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Enjoy the episode Campsite Media.
When European settlers arrived in the colonies in the seventeenth century, they brought the death penalty with them. The first recorded execution by Europeans was carried out in sixteen oh eight, long before American independence and the ratification of the Constitution. Crime subject to the death penalty have included murder, robbery, rape,
horse dealing, and aiding a runaway slave. For most of the twentieth century, the state of Georgia electrocuted intimates to death right up until the time of a mam Jamial's arrest, actually, but the courts ruled that cruel and unusual, so when a Maam Jamil's life was put in the hands of twelve good folks from Georgia. He faced lethal injection that was supposed to be more humane. A Mam Jamil's defense team felt the pressure. Their arguments, the words they chose,
even their facial expressions. It could all affect the jury's opinion. A mistake, a poor choice could lead to a mam Jamial being sentenced to death and ultimately killed. A Mam Jamial's defense attorney, Tony Axam.
I would be asking to save his life. So that's all. That's a tremendous bird. You've said, jurors, he's not guilty. There's not enough evidence, and now you have to come in front of that same jury and say, okay, let's assume you got it right. I have a second argument for you. He should live.
The prosecution was the first side to call witnesses. Deputy Kinchin's mother took the stand. She said when she was at home, she found herself sitting next to the phone waiting for her son to call. Kinchin's sister said his death left her depressed and angry. Kinchin's wife said he had been a good father and that some days she just sat and cried. The defense called witnesses in an effort to show that a man Jimil and the decades
before the shooting, had lived a life of service. Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta and aid to doctor King, he was a defense witness. Remember it was Young who, nearly twenty years after this day in court, wrote a letter to the Fulton County DA's office arguing that AmAm Jamial was innocent. Young said that he and a Maam Jamil or h. Rat Brown at the time, met briefly
in the sixties. They weren't close, but Young still knew that Rapp had lived through Jim Crow worked in the rural South, endured violence, and spent much of his life as part of a movement pushing to improve the lives of black people that counted for something. The way Young saw it, Axem told me and Maam Jamil had built up some credits going through all that credit to some imaginary system weighing the value of human lives.
So he should be spared.
Now we're at two thousand and we still don't have freedom. And that's the storm that Jamil Alamin weathered, and being in that storm, he deserves to live even if you think that he did it, spare his life, let him live.
In their closing arguments, the prosecution to the murder was especially vile and that it showed a Maam Jamil was depraved. Prosecutors showed gruesome, bloody photos of Kinchin's wounds. They said it mattered that it was a sheriff's deputy who was killed, and by sentencing a Maam Jamil to die, the jury would be signaling that violence against law enforcement won't be tolerated. Jack Martin, in his closing argument, stressed the power that
society had put in the hands of the jury. What is to be decided now, he said, is the most important decision that any person ever makes in their whole life, the most important decision that any democracy or any government ever makes, the one time that we presume to be god like. I appeal to your best, not your worst, Martin said. I appeal to your hopes for the future, not your fears. I appealed to the possibility and the reality of redemption in all of us, not the brutal satisfaction of revenge.
Not the worst than us.
AmAm Jamil didn't fear execution, and as the jury deliberated on a sentence. He put everything in the hands of a law. After five hours, the jury decided against the death penalty and they sentenced a Mam Jamil to life in prison without parole. From Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts, This is Radical, I'm Mostly Secret, Episode five, Cherry Pie, AmAm Jamille h.
Rat Brown.
He had a gift for delivering unforgettable lines. But there's one phrase that's stuck in our culture memory more than any other. He said it in the speech in nineteen sixty seven during the long hot Summer of Black Rebellion.
Violence is a plot of America's culture.
It is as American as cherry pie.
Violence is as American as cherry pie. It's meant as a statement of fact, one of those beautiful phrases that's simple and profound. At the same time, Rap wasn't saying that violence is inherently good. He was saying that violence is America, and America is violence. America was founded with violence, built with violence, and persists because of violence. Never mind that Americans eat apple pie way more than cherry pie. The slip better conjures up the red bloodiness of it all.
I was still obsessed with getting to.
