This essay may or may not have been written by Sean Swain (see footnote). It was posted to SeanSwain.org tonight.
1993 Never Ends: The Lucasville Uprising, 20 Years Later
1993 Never Ends: The Lucasville Uprising, 20 Years Later
By _____ _____*
I remember the images of the prison
beyond the razor-wire beamed to me through my idiot box as the
guards, in a panic, went cell to cell, slamming doors that easter
morning. At Mansfield Correctional, we watched the spectacle unfold,
seemingly unreal, enduring the emergency lock-down. Normal prison
operations ended.
“Normal operations” is a term
often blasted over the prisons' loudspeakers, one that indicates that
whatever event that just occurred and required special attention has
been resolved and that everyone in the prison environment can resume
functions as before. It is only a term now. There is no substance to
it. “Normal operations” have not been resumed since 1993.
The Lucasville Uprising, for all
practical purposes, has continued for the last twenty years. In terms
of prison operations, the prisoners still control the cell-block and
the guard hostages are still held. “Lucasville,” a single-word
epithet, excuses or justifies every policy or procedure that the
prison complex undertakes, as if the utterance of that single word,
“Lucasville” is all the explanation needed.
The Lucasville Uprising is not an
event that happened twenty years ago, an event with causes that can
be analyzed or lessons to be applied in the practical world of prison
operations; instead, the Lucasville Uprising is a constant and ever
present specter that haunts every corner of the Ohio prison complex,
a narrative, a mythos, burned into the collective psyche of the
prison establishment. It has transcended the mundane events that
unfolded in a specific place at a specific time, and it now
represents something more- to invoke the words “Lucasville
Uprising” to prisoncrats is analogous to invoking, “Remember the
Alamo.”
For workers in the prison complex, the
words “Lucasville Uprising” represent the traumatic experience
when their collective “we” was under “attack” by their
“enemy.” It has the same traumatic power for the prison complex
as a bloodied nose to an unsuspecting schoolyard bully whose effort
to expropriate milk-money were never resisted. And in the throes of
that proverbial bloodied nose, the Ohio prison complex has, for two
decades, exacted its revenge upon every captive in its mismanaged
control. In so doing, the prison system has not analyzed the
Lucasville Uprising in order to gain insight into its true causes and
thereby prevent a repeat of history, but has, instead, greatly
intensified, statewide, the very repressive forces and dynamics, the
childish maliciousness of the arrogantly and ineptly powerful, that
instigated the Lucasville Uprising in the first place, thereby
greatly increasing the probability of repeating history again and
again.
The last two decades, Ohio prisoncrats
remain “stuck” in 1993, unable to move past the Lucasville
Uprising, engaging in a campaign of thinly veiled retribution sure to
provoke more prisoner resistance. This campaign is represented by the
initial removal of weights and recreation equipment shortly after the
uprising, to the removal of tobacco, the serious cuts to food
portions, the end of food and sundry boxes from home, and the general
atmosphere of hostility that underpinned all of these gradual
encroachments.
In the last two decades, there has
been a statewide shift in the prison system's approach, one in which
prisoners are reduced to the state of non-humans, not just in terms
of material conditions, but in terms of fundamental rights. A case in
point:
Shortly after the Lucasville Uprising,
the Correctional institution Inspection Committee, a committee of the
Ohio General Assembly with a civilian staff to investigate prisoner
complaints, undertook to “reform” the prison grievance procedure.
This effort was a consequence of reliable indications that the
Lucasville Uprising occurred in part because the prison population
largely understood the grievance procedure to be ineffective, and
with no recourse to resolve grievances took direct and desperate
action. So, to avoid further such uprisings, the CIIC proposed to
“fix” the grievance process.
That grievance process, rather than
being “fixed,” has instead been incorporated into the harassment
and repression machinery of the prison system. The inspectors,
apathetic and unresponsive at the time of the Lucasville Uprising,
are now openly inimical to prisoners, stalling prisoners' exhaustion
of grievances in order to prevent prisoners from proceeding to court;
and in the period of time that prisoners are preventing from filing
litigation, inspectors often prompt staff to employ harassment and
retaliation designed to break the will of prisoners to litigate. In
this way, inspectors no longer protect the rights of prisoners, but
instead protect the “bottom line” of the prison complex,
insulating it from the consequences of it's abuses.
