In Florida, a white prison gang brutally beat a Black 14-year-old named Martin Lee Anderson to death last year. Anderson had been sentenced to a juvenile boot camp prison in rural Florida as punishment for taking his grandmother’s car for a joyride and then violating the terms of his probation. Within hours of his arrival, gang members surrounded him, held him down, punched him, kicked him, and, while restraining him, held hands over his mouth for up to five minutes at a stretch. They went on beating him for half an hour. They kept on beating him even as he lay limp and unable to move. The attack was captured on tape in a surveillance video, and the autopsy report concluded that Anderson died of suffocation. But just a couple weeks ago, in spite of the video, in spite of the report, the thugs who murdered Martin Lee Anderson were acquitted by an all-white jury in Panama City, Florida. Why? Because when they battered Martin Lee Anderson to death, the gang colors they were wearing looked like this:

An uneasy sense of dèjá vu swept over Florida last week after an all-white jury acquitted seven juvenile boot camp guards and a nurse charged with aggravated manslaughter in the death of a black teen last year.

The shocking verdict came down despite a half hour of videotape that showed the guards hitting and kicking the 14-year-old, Martin Lee Anderson, and holding their hands over his mouth for as long as five minutes at a time, while the nurse stood by and watched. The jury seemed persuaded by the first and widely discredited autopsy report that blamed the boy’s death on a sickle-cell condition, even though a second autopsy ordered by the state had ruled Anderson died from suffocation (the Justice Department has since announced it will investigate whether federal civil rights violations charges should be brought in the case). It’s wrong! Anderson’s mother, Gina Jones, shouted as she stormed out of the Panama City courtroom after the verdict was read.

— Tim Padgett, TIME 2007-10-17: What’s Wrong With Florida’s Prisons?

(Story thanks to Alas, A Blog 2007-10-25 and The Bias Committee 2007-10-18.)

There’s more. Because there is always fucking more. For example, there are the repeated efforts by state and local officials to cover up the murder. Or there are the other cases.

The Anderson decision was reminiscent of another bewildering verdict five years ago, when three Florida state prison guards charged with stomping 36-year-old inmate Frank Valdes to death in his cell in 1999 were acquitted — even though the guards’ boot prints were found all over his back.

… The state is facing lawsuits alleging that its prisons subject too many inmates, including the mentally ill, to a prisoner “warehousing” culture of unlawfully extreme isolation and deprivation, usually with little or no rehabilitation efforts to prevent recidivism. Other suits decry what one calls excessive as well as malicious and sadistic use of pepper spray and other chemicals to keep mentally ill prisoners under control. In many cases the sprays have burned off inmates’ skin, according to the suit. Florida prisons still need to end this kind of outrageous conduct, says Randall Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute in Miami, which is participating in a suit filed against the state’s current Corrections head, James McDonough, along with other department officials.

… In June of 2003, Omar Paisley, 17, an inmate at a juvenile detention center in Miami that was filled 135% beyond capacity, died when nurses ignored his pleas for help after his appendix burst. The nurses were later charged with manslaughter and third-degree murder, to which they have pleaded not guilty, and their trials are pending. Prosecutors at the trial of Valdes — who was awaiting execution for murdering a Palm Beach County corrections officer in 1987 — contended that one of the reasons he was beaten was the letters he’d begun writing to the media about abuses at Florida State Prison under its then warden, James Crosby. That made it all the more surprising when Bush appointed Crosby secretary of the state’s Corrections Department in 2003. Then last year Crosby was convicted after a sweeping federal probe of corruption inside the state’s prisons — and he’s now serving eight years in prison himself.

Whenever these kind of atrocities happen, mainstream media sources routinely decry and marginalize them in the same breath, by describing the sadism and the violence as abuses within the prison system, rot within the corrections culture, etc. This admits the problem while not really taking it seriously. In fact, intimidation and violence are the currency of control in prisons as we know them, and these practices bear no meaningful relationship whatsoever to any defense against imminent threats: convicts are imprisoned and coerced whether or not their crimes were violent, whether or not their crimes were even particularly serious, and whether or not there is any realistic chance that they will pose an ongoing threat to anybody in the future, because the hangman State exercises its power in the name of after-the-fact deterrence of unrelated parties, in the name of rehabilitation, and sometimes in the name of punishment and vengeance. This is not a matter of some fundamentally humane institution being perverted, under the influence of corrupt individuals or a corrupt internal culture, into an abuse of power. The thing itself is the abuse.