The bottom of what happened on the ninth of March sixteenth, two thousand. The evidence that came out at trial, it was too shaky for me to set aside the possibility that a Mamjimial was wrongfully convicted. But I was pulled in another direction too. I needed to investigate this American violence, how it operates, and the consequences, however dark or disguised
they might be. I since it was key to understanding a Maamjamial and to understanding the eruption of violence in the West End, whether a Mam Jamil was involved or not. After AmAm Jamil was convicted and sentenced, law enforcement officials held a secret meeting with the warden of Reidsville Prison in Tattnall County, Georgia. A Maam Jamil was going to be transferred there. Tattnall County's story is America's story crammed into five hundred square miles of swamps and rolling hills
in southeastern Georgia. One point a quarter of the county's population was enslaved raising beef, cattle, and cotton under the Georgia sun and under the threat of death, rape, and family separation. Much of Tattenneau County's success at the time, according to an official county website, can be attributed to slave labor.
Then the State of Georgia opened.
A prison near the county seat, Readsville, and much of the county's growth in the last thirty five years, again, according to an official county website, can be attributed to Regisville Prison. In that secret meeting, law enforcement officials told the warden that thirty to fifty thousand people had vowed to save a Maam Demial and to spirit him away from the State of Georgia by force if necessary. Thirty to fifty thousand people before law enforcement flew a Maamjamial
to Reedsville in a helicopter. They set up a five mile perimeter around the prison. A Ma'am Tarak Khan was the sole Muslim chape at the prison.
When a Man Jamial arrived.
They treated it like al chapo, right like that there was gonna be you know, this army is going to break him out of something, and the snipers and everybody outside and trucks and this and that and bring him in in a hui, you know, and all of that kind of stuff, and uh, it wasn't none of that. You know, they just overdo stuff.
A Mam Tarik had met a Man Jamil before on the outside. They seen each other at basketball games, and a Mam Tark went to the Western Mastet a couple of times as a chaplain. He had seen guards abuse inmates for basically no reason, and he worried they would give a man Jamil an especially hard time. So after the helicopter landed the Hueiye, he went to check on him.
I wanted to stay there a little longer that day to make sure that when hey body men, that he didn't get scraped up, you know.
What I mean.
Reedsville was one of the state's highest security prisons. Politicians called inmates there the worst of the worst. A Ma'am Jimil, now nearly sixty years old, was held in a unit named K Building and solitary Confinement. The doors to the cells and K Building were solid metal, except for a slot for a tray of food and a flap guards would open to handcuff the inmates. A Maam Jamil's cell was probably eight feet by ten feet, just enough room
for him to take three steps in either direction. He was forced to spend twenty four hours a day inside his cell, except for the occasions he was given an hour to go outside to get some fresh air and direct sunlight, but even then he was still inside a cage. Our systems of public safety are built on the idea that in order to protect the public, we must harm some individuals. Punishment is a kind of harm, a kind of violence. Often that as a society we have read
a person deserves because of the acts they committed. The death penalty is an obvious example of violence if it's squarely into the most common definition, the exercise of physical force against another, and the practice of solitary confinement isn't too far off. Most often, state violence is concealed by bureaucracy and innocuous terms corrections, k building, even confinement.
They were really stringent on him, thinking that he was going to have control over people there, you know what I mean. But you know, he had an even mindset about him being in there. He wasn't panicking, you know, he just this is where I'm at, you know, this is the hand I'm in debt, So I'm here.
A man Jamil was in solitary confinement, but he wasn't completely isolated. He could see visitors, and he had them almost every weekend in holiday. His wife Karima and their son Kyrie came about three times a month. Sister Karima, an attorney herself by this time, was working with a legal team to appeal to Mam Jimil's conviction and the Maam Jamil supporters. At least once a year, around Thanksgiving and Christmas, they gathered outside the prison to protest his
conviction and his treatment inside. A Maam Jamil communicated with the other inmates in K Building by talking through air ducts between the cells. A Maam Tarak told us that AmAm Jamil gave the Shahada, the Muslim oath to a white supremacist and K Building that he converted the guy to Alam. A tale, maybe a true one from the legend of AmAm Jamil. A Ma'am Tark. He visited a K Building pretty regularly.
It wasn't necessarily a special trip for him per se. But I've made short of when I went over there that I got a chance to talk with him. I called officer officer to dropped slot. There's a little slot there and they would drop the slot. So I don't have to talk in the crack of the door. But you know, I used to talk to him periodically, you know what I mean. And he always had good spirits. You know what I mean. He's locked up, don't have anything, and then ask you is anything I could do for
you? You know what you need anything? I mean, that's his first words, you know, I mean, you locked up?
