Attending a Powwow in Prison

Saturday I attended a powwow at the Federal Correctional Institute. I went as a representative for the American Friends Service Committee at the request of Charmaine, a Navajo woman who has become an advocate for American Indian inmates in Arizona. Charmaine asked AFSC to send someone to accompany her because she has learned that the corrections officers and administrators behave themselves better when they know they are being observed. I'm glad I went.

Travel Log: Star Date 10/17/09

8:30am:
Pick up Charmaine.

9:00am:
Pick up "N," a Tohono O'otham young woman who has volunteered to dance and sing at the powwow today.

9:30am:
Arrive at the Federal Correctional Institute on Wilmot, south of I-10 to meet the other volunteers: a Navajo flute-player, his relative and an O'otham apprentice, and Charmaine's Lebanese friend. Everyone but the apprentice and I wore some sort of traditional dress, but N is the only one who committed to dressing up all the way. We fill out forms stating our names, addresses, vehicle information and purpose for the visit, as well as a declaration that states we are not bringing in narcotics, firearms, pocket knives, metal cutting tools, recording devices, cameras, wallets, electronic devices, marijuana, weapons, ammunition, purses, pocketbooks, change purses, watches, pens, or pencils. In order to attend the powwow, each of us had to submit our social security information to the chaplain so she could do a background check. The chaplain did not "get to" two of the volunteers in time to run their background checks. One of them was a traditional dancer.

10am:
N puts her street clothes in a locker after emerging from the bathroom in stunning regalia. She decided to leave her more involved regalia at home because she didn't want to deal with transporting her fans and feathers. Her friend's Ojibwe mother sewed her a bright turquoise healing (jingle) dress with pink, fuchsia and purple patterns. As she walked the cylindrical metal cones brushed against each other, like she was a metallic eucalyptus tree in the breeze. A friend of hers had beaded her matching, knee-high moccasins, star barrettes with mirrors in the middle for her two braids, another for the back of her head, and another still hanging from a beaded choker-- not to mention the beaded earrings and a band she wore like a crown. On top of her dress she wore a brown leather belt with metal circular studs and hung a pink, purple and white Coach scarf onto the belt (off to the side).

We are herded through the metal detector and get stamped with an invisible ink.

One of the chaplains meets us on the other side of the metal detector and brings us through a locked door where we pass the invisible ink on our hands underneath a black light. We are then escorted out another locked door into a small, minimally landscaped yard where we follow the chaplain into the cafeteria.

10:30am:
We are served the first lunch of the day. Each of us gets a dinner roll, beans, a chicken patty with a piece of lettuce and raw, white onion, three sugar cookies and red Kool-Aid or coffee. The trays are dark green, sturdy plastic with deep indentations for the different kinds of foods and two cup holders. The cups are like smaller Pizza Hut cups but ugly olivey-brown in color. The inmates who chose to participate in the powwow today were supposed to meet us in the cafeteria for lunch but the guards were not notified in time for us to eat together. N and I make small talk with the chaplain and learn that there are 5 different religious groups that he presides over in this prison. The chaplain says that he converted to Catholicism as a prisoner in Vietnam and that he thinks priests who work in prisons do more work than those on the outside. He also tells us that during Christmas the inmates will get an extra cookie or two and have started to call them "holy cookies."

11am:
We are escorted out as the native inmates are escorted into the cafeteria. Our volunteer groups meet the head chaplain, Chaplain Barnett, a blond white woman who towers over our group. She seems chipper as she goes over the ground rules: no touching other than hand shakes, and no giving or receiving of anything, period, without a chaplain's consent.

11:15-11:30am:
We are escorted into the chapel and take our seats in the circle around a traditional powwow drum. There is a giant wooden cross nailed to the wall at the from of the room; a couple ceiling fans; locked, upright metal storage shelves; and the chaplains' offices at the back of the room. Once we're seated the inmates start filing in. Each inmate shakes the hands of the people seated around the circle and sits. I hear greetings in various languages. I can't remember ever being in a group where everyone shook everyone else's hand in such a deliberate, respectful way. There are two elder inmates in wheelchairs, four with some sort of tribal solidarity bandanna, and all the inmates in khaki pants with white or khaki tops, and a khaki belt. Their last names and Department of Corrections Identification Numbers are printed on a white label just above their left chest pockets.

