Police, prison and abolition

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:04 pm

MANIFESTO: The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression Platform, 1971
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 18 Aug 2021

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MANIFESTO: The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression Platform, 1971

Remembering the Attica prisoner demands as the 50th anniversary approaches.

MANIFESTO: The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression Platform, 1971

Editors, The Black Agenda Review

On September 9, 1971, two weeks after the murder of George Jackson at San Quentin State Prison, 1,281 men incarcerated in New York State’s Attica Correctional Facility began one of the most significant prison uprisings in U.S. history. For four days, the prisoners had control of Attica, holding 42 members of the prison staff hostage. They attempted to negotiate with the state and prison authorities for improved living conditions and the expansion of their political rights. Their demands were enumerated in “The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression Platform.” The Manifesto is a remarkable document. It offers a harrowing view behind the prison walls, describing a place where violence, torture, and punitive deprivations are routine. It also shows a profound historical awareness of a shift in penology from a philosophy or rehabilitation to one of mere punishment, and the transformation of the prison from a place of reform to a “concentration camp.” Moreover, as a document collectively produced by the prison rebels themselves, it reflects a radical democratic practice and a defiant and bold assertion of humanity by people living in conditions that were meant to make them inhuman.

New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused to accede to the prisoner’s demand. On September 13, 1971, after four days of negotiations, he ordered state police to take back control of the prison. In a bloody spectacle of tear gas and bulletins, they stormed Attica killing more than 43 people, including thirty inmates. The rebellion was crushed.

As part of The Black Agenda Review’s continued commemoration of Black August, we “The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression Platform.”

THE ATTICA LIBERATION FACTION MANIFESTO OF DEMANDS AND ANTI-DEPRESSION PLATFORM

WE, THE IMPRISONED MEN OF ATTICA PRISON, SEEK AN END TO THE INJUSTICE SUFFERED BY ALL PRISONERS REGARDLESS OF RACE, CREED OR COLOR.

THE PREPARATION AND CONTENT OF THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN CONSTRUCTED UNDER THE UNIFIED EFFORTS OF ALL RACES AND SOCIAL SEGMENTS OF THIS PRISON.

IT IS A MATTER OF DOCUMENTED RECORD AND HUMAN RECOGNITION THAT THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE NEW YORK PRISON SYSTEM HAVE RESTRUCTURED THE INSTITUTIONS WHICH WERE DESIGNED TO SOCIALLY CORRECT MEN INTO THE FASCIST CONCENTRATION CAMPS OF MODERN AMERICA.

DUE TO THE CONDITIONAL FACT THAT ATTICA PRISON IS ONE OF THE MOST CLASSIC INSTITUTIONS OF AUTHORITATIVE INHUMANITY UPON MEN. THE FOLLOWING MANIFESTO OF DEMANDS [IS] BEING SUBMITTED:

We, the inmates of Attica Prison, have grown to recognize beyond the shadow of a doubt, that because of our posture as prisoners and branded characters as alleged criminals, the administration and prison employees no longer consider or respect us as human beings, but rather as domesticated animals selected to do their bidding in slave labor and furnished as a personal whipping dog for their sadistic, psychopathic hate.

We, the inmates of Attica Prison, say to you, the sincere people of society, the prison system of which your courts have rendered unto is without question the authoritative fangs of a coward in power.

Respectfully submitted to the people as a protest to the vile and vicious slave masters:

The Governor of New York State

The N.Y.S. Department of Corrections

The N.Y.S. Legislature

The N.Y.S. Courts

The United States Courts

The N.Y.S. Parole Board

And those who support this system of injustice.

The inmates this prison have vested the power of negotiation regarding the settlement of the stipulated demands within the judgement and control of these men:

Donald Noble 26777

Peter Butler 26018

Frank Lott 26148

Carl Jones-El 24534

Herbert Blyden X. 22480

All and any negotiation will be conducted by prison and state authorities with these five men.

These demands are being presented to you. There is no strike of any kind to protest these demands. We are trying to do this in a democratic fashion. We feel there is no need to dramatize our demands.

We, the men of Attica Prison, have been committed to the New York State Department of Corrections by the people of society for the purpose of correcting what has been deemed as social errors in behavior. Errors which have classified us as socially unacceptable until reprogrammed with new values and more thorough understanding as to our values and responsibilities as members of the outside community. The Attica Prison program in its structure and conditions have been enslaved on the pages of this Manifesto of Demands with the blood, sweat, and tears of the inmates of this prison.