What you got?
You know what I'm saying. So, but that's how he was. He always did that. Even if you see him now, he'll say the same thing.
I know from court documents that when a Mamjamil arrived at regivial prison, the warden was immediately suspicious and wary of him. Mam Jamil was accused at least three times of being involved in escape plots. I'm talking Shawshank redemption type stuff here. One time he was allegedly caught hanging out near a broken window on the other side of the glass, a rope made of sheets and a hacksaw.
He denied all of it, but the possibility of mam Jamil's escape that was just the beginning of the warden's concerns. In a memo from July two thousand and two, months after a Maam Jamil was convicted. The warden said that AmAm Jamil had the potential and influence to be a definite threat. This at the same time, he said that AmAm Jamil hadn't created any trouble, that his behavior was acceptable, and that the warden expected his behavior would continue to be.
Acceptable to me.
This contradiction that a Maam Jamil was a threat but also well behaved the warden was revealing a deeper fear, something like the evil energy that the US Marshall felt in that Alabama courtroom standing near him. The myth of a man Jamil. It was spreading out of a man Jamil's control and gaining traction among people with the power to punish. In two thousand and five, after three years of prison time, a Muslim inmate and a different facility
is in a Mam Jamila message. The other guy wanted to know if a Mam Jamil would assume leadership over Muslims. Throughout the Georgia Department of Corrections, unifying Muslim inmates at over fifty prisons, a Ma'am Jamil said yes. A document was circulated for other Muslim inmates to sign if they agreed to pledge baya or loyalty to a man Jamil. The mission as it's laid out in the copy of the document we have seemed noble enough. It said, Look,
Muslims aren't treated well in Georgia prisons. If we come together under a Mam Jamil, we can better advocate for ourselves and that will ultimately help us be better Muslims. But a Ma'am Tarik he didn't think this was a good idea, even though he had a lot of respect for a Maam Jamil.
I think a few brothers told me about it, and they would ask me about it, and I told him, no, that's not gonna happen, because that would even that at that particular time, would trump the other authority that is there.
The wardens ran the prisons period, and they would shut down any other parallel hierarchy. When prison administration learned of the BAI, they talked to a Maam Jimial about it and he said he would instruct the other Muslims to quash the effort. That would be the end of that. But in June of two thousand and six, about six months after the BAI began, the FBI published an internal report with the title the attempt to radicalize the Georgia
Department of Corrections inmate population. The report called AmAm Jimil an Islamic extremist.
Basically a terrorist.
It ran through his biography, even quoted his fiery speech in.
Cambridge, Maryland.
The FBI report narrowed in on a few lines in the BAI document, and maybe reasonably so. One of the lines said the Georgia Department of Corrections is a battlefield and we need a general to coordinate and direct us, and another a quote from an Islamic text. It suggested violence against anyone who challenges the leader. Here's this idea again. Violence is a means for the greater good. It's scary
for authorities when they're facing it too. It's why so much of the response from the FEDS was based on what they thought a man Jamil might do or how they imagine others might respond to him.
Not what actually happened.
One passage of the report reads, it should be noted that any statements made by Alamine could be taken in an extreme nature, and the content could be potentially dangerous, even if Alamine's intent was innocuous and Mama Jamil became bigger than he actually was, scarier than he actually was, because the fear of violence freaks you the fuck out. One morning in two thousand and seven, prison guards showed
up at a mamm Jimial cell and k building. They took him out through the rear gate of the prison, where there was a caravan waiting. The guards put him in the back of an suv. We got you now that Mam Jamil, said, one of the guards told him. Then they drove off. In the most common definition of violence, like I mentioned a few minutes ago, the word simply
means to exercise physical force against another. But there are also meetings of violence, obsolete uses dating back to the fifteenth century that define it as an abuse of power or authority that persecutes or oppresses. These days, we don't really call that violence. No blood, no visible injury, But the consequences of such violence that we don't really call violence,
they're very real, tangible. The FBI surveillance of a Mamjmial the infiltration of the mass JD by informants, it could fall under this lesser used definition of violence, And the more I learned about the extent and duration of the surveillance the more I was convinced that it contributed to the shootout where there was very real blood a Ma'am Jamil's wife, Karima Elamine, she got information from the FBI that helped me draw this conclusion. Sister Karima is a lawyer,
one I'm acquainted with. Actually, she represented me and my wife on our green card application. Embarrassingly enough, I didn't realize at the time who her husband was. We reconnected when I started working on this project, and she was as nice as ever, though she did tell me that
my generation needs to know more of its history. Sister Kareema is pretty private and she didn't want to be interviewed, but we were able to find a recording of her from a rally to support AmAm Jamil that happened in Harlem.
