Ammon Hennacy over de isoleercel

Uit het handboek over hoe de isoleercel te overleven. Hennacy mocht in 1918 nog wel een boek, en wel de bijbel, bij zich hebben.

1. Warden Zerbst offered to let Hennacy out of solitary if he
would snitch.

In about five minutes he returned, saying: "I forgot to ask you something, Hennacy. I’ll leave you out tomorrow just the same."

"What is on your mind?" I asked.

"Have you been sneaking letters out of this prison?" he asked in an angry tone.

"Sure," I replied, smiling.

"Who is doing it for you?" he demanded.

"A friend of mine," I answered.

"What is his name?" was the query.

"That is for you and your guards and stool pigeons to find out. I won’t tell you, for I want to get some more letters out concerning the evil things that go on," I replied good-naturedly.

He stormed around my cell, somewhat taken back by the fact that I had not lied or given in. "You’ll stay in here all your good time and get another year, you stubborn fool," he said as he left.
It was not for many years that I knew I had used the method of moral jiu jitsu as advised by Ghandi: If you don’t give your enemy a hold he can’t throw you.

Never be on the defensive; always answer quickly and keep the enemy on the run. He is used to trickery and is put off his guard by an honest and courageous opponent whom he cannot scare or bribe... (But) the world needs a Samson to pull down their whole structure of lies.

2. Hennacy hears the groans of the prisoner in the cell next to him. This man is being tortured to the point of madness. Hennacy thinks of suicide.

How soon would I be strung to the bars? How long could a fellow stand such treatment?

As soon as it was dark I sharpened my spoon again and tried it gently on my wrist. The skin seemed to be quite tough, but then I could press harder. If I cut my wrist at midnight I could be dead by morning. I thought I ought to write a note to Selma and to my mother and I couldn’t see to do it until morning. Well, I had waited that long, I could wait a day longer.

3. Hennacy survives. He sings, reads, and thinks about love and purpose.

The sun shone brightly in my cell the next morning for the first time in weeks. I crouched again by the door and saw Berkman’s bald head.

Tears came into my eyes and I felt ashamed of myself for my cowardly idea of suicide just because I had a few reverses. Here was Berkman who had passed through much more than I would ever have to endure if I stayed two more years in solitary. How was the world to know more about the continued torture of Popoff and others if I gave up?

The last two verses of the I.W.W. Prison Song now had

a real meaning to me as I sang them again. I was through with despair. I wanted to live to make the world better. Just because more prisoners, and for all that, most people on the outside, did not understand and know what solitary meant was all the more reason why I should be strong. I sang cheerfully:

By all the graves of Labors dead,

By Labor’s deathless/lag of red,

We make a solemn vow to you,

We’II keep the faith, we will be true.

For freedom laughs at prison bars,

Her voice reaches to the stars;

Proclaiming with the tempest’s breath

A cause beyond the reach of death.

I had now read [the Bible] through four times and read the New Testament many times and the Sermon on the Mount scores of times.

I had made up games with pages and chapters and names of characters in the Bible to pass away the time. I had memorized certain chapters that I liked. As I read of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Micah and others of the prophets and of Jesus, I could see that they had opposed tyranny. I had also spent many days reviewing all of the historical knowledge that I could remember and in trying to think through a philosophy of life. I had passed through the idea of killing myself. This was an escape, not any solution to life. The remainder of my two years in solitary must result in a clear-cut plan whereby I could go forth and be a force in the world. I could not take any halfway measures…

I had called loudly for the sword and mentally listed those whom I desired to kill when I was free. Was this really the universal method which should be used? I would read

the Sermon on the Mount again. When a child I had been frightened by hell fire into proclaiming a change of life.

Now I spent months making a decision; there was no sudden change. I had all the time in the world and no one could talk to me or influence me. I was deciding this idea for myself.

Gradually I came to gain a glimpse of what Jesus meant when He said, "The Kingdom of God is Within You." In my heart now after six months I could love everybody in the world but the warden, but if I did not love him then the Sermon on the Mount meant nothing at all. I really saw this and felt it in my heart, but I was too stubborn to admit it in my mind.

