May 1-the United Front to Abolish Security Housing Units took to the streets again, the third month in a row that we have been out in different cities across California to protest this country’s torture isolation chambers in our brutal domestic prison system. These isolation chambers are known in California as Security Housing Units, and almost 3,000 people are being held in them in California alone.

“In California, and across the country, Security Housing Units principally target oppressed nations. In 1998 the California Department of Corrections (CDC) reported that 34% of the population in all CDC institutions was Latino, and 31% was Black. The populations of the SHUs is even more disproportionate. 82% of people in SHUs were nonwhite, & 52% of those in SHUs were Latino. This compares to a California population that was 32% Latino and 7% Black in 1998� [www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/agitation/prisions].

Our United Front is a coalition between a wide range of people in movements such as the Barrio Defense Committee, the African People’s Socialist Party, African People’s Solidarity Committee, Justice for Palestinians, California Prison Focus, and RASCALS. On the first Saturdays of every month we hit the streets to educate and rally public support to abolish the SHUs. This month students from UCSC and CSUMB went to the downtown plaza in Watsonville, where just a few days earlier people held a vigil for Durrell Feaster & Deon Whitfield, two youths found hung in their cells in the Stockton California Youth Authority (CYA-the prison system for our youth) [www.sfbay.indymedia.org]. This was the first time we petitioned in Watsonville. It was very positive, for many community members were outside together, young and old, either walking downtown or in the park. Communication went well because two of our activists could speak Espanol to La Raza community of Watsonville. Our United Front also spoke out in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and Los Angeles.

On the previous Monday, April 26, we were protesting at the United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, in front of the Federal Building, with a representative SHU we built, only 6x9 ft box. The UN has recently stated that the Control Units at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is torture, & yet the same thing is happening in CA prisons. We need to deal with the CA Prison System first because it directly affects our communities here at home.