11:30am:
An older inmate, "Bootchi," welcomes the group to the annual powwow. I never counted how many of us there were, but my guess is that there were about 30 in attendance. I heard some people asking where everyone else was-- apparently the chaplains had scheduled the powwow on a visitation day. I learned later that more than half of the inmates who could have come decided not to, and that before Chaplain Barnett started running things, the native inmate got one full day of seminar and another full day of powwow-- and now they get 3 hours of one or the other.

Bootchi invites everyone outside to smudge with sage. From what I know, smudging is an act of purification and blessing: burning sage rids the user of bad energy and protects them against bad energy or spirits. One of the inmates used an eagle feather to fan the smoke over my head, torso and legs and then I did the same thing using my hands.

11:45am:
The Red Shield drum group plays a grand entry song, a flag song, and a veteran song ("Soldier Boy.")

12pm:
Bootchi calls Charmaine up to the podium to introduce herself. She talks about how thankful she is for this experience to feel reconnected to her people. Then Bootchi calls up Lenny, a spiritual advisor and activist, also Navajo. Lenny will be going to see political prisoner Leonard Peltier at Leavenworth the end of November, then to the American Friends Service Committee's national office, and then to meet with one of Obama's advisors about granting Peltier executive clemency. I just finished Peltier's "Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance" before I attended the powwow because it seemed like a good way to familiarize myself with some of the issues facing American Indian inmates in federal prisons. If you are unfamiliar with Peltier's case, the basic jist of it is that Peltier was a prominent activist in the American Indian Movement in the mid-to-late 70s and was framed for the murder of two FBI agents who were killed in an FBI-instigated shoot-out on the Pine Ridge reservation of the Oglala Lakota in South Dakota. Peltier was sentenced to two consecutive life-sentences (30 years each) plus 7 years for trying to escape after he learned that two fellow inmates had been coerced into attempting to kill him. All of this may seem hard to believe, but there are many, many sources/people who have documented every part of the FBI's wrong-doing, including Peltier's lawyer, former Attorney General of the United States, Mr. Ramsey Clark. "Incident at Oglala" is a great documentary on the subject; as is the 600 page book, "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI's war on teh American Indian Movement"; and online the greatest resource may be the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee...I guess this whole Peltier thing needs to turn into its own post. Before moving on though, I will mention that one of the highlights of the powwow for me was meeting an inmate who was directly related to various different people involved in the historical events surrounding Peltier's case-- I feel awkward naming his relatives that appear in "Prison Writings" just because I don't want to cause any drama for him or his family, but the revelation for me was that the AIM movement didn't just happen in an isolated place in the distant past, but that there are cousins, nephews, grandchildren, etc. whose elders were involved in some of the most bad-ass, righteous kinds of direct-action any movement in the U.S. has ever seen-- and that those descendants know what went down and what's still going down.

If you're still reading this, thank you.

It's hard to know where to go from here. Some of the highlights were seeing different inmates around the room nod in agreement when Charmaine told the group that she had taken on prison work because when her uncle, who had started working with native inmates in the 70s, had passed on, she decided to heed the call to leadership-- even though it was hard and she didn't want to do it, she knew she had to for her people. As we were leaving, one of the younger guys came up to her and said that next year he was going to do a traditional dance as part of the powwow-- which was good, because only Charmaine (briefly) and N (for a couple more songs) had done anything traditional in addition to the basic step that anyone can do.

