Left And Right Have Worked Together For More Humane Prisons

Left and right uniting on prison reform is in the news.  This story in the New York Times is about the unlikely alliance of usually bitter adversaries Koch Industries and the Center For American Progress.

Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the conservative Koch brothers, and the center, a Washington-based liberal issues group, are coming together to back a new organization called the Coalition for Public Safety. The coalition plans a multimillion-dollar campaign on behalf of emerging proposals to reduce prison populations, overhaul sentencing, reduce recidivism and take on similar initiatives. Other groups from both the left and right — the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, the Tea Party-oriented FreedomWorks — are also part of the coalition, reflecting its unusually bipartisan approach.

This is great.  The reason I can say that with such confidence is that I have seen it happen before and it really worked.  Here is a picture of left and right sharing common ground on a prison issue.



The picture there has Ted Kennedy watching while my friend Tom Cahill congratulates George W. Busch on his signing of the Prison Rape Elimination Act .  Not very long before that Tom had been in Iraq serving as human shield, possibly the only US Air Force veteran to do that.

In my nearly 20 years working with Justice Detention International (formerly Stop Prisoner Rape), support for the effort to end sexual abuse in detention has come from across the ideological spectrum.
When Kent Hovind, who is about as far right as you could conceivably published a book calling for prison reform, I asked Tom Cahill for his comments.  Tom had high praise.

Fixing the prison industrial complex is something that both left and right can embrace.  It should be interesting.

Tom Cahill Forgives The FBI

My friend Tom Cahill  has given me permission to republish his letters home from his voluntary exile in France. This is the first in the series.  It will be daily until I have caught up and then as I receive them.

Hullo Audrey,

I can't sleep so here's a very small part of "our" story--yours as well as mine and EVERY other living American.

I grew up in New Jersey where I was born in 1937. While in the Air Force in 1955, I fell in love with Texas where I was stationed awhile.  Upon discharge from the service, I studied journalism at the University of Texas in Austin and afterward  got a job on a statewide magazine during which time I was assigned to photograph Pres. & Mrs. Kennedy at a Democratic Party Fundraiser in Austin the night of Nov. 22, 1963.  I had a White House press pass and a friend of Vice-Pres. Johnson was going to set-up a photo op for me.  To say this 26-year-old was "excited," is an understatement.

Of course the Kennedy's never made it to the Party-party.  And this was the second or third major trauma of my life, the first having grown up in a dysfunctional family, and the second my service time in Germany for which in January 2013 I received a 100 percent, service-connected disability pension from the Department of Veterans Affairs.  This is how I'm now able to live abroad.

By 1967, I was totally involved in the "zeitgeist," publishing an "underground" newspaper in San Antonio, Texas (possibly America's most fascist city then AND now).  While jailed for civil disobedience in October 1968, I was beaten, gang-raped and otherwise tortured for twenty-four hours, then kept in the same cell for two weeks until I looked presentable.  A guard or trustee had told my cell mates (mostly black and Hispanic) that I was a "child-molester" and, "If you take care of him, you might get an extra ration of Jello."

Two memos from my FBI files indicate COINTELPRO (the Bureau's Counter Intelligence Program against the "New Left")  set me up.  FBI "dirty tricks," the term used by the media back then, was common in the late 60s and early 70s and my treatment might have been one of the more gentler.

A few months later, in my sister's custody, we relocated in San Francisco.  My sister is a retired nurse and former Catholic nun residing in Napa.  She was/is a "secondary victim"  of my ordeal and has her own horror story about this time of our lives.

About ten years later, the accumulated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) set in with a vengeance.  My wife of the time and I lost our business, we separated, and I became homeless, living in a battered, leaky camper shell on back of an equally old pick-up mostly in San Francisco from 1977 until 1987.  Fortunately I got into therapy at the Center for Victims of Violence in San Francisco and even attended meetings of a rape support group in which I was the only male.  The women accepted me right away and helped me understand Rape Trauma Syndrome (RTS) which is a form of PTSD.

While researching RTS and PTSD, I  read in the "Chronicle" about a group called "People Organized to Stop Rape of Imprisoned Persons (POSRIP).  I contacted a former member who told me POSRIP was defunct but sent me a bunch of back issues of their newsletter.  Through the article in the Chron and the newsletters I became outraged at the extent of this barbarism as well as how  long it had been happening.  It seemed to me that Church, State AND Society were all conspiring to cover-up this yucky subject that has affected every last one of us and I can damn well prove it.

Audrey--as I write this, I can feel my blood pressure rising but I'll continue.  I'm just experiencing a tiny bit of the rage I used to feel back in the Eighties when my PTSD/RTS kicked-in big time.  Back then I'd go to the gym at the South End Rowing Club and punch a bag till the anger subsided, then I'd row for an hour or so around Fisherman's Wharf.

