The US prison system is the constantly evolving product of centuries of research and experimentation in the dissolution of solidarity. Of the prison regime’s many programs, which do not always run in neat harmony, counter-solidarity enjoys a special privilege and guides many of the prison’s operations. Some of these are built into protocol, and integral to the prison’s daily rhythmic mode of catastrophe-creation: strict limitations on personal contact with loved ones and networks of solidarity on the outside through mail censorship, phone austerity, and an often pathological hostility toward durable connections across the wall; vague rules banning association, applied unevenly to break up small communities like abolitionist, queer, and/or Black liberationist reading groups and prisoners’ organizations; and the constantly looming or actualized threat of solitary confinement, re-named by a never-ending succession of acronyms.1

Other measures are not officially, legally sanctioned, but are far more proactive. In California’s infamous “gladiator fights,” prisoners have been made to fight each other, sometimes to the death, for guard entertainment and gambling, but more importantly to stoke racial, regional, and national animosity between imprisoned people. Treaties between imprisoned groups with histories of mutual hostility are intentionally thwarted by administrations and guards (Fortino 2020). These practices are rare, though not exceptional. They share a logic of counter-solidarity with daily instances of using carceral leverage to recruit informants, stir rumors and sow animosity between imprisoned individuals and groups. Two integral forms of that leverage are two of the most widespread and routine techniques for counter-solidarity violence: the hole and the bus, solitary confinement and forced transfer.

Solitary confinement, or “the hole,” is known by a litany of acronyms: the RHU, the SHU, POC, CMU, Ad Seg, and so on. While the prison regime is constantly cooking up new reasons to inflict psychological trauma on imprisoned people through prolonged isolation, it is also constantly renaming the hole to avoid detection by opponents of solitary confinement and to avoid accountability to the existing rules restricting the practice of isolation. Oh, there’s a new policy limiting the use of Solitary Confinement? Well, argue the prisoncrats, that has nothing to do with what is now called a Psychiatric Observation Cell. Currently, it is estimated that over 75,000 people daily are isolated in solitude in US prisons (Gullapalli 2022). But that number, based on official counts, is almost certainly significantly lower than the real total, partially due to the unreliable nature of prison and jail statistics and partially because of this ongoing reclassification of the hole. The physical and psychological devastation inflicted by solitary confinement is a well-established fact, thoroughly documented by institutional and academic research. The research affirms what people subjected to this form of torture have said since its inception: the hole gradually destroys people because it is designed to destroy people (Herring 2020).

The hole, or the “jail within the jail” as it is commonly called, is a constant looming threat. Anyone can end up there for serious and minor infractions, or for no infractions at all. Like the prison of which it is the center, however, Black and disabled people are far more likely to see the inside (Eskender 2022). The ever-present possibility of getting sent into solitary is a threat to the meager personal connections prisoners are able to establish and maintain inside and out. The hole typically entails loss or significant reduction of ‘privileges’ such as phone time, mail, books, important programs like religious and secular study, medical care and therapy. Its isolation, like the prison, dissolves contact with both immediate and remote friends, loved ones, acquaintances, and comrades. As Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz pointed out and as Orisanmi Burton’s work proves, the modern isolation regime is the product of a deeply political dream of social control, rebellion-crushing, and counter-revolutionary warfare. In the early development period of modern ‘control units,’ the carceral prototype for today’s Super Max prisons and the Federal ‘Communication Management Units,’ a key architect of this new mode of incarceration, Edgar H. Schein, celebrated their potential capacity for ‘brainwashing’ and their utility as laboratories for social control in the imperialist war on global communism (Schein 1960).

