you have to love the 'thug life' photo they ran. ha. xo, Daniel
ps-thanks for all the support & love.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/04/daniel_mcgowan.php
After
more than seven years, the stack of dehumanizing and seemingly
unconstitutional interactions between Daniel McGowan and the American
prison system is now piled so high it is teetering over into a recursive
mess of bleak and Kafkaesque absurdity.
By Nick Pinto Tue., Apr. 9 2013 at 5:12 PM
Categories: Free Speech, Prison
 |
| Support Daniel McGowan Facebook Group |
| Daniel McGowan has been forbidden from publishing anything without the permission of the Bureau of Prisons. |
Last Monday, McGowan published a piece on the Huffington Post that
laid out much of his situation to date. After years in prison for his
role in environmentally motivated property destruction that was
prosecuted as acts of terrorism, he wrote, he was finishing up the
remaining months of his sentence in a halfway house in Brooklyn.
The various perversions of the case that sent McGowan away are well documented in the documentary (streaming on Netflix!) If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.
But, as McGowan wrote, less publicized is what happened to him a year
into his prison term: Despite a flawless disciplinary record, McGowan
was transferred to an experimental new Communications Management Unit, a
supermax-like extreme-isolation facility some have dubbed a "Little
Guantanamo."
Why
was McGowan transferred to a CMU? He never got a good answer to that
question, even after a Freedom of Information Act request, so, along
with other CMU inmates, he filed a lawsuit challenging the
constitutionality of the CMUs and alleging that they are effectively
political prisons designed to silence the voices of people whose message
the government doesn't like. As it turned out, McGowan was right:
Bureau of Prisons memos discovered through the lawsuit appear to link
his transfer to the CMU to the fact that he continued to write things
the government found politically objectionable.
"While
incarcerated and through social correspondence and articles written for
radical publications, inmate McGowan has attempted to unite the radical
environmental and animal liberation movements," one memo states, before dilating on other political statements McGowan made in interviews and his own writing.
McGowan wrote about all of this in his Huffington Post piece
last Monday. Two days later, the staff at the halfway house to which he
had been assigned told him that his work permit had been revoked on
order of the Bureau of Prisons. The next morning, federal marshals
arrived and brought him to the Metropolitan Detention Center. Once
there, he was presented with a document explaining that he had violated
the terms of his release to the halfway house. Specifically, the incident report stated
that McGowan had violated a prison regulation that stated "an inmate
currently confined in an institution may not ... act as a reporter or
publish under a byline."
That's right: McGowan was sent back to jail for writing about how he'd been imprisoned in a CMU for writing things.
There's
more: The regulation that the Bureau of Prisons cited to justify
returning him to jail had actually been declared unconstitutional by a
federal court in 2007, and the Bureau of Prisons had finally taken it off the books in
2010. McGowan's lawyers mentioned this to the bureau and to the lawyers
representing the government in his lawsuit, and he was re-released to
the halfway house on Friday.
But
that's not the end of it. Back at the halfway house, staff presented
McGowan with a document and directed him to sign it. The document stated
that "he is not permitted to have any contact with the media without
approval from the BOP's Residential Reentry Manager. Accordingly,
Resident McGowan was advised that writing articles, appearing in any
type of television or media outlets, news reports and or documentaries
without prior BOP approval is strictly prohibited."
It's
worth noting that McGowan hadn't been asked to sign this document when
he first arrived at the halfway house, nor, as far as his lawyers can
tell, has anyone there been asked to sign it. In fact, there's nothing
in the Bureau of Prison's published media policythat requires pre-approval before publishing anything.
"There is no national prohibition on publishing," Chris Burke, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, confirmed this afternoon.
"I
thought I had lost my ability to be surprised by what the Bureau of
Prisons does years ago," said Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer with the Center
for Constitutional Rights who's representing McGowan. "But restricting
an individual's freedom of speech in this manner is truly surprising.
It's beyond ironic that Daniel was retaliated against and returned to
prison for publishing a blog about being retaliated against for speaking
out in prison."
Here's the incident report explaining McGowan's return to prison:
And here's the statement McGowan was required to sign upon his return to the halfway house:
--
SIGN THE JERICHO COINTELPRO PETITION!
Free All Political Prisoners!
nycjericho@gmail.com • www.jerichony.org
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