In 1984, I fasted two months (63 days), the last few weeks parked outside the gates of San Quentin Prison.  Because of a story that appeared in a Marin County newspaper, the "Chronicle" sent a reporter to interview me.  In my camper, we spent at least an hour and more like two.  I had a lot to show and tell him including my 300-plus-page FBI file covering the years 1967-71.  Upon leaving, the guy told me something to the effect, "You know, Tom, I'm just a reporter.  I don't know if the paper will run this story."

I thanked the guy for hearing me out and bid him a polite "good-bye" although I was seething inside.   "Between-the-lines," I got the message--OUR story may NOT be newsworthy.  By "OUR," I meant hundreds of thousands if not millions of victims AND "secondary" victims of institutionalized torture.  In fact, prisoner rape affects EVERY American psycho/spiritually as well as financially.  Among other things, it's a major reason for violent crime in and out of prison.  Deep down, officials know this but have turned a blind eye to the bloodshed and a deaf ear to the screams of terror because it feeds the justice industry.  And if the USA is good at anything, it's marketing--crime, war, morality, illegal drugs--all products that make big bucks for the gangsters in the suites.

But I digress . . .

After two weeks and the story didn't appear in the "Chronicle," I first drove to the VA hospital at Fort Miley for a check-up at which time the doctor gave me a week to live.  I left my truck at the hospital and took a bus downtown to the "Chronicle."  I had a walking stick for support and a hammer with which to tap the computer screen of any reporter who might tell me "our" story was not newsworthy.  But by then the city room was closed to the public and a guard at a desk handed me a phone with a direct like to a reporter who told me, "Yea, I know about you," and hung up.  I was expecting a brush-off but not as rudely at this.

Calmly, I walked out front, assumed the lotus position in front of one of the plate glass doors,  and Native American Indian-style, asked the door for forgiveness before killing it.  You bet I was manic!

Genaro Molina, a Chron photographer, arrived at the same time as the police.  It was about 11:10 AM,  22 August 1984. I recorded it somehow in my brain. To my knowledge the "Chronicle" never published the photo or story.  But some months later, Warren Hinkle, who had been a columnist for the "Chronicle" before relocating at the "Examiner," did a column about those of us sexually assaulted behind bars.

At the website of "Just Detention International," you can get some more of the the story including photographs of me and the 1971 truck/camper I bought about 1985 that served as my home AND the office of POSRIP until 1987 when I moved into a barn in Mendocino County.  The truck I lived in from 1977 to 1985 was a 1968 Ford with a camper-shell someone had left in a junk yard.

Now I have a 1996 Peugeot bus converted into what the French call (in English) a "camping car." I have a Hobie I9S sailing kayak and between doctors' appointments, I travel from one scenic puddle to another like the water spaniel I am.  Home is a townhouse I rent from a friend on the west coast of Normandy not far from Mont St. Michel.  This morning, I'll pick up my residence permit from the police. Soon I'll get French national health insurance.  Then that's all I'll need is a French driver's license to be an ex-patriot in the truest sense of the word.

I believe in the healing power of forgiveness.  I forgive the the FBI for their dirty trick on me.  I forgive the  "San Francisco Chronicle" for not publishing our story in 1984 that might have speeded-up  the present program of stopping this cruelty.  I forgive the American people for not caring about the many injustices all around them till one happens to them.  I forgive myself for not being a better communicator.

Tom Cahill

Granville, France

Warning to Occupy Wall Street - Rape Can Still be Part of the Penalty

This was originally published on forbes.com on October 2011.  It is a guest post by Tom Cahill.  There are three words that I considered cutting, but left alone, which sparked a bit of controversy.  See if you can spot them.

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A brief stint in custody as the result of acts of civil disobedience might be an event that you can reminisce on.  Something that can add a bit of color to your life.  Think about Henry David Thoreau turning a day in the Concord jail into the classic On Civil Disobedience.  He had refused to pay his poll tax to protest the Mexican War.  A little more contemporary, although quite old now, is the indie cult classic Return of The Seacaucus Seven, where a group of boomers fast approaching the watershed age of 30, gather in New Hampshire and talk about how they didn't make it to the big Washington protest, because they were arrested in New Jersey.  The brief  jail visit can be much more horrifying for some.  I personally have known two activists, who were brutally gang raped during brief incarcerations for minor acts of civil disobedience.  Stephen Donaldson died in 1996, but Tom Cahill still feels his spirit alive.  Tom asked me to share this caution with the young occupiers out there. 