The hole immobilizes groups, individuals, and messages, putting immense stress on existing relationships and foreclosing the building of new ones. Those relationships are absolutely necessary for individual prisoners’ social survival, mental health, legal defense, and sense of connection to the outside world. They are just as vital to the collective millions of people locked in cages by the United States and the millions more who survive their loved ones’ physical absence. Mediated interpersonal relationships are the foundation for mutual aid networks, flows of information about prison conditions and state violence, and the building of networks for radical study, knowledge production, organization, and what imprisoned abolitionist organizer and theorist Stephen Wilson calls ‘dis-organization’ of the prison’s order. These relationships that can be and are so easily interrupted and dissolved by the hole are nothing short of the condition of possibility for any organized challenge to the prison regime. While solitary confinement traumatizes the individual, it dramatically weakens actual and potential collectives behind and across the prison wall through immobilization of both people and media.

Prisons also weaponize mobility. The routine, often brutal practice of forced transfer of a person from one facility to another is one of the most important tools in the prison’s counter-solidarity program. Colloquially known as ‘diesel therapy,’ forced transfer is a systematically disorienting process. It is often sudden and surprising. Typically, the person being shipped around in a prison van is unaware of their destination or the planned duration of their trip until they arrive at a new facility. Family members, friends, comrades, and lawyers are not normally informed of transfers, except by the unexplained interruption in communication—promised calls are not made, video visits are cancelled, and emails go days without replies. Forced transfer constitutes a temporary disappearance of the shipped captives by denying them access to connective media and even by removing them from camera-surveilled prison spaces. While nothing can guarantee one’s safety in state captivity, the suspension of even these weak channels for communication with loved ones and other sympathetic people on the outside expose prisoners to even more harm, and more severe attack. Forced transfer sometimes serves as an occasion for brutal beatings as prisoners board or dismount the prison van.

Transfer is sometimes a logistical technique to balance a state’s prison population across facilities; sometimes it’s the result of a prisoner being sent to the hole and deemed unfit or unsafe to return to general population at that facility; sometimes it’s purely punitive; and sometimes it’s the prison’s best way to stop a flourishing solidarity network, or even an organization or a radical study group. Imprisoned organizers like Keven ‘Rashid’ Johnson, Shaka Shakur, and Kwame ‘Lil Beans’ Shakur are three of many politicized prisoners who have been treated to the brutality and instability of ‘diesel therapy’ (Johnson 2021; Shaka Shakur 2019; Kwame Shakur n.d.). They have long argued that transfer, and in particular the system of interstate transfer that keeps them moving from state to state, is a conscious effort by prison officials to stifle organization and kill movements, locating transfer in the longer history of carceral counterinsurgency and COINTELPRO.2

All of these practices of isolation and social disaggregation which target bonds of solidarity are necessary for the prison regime’s daily and historical operation. And because the prison is a necessary component of what Charisse Burden-Stelly calls “modern US racial capitalism’s” infrastructure, the conditions of possibility for the prison regime are also some of the conditions of possibility for US imperialism and its attendant social, political, and environmental catastrophes. In other words, the catastrophe of US prisons extends well beyond the interior catastrophes of genocidal domestic warfare, partially contained by walls and barbed wire. Beyond the two million people locked up in the US, beyond even their friends and families, the catastrophe of prison is a truly historical force, daily shaping life and death on this planet. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, arguing for the geographic study of prisons and a prison-centered approach to US and global geography, argued in 2002 that “A prison-centered map shows dynamic connections between 1) criminalization, 2) imprisonment, 3) wealth transfer between poor communities, 4) disfranchisement, and 5) migration of state and non-state practices, policies, and capitalist ventures that all depend on carcerality as a basic state-building project” (Gilmore 2022). This fifth category far exceeds the relatively small parasitic companies doing deals directly with departments of correction, and includes the suppression of movements for Black liberation, struggles for decolonization on five continents, and fights against patriarchal domination; it includes union-busting, imperial meddling, counterinsurgency, and “domestic” and global warfare.