One day, I was walking back and forth in my cell when, in turning, my head hit the wall. Then the thought came to me:

"Here I am locked up in a cell. The warden was never locked up in any cell and he never had a chance to know what Jesus meant. Neither did I until yesterday. So I must not blame him. I must love him."

Now the whole thing was clear. The Kingdom of God must be in everyone: in the deputy, the warden, in the rat and the pervert. And now I came to know it—in myself.

I read and reread the Sermon on the Mount: the fifth, sixth and seventh chapter of Matthew thus became a living thing to me. I tried to take every sentence and apply it to my present problems. The warden had said that he did not understand political prisoners. He and the deputy, in plain words, did not know any better; they had put on the false face of sternness and tyranny because this was the only method which they knew. It was my job to teach them an other method: that of goodwill overcoming their evil intention, or rather habits.

The opposite of the Sermon on the Mount was what the whole world has been practicing in prisons and out of prison; and hate piled on hate has brought hate and revenge. It was plain that this system did not work.



Ammon Hennacy, Georgia 1918

Vanuit de Griekse isoleercel

Op 20 februari schreef Katerina Goulioni onderstaande brief aan de Griekse ombudsman. Op 18 maart was zij dood. Met enkele verbeteringen overgenomen van Occupied London, ik hoop niet dat het mij kwalijk genomen wordt dat ik het verhaal niet in het Nederlands vertaal (het zou toch een tweedehandsvertaling zijn).
De dood van Katerina Goulioni heeft to een algemene gevangenisopstand in Griekenland geleid.

Complaint to the Greek Ombudsman by prisoner Katerina Goulioni

Eleonas Thivon, 20-02-09

I am 41 years old today, addicted to heroin from the age of 17. All these years I have been sick and addicted to a substance without which I would not be able to stand, to work, to live. The worst nightmare however, some nightmare many consider a somehow given follow-up to the addiction, is one I had never imagined I would live in the way I live and am threatened to live daily. This “given follow-up to the addiction” is my imprisonment which means my captivity, being taken hostage by prison guards who control and intervene even on my genitals and most private parts of my body.

Whenever I enter a prison, either because I go there for the first time or after returning from court or the hospital, I am subject to the following attack, which they call “body search”:

The guard forces me to take off all my clothes, to open up my legs and to cough while she examines my anus. Often she takes the opportunity to examine my naked body; she looks at me thoroughly, she treats me offensively, ironically, as if I’m the worst scum on earth.

Then, they give me other clothes, from their storage, which are mismatching and humiliating. They take my bra because it is “banned” in isolation as I might, supposedly… kill myself with it. They give me shoes a few sizes bigger than mine so that I walk like a clown and they take me to the pharmacy. There, they make me sit on a gynaecological chair and the guard puts her finger in my vagina. I am then forced to urinate in the presence of the guard, for the drug test.

Once, on the paper placed on the gynaecological chair where they put me I saw hair of the previous prisoner. The sterilisation of their equipment is something they only occasionally remember. To some they place rusty dilators while forcing their fingers in such way that the prisoner is in pain. The sarcastic jokes do not miss from their repertoire.

Recently I refused a vaginal examination from the gynaecologist as I think that regardless of knowledge, specialisation and education level, having anyone force their fingers into you is at least “improper”, I’d say. I asked for a sonar scan only to be threatened I would be tied up overnight - this threat was mouthed by the prison guard assigned the role of a …nurse in the Prison of Thiva, Stella Gavana, in the presence of her superior Sotoria Sampani. She told me that since I am a prisoner I must accept the vaginal examination - and those who are not prisoners are “different”. In short she told me and still tell me that since I am a prisoner they can do whatever they want with me and I should not react.

They took me to sub-commander of the prison Aglaia Kafritsa, who told me that since I refuse the vaginal examination, any drugs found in the prison she will charge on me and that she will hold me in solitary confinement for many days to come. When I asked her for a sonar scan and told her I can no longer stand this raping of my vagina she told me she did not have the capacity to do that. I replied that I am not obliged to pay for their own incapacity and they took me to solitary - where they would take me, that is, whether they had given me a vaginal examination or not.

