Section I. Putting Political Prisoners on the Map

Political Prisoners in the U.S.?

Freedom Now!

1989

The Government denies it. Yet today there are more than 100 people locked up in U.S. Prisons because of their political actions or beliefs.

The U.S. alone among the world's governments maintains the fiction that it holds no political prisoners. The official position is that all those jailed for politically motivated actions are "criminals." The U.S. tries to hide the existence of political prisoners because they challenge the image that the U.S. is a truly democratic and humane society. These prisoners expose the fact that there are political resistance movements of such influential impact that the government is compelled to use repression against them.

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This was the text of a flier produced by Freedom Now!, an effort to pull together in a single organization representatives of all the U.S. political prisoners and leaders of all the internal national liberation movements.

By labeling political prisoners as criminals, the U.S. government has also been able to shield from view serious human rights violations against them. These include:

• excessive prison sentences — example: 8 Black political prisoners will soon begin their third decade behind bars;

• psychological torture;

• assault — example: one Puerto Rican prisoner of war was beaten to death by guards and his death labeled a suicide;

• sexual assault — example: under the guise of security, male prison staff forcibly conducted cavity searches on two women political prisoners at F.C.I. Tucson;

• denial of medical care;

• placement in control units — example: the men's federal prison in Marion, Illinois, which includes several political prisoners among its 400 inmates, has been condemned by Amnesty International for violating international standards on the minimum treatment of prisoners. The men in Marion are locked in their cells 23 hours per day and are sometimes chained spread-eagle to their beds for days at a time. The control unit for women at Lexington, Kentucky, was an experimental underground political prison that practiced isolation and sensory deprivation. It was finally closed by a federal judge after two years of protest by religious and human rights groups.

Human Rights Must Begin at Home!

Who are America's political prisoners? Like the four women and men pictured on the facing page — Alejandrina Torres, Leonard Peltier, Geronimo Pratt and Susan Rosenberg — they represent many movements for freedom and social justice.

People of color are most often targeted. Black activists participating in the fight for Black Liberation and against racism are the largest group represented, with well ever 50 political prisoners. Many of them, like Geronimo Pratt, have been in jail nearly 20 years.

The movement for Puerto Rican independence has also been heavily attacked with the imprisonment of many of its members. These include 14 women and men such as Alejandrina Torres who consider themselves prisoners of war. They have taken this position because they believe that as colonized people they have the right to fight for independence, and their captor, the United States, has no right to criminalize them.

Other political prisoners in the United States include more than thirty white North American activists. These militants are accused of various actions opposing the foreign, domestic and military policies of the U.S. government. Their protests have been directed against symbols of U.S. support for the apartheid regime in South Africa, military intervention in Central America, and the continued colonial oppression of Blacks and Puerto Ricans. Among these prisoners are women and men from the religious peace community who have received long sentences for direct actions against U.S. nuclear...