The program which we are submitted to under the façade of rehabilitation are relative to the ancient stupidity of pouring water on a drowning man, inasmuch as we are treated for our hostilities by our program administrators with their hostility as medication.

In our efforts to comprehend on a feeling level an existence contrary to violence, we are confronted by our captors with what is fair and just, we are victimized by the exploitation and the denial of the celebrated due process of law.

In our peaceful efforts to assemble in dissent as provided under this nation’s United States constitution, we are in turn murdered, brutalized, and framed on various criminal charges because we seek the rights and privileges of all American people.

In our efforts to intellectually expand in keeping with the outside world, through all categories of news media, we are systematically restricted and punitively remanded to isolation status when we insist on our human rights to the wisdom of awareness.

MANIFESTO OF DEMANDS

1.WE DEMAND the constitutional rights of legal representation at the time of all parole board hearings and the protection from the procedures of the parole authorities whereby they permit no procedural safeguards such as an attorney for cross-examination of witnesses, witnesses in behalf of the parolee, at parole revocation hearings.

2.WE DEMAND a change in medical staff and medical policy and procedure. The Attica Prison hospital is totally inadequate, understaffed, and prejudiced in the treatment of inmates. There are numerous “mistakes” made many times; improper and erroneous medication is given by untrained personnel. We also demand periodical check-ups on all prisoners and sufficient licensed practitioners 24 hours a day instead of inmates’ help that is used now.

3.WE DEMAND adequate visiting conditions and facilities for the inmate and families of Attica prisoners. The visiting facilities at the prison are such as to preclude adequate visiting for inmates and their families.

4.WE DEMAND an end to the segregation of prisoners from the mainline popu- lation because of their political beliefs. Some of the men in segregation units are confined there solely for political reasons and their segregation from other inmates is indefinite.

5.WE DEMAND an end to the persecution and punishment of prisoners who practice the Constitutional Right of peaceful dissent. Prisoners at Attica and other New York prisons cannot be compelled to work as these prisons were built for the purpose of housing prisoners and there is no mention as to the prisoners being required to work on prison jobs in order to remain in the mainline population and/or be considered for release. Many prisoners believe their labor power is being exploited in order for the state to increase its economic power and to continue to expand its correctional industries (which are million-dollar complexes), yet do not develop working skills acceptable for employment in the outside society, and which do not pay the prisoner more than an average of forty cents a day. Most prisoners never make more than fifty cents a day. Prisoners who refuse to work for the outrageous scale, or who strike, are punished and segregated without the access to the privileges shared by those who work; this is class legislation, class division, and creates hostilities within the prison.

6.WE DEMAND an end to political persecution, racial persecution, and the denial of prisoner’s rights to subscribe to political papers, books, or any other educational and current media chronicles that are forwarded through the U.S. Mail.

7.WE DEMAND that industries be allowed to enter the institutions and employ inmates to work eight hours a day and fit into the category of workers for scale wages. The working conditions in prisons do not develop working incentives parallel to the many jobs in the outside society, and a paroled prisoner faces many contradictions of the job that add to his difficulty in adjusting. Those industries outside who desire to enter prisons should be allowed to enter for the purpose of employment placement.

8.WE DEMAND that inmates be granted the right to join or form labor unions.

9.WE DEMAND that inmates be granted the right to support their own families; at present, thousands of welfare recipients have to divide their checks to support their imprisoned relatives, who without outside support, cannot even buy toilet articles or food. Men working on scale wages could support themselves and families while in prison.

10.WE DEMAND that correctional officers be prosecuted as a matter of law for any act of cruel and unusual punishment where it is not a matter of life and death.

11.WE DEMAND that all institutions using inmate labor be made to conform with the state and federal minimum wage laws.

12.WE DEMAND an end to the escalating practice of physical brutality being perpetrated upon the inmates of New York State prisons.

13.WE DEMAND the appointment of three lawyers from the New York State Bar Association to full-time positions for the provision of legal assistance to inmates seeking post-conviction relief, and to act as a liaison between the administration and inmates for bringing inmates’ complaints to the attention of the administration.

14.WE DEMAND the updating of industry working conditions to the standards provided for under New York State law.