He struggle.
Rallies for a man Jamil weren't uncommon after he was convicted and placed in isolation. This is one of the larger ones we've come across. There were about two hundred people there. Here's sister Kareema.
I do want to extend email Jamil and I do call him Emaim Jamil. I want to extend his greetings and his appreciation and he would say, I Salamu a leako to everyone, and that's how I begin, and I begin in the name of Allah the most Merciful.
Soon after she and Rap began their relationship, the FBI contacted her sister.
Karama's family were part of a.
Black power group and they had been arrested. The FBI tried to make a deal with Kareema.
They wanted me to tell them where my husband might soon to be husband, where he was traveling. And they told me at that time, well, if you help us, will drop the chargees against your sister and her husband. And I said, well, you know they were frayed, so I'm not even going to go there. I'm not going to cooperate. Five years later, my husband is still saying he could never figure out whether I had cooperated or not. He's still telling me that, right.
It's sort of a dark joke, but also an ugly thing to have between a couple. Sister Karma said that when Rapp was a target of the FBI, the bureau harassed both of their parents so intensely that her father dropped dead in the street after some officials visited him in his job. A month later, a Mamjimialsma died and four months after that, Sister Karima's mother died. And let's not forget the car bomb.
It brought out a family closer and closer to him. Why they demonstrated the extent and the degree that they will go to divide family.
After a Mam Jamil was convicted, Sister Karma filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI. It told her that they had twenty one thousand, six hundred and forty nine pages of records potentially responsive to her request. Twenty one thousand, six hundred and forty nine. Maybe at one point there had been even more records on a Mam Jamil, but the FBI said many were damaged in a flood.
Anyway.
Two years later, after Sister Karma submitted their request, the FBI turned over almost seven hundred pages.
When I look through the.
Documents, there were two things I saw that suggest the FBI was at least linked to the shooting of Deputy Kinchin and Deputy English. I don't mean they somehow orchestrated the thing. What I mean is that the FBI, they were up in the mix. First, there were three handwritten words. It was placed remember how when a Mam Jmial was captured in Lowndes County, Alabama, an FBI agent named Ron Campbell and kicked and spit on him. Campbell had a
troubled history with the Bureau. Was accused of shooting an African American Muslim in the back of the head and planting a gun at the scene in Philadelphia. While Campbell was chasing a Mam Demial, he fell in the swamp, he'd say later, and was on his own for at least a few minutes. During the trial, the defense called Campbell to testify. Here's a ma'am Jamil's lead defense attorney, Jack Martin.
We knew that Campbell was willing to plant out as he was a corrupt FBI agent. The gun was not on at the time he was arrested. It was supposedly found later, and they found the gun on the ground. I wonder why they didn't find the grun in the first place.
I said this earlier, but I'll say it again. We contacted Campbell, but he didn't agree to an interview. An internal investigation cleared Campbell in that Philadelphia case and he was never charged with anything related to it. And we don't have any evidence Campbell was a corrupt agent. That's just what Martin thought. After a man Jimial was captured that same night, a sergeant on the dog tracking team found a nine millimeter pistol near the edge of the woods.
Why would ala mean if you had this shootout in the lad with his gun, had brought it with him to Alabama, why wouldn't he just.
Get rid of it?
The document's sister Karima got from the FBI. They included handwritten notes of a debrief with the sergeant on the dog tracking team, and the notes from the FBI said, apparently paraphrasing the sergeant about the gun, that it was placed like maybe the sergeant told the FBI that it looked like the pistol had been planted. That one handwritten note it supported the argument that the FBI conspired to
get a mam Jamil convicted. We tried to ask the sergeant about this, but he didn't agree to an interview. Law enforcement found another gun in the woods too, a Ruger Many fourteen rifle. Like with the pistol of mam Jamial's fingerprints weren't found on the rifle. Both guns were ultimately linked to a mam Jamil in the shooting.
