Vol. 78/No. 8      March 3, 2014

Throwing workers into tiny, windowless cells, keeping them there 23 hours a day, denying them contact visits with relatives and friends, regulating what they can read and do, these conditions in the solitary confinement cells in prisons all across the U.S. are not just violations of basic rights. They are an affront to human dignity.

These barbaric methods are used in an effort to break prisoners’ morale, to demoralize them and destroy their spirit. Often the only way out is to become a cop toady and snitch on fellow inmates.

Solitary confinement is routinely employed against political prisoners. The Cuban Five, five Cuban revolutionaries framed up in 1998 for tracking the activities of paramilitary groups in Miami with a long history of armed assaults and acts of sabotage against Cuba, were thrown in solitary for 17 months before their trial. The efforts to force them to their knees, to get them to deny the justice of their efforts to defend the Cuban Revolution and accept a “plea bargain” utterly failed.

The authorities fear the example of integrity, courage and dignity these fighters represent to working people, behind and outside prison walls.

The propertied rulers have the same attitude toward all workers. The deepening crisis of their capitalist system is driving them to more far-reaching and harsher attacks on the working class worldwide. As they push relentlessly harder, their repressive methods will become more brazen and increasingly driven by fear of the day, the inevitable day, when workers will rise up against them.

To the propertied rulers, the working class is a criminal class, and the treatment meted out in their prisons is increasingly mirrored in their treatment of us as a whole. They live behind taller and taller gates while they chip away at our political rights, build up their cops and expand their criminal “justice” system.

Join the fight to stop solitary confinement!
 
 
Related articles:
End Solitary Confinement! demand Calif. protesters
Speakers at state hearing back prisoners’ fight
 
 
 
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