Click here for more information about the documentary — and to make a donation and become part of bringing this desperately needed project to fruition.

This issue’s got

• Why Are So Many People Incarcerated in the U.S.? by Waheedah Shabazz-El
• The Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement by Tina Reynolds
• Prison Food: The 411 of Navigating the System by Tré Alexander
• Reach the Light by Kyle
• How to Obtain Your GED While in Prison or Out by Stanley J
• Preventing, Diagnosing, and Treating MRSA by Ronda B, Suzy S, Bernard T, and Naseem B

plus, addresses in different regions of the U.S. to write for Advocacy and Support Resources and Informational Resources!

Prison Health News is a print newsletter read by 2,500+ people who are locked up in prisons and jails across the United States. It is produced by a Philadelphia-based collective of writers and editors, most of whom have been in prison and are living with HIV, and includes the work of imprisoned artists and writers. Our readers are living inside a system that denies them prevention tools and treatment information about HIV, hepatitis, and other health issues. They are dealing with medical neglect, daily humiliations driven by intense stigma, and the destruction of their communities by mass imprisonment.

Prison Health News is a project of Reaching Out: A Support Group with Action and the Institute for Community Justice, which are based at the HIV/AIDS services organization Philadelphia FIGHT. Volunteers at the AIDS Library (also at FIGHT) answer the many letters to us from people in prisons and jails asking for resources and health information.

This issue is not yet available on the Institute for Community Justice website, but there you can read back issues, subscribe, and find out how to submit articles. There is also a contact list of organizations around the country that work with us on distribution and to support and advocate for people incarcerated in their cities and states. If you are in Philadelphia and would like to participate in the writing/editing collective, you can contact me at mizsubways (at) gmail.com.

To help distribute Prison Health News, contact:

Institute for Community Justice
21 S. 12th Street, 7th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Office: 215.525.0460
Fax: 215.525.0461

Instructions for printing Prison Health News on your home printer:

1. Download the printable version here.

2. Use Letter size (8 1/2 x 11) paper. Make sure that the printer is not set to reduce, or “scale” the document. On my Mac in Preview, I go under “File” and click on “Page Setup,” then make sure “Scale” is set to 100%. I don’t think it’s much different for other computers and programs.

3. In the printing options, select “Odd pages only.” Press print.

4. Half of the pamphlet will print. After it finishes printing, take the whole pile, flip it over, and insert it back into the printer. It usually has to be flipped over lengthwise, but you might want to make sure by using a test page.

5. In the printing options, select “Even pages only” and press print.

You can download it as a pdf for reading by clicking here, or the printable version by clicking here. See the end of this post for helpful printing instructions.

This issue’s got

• Beat Stress with Dahn Yoga Meditation by Teresa Sullivan
• Fasting for Human Rights in the Secure Housing Units of California by Suzy Subways
• How HIV Meds Work, Part II: An Update on HIV Drug Classes by Hannah Zellman
• The Society for Employment and Equal Rights by George N. Murray
• Free Your Mind by Angelo Johnson

plus, addresses in different regions of the U.S. to write for Advocacy and Support Resources and Informational Resources!

Prison Health News is a print newsletter read by 2,500+ people who are locked up in prisons and jails across the United States. It is produced by a Philadelphia-based collective of writers and editors, most of whom have been in prison and are living with HIV, and includes the work of imprisoned artists and writers. Our readers are living inside a system that denies them prevention tools and treatment information about HIV, hepatitis, and other health issues. They are dealing with medical neglect, daily humiliations driven by intense stigma, and the destruction of their communities by mass imprisonment.

Prison Health News is a project of Reaching Out: A Support Group with Action and the Institute for Community Justice, which are based at the HIV/AIDS services organization Philadelphia FIGHT. Volunteers at the AIDS Library (also at FIGHT) answer the many letters to us from people in prisons and jails asking for resources and health information.

