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Prisoners Fight Behavior Mod

Prisoners Fight Behavior Mod image
Parent Issue
Day
11
Month
October
Year
1974
OCR Text

Prisoners Fight Behavior Mod

Resistance to behavior modification in prisons continues to mount. At the Marion, Ill. U.S. Penitentiary prisoner Rafiki (Eddie) Sanchez is awaiting trial in the cages of the Control Unit Treatment project, a program similar to the one he is charged with resisting at the U.S. Penitentiary in Springfield, Mo.

In Springfield Sanchez tried to take a guard hostage while incarcerated in the START Behavior Modification Unit, ruled unconstitutional and officially ended July 31.

"My act was solely political," said Sanchez, "'as I sought intervention by the public for prisoners confined in behavior modification programs across the country."

Treatment at the Control Unit program in Marion includes sensory deprivation and isolation from all human contact for long periods of time, twenty-three-and-a half hour lockups every day; electroshock; massive doses of mind-altering drugs to enforce submission; and lobotomies which remove portions of prisoners' brains.

It is a new version of the old CARE (Control and Rehabilitative Effort), outlawed like the START program in Springfield.

Resistance by prisoners confined in behavior modification units across the country has led to work stoppages, fasts, court suits, rebellions, and suicides.

At Marion, Curly Fee was found hanged in his cell in October, 1973; the next month Patrick Cullen and James Pattmore slashed their achilles' tendons to protest their two-year confinement in cages; Paul Neill slashed his wrists after officials told him he would "never get out of the CARE unit."

Several other prisoners, including Sanchez, have been diagnosed as suffering from varying degrees of "stimulus deprivation psychosis" resulting from long periods of isolation.

A suit filed against the Control Unit program by the National Prison Project and the National Lawyer's Guild in April is still pending.

--Liberation News Service