AFSC Prison Watch Records

The Prison Watch Program of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is a Newark-based activist group that monitors human rights abuses in U.S. federal and state prisons, provides advocacy support to imprisoned individuals and their family members, collects testimonies by incarcerated people exposed to state violence, and creates and disseminates resources to help people survive incarceration. For nearly four decades, Bonnie Kerness has served as the coordinator for Prison Watch.

In 1976, activist Bonnie Kerness began working for AFSC’s Criminal Justice Program in Newark, where she helped to develop two key projects: the New Directions Youth Project and the Family Stabilization Project. Both projects sought to provide reentry support to incarcerated individuals and their families. Recognizing reentry as a family and community issue, these projects provided free counseling and advocacy support to formerly incarcerated and recently released individuals and their loved ones.

In 1986, Kerness received a letter from political prisoner Ojore Lutalo. After visiting Lutalo at Trenton State Prison in New Jersey, Kerness discovered that Lutalo was one of many political prisoners who had been sequestered in management control units (MCU) and subjected to years of solitary confinement. Kerness cites Lutalo’s affiliation with the Black Liberation Army (BLA)—whose members included several high-profile freedom fighters, such as Sundiata Acoli and Assata Shakur—as the primary reason for Lutalo’s administrative isolation.

In the following years, AFSC’s Criminal Justice Program formalized into the Prison Watch Program, as Kerness, staff, and student volunteers turned their attention towards monitoring human rights abuses in prisons. As Prison Watch’s investigations and reports detailed, Management Control Units had begun cropping up in U.S. prisons throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Kerness traces the construction of these military-style control units, which relied on the use of prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation, to the years following the civil rights movement and the widespread imprisonment of black and brown freedom fighters.

From the mid-1990’s onwards, the Prison Watch has circulated pamphlets, manuals, and reports produced collaboratively by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people with Prison Watch volunteers and students. Prison Watch has contributed to a range of publications. More recently, Kerness helped publish, “Torture in New Jersey Prisons” and “Survivors’ Speak,” which were both submitted to the United Nations as a Shadow Report for the Committee on Torture.

Today, Prison Watch continues to disseminate public information on human rights abuses and respond to the immediate needs of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Prison Watch has successfully advocated for decarceration through a variety of ongoing legislative actions and campaigns such as the use of the Public Health Emergency Act, which helped to secure the release more than five thousand at-risk incarcerated people during the Covid-19 pandemic. Other advocacy work includes the Clemency Project, the Second Look Campaign, The Dignity Act, and the passage of the Isolated Confinement Restriction Act. For decades, Prison Watch has provided grass roots expertise to coalitions, advocacy groups, community organizations, students, writers, and the media, while also promoting national and international attention to the practices of isolation and torture in prison.