In solitary they put me in a cell where I had to ring a bell for a guard to come take me to a toilet shared between all the prisoners and watched by a camera.

While defecating you are being watched by the prison guard from the camera and only once she sees your excrement can you ask for her permission to flush the toilet.

Not only am I forced to defecate in front of a prison guard, I am also forced to defecate 8 times before I am removed from solitary - although this, too, depends on their mood.

Most prisoners take laxatives in order to achieve these 8 defecations and often either the prison guard doesn’t come to open their door or there is another prisoner in the toilet and so they literally defacate on themselves. The guards will threatingly tell them, “this is Thiva, you will only ring the bell when you really need it”, which “real need” is assessed by the prison guard. Or they will grudgingly tell them, “you want to go to the toilet again?”, and similar in an unbelievably inhuman and sadist behaviour.

It has happened to me that the guard would not open the door and so I was forced to urinate in a plastic bottle and to later have problems with my bowel because of holding on defacating. In the end I reached the point of kicking the cell’s door so that it would open; the guard treated me subhumanly and in a provocative manner because I called her “chicken”; she wrote a false report (ms Harikleia Daniilidou is the guard in question) together with guard Ioannis Galanis, who was on duty on the day. I stood against the disciplinary committee and their subordinate attorney Georgios Prassas punished me with the detention in isolation for five days with the additional and illegal removal of my right to coffee, cigaretes and phone calls.

This disciplinary punishment is only written off my records after two years, meaning that apart from the torturing I was put through, I will not be able to be bailed out sooner and so my sick parents and my 21-year old daughter will wait a long time before they can see me and I can support them.

All of these events took place in the female prison of Koridalos (Athens) but all of these guards still work in Thiva, together with head prison guard Panagiotis Korakis, who here in the isolation unit of Thiva told me that despite my 8 defacations he has the right to hold me in isolation for six days according to “prison rules”. The prison rules mention nothing of the kind - to the contrary they state that a 3-day stay in isolation can only take place after an order by an attorney general and is only extended if illegal substances are found in the body of the prisoner which are impossible to remove…

You cannot take a bath in isolation (which they call “special detention area”, as if changing a name ends the horror) because whenever there happens to be hot water, the guard is not there and where she is she might take you out of the cell, insisting that water is hot even when it isn’t.

Whenever you take a bath they watch you. And so we might stay without taking a bath for seven days, if not longer. You are only allowed to order coffee, water etc from the prison café, which runs for the prison guards and in which prisoners also work. Last time I was held in isolation I paid 20 euros to the café. With this amount I could have lasted around 20 days by buying my own coffee and sugar and yet I was forced to spend it within 5 days. Yet here the managing of our money depends on the mood of the prison guards.

So when our torturers decide to take us out of isolation we have to go through the same torture of body search and vaginal raid. They can put you through the same torture at any time in the main prison unit, where I am staying, whenever there is a suspicion of use of illegal substances. They enter our unit, they wake us up, they put us through this examination, they take us out of unit and mess up all our stuff, throwing it to the floor. We then lose our stuff because they throw it or take it with them and need to put everything back to place in order to be allowed to sleep…

I used to be a human with lust for knowledge, with a sustainable business, with lust for creation.

Today, all this pain, abuse, the raping of my body and my soul make me dream that I kill all those who get paid to torture weak people.

Crunching my teeth I wisper “to your doggedness, you swine, I still hold” hoping the day will come when they will stop putting their dirty, twisted hands on defenseless people. I know the world cannot change, yet it can REFORM - as long as we don’t stay indifferent.

I shall never overcome all that I have been put through in prison.

Goulioni Katerina

Duizenden gevangenen in de VS psychotisch door isoleercel

Dit verhaal komt onder dankzegging via The Christian Radical van wie de illustratie ook afkomstig is.
Opmerkelijk dat de Rote Armee Fraktion in feite de aanleiding gaf tot de eerste protesten tegen de isoleercel in Nederland.
Op uw impertinente vraag hoe ik dit weet kan ik zonder terughoudenheid antwoorden: ik was bij die acties. Het stemt treurig dat het niettemin allemaal erdoorgerost is, in Nederland en elders - en vooral in het paradijs van de opsluitindustrie, de VS.