But you know, like I've.
Said before, ballistics analysis linking a specific gun to a specific bullet, it has no basis in science. But if the guns were placed, were they identical models that law enforcement could have gotten anywhere? Were they brought all the way from Georgia. Attorney Martin has a theory for that.
It only would be plausible if some ount know of it. The undercover agent for the FBI, whoever collected the gun in Atlanta or got a gun that matched the situation and brought it to Alabama.
Basically, Martin is saying someone somehow connected to the FBI who was in and around the mass Jed at the time of the shooting, they helped execute a frame job.
And so that brings me.
To the second thing in the documents that sister Karima got from the FBI proof the bureau was surveiling a Mamjamial just days before the shootout on March sixteenth, two thousand. The documents are heavily redacted, but I can see that they include regular reports and surveillance of a mam Jamial and the mass Jed, and the surveillance actually appeared to escalate in the months before the shootout.
Let me start at the beginning.
March nineteen ninety eight, during two hours of surveillance, the subject, a Maam Jamil, was not observed. April ninety eight, agents drove through the West End and saw a Mam Jmil standing on the deck behind his corner store across from the mass Gen. February nineteen ninety nine, a confidential source told someone at the FBI a piece of information significant enough that it was shared with FBI headquarters, and the
surveillance appeared to intensify. April ninety nine, an agent saw a Mam Jamil unload something from a dark green Ford Explorer with and this is noted in the report dealer tags. The next month, a mam Jamil was pulled over in that Ford Explorer because he was driving with dealer tags, and then arrested for allegedly driving a stolen vehicle. Then there were FBI reports in May, June, July, and August of ninety nine, all redacted. In October there's another long report.
It describes a Mamgmil as the leader of a network of masters in the US that are quote involved in violent crimes and gained their funding from countries in opposition to the philosophical.
Standing of the United States.
Alamin is well known to law enforcement authorities as an active militant.
End quote the.
Philosophical standing of the United States. That sounds to me like something you'd expect to find in a coin tell pro document from the sixties. In February two thousand, the FBI got an updated driver's license vhoto of a mamm Jimil from the Georgia State Patrol and on March sixth of two thousand, just ten days before the shootout, there's a memo with a section at the bottom reporting a mam Jmial was charged with failing to appear in court
on that stolen vehicle charge. It was his failure to appear that led to the warrant that Kentin and English had with them in the West End on March sixteenth.
Two thousand.
Despite all their redactions in the documents, they said a lot the FBI could have done work behind the scenes to get a mam Jamil arrested in that Ford Explorer. They could have had someone running surveillance in the West End at the time of the shootout, someone who might have helped plan a weapon in the woods. That all seemed possible to me. Some of it even seemed likely.
Now I knew that the FBI is pursued of a man Jamil of h rap Brown, what we can call a kind of violence against him and his family and his community.
It hadn't stopped at the end of the nineteen sixties.
It didn't even stop once he was convicted and placed in solitary confinement in Georgia. Because the FBI's reported about a Mamjmial while he was in prison, the one that labeled him an Islamic extremist. That report helped justify even more violence, violence that some might call.
Soul crushing.
In two thousand and seven, five years after he was convicted, when a Ma'am Jamil was taken out of his cell in the early morning, put in the back of an suv and driven away from Reedsville Prison in Tattnall County, Georgia.
He had no idea where he.
Was being taken. We got you now, he said.
A guard told.
Him, I wonder where a Maam Jamil thought he might be going when he heard that. It's not something an iniminate here. As before being taken to a medical appointment or a court date. Now this was much more ominous. It had to be worse than solitary confinement in Georgia's toughest prison, where Ma'am Jamil had already been. Did his mind turn to the car bomb? Did he think about waterboarding Guantanamo? Or did he trust his government to follow the rule of law?
I don't know.
