This was written mostly by Sean. Sections [in brackets] are written by outside supporters, due to new information regarding Dillon.

In the second paragraph of the first page, Hunsinger admits that the original conduct report, MANCI-12-007219, was dismissed “due to its primary reliance on… Swain’s beliefs and possession of anarchist publications…” What she doesn’t admit is that she made up evidence- that she misrepresented outgoing correspondence to Ben. That’s a nice way of saying she lied. That her targeting of me was harassment and that this conduct report is an effort to successfully harass me while pretending her real motives, already revealed, aren’t relevant.

This is provably a continuation of the prior repression and harassment.

What I’ll do is, I’ll analyse the instances of this conduct report that ostensibly accuse me of something. Continue reading →

On April 30th 2013, Angela Hunsinger filed this conduct report dated September 19th, 2012. It relies almost entirely on “evidence” collected in the spring of 2013.

Are they alleging time travel now?

This 12 Monkeys thing keeps getting more and more like the sci-fi movie.

The good news is, Investigator Hunsinger seems to be coming unravelled. When Sean wrote a kite asking her for info on the type-writer she claims is both his and matches the one used to create 12 Monkeys materials (even though the make and model don’t match) she wrote back:

MAKE: blast.org
MODEL: seanswain.org
SERIAL #: 12 Monkey

She’s also taken to answering kites with snotty childish phrases like “nobody cares” and “get a new hobby”. It’s a good thing Sean Swain’s supporters are too mature to match her juvenile behaviour by making prank phone calls to 419-526-2000 ext 2027, 2026, and 2029.

Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (ODRC) Legal Counsel Trevor Clark has taken over Sean’s case from Angela Hunsinger. Clark says he plans to throw out the Rules Infraction Board (RIB) decision and re-do the investigation himself.

Hunsinger’s RIB report relied on an “ideological match” between Sean’s anarchist beliefs and the propaganda distributed by the Army of the 12 Monkeys. Sean appealed the decision, all the way to ODRC director Gary Mohr. All of his appeals were denied, nobody in the ODRC thought there was a problem. Sean was on his way to supermax, when his lawyer, Robert Fitrakis, threatened a civil rights lawsuit, claiming that Sean’s ideology is rooted in neolithic indiginism, his state-approved religious belief. The ODRC sent Head Legal Counsel Trevor Clark in to look at the situation and prepare a defense against the lawsuit. After reviewing Hunsinger’s conduct report, and listening to the RIB hearing, Clark admitted to Sean that listening to it, he “wanted to shoot [him]self in the fucking face” because the hearing and report was so poorly conducted.

Trevor Clark then proceeded to start over from scratch fabricating another frame up. Here is what we have been able to determine about Clark’s frame-up strategy, based on the few letters Sean has been able to get past the mailroom paper-shredder. We’re meeting with Mr Fitrakis on Monday to review the paperwork and detailed accusations Sean is facing, so expect a more accurate update early in the week.