Related:

• GT 2007-10-13: Gangsters in Blue
• GT 2006-04-07: Over My Shoulder #18: Barbara Deming’s A World Without Prisons (1970), from We Cannot Live Without Our Lives

As if deliberately setting out to taunt me, Kate Tennier of Toronto wants to coin retro-progressive as a political neologism. Lloyd Alter, also of Toronto, has come up with an accompanying survey, Are You a Retro-Progressive? With all due respect to deliberate primitivism and trend-story thinking person’s terms, I don’t think they’ve quite gotten it. So, I offer my own survey, below.

Are you a retrogressive retro-progressive?

Do you agree or disagree with the following quotations? For each that you agree with, give yourself one point.

We know enough about agriculture so that the agricultural production of the country could be doubled if the knowledge were applied. We know enough about disease so that if the knowledge were utilized, infectious and contagious diseases would be substantially destroyed in the United States within a score of years; we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation.

(That’s Progressive academic Charles R. Van Hise, quoted in Paul (1995), p. 78.)

… the way of Nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born.

(That’s notable Fabian H.G. Wells, in 1905, quoted in Paul (1995), p. 75.)

A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit — in other words social failures — would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.

(That’s the noted environmentalist lawyer and author Madison Grant in his eugenicist magnum opus, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), pp. 50–51.)

Bonus question. When you see the following picture…

… do you think (a) Quaint, anti-consumerist, and ecologically responsible, or (b) an ad-man’s glossy idealization of an underlying reality of unpaid labor, soul-killing drudgery, and patriarchal control? If (a), give yourself one point. If (b), your second-wave feminism isn’t trendily retro enough for a movement that rhetorically identifies itself with the leading white male technocrats of the 1900s-1930s.

If you scored three or more, congratulations. Your beliefs are closely in line with those of the retro Progressive movement. Now that’s some of that old time religion!

Further reading:

• GT 2007-03-22: The Progressivism of fools
• GT 2006-04-22: Over My Shoulder #20: Damon W. Root (2006), review of David W. Southern's The Progressive Era and Race

Femapsychosis, n. – a personality disorder characterized by grandiosity, narcissism, and an acute break from reality in the face of natural disasters. A femapsychotic often believes that he or she is the only one who is capable of saving thousands or even millions of people, and cannot conceive that anyone would not want or would not need his or her help. They create and fixate on plans, believing that the only way to help any individual person in a disaster area is to create and enforce a one-size-fits-all plan to cover every person affected. This fixation can become violent, sometimes leading to roadblocks and preemptive attacks on anyone who intends to offer help to individual victims of the disaster outside the scope of the plan.

For a case study, see the remarks by Ron, John, Jammer, and Dan T., in a Hit and Run thread on Kansas Mutual Aid and the Greensburg relief efforts, for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

(Link via Le Revue Gauche 2006-10-14.)

But remember, it doesn’t really count as torture unless a government lawyer decides that it’s bad enough to count.

In a new court filing on behalf of alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla, his lawyers allege that government interrogators forced him to take LSD, Gerstein reported.

Additionally, Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations, he quotes the filing.

— Justin Rood, TPMmuckraker (2006-10-12): Is U.S. Government Using LSD for Interrogations?

I have no way of knowing how credible Padilla’s specific claims are. But I do know this:

… in 2002, Justice Department lawyers carefully considered the issue and advised the White House that it was okay. In their view, it was acceptable to force detainees to ingest mind-altering substances, as long as it was not intended to cause months-long bouts of serious mental illness.

How do we know that? Because in August 2002, the Justice Department gave then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales a 50-page document saying so. And a follow-up document in 2004 reaffirmed it.

The now-infamous 2002 Bybee Memo was leaked to the press in 2004, at which time the administration quickly disavowed it. (In December 2004, Justice released a new version of guidance for detainee treatment.)

For nearly two years, the Bybee Memo was the administration’s guiding document for how detainees were to be treated. The document which replaced it does not appear to substantively alter its conclusions on forced drug use by detainees.

In the 2002 Bybee Memo, then-Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee (now a federal appellate judge) concluded that giving detainees mind altering substances (that’s a commonly used synonym for drugs, he noted for the squares in the White House) was legal, as long as doing so did not cause prolonged mental harm by disrupt[ing] profoundly the senses or personality, and was not intended to do so.

Bybee wrote that conditions such as months-long bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder or even chronic depression could be considered prolonged mental harm. As for what constituted a profound disruption of senses or personality that would cause such long-term suffering, he included:

• the inabliity to retain any new information or recall information about things previously of interest to the individual.