This issue is not yet available on the Institute for Community Justice website, but there you can read back issues, subscribe, and find out how to submit articles. There is also a contact list of organizations around the country that work with us on distribution and to support and advocate for people incarcerated in their cities and states. If you are in Philadelphia and would like to participate in the writing/editing collective, you can contact me at mizsubways (at) gmail.com.

To help distribute Prison Health News, contact:

Institute for Community Justice
21 S. 12th Street, 7th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Office: 215.525.0460
Fax: 215.525.0461

Instructions for printing Prison Health News on your home printer:

1. Download the printable version here.

2. Use Letter size (8 1/2 x 11) paper. Make sure that the printer is not set to reduce, or “scale” the document. On my Mac in Preview, I go under “File” and click on “Page Setup,” then make sure “Scale” is set to 100%. I don’t think it’s much different for other computers and programs.

3. In the printing options, select “Odd pages only.” Press print.

4. Half of the pamphlet will print. After it finishes printing, take the whole pile, flip it over, and insert it back into the printer. It usually has to be flipped over lengthwise, but you might want to make sure by using a test page.

5. In the printing options, select “Even pages only” and press print.

Take action to support the hunger strike! http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/take-action/

Follow the hunger strike on Twitter! http://twitter.com/#!/HStrikeNews

Demands

Prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison (California) are on an indefinite hunger strike that began on July 1, 2011 to protest the cruel, inhumane and tortuous conditions of their imprisonment.

At least 6,600 prisoners across the state of CA have joined them in solidarity with their demands.

The hunger strike has been organized by prisoners in an inspiring show of unity across prison-manufactured racial and geographical lines.

The changes the prisoners are demanding are standards in other Supermax prisons (eg, Federal Florence, Colorado, and Ohio), which supports the prisoners’ position that CDCR’s claim of such demands being a threat to safety and security are exaggerations.The hunger strikers** have developed these five, straight-forward core demands:

1. End Group Punishment & Administrative Abuse – This is in response to PBSP’s application of “group punishment” as a means to address individual inmates rule violations. This includes the administration’s abusive, pretextual use of “safety and concern” to justify what are unnecessary punitive acts. This policy has been applied in the context of justifying indefinite SHU status, and progressively restricting our programming and privileges.

2. Abolish the Debriefing Policy, and Modify Active/Inactive Gang Status Criteria -

• Perceived gang membership is one of the leading reasons for placement in solitary confinement.
• The practice of “debriefing,” or offering up information about fellow prisoners particularly regarding gang status, is often demanded in return for better food or release from the SHU. Debriefing puts the safety of prisoners and their families at risk, because they are then viewed as “snitches.”
• The validation procedure used by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) employs such criteria as tattoos, readings materials, and associations with other prisoners (which can amount to as little as greeting) to identify gang members.
• Many prisoners report that they are validated as gang members with evidence that is clearly false or using procedures that do not follow the Castillo v. Alameida settlement which restricted the use of photographs to prove association.

3. Comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 Recommendations Regarding an End to Long-Term Solitary Confinement – CDCR shall implement the findings and recommendations of the US commission on safety and abuse in America’s prisons final 2006 report regarding CDCR SHU facilities as follows:

• End Conditions of Isolation (p. 14) Ensure that prisoners in SHU and Ad-Seg (Administrative Segregation) have regular meaningful contact and freedom from extreme physical deprivations that are known to cause lasting harm. (pp. 52-57)
• Make Segregation a Last Resort (p. 14). Create a more productive form of confinement in the areas of allowing inmates in SHU and Ad-Seg [Administrative Segregation] the opportunity to engage in meaningful self-help treatment, work, education, religious, and other productive activities relating to having a sense of being a part of the community.
• End Long-Term Solitary Confinement. Release inmates to general prison population who have been warehoused indefinitely in SHU for the last 10 to 40 years (and counting).
• Provide SHU Inmates Immediate Meaningful Access to: i) adequate natural sunlight ii) quality health care and treatment, including the mandate of transferring all PBSP- SHU inmates with chronic health care problems to the New Folsom Medical SHU facility.