1. Recruit a snitch. Clark says he got Leslie Dillon to roll over. Apparently they threatened Dillon’s sister and mother with FBI investigation to pressure him into implicating Sean and Blackjack. On Jan 9th, 2013, Leslie Dillon (#416-607) signed a sworn affidavit that he is Monkey #9 and that Sean and Blackjack were not involved. Clark says Dillon recanted the affidavit. Dillon insists he didn’t tell them anything. It’s possible Clark is snitch-jacketting Dillon, or it’s possible that he actually did roll. Until this is confirmed, everyone should be very cautious about working with Leslie Dillon, or talking with him about anything that could be mis-represented as illegal support for the 12 Monkeys.
2. Share the home addresses of elected officials with a convicted murderer. We’re not sure how this strategy helps Clark, but it is something he has done. Clark found a list of home addresses for Ohio politicians while searching Sean’s property. He presented this list to Sean and asked where he had got it. Sean explained that years ago, he wrote the General Assembly to request mailing addresses of elected officials, so he could write them letters appealing to their consciences. This was back when he thought politicians might care about his wrongful conviction. The clerks sent him a list of home addresses. While explaining this to Clark, Sean looked at the list and memorized some addresses. When he got back to his cell, he wrote a letter to Senator Hagan’s home address, asking if Hagan knew that the ODRC lead counsel was sharing addresses with him.
3. Read all Sean’s mail, throw some of it in the trash. Clark told Sean that he has read 10,000 pages of Sean’s mail, collected and copied over the last six months. (Sean says: “I’m fairly certain that’s not true. He had no self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the face.”) Sean’s mail continues to be heavily intercepted, delayed and often simply lost. Normally, prison officials are not allowed to read outgoing mail, or block incoming mail without filing a report and returning it to the sender. None of those rules apply to the treatment of Sean Swain.
4. Fabricate threats. In the face of constant ill-treatment, lawlessness and persecution Sean was seeking some form of accountability or recourse. He requested his outside supporters create something he calls BLAST! Blog, on which dirty or corrupt correctional officers and prison officials’ names and other publicly available information would be listed. Far as we know, this is neither illegal, nor is it something Sean can actually do. Sean has been incarcerated for over 20 years, he does not, and never has had access to the internet. It is also something his outside supporters have not done. Sean often suggests various schemes and projects (video advertisements, topless gender-bending car washes, another run at governor, a rock concert headlined by a dozen mainstream bands from the 90s are a few of my recent favorites). We cannot keep up with Sean’s imagination, and often we don’t want to, even if we could. At anyrate, no one is sure exactly how Clark intends to build a case around Sean talking to us about this thing.

The most interesting thing about Clark’s investigation is that it focuses on letter writing Sean has done AFTER being rounded up and accused of being leader of the Army of the 12 Monkeys. None of this evidence (other than the obviously unreliable and possibly non-existent testimony from a flip-flopping snitch, extracted under threat of violence against his family) has anything to do with the Army of the 12 Monkeys. None of it attempts to prove Sean’s involvement, only his dissatisfaction with being accused and persecuted. I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t imagine this strategy being any better than Hunsinger’s “ideological match” argument. Of course, that clearly doesn’t matter, as far as the ODRC process is concerned. They’ve already demonstrated they’ll approve any raise in Sean’s security level and deny any appeal he files.

Clark is also not seeking level 5 (supermax) security increase. He wants to send Sean to level 4, at Lucasville, the site of the longest deadly prison uprising in US history. We think that Sean should be sent to Marion correctional instead. He had a spotless record and was slated for a transfer to minimum security there before these unfounded accusations arose. In Marion, Sean can either participate in more programs and earn himself a parole, or work on his original conviction and prove his innocence without the endless harassment he has faced at ManCI.

Sean continues to endure ill-treatment at ManCI. His mail and printed materials are arbitrarily blocked, delayed or The food portions have shrunk, Sean and Blackjack have lost upwards of 40 pounds since being sent to administrative control.

Supporters of Sean Swain should call Mansfield Correctional and ask them to stop messing with his mail, his food, his clothes, his blankets, his ability to sleep, the temperature of his cell, and any other “special treatment” he and Blackjack are receiving. Call 419-526-2000.

Supporters can also call Trevor Clark and ask him to admit that they have nothing solid against Sean and to leave him alone. Call central office legal services 614-752-1765 and ask for Trevor Clark.

More importantly, folks can write to Sean, donate to his legal defense fund, and spread the word about this persecution of a steadfast, committed anarchist prisoner. Sean remains optimistic, he’s excited to have “kicked a dent” in Trevor Clark’s career and potentially ruined Hunsinger’s. He ends most correspondence with “I think we’re winning.” We hope he’s right.

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.
They have not yet resumed.
“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.