- Sherwood Ross -

The United States today is housing tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement, a form of numbing mental torture that drives about one-third of them psychotic, induces irrational anger in 90 percent, and ups the likelihood they will commit violent crimes upon release.

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” U.S. Senator John McCain once wrote of his two years spent in a fifteen by fifteen foot prison cell in Viet Nam. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” Testimony from other notables that have endured long stretches in solitary have elicited like comments.

Yet, the U.S. today has the dubious distinction of incarcerating “the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement” around the world, according to an article in the March 30th The New Yorker magazine.

And they make up a growing portion of our 2.3 million inmates, a shameful statistic that ranks America first among all nations. Gawande’s article is titled “Hellhole.”


The first supermax built anywhere was Sydney, Australia’s “Katingal” unit at Long Bay Correctional Centre in 1975. Dubbed the “electronic zoo,” it lasted a brief two years before it was closed down over human rights concerns, according to Wikipedia.

In the 17 years beginning with the construction of the first U.S. “supermax” prison in Marion, Ill., in 1983, 60 such prisons have sprouted---prisons specifically designed for mass solitary confinement, reports Atul Gawande in the The New Yorker. The Federal Bureau of Prisons euphemistically refers to its solitary cells as “Special Housing Units.” Most of the supermax prisons have been erected by State governments and two-thirds of all states have them.

“The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels,” Gawande writes. “America now holds at least 25,000 inmates in isolation in supermax facilities. An additional 50,000 to 80,000 are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures.”

The Urban Institute found the per cell cost for confining one prisoner in solitary for one year is $75,000. Taxpayers could put a dozen students through community college for the same bucks and society would get a better return. From every indication, money spent on a supermax is money poorly spent.

Boston psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, who interviewed more than 200 prisoners kept in solitary, concluded that about one in three of them had developed acute psychosis with hallucinations. Prisoners so confined spend their time talking to themselves, pacing back and forth like animals in cages, and blank out mentally.

Some beat their heads against the walls until blood flows. Others lapse into catatonic states, utterly destroyed as functioning human beings. “EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement,” Gawande writes.

Often, prisoners can be confined in solitary for minor infractions of prison rules, such as taking too much time in the shower or associating with a gang member. By denying an inmate social interaction, “the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury,” Gawande points out. After all, he notes, “Human beings are social creatures.”

The writer quotes Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz allowed to study inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, as finding many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind---to organize their own lives around activity and purpose. Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result.”

Additionally, many of the solitary inmates become consumed with revenge fantasies. We need to ask, “What is the cost to society in treasure and blood after their release?” “How many go straight to mental hospitals?” “How many wind up right back in prison?”

There are defenders of the supermax model, however. One inmate wrote the Denver Post he was not affected by the boredom and considered the silence “wonderful.” He said, “I still have a relatively intact mind. It could be infinitely worse.” And in Forbes magazine, author Ian Ross (no kin), wrote, “It’s worth considering that the Supermax model--which includes prisoner isolation for 23 out of every 24 hours a day--may be serving as a deterrent to some violent criminals, a kind of brightly lit billboard that advertises the life of rather extreme measures they are facing. There’s no way to quantify that, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.” (It may be, indeed!)

In June, 2006, after a year-long study, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons called for an end to long-term isolation of prisoners. It said there were no benefits to the practice beyond 10 days of punishment. What’s more, Gawande writes, “evidence from a number of studies has shown that supermax conditions---in which prisoners have virtually no social interactions and are given no programmatic support---make it highly likely that they will commit more crimes when they are released.”

The writer says our willingness to confine our own citizens to solitary made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war. “In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement---on our own people….”

Since prolonged solitary is little more than the sadistic crucifixion of thousands of human beings, where, oh where, is the public outrage?