Like prisoners in the modern-day Communications Management Units I visited, Cancel Miranda was only allowed visits between glass and conducted in English. He was not allowed to see his children. In , USP Marion was created as a high-tech replacement for Alcatraz, and of its prisoners — including Miranda — were transferred there.
Prisoners characterized CARE as psychological attack sessions. When prisoners protested the beating of a fellow inmate in by organizing a work stoppage, prison officials created an even more extreme program at Marion called the Control Unit. Over the years, the Marion, Illinois, prison became infamous for this Control Unit , which kept prisoners in solitary confinement on lockdown for twenty-two hours at a time.
There were accounts of widespread brutality. Like Alcatraz, though, the Control Unit did not house prisoners solely based on their propensity for violence. Later, government officials called for an even more extreme facility, and the Supermax ADX-Florence was built in Colorado. In the s, a similar unit was created for women. The Lexington HSU existed belowground, in total isolation from the outside world and with radically restricted prisoner communications and visitations. The women were subjected to constant fluorescent lighting, almost daily strip searches, and sensory deprivation.
The purpose of these conditions, according to a report by Dr. Barrington Parker, the judge in this case, said that the prison units were illegal because they disproportionately punished political dissidents.
And yet the closure of the HSU was hardly the end of the story. During the required public comment period, civil rights groups protested that the program was inhumane. The backlash prompted the government to drop the proposal. Or so it seemed.
Two years later, they opened another in Marion, Illinois. In October , the U. Bureau of Prisons reported that federal prisons house people convicted in terrorism-related cases. However, the government will not disclose who is housed in the CMUs, why they were transferred there or how they might appeal their designation. These secretive prisons are for political cases the government would rather remove from the public spotlight. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The argument was not supported by facts, because it was incredibly difficult to learn the details of these prison units. As I detailed in my book, Green Is the New Red , prison officials threatened to punish McGowan if I interviewed him, and later punished him for writing about the units for the Huffington Post. But right now, the report is being kept hidden, even from members of Congress and government officials.
This notion of a parallel legal system has crept into local law enforcement as well. In Chicago, the police department is operating an interrogation compound called Homan Square. It is off the books, which means that Americans locked inside are not listed in police databases and cannot be found by friends and family. As Spencer Ackerman reported for The Guardian , arrestees are denied access to attorneys, and some have reported police beatings.
Unlike at the police precinct, no one is booked and charged here, and lawyers are turned away at the door. He was moved from ship to ship as these Coast Guard cutters went about their patrols, picking up more cocaine in the Pacific Ocean. So this guy, Arcentales, and another guy — they're on a ship.
This is a Coast Guard ship and they're basically exposed to the elements and basically shackled and not getting much food.
How can the Coast Guard get away with keeping people under those conditions when the men haven't even been charged? The Coast Guard makes the argument that these people are not formally under arrest until they get to the United States. They're simply being held, while the Coast Guard deals with the logistical challenges of trying to get these men onto shore — into an airplane and flown to Florida, where they'll be prosecuted. Courts have generally bought the government's argument.
The argument by the Coast Guard and by federal prosecutors that these logistical delays are legitimate, as it's hard enough to get people back. The reality is that when the Coast Guard has had to move people more quickly, they do. Very often, detainees are brought to port in one of these cutters, then placed in a hidden room in a helicopter hangar or in a room below deck and hidden there for the day while the Coast Guard cutter refuels or the Coast Guard crew get a bit of a break and then are brought back out to sea.
So there are these delays that people in the Coast Guard — Coast Guard officials I interviewed — though really are actually unreasonable, considering that they're near an airport. Somebody could be put on a plane and brought back to the United States. As we've made this decision to prosecute more and more people, these delays have grown longer and longer. What we're seeing now is sort of carting people around He was the head of Southern Command between and then retired. Under the Trump administration, he became head of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Coast Guard.
On two occasions he has had a role in these operations. And John Kelly has really been a proponent of the idea. He's called drug smuggling in Central America an existential threat to the United States. And the idea that we need to push our borders outward farther and farther away from our actual borders in order to defend the homeland, that's led to this effort to interdict drugs far, far away from the United States in places where drug smugglers actually really have very little idea where their drugs are headed.
So, Johnny Arcentales and the other men that I've spoken to know, they're not thinking about where these drugs are going. The drugs are moving from South America to Central America as far as they're concerned. It's out of their control after that, but we're arresting people in international waters, often on foreign boats, thousands of miles from the United States. So the Coast Guard is arresting these people in these boats and it's not clear whether the drugs on these boats are going to the U.
Ultimately, most of the cocaine on these smugglers' small boats is probably headed for the United States. But some of it may be going to other markets, to European markets, to Australian markets or elsewhere. It's not always clear that the drugs are coming here and, in fact, the circuit court in California has said that the U.
And that's one of the reasons why federal prosecutors prefer to bring these cases to Florida, where that burden of proof is not required.
Whatever happened to Johnny Arcentales? How many days was he out there on this ship? He was picked up in September of And for the next 70 days, he was held aboard a series of Coast Guard cutters and Navy frigates as he was moved around the Pacific Ocean.
He describes the experience of feeling like he really might disappear. He didn't know that he was going to be brought to the United States, wasn't being allowed to call his family — wondering, "does my family think I died? He was brought to the United States, charged criminally under drug trafficking laws and was sentenced to 10 years to a decade in federal prison.
He's now in a federal prison in New Jersey. The community he comes from on the central coast of Ecuador, many men have left on these smuggling trips. More than a year ago, there was a major earthquake in Ecuador that left families in dire economic straits. Since then, there have been more and more people leaving. In fact, his son-in-law decided not long after that earthquake to take one of these jobs and left home. He didn't tell anyone and disappeared.
Days later, was picked up by the Coast Guard. He was also sentenced to a decade in U. The question about the legality of the U. Coast Guard's detention practices has not been raised, in an international context, in criminal courts.
In the United States, when defense attorneys have tried to argue that the conditions amount to inhumane treatment, some cases judges have agreed. But they've said there's nothing we can really do about it. The law does not allow for us to throw this case out. I wrote to dozens of men and received letters back from many of these men who'd been detained on these Coast Guard ships, describing the conditions of their confinement.
Describing what sounded to me like real terror for them on the high seas. Those are stories that hadn't been told before. No the bathrooms on these boats are very different, ship to ship. They're provided essentially buckets to use as toilets on some of the boats. And these men are then required to clean out the buckets themselves and dump them off the edge of the ship.
They describe that as a really terrible disgusting process. And the Coast Guard says "our ships aren't equipped as detention centers. We don't have facilities here.
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