And I guess there are some things that happened that were unexpected-- like crying. One of the guys started wiping his eyes and was asked up to the podium to address the group. He told us that this was the first time he had felt broken, that the powwow had reminded him of how much he missed his community and being able to practice his culture, of how beautiful ceremony and gatherings could make him feel. In talking to one of the volunteers they warned me that I might see them crying because they knew they couldn't help but think of their relatives in jail/prison. And I cried when I found out that Jewish prisoners were given 30 days of special food and the first and last (full) days of Ramadan to spend in the chapel. Just how racist is it to give a population that could potentially represent the 600+ tribes in the U.S. 3 hours to practice their spirituality while another group is allowed that much consideration for one holiday? I want to look into the federal prison policies to see if Chaplain Barnett is breaking any kinds of rules that she can be pressured into abiding by...otherwise I plan to write her a note describing, in detail, the things that seemed disrespectful to me-- like the fact that she and the other chaplain repeatedly opened and closed their heavy metal doors and were walking in and out of their offices and carted in the water chest during moments that should have been reserved for spiritual reverence. There was also the fact that they didn't have enough film to take more than 3 randomly shot photos (there was supposed to be enough to take process photos as well as group photos at the end).

Charmaine asked me if I would like to attend the state powwow in January and a Talking Circle sometime in the next couple of months. I said yes. From what Charmaine told me, talking circles are set up so that native inmates can get a chance to talk to each other in a safe setting about whatever they feel inclined to talk about. As someone who has done anti-racism work before, I know those conversations have the potential to be very validating and inspirational. I'm also looking forward to the powwow at the state prison (Charmaine is allowed to organize one powwow in a federal prison and one in a state prison per year.) I guess the inmates in this particular unit at the state prison can buy and recieve the materials they need to furnish themselves with the kinds of regalia one could find at a powwow on the outside-- the kind of showy, gorgeous regalia you can see if you google fancydancing. Actually, that seems like a good note to end this on.

Week 1

This week I learned the basic system for receiving letters from AZ inmates, logging the correspondence between them and us in the database, and how to respond to letters. As AFSC cannot provide legal advice to inmates I had to send along the names of organizations who might be able to help the inmates with things like suing for Hepatitis C treatment that was being denied. Another inmate had been denied a request for protective segregation from other inmates who had threatened to kill him and his mother had been denied--he also said that he had been tricked into signing a waiver of appeal-- all we could do was to ask for the name of someone he thought might be helpful to call to see if we could find out if he had any other options (we also told him to try and find out those options for himself as well).

I decided to sign my letters with only my first initial as a means of protecting myself...it's a trip to be able to look up the crimes the inmates have been incarcerated for and to acknowledge the fact that I am judgmental of people for what they did. It's been good for me to do the readings on solitary confinement because it's helped me to articulate for myself why, no matter what someone did, it is not right for that person to undergo a form of torture for an average of 5 years or more without any significant human interaction or kind of rehabilitation, education or work because, if that person does get out of prison they are living in my state, with my family and friends, after receiving treatment that most likely has left them more messed up than when they went into jail/prison.

Notes on readings for this week:

“Buried Alive: Solitary Confinement in Arizona’s Prisons and Jails” by Caroline Isaacs and Matthew Lowen of the American Friends Service Committee–Arizona

-“Arizona has chosen to employ long-term isolation not only for sentenced adult felons but also for juveniles under 18 years of age and for persons detained in jail prior to being found guilty of the criminal charges pending against them” (1).

-“Solitary confinement in supermax units is characterized by holding prisoners alone at least 23 hours per day for months or years. The cells are generally the size of a small bathroom and are outfitted only with a toilet, a sink, and a slab of metal protruding from the wall as a bed. Many cells have no windows and no way to tell if it is daytime or nighttime. Prisoners describe either an eerie silence or a deafening wall of constant noise 24 hours each day. Prisoners eat alone and most human ‘interaction’ occurs through a small slot in a steel door. Shakedowns, or cell searches, by guards and strip searches are common. These prisoners have extremely limited access to prison programs. They are forbidden from holding jobs or attending rehabilitative or educational programs. In 2000, the United Nations Committee Against Torture called the ‘excessively harsh regime’ of supermax prisons a violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture” (2).

-The people who are sent to long-term isolation units are “death-sentence prisoners, prisoners who have been threatened or attacked by other prisoners, and, most often, prisoners found in need of behavioral modification because of alleged gang membership or behavioral problems. Assignment to such units is a purely administrative decision, controlled by corrections officials, raising concerns regarding protections of a prisoner’s right to due process” (2).