• deterioration of language function, e.g., repeating sounds or words over and over again;

• impaired ability to execute simple motor activities, e.g., inability to dress or wave goodbye;

• inability to recognize and identify objects such as chairs or pencils despite normal visual functioning;

• the onset of ‘brief psychotic disorder, in which a detainee suffers psychotic symptoms, including. . . delusions, hallucinations, or even a catatonic state [which] can last for one day or even one month;

and more. (These examples, of course, are in no way intended to be an exhaustive list, Bybee noted.)

Oh — and for this to constitute torture, the government handler who’s forcing drugs into the detainee has to specifically intend to cause prolonged mental harm, according to Bybee.

— Justin Rood, TPMmuckraker (2006-10-13): LSD Mystery: In 2002, Justice Dept. OK’d Dosing Detainees

Please bear in mind that this government has no particular qualms about forcing psychotropic drugs on prisoners against their will, if they find it useful to deliberately destroy the prisoner’s sense of reality in the course of an interrogation, just as long as the psychotic break that they force on you wasn’t specifically intended to be more prolonged than a government lawyer thinks it ought to be.

Welcome to life in Red State America.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-05-11: Free Carol Fischer! State of Ohio puts a political dissident into psychiatric confinement
• GT 2002-08-10: Judge Doumar has made his ruling; now let him enforce it.
• GT 2002-06-11: An Important Update from the War Information Council

Please let as many people know about this as you can.

Cleveland antiwar activist Carol Fischer is being held incommunicado in the psychiatric of the Cuyahoga County jail in on the orders of Judge Timothy McGinty. Fischer, who at 53 years old stands 5’4″ and weighs 130 pounds, was convicted of a felonious assault she allegedly committed against two Cleveland Heights police officers last year. The cops claim that Fischer bit and tried to hit them when they arrested her for posting Bush Step Down posters in violation of the city sign ordinance; Fischer and her supporters claim that she was cooperating and the police attacked her without cause:

According to her statements, Fisher was hanging posters announcing the World Can't Wait Cleveland action during the State of the Union, when a passing officer told her it was a $100 fine if she didn't take it down.

Fisher turned and walked toward the poster, in compliance with the officer's warning. But instead of allowing her to take it down or just issuing a citation, Downey and Frinzl were on top of her grinding his knee into [Fisher's] back and [her] face into the sidewalk.

Fisher said she told the officers she could not breathe. That didn't matter. Two more officers showed up, and they dragged her to a bench, shackled her legs, and handcuffed her tight enough to cause serious bruising.

Fisher objected to her arrest, telling the officers that as citizens we have the responsibility to stop the crimes of the Bush regime.

According to her statements, this inflamed the officers. One told her, I am sick of this anti-Bush shit, and they threatened to kill her. You are definitely going to the psych ward, said another. And that's where she ended up, incommunicado, even to her Power of Attorney for health care. University Hospitals personnel were forbidden by the police to allow visitors or for Fisher to make a phone call.

— Eric Resnick, Cleveland Independent Media Center (2006-02-16): Not Guilty, Carol Fisher arraigned this morning

Fischer was found guilty on all charges after a controversial trial in which the judge repeatedly blocked defense testimony. Now, I don’t have any particular knowledge of Carol Fischer, or the cops, or the case, so I have no particular way of knowing whether she is innocent or guilty. What I do know is that this is obscene:

According to World Can’t Wait, Judge Timothy McGinty has forcibly incarcerated Carol Fisher in the psych unit of the Cuyahoga County Jail in downtown Cleveland, for an undetermined period of time. McGinty is forcing Fisher to undergo a state psychological exam as part of her pre-sentencing investigation. During yesterday’s hearing, McGinty stated that Fisher’s opposition to the Bush regime indicates to him that she is delusional.

At the hearing held yesterday, McGinty wore a t-shirt which read: Wanted for Illegally Crossing Borders: The Bush Regime If you are going to insist that crossing borders illegally is a crime which cannot be tolerated, how about George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice (and yes, Colin Powell) and the rest of that gang, with their highly illegal, and violent, crossing of the border — into Iraq, among other places?! McGinty stated that Fisher’s t-shirt evidenced her delusion. When Fisher began to explain her opposition to psychological testing, McGinty stated: I do not negotiate with felons. World Can’t Wait reports that in a telephone conversation with Fisher yesterday, she stated she had inexplicably been put on suicide watch and her eyeglasses had been taken from her. If she continues to refuse the psych exam, she will be forcibly sent to North Coast Mental Institute for a 20-day evaluation.

