Congress Critters Now Ordering Solitary Confinement for Emailers

So, you're doing a six-month stint at your local minimum-security federal prison farm for disturbing the peace and a little property damage while celebrating UK's win over Indiana in the NCAA tournament.

Your congress critter, to whom you have sent emails criticizing his votes and questioning his ancestry, puts in a call to the Bureau of Prisons and gets you transferred to solitary confinement at the SuperMax hellhole in Marion, Indiana.

Wait, what?

Kevin Gosztola at Firedoglake:

Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher, who was given a two-year sentence in prison for making fake bids in a Utah public land auction that was later found to be corrupt, has reportedly been moved to solitary confinement after a member of Congress contacted the Bureau of Prisons.

Peaceful Uprising, a climate change activism group which DeChristopher co-founded, states in a press release posted on March 27:

On the evening of Friday March 9th, Tim DeChristopher was summarily removed from the minimum security camp where he has been held since September 2011, and moved into the FCI Herlong’s Special Housing Unit (SHU). Tim was informed by Lieutenant Weirich that he was being moved to the SHU because an unidentified congressman had called from Washington DC, complaining of an email that Tim had sent to a friend. Tim was inquiring about the reported business practices of one of his legal fund contributors, threatening to return the money if their values no longer aligned with his own. According to Prison officials, Tim will continue to be held in isolated confinement pending an investigation. There is no definite timeline for inmates being held in the SHU — often times they await months for the conclusion of an investigation.

In the SHU, Tim’s movement and communications are severely restricted. In the past two weeks, he has been allowed out of his 8 X 10 cell (which he shares with one other inmate) four times, each time for less than an hour. The SHU could have been designed by Franz Kafka. Tim is allowed one book in his cell, and four in his property locker. His writing means are restricted to a thin ink cartridge which makes correspondence extremely difficult. He can still receive mail from the outside, but has no other form of communication other than 15 minutes of phone calls per month.

First off, this congress person who ordered DeChristopher into solitary confinement is a coward and should be unmasked. DeChristopher is powerless in prison. He is already being punished.

If the description of events is correct, it seems like a congressman is trying to intimidate DeChristopher for wanting to return money. To amplify the punishment because of an email is cruel. That the punishment is to place DeChristopher into solitary confinement is even more inhumane. In fact, it is what a fascist country would do to a political prisoner.

There do not appear to be any other instances known where a congressman called up the Bureau of Prisons and was able to get a prisoner moved. That seems terribly arbitrary and unjust. So, why is the Bureau of Prisons granting the unnamed congressman this power? Did DeChristopher violate some regulation he is supposed to abide by when he wrote the email?

Peaceful Uprising is correct. To get this sorted out could take months. It took months to get Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, moved out of solitary confinement at Quantico Marine Brig to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Though there was political support for the pre-trial confinement conditions being imposed, no congressman is known to have ordered the brig authority to keep Manning under the prevention of injury (POI) watch that led to his cruel and inhumane treatment. So, what is happening to DeChristopher may be even more appalling.

Note also that what DeChristopher did was entirely non-violent and far less damaging to society than setting a sofa on fire in celebration. He shouldn't be in prison at all. His real crime, of course, was fighting the plutocracy.

This is what comes of treating elected officials like petty princelings instead of the servants of the people they are supposed to be.

The motherfuckers work for us, and it's way past time they got reminded of that.