New Bureaucratic Sleight of Hand Being Used to Punish NC Prison Rebels

It’s come to our attention that North Carolina prisons are using a new classification system to drastically increase time in isolation for NC prison rebels. Maximum and Intensive Control Units (M-Con and I-Con, respectively) are sometimes now being exchanged for “Rehabilitative Diversion Units” (RDU).

As explained by one prison rebel active with the 3^rd Party Black Panthers, currently in segregation on the RDU at Marion, NC: “If a prisoner is charged with an A-class offense of any nature, the prisons are giving you recommendations for I-Con, but that’s no longer in existence. So they calling it Resistrictive Housing per Administrator. The facility heads are not signing off on that scam, so prisoners who are found guilty of A-class offenses [who would normally get 30 days seg] are now getting 6 months of restrictive housing, then 3 months modified housing.”

Not only that, prisoners can now be removed at any time into a more punitive segregation at a facility in Marion, NC, not unlike the Control Management Units reported on by former political prisoner Daniel McGowan. Writes the same prisoner: “Now it’s all being set up to fly prisoners out of the facilities on any day of the week directly to this RDU program where you are stripped of everything: law work, law books, and anything religious that’s not in line with the facility’s redneck, cross-burning hillbillies!”

All this translates to a kind of bureaucratic sleight of hand by which rebellious, conscious, and disruptive prisoners, as well as mentally disabled prisoners are likely to face many times the amount of months in isolation than they would have before. These shifts in methods of social control can be read as a response to rebellion on both sides of the wall, in particular targeting prisoner-led revolt large and small, including the nationwide strike which struck US facilities in September 2016.

Solidarity with NC prison rebels,

-some anarchists