The U.S. Justice Department is segregating “high-security-risk” Muslim and Middle Eastern prisoners and tightly restricting their communications with the outside world in apparent violation of federal law, says Rawstory.com. Quietly begun in December, a “Communications Management Unit” (CMU) at a federal penitentiary in Indiana targeting Muslim and Middle-Eastern inmates started wihout giving the public an opportunity comment on changes to prison programs.
Howard Kieffer of Federal Defense Associates, a legal group based in California that assists inmates and lawyers of inmates on post-conviction defense matters, said that the new program, which purports to house high-risk inmates for the purpose of better monitoring their communications, “is not related to inmate security” at all. The program “doesn’t affect the highest security inmates who are still being kept in other high security prisons, where some may be allowed greater freedom in communications than the CMU inmates,” he says. “It affects a class of inmates who would not garner as much sympathy as others and who have diminished support in the U.S.”
Link: http://www.rawstory.com//news/2007/Documents_show_new_secretive_new_US_0216.html