-“New York State found that 53 percent of all mentally ill inmates in supermax confinement had attempted suicide” (3).

-“the use of long-term isolation is … a thoroughly ineffective behavioral-management tool that actually exacerbates and produces mental illness, frequently resulting in increased behavorial problems. . . . research and investigations are showing that supermax confinement creates more problems than it solves” (5).

-Recommendations

Immediate measures:

1. All facilities employing any level of long-term isolation should be subject to permanent review and monitoring by an independent body that is empowered to hold the facility accountable for problems and enact necessary reforms.

2. One aspect of this monitoring should be a requirement to collect and release to the public statistical data that indicates the impacts and effectiveness of this type of confinement, including:

a. Incident reports of assaults, disturbances, suicides, and suicide attempts by unit;

b. Percentage of prisoners with mental illnesses, onset of symptoms correlated to housing in solitary confinement, and treatment requested and received;

c. Recidivism rates by unit, mental health status, and length of time in solitary confinement;

d. Cost data.

Intermediate measures

3. All facilities should be sufficiently funded to allow for adequate mental health treatment, including maintaining proper staffing levels, providing ongoing staff training, and delivering the community standard of care for all mentally ill prisoners, including timely and consistent delivery of proper medications.

Long-term measures

1. Under no circumstances should prisoners with a history or symptoms of mental illness be held in long-term solitary confinement conditions.

2 . Juveniles and pre-trial detainees should never be held in long-term solitary confinement conditions.

Eliminate the use of long-term solitary confinement in all Arizona facilities.

"Torture in Our Own Backyards: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons"

By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet
Posted on March 24, 2008, Printed on September 26, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/80440/

“today an estimated 20,000 prisoners in 44 states live in these modern-day dungeons, judged to be "unmanageable" by prison officials and moved from other penitentiaries to the nearest supermax.”

"The (United Nations) committee (Against Torture) is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to," they stated, "the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

“Alan Mills of the Uptown People's Law Center in Chicago, Ill., thinks that the ambiguity surrounding how and why inmates are sent to supermax facilities constitutes a violation of due process. ‘Sending someone to a supermax is punishment,’ Mills told AlterNet, ‘and before someone gets punished, they have a right to a fair hearing.’ ‘Just like if you were to get a traffic ticket, you have a right to say 'I didn't do it' and bring witnesses, and the police would have to come and testify against you,’ he said. ‘The same should go for prisoners who are being subjected to this horrendous long-term confinement.’ Mills claims he has ‘tracked a pattern of prisoners being sent to Tamms because of them filing grievances or lawsuits and being jailhouse lawyers.’”

“IDOC (Illinois Department of Corrections) also claims it costs approximately $60,000 per inmate per year to keep the (supermax) facility running, a figure over three times higher than the per-inmate annual cost at other IDOC facilities.”

"'You get these guys and they don't know how to acclimate, so they start cutting themselves up,' [former Illinois supermax inmate Reginald Berry] recalled, adding that some would go so far as 'taking a pen and sticking it all the way up into their penis,' or even worse, attempting suicide."

“One expert on the effects of solitary confinement, Dr. Terry Kupers, who consults prison agencies on mental health services, says it is not uncommon for ‘psychiatric symptoms [to] emerge in previously healthy prisoners … in this context of near-total isolation and idleness.’ Psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Stuart Grassian concurs. In 2005 he told the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons that he had evaluated ‘scores of inmates’ who ‘psychiatrically deteriorated during the course of their confinement in solitary.’ ‘Many of these inmates,’ he said. ‘have become psychotic, and many have engaged in self-injurious and self-mutilatory behavior.’/ Annibal Santiago, who has been incarcerated at Tamms since 1998, describes how it feels from the inside: ‘The mentally ill prisoners drive the normal prisoners crazy by screaming, crying, yelling into the pod at all hours of the day and night for days nonstop, by banging on toilets, doors, walls, and/or by shaking or kicking the doors so hard that it sounds like rumbling thunder, flooding the wing with toilet water, and by throwing feces at other prisoners or inserting feces into the air vents so that the whole wing receives a dose of the smell for months.’”