28 MAR 13

Dear Ben,

I’ve given this some thought since speaking with ODRC Counsel Trevor Clark yesterday. Please share with Raul that I hope he knows that counterfeiting U.S. Currency is against the law. I didn’t perhaps make clear to him that he should ONLY counterfeit Canadian currency, which does not violate any U.S. Laws, if he is going to counterfeit, and he should buy a book at any major book store explaining how to counterfeit before he does it, as all the major book chains sell books on counterfeiting because it’s free speech to talk about counterfeiting all you want… which is what my letter was. Free speech.
Also, I’ve had a change of heart. I think the children of the people who run the world and fuck it up are more important than the children of us peons. Rather than the ruling elite having to fear for their children dying, we should promote a volunteer list where poor people voluntarily sacrifice their children instead. That makes a lot more sense.
I really mean it. I’m not just saying that because twisted wierdos are digging through my mail searching out a reason to persecute me for my beliefs.
Also, please let Bob know we’ll have to depose the Clerks of the House and Senate to ask why, in 2002, they sent me the home addresses of senators and representatives. Counsel T. Clark wanted to know why I have those addresses. He says the addresses are home addresses. I don’t want to be in trouble because of information a government agency sent to me. That would seem like entrapment.
Finally, I think we shouldn’t put BLAST! Blog on the website. I think I should just bend over and spread my ass cheeks and let Ohio brazenly ignore its own laws and its own rules, and cram a pineapple in my ass everyday, and make me die at supermax, and the lowdown scumbags with no one to right their wrongs should get a free pass, and the atrocities should go on and on, including the deaths on torture cell row, and perhaps I’ll just file a grievance that everyone can ignore, because this steady march toward mass graves means nothing at all compared to the terrible, terrible tragedy of one of these super scumbags who approve TORTURE for free speech answering their door and getting shot in the chest.
Lordy, lordy. That would be awful compared to my parents dying while I lose my mind at supermax because no laws really exist and mentally ill shitbags like Hunsinger can just send me off to die to save her own job.
So, let’s not do something irrational and totally whacky like, I don’t know, do something. Instead, let’s volunteer to fall over dead for the benefit of the fascist fuckweasels and ruling elite.
Oh yeah. Any hateful things I wrote, I didn’t really mean it. I love sociopaths who torture and kill their captives.
I’m not just saying that because lunatics read my mail and have an infantile sense of entitlement. I really do know my place as a shit-eater.
Yum. Yum.
I think that takes care of it. Please be sure and hold onto this so Bob can use it later when I’m facing some more ridiculous persecution because I’m held by lawless oppressors and have no redress but to do radical shit in my own defense because my captors are irrational and no rules or laws apply (because THEY said so).
Again, that’s not in this letter because the fascists are reading it and pulling some weirdo Nazi thought-crime shit on me, and I’m not keeping a carbon copy just because I’m anticipating the disciplinary hearing. But, I am keeping a copy.
As a final note, I think everyone everywhere should always obey the laws of their rulers, even the really dumb ones, and if anything I wrote to anyone seemed to imply differently, I’m just misunderstood. Feel free to post this letter on the site.
I mean every word of this, you know. I’m not just writing it in my own interests because we live in a fascist police state.
With overwhelming love and affection for Jpay, Gary Mohr, and all the control freaks who keep us in perpetual bondage,

Hugs and kisses,

SEAN

P.S.: Please send a copy of this (or email) to DRC Legal Counsel Trevor Clark. I’d hate it if he missed this letter after reading 10,000 pages of other stuff.

Someone sent a copy of Walden to Sean. It was denied on flimsy flimsy grounds. Here is Sean’s hilarious response.

Trevor Clark, legal council from ODRC central office met with Sean, BlackJack, Leslie Dillon, and Shawn Marshall (all of the people accused of A12M activities). According to Sean Mr Clark said, in frustration: “I’ve got 2 lunatics (Dillon, Marshall) one guy who won’t talk to me (BlackJack) and one guy who won’t shut the fuck up (Swain).

ManCI staff continues to delay, deny and interfere with peoples’ mail. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden was denied, which inspired Sean to file this hilariously exacting and thorough informal complaint.

He said he’s read all of Sean’s outgoing mail for the last 6 months (prisoners’ outgoing mail is normally protected from monitoring). Sean says: “I’m fairly certain that’s not true. He had no self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the face.”

More importantly, Mr Clark suggested that he might throw out Angela Hunsinger’s Conduct Report and redo it himself.

