“You feel very removed from things, even the society of the prison. When McGowan served his time in 2007 for his role in two arsons with the Earth Liberation Front, inmates were only allowed one 15-minute call a week and four hours of visiting a month. “It is soul-crushing,” said Daniel McGowan, who spent nearly four years in the two CMU units. The conversation is monitored by guards, who could stop it at any moment if inmates speak in a language other than English, use hand signals, or break another one of the many visiting rules. Just a phone call on two sides of a thick plastic window. When their family and friends travel for their two 4-hour visits a month, they are not allowed to touch each other. Just what kind of treatment do prisoners in these CMU’s deal with? “Prisoners get two 15-minute phone calls a week. Maybe the harshest aspect of being sent to the CMU was the realization that you may never know why you were sent there or how you could get out of it. Critics say they flouted federal law by not publishing the proposed rule and opening up a period for public comment.” Readers Supported News If a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights had not been filed in 2010, we may never have known much about these abusive tactics in our domestic prison system. “The units opened almost in secret in 20. The reason very little was known about the CMU’s is that when they first were initiated at prisons in Indiana and Illinois, their existence was kept from the public. They are basically a section of a prison where certain prisoners are housed with limited or no access to communications or family visitations. If you were like me, you may never have heard the term “Communications Management Units” before.
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