Doing Whatever It Takes to Serve Massa: Black Straw Boss Runs Inhumane SC Riot Prison Featuring Water that Smells Like Feces, Denial of Light/Air, Moldy Food & Provocation of Gang Fights

in photo, mentacidal straw boss Aaron Joyner, aka the warden of Lee Correctional Institution

According to FUNKTIONARY:

Straw-Boss  - a Sambo who is appointed a certain oversight role for the white power Overseer. It is the job of the Straw Boss to establish a formal organization to effectively and systematically carry out the wishes of the white supremacist power matrix while serving his own personal needs and ends through patronage power. 

double consciousness - the sense of looking at one's Self through the eye's (axiology) and distorted mirrors of others. 2) the psych-mismanagement of one's neurosis. 3) intimately involved with what you hate, and torn apart from who you (think you) are. [MORE]

From [HERE] At a news conference on April 16, Bryan Stirling, the director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, tried to explain why seven men had been stabbed to death and many more had been severely injured by their fellow prisoners at the Lee Correctional Institution. A fight had broken out the night before between rival gangs over “territory, contraband and cellphones,” Mr. Stirling said, and the priority now was to jam all illegal cellphones in the state’s prison system.

According to the many emails, calls and texts I have received this week from inside South Carolina’s prisons, however, this account is misleading, and to clamp down even harder on the men inside would be a terrible mistake.

Yes, it was a gang fight, prisoners tell me, but it was corrections officials who had decided to house rival gangs in the same dormitory, and it was the officials’ increasingly punitive policies that exacerbated tensions on the inside. The fact that the rioting went on for seven hours, and that so many died and were injured — 22 were taken to the hospital — was, they say, in no small part because corrections officers were AWOL.

Notably, it is contraband cellphones that make it possible for these prisoners to get their own accounts of the riot to the public, as well as to document their claim that corrections officials could have prevented the high death toll.

Punitive sentencing laws have taken away prisoners’ hope for the future. One in 10 prisoners in South Carolina are serving a life sentence, and inmates are required to serve 85 percent of their time, no matter how well they have done on the inside.

Daily degradations grind away at men’s souls. As one prisoner explained, the Corrections Department has reduced visits from family members, limited their ability to send food and there are now only “two meals a day on weekends.”

“These men and women are incarcerated for a reason,” the man conceded, “but they are still human.”

The pictures [photos above are from PLN] that have been sent to me from prison cellphones make it abundantly clear, however, that the department does not see these men as human beings. One man in McCormick Correctional Institution sent pictures of the metal plates that prison officials put over the windows, meaning too little light and fresh air gets into this sweltering and filthy prison. Others have sent photos of the food they are served, which in contrast to the menu that the Department of Corrections posts publicly, looks barely nutritional. The men say it is sometimes moldy, and for those on lockdown, it is served erratically and cold.

Then there was the video a prisoner sent me of the putrid water coming out of the sink of his cell — water, another man told me, that it “smells like feces.”

“We used have so much more to do in the penal system but slowly and surely they have taken it from us,” one young man explained. He said the riot could have been avoided if there was “incentive to do better.” But, he continued, with no rehabilitation programs or relief, inmates “get fed up about it and lash out after a while.”

And just as happened at Attica in 1971 and Kinross, a Michigan prison, in 2016 the desperate men at Lee did indeed lash out — in their case, at each other. As cellphone footage sent to me from that night makes clear, however, correction officers neither prevented that violence nor protected the victims.

In one video, a wounded man lies on the floor of a brightly lit, eerily quiet dorm. It is hardly the chaotic and dangerous scene state officials evoked to explain the hours it took them to get enough officers there to bring the facility under control.

Another video shows that the only ones helping the victims were their fellow prisoners. “You got a man laying over there on the floor, blood everywhere,” a man says as his phone’s camera captures the horrific scene. He goes on: “The inmates had to come, and they had to wrap him up. And we’re waiting for the police to come to the back door. And they ain’t showed up in an hour. They refuse to come. And if he dies, this is sure delinquence on the officers’ part to help this man.”

Today, seven young men — men who were someone’s child, father, sibling or partner — are dead because we allow our nation’s correctional facilities to be run brutally. But, thanks to their cellphone keyboards and cameras, those who live in this terrible place can tell us what really goes on, and how we might change it.

They are desperate for state senators to pass new laws so that South Carolina prisoners have “an incentive to get out in society and live life again.” They argue that officials could eliminate the contraband problem simply by allowing cigarettes and cellphones to be sold in the canteen (instead of sold to them by guards, who can get upward of $1,700 for a phone). They would be less hungry if state officials would simply allow their families “to send inmates packages of food” and they’d be more productive and better able to re-enter society, they tell us, if prisons simply reinstated classes in “life skills and trades.”

And they want us all to know that cellphones don’t just help them to tell the public about abuses in the system; cellphones also tether them to family, which should matter to all of us. (Prisons have phones inmates can use, but they are controlled by private companies that charge usurious rates.) As one man explained to me, every night he calls his daughter to help her with her homework. He is trying hard to be a good father even though he is locked up. The state is telling us that the inmates fight over cellphones, but this man told me he willingly shares his phone so others can reach out to their families, and that this practice is common.

This “isn’t about society versus inmate,” another man wrote to me. “It’s about humanity.” Listening carefully to the incarcerated and protecting their right to speak freely to the public is a moral imperative. And, right now, as the mother of a young man locked away in one of South Carolina’s brutal prisons made clear to me, “They are crying out for help.”