“(former Illinois supermax inmate Reginald) Berry says one thing that kept him going was keeping his family at the forefront of his mind. It bothered him that Tamms prisoners were allowed to keep only 15 pictures in their cells. ‘Every time my wife sent me pictures, she'd send me sets of 24, and I'd say, 'OK, I got to decide right here which ones I want,' because if you get caught with more than that, they can give you a ticket and send you back down to seg [disciplinary segregation, a unit in which inmates have only one shower and one yard visit per week].’ Inmates remain in ‘seg’ for a minimum of 90 days and are not allowed visits for the duration. Once, says Berry, in what would be a devastating error, he tried to mail a picture to his son rather than throw it away. Because in the photo his son's hat was tilted to one side, the officers gave Berry a disciplinary ticket, allegedly for participating in gang-related activity. ‘My heart dropped to my knees,’ he says. ‘I told them, 'ya'll let this picture in here!’’ The violation earned him a ticket to ‘seg’ for six months -- months that were tacked onto his sentence, which had been reduced for ‘good time.’ The decision meant that Berry's sentence would effectively be extended, forcing him to miss his youngest son's college graduation. ‘I was thinking, 'You missed the eighth-grade graduation, you missed the high school graduation, you've got to make this college graduation,’ Berry recalls. . . . A 2007 Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) report lists family ties as integral to rehabilitation and successful re-entry into the general community.”

“A 2006 national survey of 601 prison wardens, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and administered by the Urban League, showed 62.5 percent of wardens agreeing or strongly agreeing that ‘staff training’ would be an ‘effective alternative to supermax prisons.’ It was the No. 1 choice selected in the survey.”

"StopMax: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons Heats Up"

By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet
Posted on August 11, 2008, Printed on September 26, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/94257/

“Wilkerson is a former member of the Black Panther Party and one of the Angola Three. He spent more than 30 years in prison (and 29 in solitary confinement) for the killing of a prison guard, along with two other former Black Panthers -- Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace -- before being exonerated by the state of Louisiana in February 2001. Woodfox and Wallace still languish in prison. They are the longest-held prisoners in solitary isolation to date in the United States.”

“Bonnie Kerness, Prison Watch coordinator for the AFSC, said that over the past two decades, the organization has received an "astounding" number of letters from people in solitary confinement describing the abuse that occurs in their desolate cells. She told AlterNet that ‘they describe in excruciating detail,’ among other things, ‘the uses of devices of torture -- forced medication, restraint beds, restraint chairs …’”

“The United States has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, at 2.2 million people as of 2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. At any given time, an estimated 10 percent of those prisoners are being held in isolation, according to a new analysis of prison data compiled by Dr. Terry Kupers, a mental health adviser to prison facilities and a leading expert on the effects of solitary confinement. That translates into roughly 220,000 local, state and federal prisoners held in solitary confinement at any given moment.”

“Over-represented among supermax inmates are ‘jailhouse lawyers’ -- those who file lawsuits, advocate on behalf of themselves and other prisoners, or otherwise irritate prison guards. Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois openly admits this on its Web site, stating that the Tamms control unit houses ‘some of the most litigious inmates in the department's custody.’”

“according to the Correctional Association of New York, more than 40 percent of completed suicides occur in segregation. In part this is due to the fact that, within the prison population, the most over-represented group in isolation is prisoners who are mentally ill. At some institutions, such as Indiana's Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, officials have admitted that the mentally ill comprise ‘over half’ of their supermax population.”

Burns, Saxon. “Isolated and Ill: A Tucson group fights to end solitary confinement in Arizona's prisons.” Tucson Weekly Currents Feature May 24, 2007

In “a 60 Minutes segment on the death of Timothy Souders, a mentally ill prisoner in Michigan who was chained down for up to 17 hours at a time in his cell. A videotape captured the moment when Souders eventually keeled over dead from dehydration after one such episode.”