If this happens, it indicates two things:

Central Office is not confident in the “evidence” presented in Hunsinger’s report. Which means Sean has been effective in pleading his case and proving his innocence. We’re hoping this puts a black mark on Hunsinger’s career and makes her reconsider being a fascist pig. In other words: we’re winning. Sean wants to thank everyone for any and all support they’ve extended over the course of this ordeal. It has made a difference.
Their “solution” is starting over and putting together a more effective frame-up of Sean. Which means we’re not done yet, and should expect the ODRC to increase repression of all the guys accused of A12M activities. This would also mean that Sean spends another 6 months in terrible conditions in the local control unit.

Now is an important time to increase support for Sean and his co-accused. Clark insinuated that they have extracted testimony from other inmates to implicate Sean. Sean doesn’t know if this is actually true, or just a ruse to confuse and intimidate him. Either way, now is an especially important time to let Sean’s co-accused know that people on the outside support them. This is particularly important for those who have admitted or not denied involvement with A12M (Dillon and Marshall).

Please write to people!

They are all at:

ManCI
1150 N Main St
Mansfield, Oh 44901

Sean Swain 243-205
BlackJack (dzelajilja) 530-144
Leslie Dillon 416-607
Shawn Marshall 461-448

Sean hasn’t been receiving mail from people who told him (through other means) that they had sent him stuff.

If you’ve sent anything to Sean and haven’t got a reply from him, please contact redbirdprisonabolition@riseup.net and we’ll let sean know, so he can at least write you back. Thanks!

Ten soldiers and Nixon’s comin’,
We’re finally on our own,
This summer I hear the drummin’,
Four dead in Ohio.
-Neil Young, “Ohio”

During a Vietnam protest at Kent State, Ohio, National Guardsmen gunned down four protesting students. The events gripped the nation’s attention. The National Guard killed four people with bullets. This past month at Mansfield Correctional, Warden Terry Tibbals matched the National Guard’s death count, killing four prisoners with incompetence rather than bullets.

Four dead in Ohio no longer hits the headlines. I do not yet know their names. What is available in terms of information is how the state classifies their deaths: two dead from what the state calls “natural causes,” and two dead from what the state calls “homicide.” Let’s talk about the homicides first.

In at least one instance of the homicide deaths, the victim was locked in a cell with the prisoner who stabbed and killed him. Of course the prisoner who did the stabbing will be charged with a crime and all the blame will be leveled at him. This is quite self-serving to prison authorities, as they get to pretend that the 100% overcrowding at MANCI that requires double-bunking a cell designed for single occupancy had nothing at all to do with this death.

Chances are, prison officials will try to also pretend the stabbing happened out of the blue, with no warning—which almost never happens. In my twenty-one years of experience, when two prisoners who share a cell have a conflict, they almost always attempt to resolve it with unit staff. Even the most irrational prisoner would prefer to have a cell move in order to end up in a better living arrangement rather than kill someone and maybe end up on death row or dying in prison.

Likely, there were warnings. Likely, the guy who got stabbed to death felt the living situation was awkward before he felt the shank sink into his flesh. Likely, he said something to unit staff.

So why was nothing done? Well, first, with budget cuts, most unit staff have been given additional duties. MANCI has half the case workers that it used to have and anyone with experience has been pushed into retirement. One unit manager is brand new, another one came to the position after running the prison’s arts and crafts program. Some of the cause managers are former guards filling in because so much staff is leaving MANCI. The end result, you end up with a prison run by people who are clueless, overwhelmed, and apathetic.

Just like the warden.

Certainly, the two homicides at MANCI this past month were homicides, but there was a whole network of prison administrators and policy-makers whose prints are now on those shanks, not least of which are the hapless Warden Tibbals and his principle cover-up artist, investigator Andrea Hunsinger, who will deflect all blame away from her co-workers and bosses. That is, after all, her job. The truth is irrelevant. Justifying the status quo overrides everything else.

Sometimes you gotta crack eggs to make an omelet.

While the cause of death listed for those two prisoners will be “homicide,” they were murdered by apathy and incompetence.

Now, the two prisoners who died of what the state calls “natural causes.” To fully understand the irony of what the state calls “natural,” you need some context.

