Bonnie Kerness

Bonnie Kerness is a lifelong anti-racist activist, beginning in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. She coordinates the Prison Watch Project for the American Friends Service Committee in the New York Metropolitan Region and has helped publish “The Prison Inside the Prison: Control Units, Supermax Prisons and Devices of Torture,” “The Survivor’s Manual,” and “Our Children’s House.”

Control Units

Illegal Torture Not Just for Guantánamo

 

In the mid-1980s, the American Friends Service Committee’s (AFSC) Prison Watch Project received a letter from Ojore Lutalo at Trenton State Prison. He wrote that he had been placed in a management control unit, which he described as a “prison within a prison.” Although he had been in and out of prison for years, he had never heard of such a unit, and he didn’t know why he was placed there or for how long. He wrote that he was being held in extended solitary confinement, allowed only one hour every other day for exercise.