The following is abridged from a letter written by three political prisoners in Leavenworth Federal Prison, Kansas, USA.
FBI director Louis Freeh [has] urged members of Congress to hold hearings concerning ways to further limit the already restricted access federal prisoners have with their families and communities. Complaining that federal prisoners have too many rights and privileges which allow them to maintain contact with the streets, Freeh proposed that Congress find ways to limit phone calls, out-going mail and visits.
Some people may not have much concern or sympathy for the ever worsening conditions in prisons, because the public is worried about crime and criminals. While sound arguments have been made that extreme conditions of repression and deprivation only serve to create more dangerous criminals, making the problem of public safety worse, our concern here is about political prisoners.
Political prisoners in the US are often subjected to the harshest conditions and prisons. As new, even more restrictive and irrational policies are proposed and implemented, it is likely many of us will be singled out first and most harshly. Every captured freedom fighter and prisoner of conscience [will be] further cut off from his/her community.
Freeh's proposals are the most recent in a series of repressive policies being proposed and implemented throughout the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). In August, here in Leavenworth Federal Prison, during a two-week lock-down [after] guards panicked and over-reacted when two men got in a fight, Warden Page True had all the weights and weight lifting equipment removed from the institution. He also issued a memorandum detailing a new, severely restricted list of what property prisoners would be allowed.
Of special concern to political prisoners is that books and literature will be limited to six books, six magazines and six newspapers (no more than one week old). This includes all educational, legal, reference, spiritual and recreational reading material. Commissary items like portable radios and sweat clothes, once sold in the commissary here, if not on the new list will be confiscated.
These measures come at a time when the BOP and Congress are testing the waters on how much of the gains made by prisoners throughout the last two decades can be taken back. Limitations on contact visits, phones, mail, and educational and legal material is all about tightening the screws on prisoners and their loved ones, and is designed to further isolate prisoners. As we have witnessed before, the FBI, BOP and those seeking political mileage on the "get tough on prisoners/criminals" platform, portray prisoners as having the lush life full of accommodations.
This is nonsense. Except perhaps for special minimum security camps, where top white-collar criminals and government officials caught too red-handedly are sent, prisons have never been easy or comfortable places. These new, extremely harsh proposals literally are bringing back conditions similar to 50 or even 100 years ago — chain gangs and dungeons, except now incredibly overcrowded.
While gearing up their prison factories to run 24 hours a day, they are trying to prevent us from helping ourselves educationally, legally and spiritually.
There are no simple solutions because prison bureaucracies are the closest thing to real, not rhetorical, fascist or dictatorial agencies that operate openly in the USA. Still, we need people to rally around these issues. We need letters sent to the US Congress, c/ the White House, Washington D.C., USA; and to Warden Page True, Leavenworth Federal Prison, PO Box 1000, Leavenworth, Kansas 66048.
We will keep struggling in here. We hope you will too.
Leonard Peltier, Luis Rosa and Jaan Laaman.[Before their imprisonment, for life, Peltier was an activist in the American Indian Movement; Rosa is a Puerto Rican who was active in the struggle for independence for his country; and Laaman was an anti-apartheid activist.]