DONNY’S   MESSAGE

Donny phoned me up very early this morning from Valhalla.  He wanted me to warn the young 99 Percenters who are now “Occupying Everywhere” of the possibility of being raped in jail even if in for a short time and what they could do to prevent it.  I agreed with him that he and I most definitely were NOT the only political activists to receive this “Royal Treatment,” as Joan Baez sang about in one of her songs a generation or so ago. 

What better way is there to “neutralize” a dissenter than by having her and especially him sexually assaulted or even merely threatened.  The humiliation is unbearable.  Thus rape is self-silencing in most cases but not for Donny who, as you know, was the first prisoner rape victim to go public.  And he did so immediately after his release from the hospital.

In fact, he called a press conference. 

For your readers unfamiliar with Stephen Donaldson, he was a US Navy Vietnam War-era veteran arrested on the grounds of the Nixon White House at a pray-in to end the bombing of Cambodia in 1973.  Refusing to make bail of ten dollars because he felt it discriminated against the poor, he was first placed in a cell block with mostly white prisoners like himself, among whom was G. Gordon Liddy who was locked-up for the Watergate break-in.  In his autobiography “Will,” Liddy expressed remorse that he may have been responsible for Donny being transferred to a cell block containing only black prisoners where the small, youthful-looking Donny was gang-raped for several days. 

A Korean War-era veteran of the US Air Force, I had been raped a few years earlier, in October 1968--in San Antonio where I had been publishing an underground newspaper named “Inferno” in Spanish and English.  Two memos from my FBI files indicate COINTELPRO may have set me up to be “neutralized” (their word) by being beaten, gang-raped and otherwise tortured for twenty-four hours while jailed for civil disobedience. 

With Donny working out of his tiny apartment in Harlem to stop prisoner rape and me on the opposite coast working out of the camper of my pick-up truck while homeless in San Francisco, we hooked-up in the early Eighties with an organization that went through several name changes and great metamorphosis.  Just Detention International (JDI) now has a paid staff and offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. and, of course, a website.

And Joan Baez, like her sister Mimi Farina before she died, is on our advisory council. 

JDI was instrumental in passing the Prisoner Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003.  It should have been Donny who witnessed the signing ceremony in the Oval Office that September but he had died in 1996, just days short of his 50th birthday from AIDS contracted from being raped again years later while confined—again--for civil disobedience. 

Earlier in 2003, I had been in Iraq where I served as a volunteer human shield at a water treatment plant near Baghdad during the US-led bombing and invasion.  I wasn’t home long when I was invited to the White House for the signing ceremony because I was a survivor of prisoner rape and the activist who had worked on the issue longest.  Watching Pres. George Bush sign the PREA into law while Sen. Teddy Kennedy and others looked on was, for me, far more surreal than any acid trip I ever took in the Sixties and early Seventies.

Now, almost a decade after the signing ceremony, the Obama/Holder Justice Department is dragging its feet in putting it’s full support behind the PREA.  On the “phone” early this morning, Donny and I agreed that “someone” may want to keep this “management tool”—as Donny and I call prisoner rape—an option for rebellious young people.  Isn’t it at least strange that the allegedly most liberal or at least most moderate presidential administration in years is NOT supportive of a humane bill passed by perhaps the most conservative and most corrupt presidential administration in US history? 

But as a long-time, non-violent, left-wing radical activist and survivor of torture, institutionalized barbarism is not strange to me.  For instance, I’ve been keeping my eye on FEMA prison camps since construction began a decade or two ago.  Now there are between six and eight hundred all over the country—waiting empty but stocked with supplies for a national “emergency.”  Just two years ago, Pres. Obama gave his approval to the prison camps managed by FEMA by signing into law the National Emergency Centers Act (HR 645) of 2009.  Yes, I’m a “conspiracy nut” and for many bloody good reasons. 

Meanwhile the 99 Percenters need to be informed about prisoner rape as well as the prison camps.  And one way to avoid both is by spreading the word, exposing these un-American methods of crushing dissent.  This is Donny’s message from his aerie.

 My View

The work of JDI and other human rights organization has sparked great progress in eliminating this horrible human rights abuse.  It still occurs at an epidemic level.  If arrests of OWS protesters run into the thousands it will not be a question of whether some of them will be raped, it will be question of how many.  My "It is what it is. Deal with it" perspective would say to demonstrators that you should avoid arrest.  It is just not worth the risk. I'm skeptical about Tom's theory on the FEMA prison camps, but the risk of rape in jail is extremely well documented. For a greater understanding of the issue check out the JDI website or watch the powerful documentary Turned Out by Interlock Media.

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The post was picked up by radfem Hub, which sadly now is just an archive.  It sparked my interest in contemporary radical feminism, something which I followed without writing about very much, but when I did write about it it got interesting.