4. Provide Adequate and Nutritious Food – cease the practice of denying adequate food, and provide a wholesome nutritional meals including special diet meals, and allow inmates to purchase additional vitamin supplements.

• PBSP staff must cease their use of food as a tool to punish SHU inmates.
• Provide a sergeant/lieutenant to independently observe the serving of each meal, and ensure each tray has the complete issue of food on it.
• Feed the inmates whose job it is to serve SHU meals with meals that are separate from the pans of food sent from kitchen for SHU meals.

5. Expand and Provide Constructive Programming and Privileges for Indefinite SHU Status Inmates.

Examples include:

• Expand visiting regarding amount of time and adding one day per week.
• Allow one photo per year.
• Allow a weekly phone call.
• Allow Two (2) annual packages per year. A 30 lb. package based on “item” weight and not packaging and box weight.
• Expand canteen and package items allowed. Allow us to have the items in their original packaging [the cost for cosmetics, stationary, envelopes, should not count towards the max draw limit]
• More TV channels.
• Allow TV/Radio combinations, or TV and small battery operated radio
• Allow Hobby Craft Items – art paper, colored pens, small pieces of colored pencils, watercolors, chalk, etc.
• Allow sweat suits and watch caps.
• Allow wall calendars.
• Install pull-up/dip bars on SHU yards.
• Allow correspondence courses that require proctored exams.

**Signed by

Todd Ashker
Arturo Castellanos
Sitawa N. Jamaa (s/n R.N. Dewberry)
George Franco
Antonio Guillen
Lewis Powell
Paul Redd
Alfred Sandoval
Danny Troxell
James Williamson
Ronnie Yandell
…and all other similarly situated prisoners

Before the global AIDS protest, we met up in the morning outside City Hall in Washington DC to demand housing for people with AIDS. Mayor Fenty has recently closed some shelters, and now even more people in the city with America’s highest HIV rate are dying in the streets.

Check out the photos from the protest/funeral at the White House, taken by Kaytee Riek, by clicking here.

"In Loving Memory..." (photo by Kaytee Riek)

African doctors try to find ways to comfort their patients when there is no treatment. (photo by Kaytee Riek)

But then I think, Wait a minute. How did we get in this situation? How did so many Americans get so screwed up in their thinking that we could allow the government to start dismantling social security and endlessly wage two wars (or three, if you count Pakistan) funded by devastating cuts to our libraries, hospitals, schools, everything that’s left of the New Deal? For us to roll over and take this, we had to be persuaded to blame ourselves for everything bad that happens to us. They started with blaming drug users and people with criminal records, and they really started winning when they blamed “welfare mothers.” Now they can blame the young people for all the violence in our communities, and if the parents don’t want to accept that, the parents can blame themselves and each other. If we can’t find a job, it’s our own fault. Failure and shame.

Blaming the Victim

My dear friend and study group comrade Dana Barnett turned me on to an amazing book called Blaming the Victim by  William Ryan. He wrote it in 1970, but I think it’s even more infuriatingly accurate for our own times. Here’s a bit from page 5: “The miserable health care of the poor is explained away on the grounds that the victim has poor motivation and lacks health information…. The ‘multiproblem’ poor, it is claimed, suffer the psychological effects of impoverishment, the ‘culture of poverty,’ and the deviant value system of the lower classes; consequently, though unwittingly, they cause their own troubles. From such a viewpoint, the obvious fact that poverty is primarily an absence of money is easily overlooked or set aside.”

The rich, the Right, and the liberals started off by blaming the people who can most easily be marginalized, and then they came for the rest of us. This means our best hope to take apart this incredibly successful victim-blaming ideology is to learn from the movements built by the most stigmatized, the people most abandoned and hated and feared by the majority.

