On June 28, 1982, a small group from the Honolulu Friends Meeting (Quakers), the local American Friends Service Committee (the Quaker-based social service organization), and catholic Action of Hawaii, an indpendent peace group, peacefully picketed outside the Oahu Community Correctional Center in support of prisoner rights.

Prisoners were locked down, all privileges revoked, and had started a hunger strike.

Their grievances, recounted in a press release I wrote those 27 years ago, included continuing assaults by guards, threats of reprisals against inmates who complained, and restrictions on recreation and family visits.

A handwritten statement from the inmates’ Huki Like council said, in part:

The factional dispute is among the staff, all in positions of authority. Mis-management on the one hand, and incompetence on the other, and the mis-use of power on both hands, and we are the ball.

We ask for all right thinking persons to aid us in the realization of our aims. Nonsense cannot exist in the presence of sense.

Then there was a statement from inmates held in the old cell block.

They (administration) locked up

some inmates this morning.

We are now on hunger strike.

We must remember that hungry people

who cannot be heard are hard to control

Some people are talking about dying.

I found these documents and others among papers that we had saved, stuffed in boxes and forgotten until recently. Then I found the photographs.

It was all part of the continuing aftermath of the brutal “shakedown” that had taken place just over six months previously.

The “shakedown” at the Oahu Community Correctional Center, December 14-18, 1981, was a massive organized sweep by correctional officers and police, aided in the initial phase by more hardened guards from the high security prison at Halawa, in search of weapons, drugs, and other contraband.

Officials denied any excessive force had been used, despite numerous accounts that leaked out of the prison as telephone contact and family visits were restored.

It took a long time, but eventually there were extensive investigations by the State Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Dante Carpenter, and a separate investigation by the State Ombudsman.

The Ombudsman’s findings:

There was insufficient evidence that unreasonable force was used against 59 of the 103 inmates; there was sufficient evidence that unreasonable force was used against 44 of the inmates. Of these 44, 18 were treated for injuries such as bruises, contusions, lacerations, and abrasions.

The 103 inmates made 121 allegations; there was sufficient evidence that unreasonable force was used in 40 percent of the allegations.

At the time, both Meda and I were teaching classes in the prison school offered through Honolulu Community College, a very educational experience for teachers and students. Meda was a veteran of several classes and research projects involving the prison, while I was a first-time instructor teaching introduction to political science.

Within days, we started getting phone calls from inmates’ families with terrible details of beatings and violence initiated by guards during the shakedown while prison administrators stood by.

As soon as family visits were restored, we went out to OCCC in the early morning to interview visitors exiting the facility. Using details learned from multiple interviews, we wrote a report detailing numerous incidents of excessive force.

We naively thought that when state officials would quickly order an investigation once they heard some of the serious allegations being made.

We were absolutely wrong.

We wrote a long letter to the editor which gives a good sense of our experience of the period.

It was the week before Christmas and, it seems, a good time to beat up prisoners. During December’s “shakedown” at the Oahu Community Correctional Center, a large number of inmates were attacked by groups of armed guards and beaten while they stood naked and obviously unarmed. Some men were beaten very badly. A few were subjected to obscene forms of pseudo-sexual abuse.

But most people in Honoloulu were already caught up in the holiday season and in no mood for hearing about, much less responding to, serious issues.

They did their best to avoid the wives, mothers, and girlfriends of inmates who told tearful tales of violence and systematic brutality.

Lawyers also tended to be immersed in office parties, on long-scheduled vacations, or otherwide “busy” until the new year.

Social service agencies usually attentive to prison problems seemed too weighed down with holiday cheer to respond effectively. The governor, to his discredit, refused to observe the season of Christ’s birth with goodwill to all people and instead closed his eyes and ears to as to avoid or suppress the truth.

It was, after all, the week before Christmas. A good time for the state to beat people.

from “Prison Punishment at Christmas”
Ian Lind and Meda Chesney-Lind
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
February 4, 1982

Click on the photo for the full photo gallery.