On September 19th, when MANCI investigator Hunsinger had me locked up for the 12 Monkey frame-up, I wasn’t taken to segregation. Instead, I was taken to a row of cells behind the medical clinic. Two of those cells are called “suicide cells,” not because they prevent suicide, but because the conditions drive you to it. The conditions are the same general recipe set forth in the C.I.A.’s Kubark Manual, the desk reference for what it calls “the simple torture situation.” When I was placed in the “suicide cell,” it was for the purpose of psychologically and emotionally breaking me. There was no bed, no head, no shower or recreation facilities; my food was half rations in a styrofoam tray that cannot hold the standard serving sizes; I had not toothbrush; I had no pens nor pencils, making it impossible for me to communicate my intolerable situation to the outside world. I was ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard. Whatever would happen to me in that area is my word against the staff’s. No witnesses. And if I turned up dead, it’s the staff’s word against no one.

That’s why that row of cells, ostensibly for “suicide prevention,” is called “torture cells” by both prisoners and staff. I first reported the Ohio Department of Retribution and Corruption’s use of torture cells in 2002 in a letter I sent to then-sentator Robert F. Hagan of the Corrections Institution Inspection Committee. I reported the use of torture cell 182 in segregation at Richland Corruptional.

Here at MANCI, those cells are no longer torture cells. They are death cells.

Death cells.

In the last month, two prisoners were removed from their population cells where someone else would call for help in the event of a medical emergency, and for their own welfare they were relocated to torture cell row and locked into a concrete tomb they would never exit alive. I don’t know if they died in the very same torture cell I occupied, pacing the floor at all hours to stay warm, sleep deprivation, freezing cold, hunger, despair, isolation, a complete sense of abandonment. I don’t know if they died in that cell and neither do you. Both men were allegedly “found” dead after quite some time, and there is no doubt they were “found” in cells with beds and available pencils and certainly the temperature in the cells was quite cozy by the time anyone other than MANCI staff arrived to investigate.

Those are the decidedly “unnatural” conditions that led to the “natural causes” deaths of two human beings.

I might still be alive only because I have friends who learned of my conditions and raised enough of a fuss to make MANCI murderers stop. The two men who died in those death cells may be dead only because they had no one.

Surviving in the custody of these murderer terrorists is just dumb luck. In a sane world, Tibbals and Hunsinger would be packing the contents of their desks into cardboard boxes and face the unemployment line that thousands of honest Ohioans have to face every day. They wouldn’t be rewarded with 501K’s for causing a record death-toll, for lying and covering-up their incompetence, for doing a worse job managing a prison that the average person you could pick at random out of a phone book.

That’s quite ignominious, holding the death-toll record for a single month. Warden Tibbals has again made his tenor here memorable.

Four dead in Ohio…
Four dead at MANCI…
So far.

“So serene on the screen you was mesmerized,
cellular phone soundin’ a death tone,
corporations cold turned you to stone before you realized,
They load the clip in omnicolor
They pack the Nine
They fire it at prime-time…”
-Rage Against the Machine “Bullet in Yer Head”

“You are what you eat.” We all heard that growing up, a piece of conventional wisdom designed to provoke us into thinking about the food products we put into our bodies. But as much as we are what we eat, it is also true that we are what we smear into our armpits or slather in our hair or rub on our skin. We ingest all of that too. So, in that sense, we are the unpronounceable chemicals we eat and we are also the unpronounceable chemicals we use to coat our bodies and faces and hair.

But there’s another way that “we are what we eat,” that we become what we ingest, and it’s something we rarely think about. What we put into our minds. Just as much as our food determines our biology, what we see and hear and absorb into our minds impacts how we think, how we understand the world, how we perceive reality, how we shape our own identities in relation to the world we engage.

None of us exists in a vacuum. We are all bombarded on a daily basis by millions of messages, some of them we consciously consider and some of hem we do not. But just because we do not consciously consider them does not mean they do not impact us. Consider, in a world wher eyou are confronted several times an hour to buy, buy, buy you may not actually purchase any of the products presented to you, but at the same time, in a world where buying and selling are the social norm, you also will not question the morality of commerce. The constant messages urging you to buy, buy, buy have the impact of establishing a norm, a cultural standard that you do not question.

