Confession of an Underground Think Tank Strategist

By Eddie Griffin

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

I thought to share some of the strategies we used in the revolution back in the 1970s at a time I was a member of an underground prison think tank. Each strategy had an appropriate name, such as: The Scatter Gun Strategy, which consisted of hitting multiple political targets at once, firing from single scatter gun position; and The Overkill Strategy, which consisted of targeting an objective beyond the “kill point”.

Conventional Frontal Assault upon a political target met force-for-force, pound-for-pound. Going up against a prison administration was fruitless and in vain. An institution can best be attacked by undermining its support structure. But how could you convince a bunch of knuckleheaded inmates of the foolishness of fighting on prison guard in hand-to-hand combat and riots? Still, some of these guys would rather fight than eat, both prisoners and guards.

I was not one for violence, and neither was I a coward. What we had to do, I suggested, was to outsmart them? It is a work of art. That was how and why Eddie Griffin stayed in hot water in prison. They called me troublemaker. The riots, I knew, they could crush, easily. But the Overkill was designed to wipe them out before they knew what hit them. Our target was the warden. This issue was R-E-S-P-E-C-T… respect for our rights as human beings. The warden thought that Respect was too much to give. There it is. That is the picture.

So we plotted to carry out a prison hunger strike to coincide the national Bicentennial Celebration on July 4, 1976. For the sake of posterity, it would be our date in infamy. Wherever in the archives of Bicentennial newspapers, there will be a little story about the hunger strike at Marion Federal Prison. It took two years to plot, which meant holding the ranks together until D-Day, and this in a prison that averaged a killing per month.

It was insane. Instead of killing each other out of frustration, prisoners should take their hostilities out on their captors, namely the prison administration. But instead of head-to-head, we would attack indirectly. The idea was: To go straight for the US government and watch the “Trickle-Down Effect” from Washington, D.C. Rattle Washington and watch the warden jump.

Maybe the brothers could get some prison policy changes, like some hiring minority prison guards to supplement an all-white prison force. We needed “eyes” to refer the fight between guards and inmates. We were losing in the fight to defend our humanity.

And so, the Overkill Strategy comprised of sending grievances to Washington, through the slow appellant process, and to the United Nations, above and beyond the warden’s authority. The Overkill Strategy consisted of multiple attacks, with the Bicentennial hunger strike being the clincher.

The other means of attack consisted of creating a paper-jam in the grievance filing process, and consuming incalculable hours of government legal scholars’ time. We made a pact: File long drawn-out complaints, a minimum of 25 pages each. About 20 prisoners pledged to file on daily complaints, 25 pages or more per clip, knowing beforehand that the warden and his staff would rubber stamp our redress petition “DENIED”.

We then appealed up the pyramid, to the appellate level, at a 50-page clip, to be DENIED again, on up the line to Washington, this time at about 100 pages per 20 inmates. Like day-in and day-out clockwork, the grievance poured out, until the system was jammed.

At the time, I had unlimited access to a class of law student at Southern Illinois University Law School, just outside the prison. To break the logjam, the courts and Congress instituted the “Informal Resolution” formula to put one more step in the process before we could go to courts. It was designed for prison officials and inmates to settle their problems at the institutional level, informally.

Our objective was not so much a resolution, but to generation tons and tons of paperwork. Therefore, most of the complaints were duds that covered for the real legal complaint that would make its way to court. While the warden was busy rubber-stamping prisoners’ complaints, some good cases sneaked through the cracks and got the court.

There, we had them again. This time in court, against the formidable People’s Law Office in Chicago, and at least a dozen outstanding and zealous civil rights lawyers.

Okay, I admit, Eddie Griffin was one of those trouble-making masterminds that wardens liked to keep out of circulation. Per capita, prisoners like us cost the government millions per day. Incarceration was not supposed to be so cheap. And, legitimate grievances can be even costlier. My estimated cost was at least a million dollars per day.

The warden’s budget was headed for a new ceiling. Beside legal woes, he now had to the media. “We will be trying our best to hire more colored prison guards,” I remembered hearing him say on the news. Inmates fell out on the floor laughing… the very thought of a black prison guard wearing federal grays.

What about the overwhelming display of force used to suppress the July 4th hunger strike, the warden was on the defense against the media. And, the media came back, again, and again, until the warden barred them. There was a security threat.

By Day 10 of the hunger strike, the prison was surrounded by protesters. “The Indians have surrounded the prison. Lock down! What?!

Among the throng of protesters carrying placards and chanting: FREE THE MARION BROTHERS, there were a group of Native Americans supporting Leonard Peltier, an American Indian Movement prison, and a contingent of Puerto Ricans and Latinos protesting the 25-year incarceration of Rafael Miranda. Hundreds of people, they said. But I never saw a one. They blacked out the TV news.

I was the Marion Brother who wrote the petition and hand-delivered it to the warden on the morning of the hunger strike. He turned red, as red as any Redman I had ever seen, and I imagined smoke coming off the top of his cranium.

That was it: The Scatter Gun Strategy in a nutshell, and I was the sacrificial lamb. The prison administration was fighting on multiple fronts, in the courts, in the media, and against outside protesters, carrying signs and shouting slogans. It got worse… worse for the warden and worse for me.

Now the Congress got into the act with an investigation, just around the time the United Nations began looking into human rights violations around the world, particularly in the Soviet Union and South Africa.

Warden Fenny had his hands full with inquiries. He literally said as much, when he deposited me into the safe keepings of solitary strip cell, refrigerated by the open winter skies. I was put on “No-Human-Contact” status, known as boogey men in the federal prison system, but not before I spoke to a Russian reporter named Ilong Andronov of Literaturnaya Gazeta. In all of the interviews I had done, as a kind of spokesman for the prison reform movement, the media had always allowed the warden word, but not with the Russian.

The Literaturnaya Gazeta was the Soviet’s equivalent of Time magazine. Now the warden had an international controversy on his hand. US prisoners on a hunger strike against an oppressive all-white prison regime, staffed with a crew of doctors working in secret on mind control techniques, with CIA and undercover FBI agents involved behind the scene. The US media broke the allegation open when Dr. Edgar Schein, esteemed MIT pioneer in brainwashing research admitted to the behavioral research.

All of these developments exceeded my wildest dream. It started out as a power struggle between prisoners and prison officials over humane treatment. But the strategy was Overkill.

As a reward, I was released from the dungeon and transferred to another prison, where I discovered Klan organizing among prison guards. But that’s a different story for another day and an altogether different strategy.