An airport about a three hour drive away from Reedsville was their first stop. A Mam Jamil sat waiting for several more hours in the back seat of a van, his feet shackled, his hands cuffed and chained to his waist. By this time, a Maam Jamil had picked up that the Feds had him, but he still didn't know where he was going. At five in the evening, now ten hours after he was taken out of his cell, he complained he was having chest pains and needed to see
a doctor. When he got out of the vehicle, he collapsed, and after some back and forth among the guards, he was taken to a hospital. There was an issue with his heart. It's not clear exactly what it was, but he underwent a procedure under anesthesia. Two days later, a Maam Jamil was finally taken onto a plane and flown to Oklahoma and then to Colorado. He was driven west through the desert.
There's mountains around it. The area itself is beautiful, but it becomes more and more remote until finally you get to this place that feels a little bit like the end of the Earth.
Laura Rovner is an attorney and one of the few people who has spent time inside the federal prison where Maam Jamil was taken in Florence, Colorado. The place's full name is United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, but it's known as ADX Florence, a supermax prison considered the most secure in the world. The Georgia Department of Corrections had requested that the federal government take custody of a. Maam Jamil, citing the FBI's finding that he was an Islamic extremist.
Laura the attorney. She teaches law at the University of Denver, where she runs a civil rights clinic. She took on her first client from ADX Florence in two thousand and six, suing the government over the conditions there.
With her students help, and then the students and I went on to represent a number of other people. And then the more work that I did, the more it became apparent how necessary it was and how really unspeakably bad the conditions were.
About three hundred Americans and foreign citizens are incarcerated at ADX Florence. Joaquin al Chapo Gusman, the former drug lord from Mexico known for his brazen prison escapes, one of the Boston Marathon bombers, men involved in the bombing of the World Trade Center in nineteen ninety three, and at least nine members of al Qaeda. Those are just some
of the most famous in the federal system. After nine to eleven, a disproportionate percentage of Muslims, by one estimate, seventy percent were incarcerated at high security prisons.
The federal government.
Opened EIGHTYX Florence in nineteen ninety four. Laura told me that as the prison population in the United States grew dramatically during the eighties and nineties, prisons, as you might expect, became overcrowded, sentences were longer, inmates grew more hopeless, and they became more violent. The idea behind opening the supermax facility was to isolate potentially violent inmates ad X Florence looks like a one or two story red brick building
that's built into the side of a hill. It's sort of unassuming on the outside except for the circles of barbed wire and the watchtower. When AmAm Jamil first arrived there, he might have felt like he was being taken underground, and it probably would have felt disorienting. There are a few windows and little or no natural light.
In terms of what people's experiences like, kind of on the way they are entering it, I think people are are generally afraid, not knowing what to expect, not knowing if they're going to be there forever or if they're going to have any ability to get out eventually.
A mam Jamil would have been taken to his own cell. Everyone in ADX is in solitary confinement. The atmosphere is clinical, cold, austere, the way a mam Jamil put it. If Reidsville Prison was run by the KKK, ADIAX Florence is run by Nazis. He had been in solitary confinement in Reidsville Prison too, but the conditions at ADAX Florence they were more profoundly isolating. The prison seems designed to sever a person's access to
an influence on society. If part of what we humans are doing as conscious beings on this earth is acting on impulses from somewhere deep down to shape the world around us. Adix Florence walls off those deeper portions the souls of people. The religious might say, with thick, thick concrete, some souls are just too dangerous. Each individual cell is eight feet by ten feet, about three steps to get from one side to the other. The walls are white
or grayish green. There's a cement platform bed, a shower, a cement desk, a port cement stool in front of the desk, and a TV. The cells have solid doors that limit communication with anyone outside. Five days a week, a Mammed Demal was able to spend an hour outdoors. He was taken fully shackled to what Laura describes as an empty swimming pool with cages dropped in it. The
view from inside the cages more concrete. A Mammed de Meal could see the sky, maybe a plane flying overhead, but nothing of the landscape, not even the mountains he would have passed when he was transported to the prison.
There are people who have talked about going out to those exercise cages and you know that somehow, there some miracle of nature, some little blade of grass was growing up under the cement, and you know, some of the people who were in the cages at different times were able to see it, and we're just so excited by it because it was the only nature that they had seen.
I mean, you don't see anything out your window except cement. Also, and you know, talked about the cruelty of one of the staff coming and just pulling out this, you know, one little blade of grass, and it's just so incredibly evocative and symbolic to me of what the space is like.