“in the past two decades, [supermax facilities] have been instituted in 44 states, according to numerous studies by Professor Daniel P. Mears, an associate professor at Florida State University. Mears' study Evaluating the Effectiveness of Supermax Prisons cited statistics that claim some 20,000 inmates, or 2 percent of the total prison population in the United States, were housed in such facilities 1998.”

“There are an estimated 300,000 mentally ill Americans in prison, who, the 60 Minutes report points out, are often sent there because they have nowhere else to go, as the country's behavioral-health system has crumbled.”

An Image of the Border

In thinking about the intersects between art and culture, I remembered one of the most powerful images from a border mobilization I attended along the Sonora-Arizona border. Every year there is a weekend-long event that takes place on the Mexican side of the border to protest the wall, immigration policies, human rights and environmental law violations, etc. In addition to feeling validated and inspired by a large group of people who share my political views, the most touching part of the weekend for me was to take part in writing the names and ages of those who had lost their lives trying to cross the border in the year since the last mobilization on small white crosses and mounting the crosses on the wall. To see hundreds upon hundreds of crosses hanging along the wall contextualizes the human impact of the United States' relationship to its Latin American neighbors. I had a very similar experience when I saw a travelling exhibit of soldiers boots lined up on the UA mall (symbolizing the soldiers that died in the Iraq War). Because I felt more emotionally connected to the issue after being able to see a visual representation of the lives lost in both these instances, I know that visual images are a necessary part of any political movement because we need a break from the rhetoric so that we don't become desensitized to it, and because we are creatures who respond to the aesthetics of any argument.

Poster Boy

MLK. Why haven't I see this before? Look how intense his facial expression is! Look how young he is! This must be from his college days. When I google imaged Martin Luther King, Jr., I guess I thought I would find tons of great images and compelling posters. But everything I saw I had either seen before or was poorly designed. This was the only image I found that was compelling...I think that part of getting the younger generations interested in social justice movements is designing media that grabs their attention and looks sexy-- and shows historical figures as they appeared in their youth so young people can imagine themselves in the shoes of someone their age. For the next MLK day I want to silkscreen this image onto a black shirt and write "Poster Boy" on the top in white letters. There could even be a nice quote on the back, like the one Maya Lin chose for her memorial: "until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream..."

anti-war.us

I was looking through this book "The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics" by Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic for some inspiration and happened upon a write up of a website I had never heard of before. Glaser and Ilic summarized the website like this "The anti-war.us website was created by Plazm Design to distribute effective anti-war messages and graphics to activists around the world. The intention is to make the images available to the public for downloading so that they can be transferred to stickers, posters, signs, or other media for posting." The idea that artists would volunteer their labor to make art to support anti-war efforts is inspiring to me because it means that these people aren't the greedy kind of designers whose only artistic goal is to make images that sell. You have to applaud people like that because it is hard to make a living as an artist and probably even harder for socially and politically conscious artists to find clients who share their same values-- at least that's my perception of contemporary society. I feel like people who are conscious and acknowledge how bad things are and are motivated to work for change are the minority in this country and in the world-- but those of us who live privileged lives have no excuse to not be using our free time and luxury money to do something positive.

Mind Map

Design, Culture and Language definitions & intersects.

An intersection of design, culture and language would be this image to the left, which uses language to communicate the content of the magazine, design to aesthetically balance the text and image, and culture in the form of a photo of a cultural expression-- in this case the Moulin Rouge in 1955.

Design is the human tendency to exert control over our environments in some way in order to live more pleasurable lives.

Culture is the way that people distinguish themselves as a group based on collectively decided norms, values, beliefs and practices.

Language is a way for people to communicate abstract ideas through symbols that have an agreed upon meaning.

Design influences culture because cultural expressions have distinct aesthetics that have been achieved through the design process. Design can also influence cultures to change through exposing groups of people to new ideas. Design influences language through its use of language.

Culture influences design because designers are conscious of different ethnic groups respond to the designs. Cultural changes must be expressed through new language.

Language, in it written form, provides the template of shapes to be used in designed communications. Language maintains culture through reiteration.