Re-Building Ourselves, Building Our Movements

People with AIDS deal with stigma most of us can’t imagine, the kind where your family refuses to share plates or toilet seats, where telling others your health status in prison can get you killed. How do HIV positive people get past the self-blame, too, the sense that you failed because you didn’t insist on a condom, you shared needles, or you were raped? The only way to do this is by building a movement and community based on supporting and believing in each other, encouraging each other to take on new challenges and skills and make changes we never thought possible. In the AIDS movement, a person living under a cardboard box can make a speech in front of City Hall at a rally. In the AIDS community’s support groups, domestic abusers and survivors can find themselves hugging in celebration of their newfound power to overcome and become someone new.

Any strategy to build popular refusal to pay for the corporate elite’s economic crisis has to be rooted in taking apart the ideology of blaming the victim. People cannot believe in themselves and become leaders if they are blaming themselves for their own oppression. And we can’t let ourselves take the short-cut and accept the myth of the “deserving poor,” the people who used to be middle-class and have had the rug pulled out from under them. We have to fight this thing on all fronts – for our rights to housing, education, health care, the return of our loved ones from prison, meaningful jobs, everything – but wherever we do, we have to consciously attack the ideology of blaming the victim, and not let anyone get marginalized out of the movements we are building. Those are the folks we can learn from the most.

[Correction:  The word limit is 2,000 words, not 5,000 words.]

What I’ve learned from the AIDS movement about the importance of confronting stigma is amazing. Cathy Cohen argues in The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics http://www.amazon.com/Boundaries-Blackness-Breakdown-Black-Politics/dp/0226112896 that the failure to fight the stigmatization of Black queers, homeless people, drug users, prisoners — everyone most at risk for HIV — has hurt the whole Black community by allowing the proliferation of prisons, the War on Drugs, gentrification, etc. What I see in movements that take on stigma and celebrate our vulnerable, creative, marginal humanity is this incredible, energetic defiance that really moves people to participate and become leaders.

Now more than ever we have to bring the margins to the center, as Kazembe argues. See the full post on his blog by clicking here:

No Chart Paper is Big Enough to Hide The Sky: Some Thoughts on Organizing Upgrade and Beyond the Choir

Sept. 16

here is a snippet:

“…the vitality of any movements come from bringing the the margin to the center, not the other way around…. There is an overwhelming logic that the only way for activist movements to be effect is to bring the center to the margin: tone down the rhetoric, clean up your act and then people will listen.And maybe they will. But whats the point of speaking if you have forgotten what to say?

That is understandable because the center has gravity: money, connections, power, and popularity. But movements don’t grow from the center. They grow from the margins and take over the center. Think about it; every musical movement in this country has come from the oppressed experiences of Black and Brown people. Blues, jazz, salsa,  hip hop are common currency and they all occurred at the bottom.

At the same time, successful social movements have married avant garde elements with vanguard elements. The Black Panther Party was as much into Bob Dylan, Cuban Poster art and film as they were into Mao Zedong. The German Communists of Weimar married expressionism with jazz and a free sex movement. The Harlem Renaissance was as purple as it was red, with queers like Langston Hughes going to Moscow after the Russian Revolution.”

************************************************************************
Join us as we tell Obama:

END THE WAITING LISTS
FOR PEOPLE WITH AIDS!

MONDAY, SEPT 20TH @ 2PM
Meet at Broad & Arch
We will march to a fundraiser Obama is attending at
the Convention Center
************************************************************************

- The US is limiting access to treatment to only those in the most dire need around the world. Others are being forced to wait in line until they get sick before they are eligible!
- In the US, more than 3,000 people with AIDS have been forced onto AIDS drug waiting lists, due to state budget cuts!
- Here in Philly, hundreds of people with AIDS are forced to wait in line for housing. A stable home makes it possible to take meds regularly.

Sponsored by:
ACT UP Philadelphia, Health GAP and Philly Global AIDS Watchdogs (GAWD)

More info:
actupphilly (at) gmail.com