risk of recidivism among inmates. McGowan, who was released to a halfway house in 2012 and now lives with his wife in Brooklyn, said the isolation of the CMUs made the transition home particularly hard. “I had a hard time with my family, getting along with people, and feeling dissociated, feeling like no one understands what I feel right now,” he said.” Readers Supported News
I am glad that the Center for Constitutional Rights filed their lawsuit and that it may just bring some relief and some due process to the prisoners now being held in CMU’s and some solace to those who were unjustly held in a CMU during the time of their incarceration. We are all entitled to due process and without it, a government could incarcerate anyone for just about any reason. What would these prisoners have done without a group of defense attorneys standing up for the prisoners rights? What do you think?
“The views expressed in this posting are the author’s alone and not those of the blog, the host, or other weekend bloggers. As an open forum, weekend bloggers post independently without pre-approval or review. Content and any displays or art are solely their decision and responsibility.”
Gary, the way the woman dismissed concerns about the drugs the child was taking and the diagnosis was sickening.
Where’s Annie? She should see this.
Feynman:
It is true, there was nothing I could say. This wasn’t an interview, it was an inquisition. Their job was not to investigate, it was to set me up as an unfit parent, and to do their best to ‘prove’ it.
I have a federal civil rights lawsuit still in progress and that I am litigating right now. I am also still publishing articles and reports as to what is happening now.
Those links can be found in the description in the youtube video.
Gary,
I watched the tape. My sympathies. The woman was unbelievably adversarial.
Sympathy for the devil? The taxpayer did not perpetrate a crime and this onerous burden is not his.
Larry! How about an article on Special Administrative Measures for next time.
SAMs require that anyone before they can communicate with a prisoner under SAMs sign a contract not to relay anything that the prisoner says to a third party, breach of this contract can result in a ten year sentence as in the case of Lynne Stewart.
There are two very serious problems with SAMs, firstly if the prisoner is mistreated there is no way he/she can complain of it and secondly I can not see how they can be prevented from limiting a lawyer’s investigation on the part of his client.
Then there is Aafia Siddiqui. Nowhere have I seen it written that she is held under special administrative measures, but the authorities have been extremely mean in allowing her contact with family members. The Aafia Siddiqui story appears to be a case where the Americans treated someone so badly that they cannot afford for the details to be verified and allowed or forced many servicemen and police to engage in a conspiracy of perjury to railroad her into prison for 86 years, an effective life sentence.
Sounds like a fundamentally illegal contract.
If a contract contradicts law, it is null and void.
Military operate their own prisons, the BOP has nothing to do w/ military prisons.
How right you are Feynman.
Well, maybe we should just count ourselves lucky that Sarah Palin isn’t in charge. Here’s her latest at the NRA Frolic…
http://news.yahoo.com/palin-waterboarding-nra-speech-205827272.html;_ylt=A0LEViERzV1TwzYAI0VkmolQ;_ylu=X3oDMTByMG04Z2o2BHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMQRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkAw–
Excellent article raff,
I am interested in this. You hit an issue that may grow in litigation the more that it’s exposed. Do these calculations include Military bases that are under the operation of the BOP? Do you know if they exercise the same standards.
Some commenter made a statement that inmates give up there rights once convicted. With certain necessary exceptions. They still do have due process rights, substantively and procedurally. Thanks for a great article.
Read the lawsuit Nick. Medium security prisons like Marion do not have the baddest of the bad. They do not lose their right to due process.
raff, I’m not sure what the due process issue is. The BOP has authority to assign inmates to prisons and units. They have many criteria but it is not subject to appeal. I see these inmates meeting whatever criteria there is for these units. Inmates are not privy to the guidelines and criteria used to designate them to certain prisons or units. You’re convicted, evaluated, and transported to the particular facility and unit. At Leavenworth, some inmates went straight to the hole and remained there. As I assume you know, the inmates lose many rights in prison, it’s prison and they forfeited them by virtue of their conduct and conviction. I again point out, if this was an Aryan making the claim I seriously doubt this article would have been written. These are the baddest of the bad. I worked the hole in Leavenworth, you have no idea, man, no idea.
rafflaw – prisoners have sued the sheriff of our county because he would not allow them porn, they lost. Disrupting the leaderships of gangs is laudatory and a legitimate function of the prison system as far as I am concerned.
Nick and Paul,
Re-read the article and the lawsuit to see the due process claims.
Rafflaw, You do realize inmates do not have the same Constitutional rights as us law abiding citizens don’t you?
Most or nearly everyone that is considered a terrorist is someone who was an agent, or was recruited or coerced into behavior they would never have been involved with otherwise. The only terrorists in the 9/11 attacks were the dancing Israelis, young Saudi men, all of whom are still alive and free, and pf course, the people who planned and carried-out the attacks, and most of THEM are considered by the uninformed public, to be heroes like Cheney and the rest.
How is the commenter defining the term “terrorist”?
I am going with Nick on this one rafflaw. Prison law is pretty well defined. Prisoners often appeal, but rarely win.
Darren Smith’s comment demonstrates understanding of the complexity of prison management. Although our criminal justice system could use massive reform, especially in sentencing, the unbelievable ways federal inmates can break the rules, but not be found to have committed a prohibited act, are depressing (at least for me.). Can I prove what I’m saying? Not at present, because if I reveal “Sensitive But Unclassified” information I would be breaking the law.