AmAm Jamil can make two or three fifteen minute calls each month. Sister Karma and their youngest son, Kyrie, they came to visit him much less frequently in Colorado than they had in Georgia. Reidsville Prison is two hundred miles from Atlanta. Eighty X Florence is fourteen hundred. On the days that sister Karima and Kyrie did come to ADX Florence, a Mam Jamil was taken to the visiting area and he sat across from them, still handcuffed and shackled, able
to speak to them through plexiglass. The visits lasted about six hours. One day, Laura was also in the visiting area to speak to a client and she caught a glimpse of a man, Jamil.
He smiled and waved when he saw me. I mean, I don't think he knew who I was, but you know, I sort of smiled and waved back. He if you're not there officially to visit a particular person, you can't have any communication with them. So there was no question that, you know, like I could have gone over or spoken
to him or done anything like that. I mean, I was worried that I would potentially get in trouble even for doing the wave, But it just was a bright, open smile that he gave me in a friendly wave, and it just, I don't know, it was just nice to see him.
AmAm Jamil's body suffered because of conditions at the supermax. Laura said that many people incarcerated there deal with high blood pressure, vitamin D deficiencies, mobility issues, and they can even lose their long distance vision because they so rarely need to focus on anything far away. Laura worries about all of that, but when I spoke to her, she seemed more concerned about the psychological effects of being incarcerated
at ADX Florence. People with mental illness when they enter the prison, they get sicker, some develop mental illness once they get there. And then there are the people who Laura can see are damaged but maybe not diagnosed. They can't make eye contact or stay focused, and they're over one or exhausted by conversations.
I think there's something particularly insidious about solitary that, in order to survive that, you're sort of trained to not need social contact anymore and everything that comes with that, And so if you sort of get good enough at it, it then becomes hard to do it again when it's not required. This idea that like you sort of go from craving it to almost being sometimes unable to tolerate it at.
All and craving human contact.
Yeah, yeah, you've gone as far as using the word torture to describe to practice. Is that something that you still that you still believe?
Absolutely?
I think when people think about torture, I think they think about things that seem much more obvious in terms of physical manifestations. So, you know, we don't sanction pulling out people's fingernails, But the mental harm and anguish that solitary confinement produces in people is just as real, and almost to a person. The folks that I have talked with who are in solitary would trade it in an instant for whatever physical punishment the state would want to dispense.
Every one of them has talked about how much horse this is.
The federal courts haven't agreed with Laura that solitary confinement and ad explorence is cruel and unusual punishment. The practice
continues today, mostly unabated. Talking to Laura and looking closely at Adax, Florence, studying the concentrated isolating violence there, I wonder if part of the reason that we citizens can stomach the government carrying out violence on our behalf is that we imagine that it stops with the person being punished, like the harm to the deserving person is done and
there are no ripple effects. But this stuff, whether it's Jimcrow sheriffs or FBI surveillance round from a semi automatic rifle, or solitary confinement, it stays with a person etched as memory. It stays within a family as loss. It stays within communities, within societies, within countries, passed back and forth. If we believe that they keep the public safe, we must harm some people. Are we accounting for the ways that violence
begets more violence? All of this, I realize now was roiling beneath the surface that night on March sixteenth, two thousand. Some prisoners at ad Ex Florence have a path to be transferred out to less harsh facilities, but it seemed that because of man Jimil was technically a state prisoner,
that wasn't a possibility. He seemed to be trapped at this prison at the end of the earth until his death, unless maybe a new piece of evidence was found, something that proved someone else shot the deputies.
I've gotten away with murder for real.
Yeah, some people say, man, you get away with murder.
I've literally gotten away with murder.
So yeah, I don't help all.
The wood.
That's on the next episode of Radical. Radical is a production of Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts. Radical was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me Mosey's Secret. Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer. Sheba Joseph is our associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson, Johnny Coufman, Emily Martinez and Matt Cher. Fact checking by Sophie Hurwitz, Kaylin Lynch and Layla Dos. Original music by Kyle Murdoch and by Ray Murray of Organized Noise. Sound design and mixing by
Kevin Seaman. Recording by Ewan Leed trem Ewen and Sheba Joseph. Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan, Ashley Warren, Eliah Papes, Destiny Dingle and Sabina Merra. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher. For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. The executive producer is That iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with additional support from Trevor Young,