The CIIC itself, facing a system that
defies reform, has surrendered in its efforts and has taken the image
of the system it set out to reform more than the system has taken the
image of the CIIC. So much so, the CIIC itself has passively
permitted situations that are recognized as “the simple torture
situation.”
The employment of torture has become
acceptable state wide. The construction of the Ohio State
Penitentiary (OSP), a so-called “supermaximum security”
institution, was justified on the argument of housing the Lucasville
Uprising prisoners; with the opening of OSP, Ohio joined the dubious
ranks of states that employ known psychological tortures over
durations of time designed to cause mental illness in those who
experience them. This coincided with a general shift in what
treatment became “acceptable.” In 2002, Richland Correctional's
use of Torture Cell 182 drew the attention of the CIIC's then-Senator
Robert F Hagan, in 2013, the deaths of 2 prisoners on Torture Cell
Row at Mansfield Correctional in a period of just 30 days did not
evoke the same bewilderment.
When the federal civil rights action
Austin V Wilkinson led to
the State of Ohio creating specific guidelines for ensuring that the
tortures of supermax deprivation were reserved for “the worst of
the worst,” it seemed the era of using supermax to neutralize
prisoner whistle-blowers and political prisoners was over. But less
than a decade later, prisoners face indefinite supermax placement for
conduct such as writing a rap verse, or for publicly challenging the
legality of questionable prison policy. The prison system's
disciplinary process has been transformed into a weapon to punish
prisoners for reporting abuses or for litigating.
Given
the prison system's conduct, and given its complete intransigence
when it comes to reasonably resolving even issues of fundamental
prisoner rights through its own processes, the courts have been
overwhelmed with prisoner litigation. The solution has not
been to reform the prisons or investigate the increase of rights
violations, but instead has been the proliferation of new laws to
limit, obstruct, delay, or eliminate prisoner litigation by making it
too costly. The solution has not
been to find ways to enforce established rules and protect basic
rights, but instead to create and rely upon irrelevant procedural
justifications for dismissing prisoner claims.
As a consequence of all of these developments in the two decades
since the Lucasville Uprising, prison conditions have greatly
degraded and all possible avenues for redress have been effectively
foreclosed. While use of the grievance process or civil rights claims
once resulted in no effective change, it now results in retaliation
and the seizure of all meager funds available to the prisoner,
leaving prisoners in worse condition for raising claims.
Further, in an era where prison staff have retaliated by spraying
pepper spray into a restrained prisoner's rectum, or the use of
supermax security to silence whistle-blowers, prisoners face more
than just harassment or financial penalties for objecting to what
objectively comes closer and closer to concentration camp conditions.
For the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, 1993 has
continued for 20 years and there is no end in sight. The narrative
that the machinery of the prison complex tells itself, its false
mythology of victimhood, its refusal of admission that it was the
principle cause of the Lucasville Uprising it provoked, has made
future such uprisings inevitable, reducing its prison population to
inhumane and intolerably oppressive conditions.
Unlike the Nazi regime and their concentration camps, Ohio has not
yet begun to dig mass graves.
But there are many individual graves.
And there promises to be more.
*
This statement may or may not have been written by Sean Swain, but
Sean Swain is an Ohio prisoner and cannot write truthfully without
facing deprivations and torture. In 2008, he was subjected to torture
at Toledo Correctional for writing a book. His torture was approved
by US District Judge Jack Zouhary, who dismissed Sean's claims in
Swain v
Fullenkamp, et al.,
because Sean's ideology is selectively not afforded constitutional
protection. In 2012, Mansfield Correctional administrators held Sean
on Torture Cell Row, where 2 men later died, and have approved Sean
for supermax placement because he wrote an article questioning the
legality of Jpay policy, an article posted at SeanSwain.org. He now
faces death at supermax for telling the truth about the crimes of his
captors.
As a consequence, whether Sean Swain wrote this or not, and no one
is saying he did, his name cannot be associated with this work for
fear of further retribution and torture.
In a free country, this footnote would not be necessary.
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