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.
I'd like to say that Tom Cahill needs no introduction. Maybe he doesn't to you. That fellow shaking hands with Tom Cahill was President of the United States at the time. Tom is congratulating him for signing the Prison Rape Elimination Act. In case you don't know him. Tom is a long time activist. The cause that absorbed him more than any other was the fate of people who were sexually assaulted while in prison. To the extent I am an activist, Tom is one of my inspirations. Of course, the people who inspire you were inspired by others. Tom recently wrote a touching piece about the passing of one of his mentors. He gave me permission to share it with my readers. As I write this, the bells of Eglise St. Pair are ringing wildly--noisily announcing eleven o'clock '"high mass" to the town's faithful. But to me, the bells are reporting to the world the passing of another great soul.
Tom Flower, my friend and mentor of almost half a century, left earth June 28 on his journey to wherever and however his soul wishes to spend eternity. John Thomas Flower was 83 and had been suffering poor health for many years. He leaves behind his "flower children"--two daughters, two sons, and lots of grandchildren. His dog, Aidan, the last of a long line of American Water Spaniels named for Irish saints, will also miss him dearly.
Tom died peacefully while taking a bath in his home in Houston, Texas, according to his children.
If the purpose of life, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, is NOT to be happy but instead "to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well," then Tom Flower gets high marks in anyone's book.
It was Tom Flower more than anyone else who in 1967, turned me 180 degrees from a neoliberal supporter of the U.S. War to stop "Godless Communism" in Vietnam to a radical, activist, "peacenik" and publisher/editor of an "underground" newspaper in San Antonio, Texas. Although my memory fails me in many things, I vividly recall the day a handful of us were picketing for peace in front of the Alamo of all places. Tom was softly, gently conversing with a passerby who, as Tom explained his reasons for not supporting "Lyndon Johnson's War," the man became more and more agitated until he punched Tom in the face, knocking him down. Tom, then 36, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard AND Marine Corps, and in the peak of health and strength, quickly got to his feet, and assumed military "parade rest" with his hands behind his back while looking straight ahead as the man mumbled something and walked away, eyes wide with fear.
Because the Democratic Party including its staunchest supporter--organized labor--accepted Pres. Lyndon Johnson's main agenda of escalating the war on Vietnam, mostly young Americans all over the country formed what became known as the "New Left"--conversely supporting the deescalation of the war as proposed by Pres. John Kennedy before he was assassinated in 1963. COINTELPRO, on the other hand, was the FBI's totally illegal counter intelligence program to destroy the New Left. And Tom Flower was so active in the "San Antonio Committee to Stop the War" that he became targeted by J. Edgar Hoover's sycophants. Among other things, Tom was fired from his job as a highly-successful, well-paid and well-liked pharmaceutical salesman. Malicious rumors were also spread about him throughout South Texas. This and more "dirty tricks" were reported in a mainstream magazine in San Antonio in about 1978, the journalist having gotten his information from the government under the Freedom of Information Act.
Tom Flower then lived and traveled all over the U.S., sometimes living communally and sometimes homeless but always being of service to others and working for the most worthy of causes especially peace. In San Francisco in the 1980s, while both of us were living in vehicles, he set-up a soup kitchen under the auspices of a church. About this time, another church, I think Anglican, ordained him a priest. I visited him often in San Francisco's Tenderloin, sometimes helping him. My favorite photo of him was published in a local newspaper at this time. It shows Tom sweeping the sidewalk where he was about to serve breakfast. He's wearing a beret and a long cassock made of denim an admirer made for him. With his grey beard and wire-framed glasses, he looks like a holy man from another century and another country.
But like many saints, Tom could be a pain-in-the-ass. He was clumsy, disorganized, messy, always breaking stuff, disrespectful of his own and others' possessions, space, money, and time. He was forever loosing his keys and other things. I could always find him because wherever he went, he'd leave a trail of dental floss but no other debris; he must have had the healthiest teeth in Christendom. He would give anyone the shirt off his own back and perhaps the shirt off your back if he could talk you out of it as he once did with me. But just once! When he would visit me on a quiet, bucolic ranch in Northern California where I lived many years, I would cringe when he called Brendan, the predecessor of Aidan, in his loud, booming voice like a first sergeant with a megaphone even. I was always happy to see Tom and his latest Spaniel arrive, but always equally happy to see them leave. They took up too much of my tiny, quiet, monastery-like space.
But on the other side of his ledger, Tom was not only a supporter of, but genuinely lived "the Radical Imperative," "religious socialism," "and "Liberation Theology"--all progressive ideas to help humanize humankind in general, Christians in particular.
Tom was a great story-teller in the tradition of the Irish. He liked to tell about the time he and I got lost looking for a friend's home on San Juan Island in the Puget Sound. Footsore and tired as night darkened the road, I began playing Irish marching tunes on my harmonica to keep our spirits up. And, damn, if Tom didn't know the words to every song I played.
Tom Flower's IQ was off the chart and he was verbally-gifted--meaning, of course, his tongue was well-connected to his brain. I frequently imagined him a great court-room attorney or an even greater statesman successfully advocating unpopular causes. Hey, he did very well selling drugs--the legal kind. And while he smoked the illegal kind--maybe a little too much sometimes--he never sold pot. I know this for sure because often while he was working and I was collecting unemployment, he would hit ME up for a loan. If he had been selling marijuana, he would have built his own church with a kitchen instead of an altar, and bunks instead of pews. My Brudder was that kind of stand-up guy. More About Tom Flower I found this case from 1972 that Tom Flower starred in. More about Tom Cahill. Here is a little bit of what I have shared about Tom Cahill over the years. This piece is about some progress in the fight against those sexually detained in prison.
This was written by Tom for me warning the activists at Occupy Wall Street about the threat of sexual assault behind bars. Two words in the piece, that Tom is still doing penance for, ended up launching me into following contemporary radical feminism, something I never thought I would write about, but it turned out I did. This is another OWS piece.
This piece about an activist case ended up mainly being about Tom.
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.
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.
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.
