I agree, behavior modification programs, where participatation is voluntary with informed consent, would be in accord with the high minded concept of "rehabilitation" of old when benevolent minded individuals tried to make a difference to uplift prisoners in positive and creative ways in sharp contrast to practices more concerned with control and the profitability potential of the prison industry of today. Such positve programs, I have no doubt, would work well to rehabilitate both violent offenders and drug dependence.

However, the nature of and purpose of today's super max-type facilities: control and special housing units, etc., as guided by modern penological goals and practices, are not concerned with protections such as informed consent, [illegible], which are either non-existent or underminded by the nature of the program. Such prisons literally are disguised laboratories involving experimentation with coercive psychological systems. Coercion means force, and physical force can and will be used. Pschological coercion entails the use of pressure applied to the mind. These systems are founded upon and heve their origin in the methods used by the North Koreans and Communist Chinese upon American POW's.

The American supermax type facilities, and architectual layouts to the smallest details of their sensory deprivation design, make the whole as much a unit of the system as their programs, and has hidden features not only to spy upon subjects but also features devised to confound the senses. For example, I, with hundreds of other prisoners, have been subjected to well concealed and subtle Baby Albert type experiments (i.e. used to attempt to induce phobias) that were deployed and became functional by simple manipulations of the environment. Numerous unwitting prisoners were exposed to these and other such subtle and deleterious coercive influences. I have suffered nerve damage to the inner ear as a consequence of one of the two Baby Albert type experiments that have been forced upon me.

Many of the guards and staff employed in these facilities are not privy to the scope and nature of what is conducted right under their noses because it is largely invisible except to the keen and informed senses; besides, the techniques and manner in which they are being used violate state, federal and international law and standards, so these staffers are on a need to know basis.

Should an alert and informed prisoner file a grievance charging forced human experimentation the prison officials are well positioned to claim that what is charged to be experimentation was mere "coincidence" or "delusional thinking." One of their tactics is to discredit the prisoner, which is easy for them to do. The sophisticated and insidious way in which the coercive psychological behavior change programs operate positions their operators to claim the glass to be half empty if someone charges that it is half full. Though difficult, it is possible, with some help, to prove the existence and use of these defects brainwashing techniques here in American prisons.

I have been targeted, not in a group program, but as an individual, for the most intense forms of coercive methods. I have experienced many times the mental anguishment and suffering that subjectional to aversive techniques produce, and the sickened feeling consequential to being subjected to manipulation as a human guinea that accompanies reflex conditioning (classical conditioning) or [illegible] conditioning, when these methods are being forced upon you against your wishes and there's little that you can do to halt the continous onslaught. The length of delay of this reply is due to injuries received as a direct consequence of these methods.

These programs, largely invisible to the prisoners victimized by them, and because they employ insidious coercive techniques, consitute forced human experimentation and no less than an effort by one group of people to impose its standards and values upon another unsuspecting and unconsenting group.

As to what behaviors the officials are trying to modify through use of coercive force? These facilities host a group version of the program in which more or less there is the appearance of voluntary participation, when actually it is the officials or operators who select the group participants who often have been vegetating in the facility for years before selection for placement in the group program and, after completion of it successfully, opportunity to be placed in general population or transferred out to a least restrictive prison. The group programs employ more milder forms of coercion though still insidious.

The forced program is where the targeted individual prisoner, who usually is influential, has leadership qualities, is in the crosshairs for his political or religious or idealogical views. I am being targeted along these lines as well as for violent measures I have taken 22 to 26 years ago in the prison setting as well as my crimes. When a prisoner is targeted the experience is no less than hostilites being opened up upon him, for indeed what is upon him is a form of psychological warfare that can easily get physical with the wrong response.

Sincerely,

LaRon McKinley Bey
Wisconsin Correctional Inst.
P.O. Box 351
Waupun, Wisconsin 53963

Dated May 1, 2013