Your exposure to constant sales pitches may not persuade you to order a pizza or pick up a bag of tacos; you may not buy that luxury car or a new pair of basketball shoes, but you implicitly accept the normalcy of a world where impersonal corporations are the source of your food, your clothes, your transportation, your employment (if you’re lucky) and your housing. Every aspect of your life is brought to you by strangers who do not care about you personally and hope to exploit you for their benefit as much as they can.

We do not question if this is how it ought to be.

We participate unquestioningly in a complex system here we have virtually no power at all over the content of our food, the materials in our clothes, the manufacture of our transportation (or the social spaces of our cities that necessitate transit), the kind of work we perform, or where we live (homes constructed according to the standards of strangers who do not know our needs).

One of the dominant social norms we never question is respect for authority. We defer to those with badges and titles. We do not question why we do that, or whether it’s in our own interests to do so. We just do it. Millions of us. Hundreds of millions.

The most immediate symbol of authority is the cop. The cop is the universal representation of the law.

If we look at the network prime-time television, what do we see? Law and Order, Law and Order SVU, Law and Order Criminal Intent, CSI, CSI New York, CSI Miami, CSI Los Angeles, NCIS, Cold Case, Blue Bloods, Criminal Minds, Cops, America’s Most Wanted, Person of Interest, Flash Point, and a host of news magazine shows like Dateline’s Unsolved Mysteries. Network programming is filled with cops. There are cops everywhere, on every channel. And even in shows that are not crime dramas, many of the prominent characters are cops: Ghost Whisperer, for example, where the main character’s boyfriend is a cop; or Mike and Molly, a sitcom where the mail lead works as a cop. Why are cops on every channel, all the time? Is this accidental?

A friend of mine proposed, as devil’s advocate, that perhaps cop dramas are more interesting—which would explain why, for instance, we do not see “plumbing dramas” on every station. But this isn’t really a valid argument. In reality, most cops on most shifts do no more of interest than a plumber. In reality, the shift of a cop is no more exciting than the shift of a school teacher or an electrician. In fact, school teachers, by all available data, work a far more dangerous job than cops do.

But you don’t see “teacher dramas” on every channel, all night long, do you? No. You see cops. Every channel, every night. You see symbols of authority and law. You see regulatory systems of society operating consistently and well. You see plenty of messages that you never question, reinforcing confidence that this system works, persuading you to conform and comply.

Is it simply paranoia to see a correlation? I read somewhere recently that there are only 4,000 police officers in the city of Atlanta. That’s a city of roughly 400,000 people. Using Atlanta as the standard, we can estimate that roughly 1% of our population is in law enforcement. So why does all of network television pump cops at us every hour of prime-time viewing?

Can we see this as anything but some kind of social agenda? To what degree are we kept under control and unquestioning by the constant, reinforced messages beamed into our brains by the cop-drama networks?

Think also for a moment about the sponsors of that entertainment. The sponsors mostly attempt to sell you technology, food and pharmaceuticals (when they aren’t advertising for the network’s programs). While providing you pro-cop propaganda to keep you docile and passive, the corporations push technologies to make you dependent, food that makes you complacent and sleepy, and pharmaceuticals that turn you into a compliant zombie with no capacity for resistance nor self-determination.

Police, pizza, and pills.

Now contrast that with the reality of actual cops pounding occupy protesters in the head with billy-clubs, pepper-spraying peaceful college students in the face without provocation, or murdering unarmed Black men like it’s hunting season, and tell me whether or not the prime-time programming is serving its designed purpose.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the networks are copping us into a state of non-freedom, that their messaging is influencing us. So, if we want to be free and we recognize how the cop shows are colonizing our thinking, a necessary first step is to shut it off. We have to reject the false mythology pumped at us. We have to fill our time with constructive and liberatory projects.

First we push the cops out of our minds.
Then we push them out of our world.
Freedom is a world without cops.