Steve, maybe you might want to review the video on the Bundy confrontation. Secondly, the law was being properly enforced in the Bundy matter. In the CMU issue, the Bureau of Prisons has not produced enforceable and understandable rules that prisoners can follow and appeal. Due process was followed in the Bundy matter, but not in the handling of the CMU units.
http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/the-threat-of-eco-terrorism
Darren, Did you ever have jail duty?
Darren, This is the best comment I’ve read in months. No shit.
I understand the reasons for the CMUs though, but I don’t know what the extent of those who shouldn’t be in one are. But here are my thoughts.
I don’t agree with the notion, in general, that prison inmates as a whole, should be allowed contact visitations. In low security ones maybe but having touch contact during visitations is almost like an open invitation to introduce contraband or weapons into the population. But that is the least focus of this article.
The average con in prison is not going to be one needing a stay in a CMU. The majority of prisoners, as Larry writes, benefit in terms of personal growth, less management, and lower recidivism as a result of having visitation and communication with the outside world. The cost/benefit shows this is worthwhile.
The largest reason I would opin to why the CMUs are utilized is because the communication with certain individual inmates with others presents a significantly higher risk than others do. Here are a few categories:
Inmates having organized crime ties
It is historically well known that leaders or mid level organized crime figures continue to operate their criminal enterprise within prisons. Some have been known to have ordered or approved of murders as a result of these communications. One of prosecutorial goals of the anti-racketeering laws is to incarcerate the leadership of criminal enterprises in order to disrupt or hopefully fracture the enterprise. Allowing leadership to continue defacto operations of the criminal organization perpetuates the criminal enterprise and in fact can allow a stop gap to permit the leadership to return to power upon release.
Inmates leading prison gangs
There are several large scale prison gangs in the US system that branch between federal and local agencies. One in particular is the Aryan Brotherhood which comprises mostly white aryan supremacists but does have some membership by latinos. It is reputedly one of the most violent prison gangs. In fact according the the FBI the gang makes up one tenth of one percent of the population but is responsible for 20% of the murders in the federal system. The gangs are heirarchial in nature and have had a structure in which a few individuals have control over many others spread about various institutions. An essential element of how these gangs function is through communication. Furthermore, to generate revenue for itself to futher its goals, the gang has branched out of the prison population into the outside world and has continued to maintain drug trafficking, extortion, and other felonies.
The feds attempted to disrupt the leadership of the gang in the mid 2000s by going after its most senior leadership. It succeeded in, among others, convictions against the two senior leaders and they were sent to ADX Florence (supermax) which is an even more extreme version of a CMU.
Communication is essential to the AB exerting its influence. One of the reasons Larry’s article mentions the curtailing of the use of foreign languages, hand gestures etc is because the AB and others have used ciphers and gestures to communicate illicit activities. The AB formed their own code system that they used in mail (postal mail) between operatives with the goal of it not being intercepted by the Bureau of Prisons. The messages encoded this way were not ones for ordinary conversation between family members, they were utilized to extend their criminal activities. The BoP cracked one of the codes for a while but the resources that were dedicated to this were many. The courts have ruled that prisons have the authority to monitor inmate communications (save for a few exceptions such as attorney / client)
Prohibiting coded or foreign language communications allows the prison the ability, in those higher risk inmates, to allow them legimate communications while disrupting criminal communications as best as possible. The short amounts of time as stated in Larry’s article might be due to resource constraints. It is something that should be discussed on how to allocate resources that might afford more legitimate and beneficial communications for these inmates.
Foreign or Domestic Terrorist Operatives / and lesser versions
There is a fundamental difference between a person who burns down a building to collect an insurance premium and one that burns one down in the furtherance of a political cause. The latter is far more dangerous than is the former.
For reasons similar to what was described earlier, the risk is that the inmate will continue to further their criminal attacks while incarcerated. This can take two forms.
Direct leadership: This is where the inmate actively directs, or operates further acts of disruption or crimes to via communication with supporters or proxies. In this case the inmate is almost effectvely free in that they believe incarceration is a necessary part of continuing their campaigns.
Indirect, symbolism: If a leader or champion of a terroristic or disruptive organization remains active in inspiring others, just having communication or visibility can be enough to keep the campaign alive. In this case the inmate does not have to directly lead illegal activities but can instead show afirmation of activities that are carried out by proxies under the blessing of the inmate.
~+~
I think it is important to have an understanding of the reasons for why CMUs exist and why it is believed to be necessary to confine some inmates into these units but what the lawsuit and Larry’s article are important to foster a conversation in to how far these CMUs go to protect the function of the prison, and the public at large while balancing the rights of the inmates.
The CMUs have their place, but perhaps some oversite into who goes there is certainly worthwhile and a due process issue for the incarcerated.
Cruel and unusual punishment? Wouldn’t that be drawing and quartering, which the British allegedly did for treason and related transgressions. Ever heard of “Papillion” or Austrailia? Self-supporting prison colonies. There’s your answer.
Put ’em behind the walls and let ’em take care of themselves without access to the “deep pockets” of the taxpayers. No $50K per prisoner, no $200K a year “guards” and no welfare, food stamps, day care assistance, utility subsidies, transportation compensation, etc., etc. for the families.
Did Mr. Universe come along after banging bigly with a bag of axioms that said everything, everywhere, every time for everybody is perfect – and the prime axiom: there will be no suffering ever, anywhere? How the heck did mankind make it this far, if not by suffering to a greater or lesser degree? Orders of magnitude of empathy and sympathy did not factor into survival of the fittest, did they? The symbiotic relationship between defense attorney and felon has achieved a bizarre state.