— Heart, Women’s Space / The Margins (2006-05-11): Free Carol Fisher! Judge Orders Peace Activist to Jail Psych Unit

Hey, McGinty, Comrade Brezhnev sends his fraternal greetings. Lest we forget:

Thanks to [Vladimir] Bukovsky’s efforts, we know, among other things, what happened at the 1967 Politburo meeting which took place just before his own arrest. Bukovsky in particular was struck by how many of those present felt that bringing criminal charges against him would cause a certain reaction inside the country and abroad. It would be a mistake, they concluded, simply to arrest Bukovsky–so they proposed to put him in a psychiatric hospital instead. The era of the psikhushka–the special mental hospital–had begun.

… In the aftermath of the Thaw, the authorities began once again to use psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate dissidents–a policy which had many advantages for the KGB. Above all, it helped discredit the dissidents, both in the West and in the USSR, and deflected attention away from them. If these were not serious political opponents of the regime, but merely crazy people, who could object to their hospitalization?

With great enthusiasm, the Soviet psychiatric establishment participated in the farce. To explain the phenomenon of dissidence, they came up with the definition of sluggish schizophrenia or creeping schizophrenia. This, scientists explained, was a form of schizophrenia which left no mark on the intellect or outward behavior, yet could encompass nearly any form of behavior deemed asocial or abnormal. Most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure, wrote two Soviet professors, both of the Serbsky Institute:

A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas in the patient’s conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled rights, and the significance of these feelings for the patient’s personality. They tend to explit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals.

And, by this definition, just about all of the dissidents qualified as crazy. … In one report sent up to the Central Committee, a local KGB commander also complained that he had on his hands a group of citizens with a very particular form of mental illness: they try to found new parties, organizations, and councils, preparing and distributing plans for new laws and programs.

… If diagnosed as mentally ill, patients were condemned to a term in a hospital, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for many years. … In both the ordinary and the special hospitals, the doctors aimed, again, at recantation. Patients who agreed to renounce their convictions, who admitted that mental illness had caused them to criticize the Soviet system, could be declared healthy and set free. Those who did not recant were considered still ill, and could be given treatment. As Soviet psychiatrists did not believe in psychoanalysis, this treatment consisted largely of drugs, electric shocks, and various forms of restraint. Drugs abandoned in the West in the 1930s were administered routinely forcing patients’ body temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade, causing pain and discomfort. Prison doctors also prescribed tranquilizers [antipsychotic neuroleptics, such as Thorazine and Haldol –R.G.] which caused a range of side effects, including physical rigidity, slowness, and involuntary tics and movements, not to mention apathy and indifference.

… Eventually, the issue galvanized scientists in the Soviet Union. When Zhores Medvedev was condemned to a psychiatric hospital, many of them wrote letters of protest to the Soviet Academy of Scientists. Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who was, by the late 1960s, emerging as the moral leader of the dissident movement, made a public statement on Medvedev’s behalf at an international symposium at the Institute of Genetics. Solzhenitsyn, by now in the West, wrote an open letter to the Soviet authorities protesting Medvedev’s incarceration. After all, he wrote, it is time to think clearly: the incarceration of free-thinking healthy people is SPIRITUAL MURDER.

— Anne Applebaum, GULAG: A History (2003), pp. 547–550.

Here’s what World Can’t Wait suggests you can do to support Carol Fischer:

• Donate to Carol’s legal defense. It costs a lot of money to get transcripts, file appeals, etc. Make checks payable to Carol Fisher Defense Fund and mail to NION/WCW PO Box 609034 Cleveland, OH 44109.

• Call Judge Timothy McGinty and express your outrage: 216-443-8758

• Join us at a Speak Out! for Carol Fisher — Saturday, May 13 at 7pm at the corner of Coventry and Euclid Heights Blvd in Cleveland Heights.

• Get your legal organization to be part of Carol’s defense: make statements, file friend of the court briefs, etc.

• Have your church group, school group, organization or club join this battle by sending statements of support, donating funds, etc.

• Request radio stations play any of the following songs, dedicate it to Carol Fisher and explain what is going on with her case:

  • Tom Petty's Won't Back Down
  • Pearl Jam's World Wide Suicide
  • Pink's Dear Mr President
  • Neil Young's Let's Impeach the President

• Write letters to the editor of:

  • The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Go to website: http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/lettertoeditor
  • The Cleveland Free Times. Email: editor@freetimes.com
  • The Sun Press. Email: sun@sunnews.com

• Send this article to your list serves and post to blogs.

Of course, WCW also wants you to join up with World Can’t Wait. I wouldn’t advise it, unless you like hanging out with well-intentioned peaceniks being steered by creepy Maoist cultists. But McGinty’s efforts to build his own psychoprison system must not stand. Free Carol Fischer! Free all psychiatric prisoners!