While carceral techniques like solitary confinement, phone surveillance, mail digitization, censorship, and forced transfer are widely and correctly understood as devastating acts of violence against individuals and families, we must also grasp them as truly catastrophic in their broader effects. Anything that strengthens the US prison regime strengthens the United States and its genocidal imperialist projects ‘at home’ (ongoing colonization, lawfare against trans people and reproductive autonomy, and deadly anti-Black racism) and ‘abroad’ (open warfare, destabilization, military profiteering, and a catastrophic global division of labor). As centuries-long struggles against planetary destruction continue to escalate, the connection between the United States’ carceral apparatus and settler-capitalist extraction is becoming more visible than ever, from the bipartisan attack on water protectors at Standing Rock, to the execution of a forest defender in Atlanta (Milman and Lakhani 2023). To build solidarity infrastructures adequate to the daunting challenges faced by everyone struggling for the revolutionary transformation of life on this planet, direct confrontation with the prison regime’s robust infrastructures of counter-solidarity is absolutely necessary. Though discouraging and difficult to grapple with, the simple fact that some leaders from every movement challenging the order of US imperialism will meet carceral violence and disappearance is irrefutable. The US prison system is therefore an important terrain for all meaningful struggles against capitalism-imperialism.

Notes

1

Special Housing Unit (SHU), Restricted Housing Unit (RHU), Psychiatric Observation Cell (POC), Administrative Segregation (AdSeg), and so on.

2

COINTELPRO, short for “Counter Intelligence Program,” was part of the FBI’s robust but covert domestic warfare on radical and even reformist social movements (including the Civil Rights movement), exposed in 1971. See https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/cointelpro-exposed/

Literature:

Eskender, Melat. “Incarcerated People of Color with Mental Illness Get Less Treatment and More Solitary Confinement.” Solitary Watch (blog), April 22, 2022. https://solitarywatch.org/2022/04/22/incarcerated-people-of-color-with-mental-illness-get-less-treatment-and-more-solitary-confinement/.

Fortino, Michael. “California Prison Officials Put Hold on Policy That Led to ‘Gladiator Fights’ | Prison Legal News,” April 1, 2020. https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2020/apr/1/california-prison-officials-put-hold-policy-led-gladiator-fights/.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, Brenna Bhandar, and Alberto Toscano. Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation. London ; New York: Verso, 2022.

Gullapalli, Jean Casella and Vaidya. “Long-Awaited Prison Census Shows More Than 75,000 People in Solitary Confinement.” Solitary Watch (blog), June 16, 2022. https://solitarywatch.org/2022/06/16/long-awaited-prison-census-shows-more-than-75000-people-in-solitary-confinement/.

Herring, Tiana. “The Research Is Clear: Solitary Confinement Causes Long-Lasting Harm.” Prison Policy Initiative (blog), December 8, 2020. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/12/08/solitary_symposium/.

Johnson, Kevin “Rashid.” “Interstate Prison Transfers as Weapons of Political Repression: My Nine Years in Domestic Exile.” San Francisco Bay View (blog), June 27, 2021. https://sfbayview.com/2021/06/interstate-prison-transfers-as-weapons-of-political-repression-my-nine-years-in-domestic-exile/.

“Kwame Shakur | Jericho Movement.” Accessed June 22, 2023. https://thejerichomovement.com/profile/kwame-shakur.

Milman, Oliver, and Nina Lakhani. “Atlanta Shooting Part of Alarming US Crackdown on Environmental Defenders.” The Guardian, February 2, 2023, sec. Environment. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/02/atlanta-shooting-manuel-teran-crackdown-environmental-defenders.

Schein, Edgar H. “Brainwashing.” Cambridge, Massachusetts: Center for International Studies at Massechussetts Institute of Technology, December 1960. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/83028/14769178.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

Shakur, Shaka. “Shaka Shakur, Traded for Rashid, Exposes ‘Domestic Exile,’ New Strategy in Prison Low Intensity Warfare.” San Francisco Bay View (blog), August 25, 2019. https://sfbayview.com/2019/04/shaka-shakur-traded-for-rashid-exposes-domestic-exile-new-strategy-in-prison-low-intensity-warfare/.

Solidarities