15.WE DEMAND the establishment of inmate worker’s insurance plan to pro- vide compensation for work-related accidents.

16.WE DEMAND the establishment of unionized vocational training programs comparable to that of the Federal Prison System which provides for union instructions, union pay scales, and union membership upon completion of the vocational training course.

17.WE DEMAND annual accounting of the inmates Recreational Fund and formulation of an inmate committee to give inmates a voice as to how such funds are used.

18.WE DEMAND that the present Parole Board appointed by the Governor be eradicated and replaced by the parole board elected by popular vote of the people. In a world where many crimes are punished by indeterminate sentences and where authority acts within secrecy and within vast discretion and given heavy weight to accusations by prison employees against in- mates, inmates feel trapped unless they are willing to abandon their desire to be independent men.

19.WE DEMAND that the state legislature create a full-time salaried board of overseers for the State Prisons. The board would be responsible for evaluating allegations made by inmates, their families, friends and lawyers against employers charged with acting inhumanely, illegally or unreasonably. The board should include people nominated by a psychological or psychiatric association, by the State Bar Association or by the Civil Liberties Union and by groups of concerned involved laymen.

20.WE DEMAND an immediate end to the agitation of race relations by the prison administration of this State.

21.WE DEMAND that the Dept. of Corrections furnish all prisoners with the services of ethnic counselors for the needed special services of the Brown and Black population of this prison.

22.WE DEMAND an end to the discrimination in the judgment and quota of parole for Black and Brown people.

23.WE DEMAND that all prisoners be present at the time their cells and property are being searched by the correctional officers of state prisons.

24.WE DEMAND an end to the discrimination against prisoners when they appear before the Parole Board. Most prisoners are denied parole solely be- cause of their prior records. Life sentences should not confine a man longer than 10 years as 7 years is the considered statute for a lifetime out of circulation, and if a man cannot be rehabilitated after a maximum of ten years of constructive programs, etc., then he belongs in a mental hygiene center, not a prison.

25.WE DEMAND that better food be served to the inmates. The food is a gastronomical disaster. We also demand that drinking water be put on each table and that each inmate be allowed to take as much food as he wants and as much bread as he wants, instead of the severely limited portions and limited (4) slices of bread. Inmates wishing a pork-free diet should have one, since 85% of our diet is pork meat or pork-saturated food.

26.WE DEMAND an end to the unsanitary conditions that exist in the mess hall: i.e., dirty trays, dirty utensils, stained drinking cups and an end to the practice of putting food on the tables hours before eating time without any protective covering over it.

27.WE DEMAND that there be one set of rules governing all prisons in this state instead of the present system where each warden makes rules for his institution as he sees fit.


IN CONCLUSION

We are firm in our resolve and we demand, as human beings, the dignity and justice that is due to us by our right of birth. We do not know how the present system of brutality and dehumanization and injustice has been allowed to be perpetrated in this day of enlightenment, but we are the living proof of its existence and we cannot allow it to continue.

The taxpayers who just happen to be our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters and sons should be made aware of how their tax dollars are being spent to deny their sons, brothers, fathers and uncles of justice, equality and dignity.

Attica Liberation Faction

Donald Noble 26777

Peter Butler 26018

Frank Lott 26148

Carl Jones-El 24534

Herbert Blyden X. 22480

The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto is available through Freedom Archives . It has also been reprinted in the Institute of Race Relations’ journal Race and Class and in Attica Prison Uprising 101: A Short Primer by Mariame Kaba and Project NIA.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/manif ... tform-1971
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 25, 2021 1:47 pm

Document: Notes of a Prison Collective: Marion Political Collective, 1976
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 25 Aug 2021

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Document: Notes of a Prison Collective: Marion Political Collective, 1976

In 1976, prisoners in the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois wrote a collective document explaining the status of the prisoner within the prison—and the role of the prison in society at large.

Opened in 1963, the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois was built to replace Alcatraz . Like Alcatraz, Marion was designed to incarcerate those individuals the federal government considered the most violent and dangerous. Unlike Alcatraz, an institution notorious for its archaic brutality, Marion deployed the latest in “modern” rehabilitation techniques. In 1968, prison officials launched a behavior modification program called the “Control and Rehabilitation Effort.” Known as CARE, the program used techniques of physical and psychological torture to terrorize and break the mind and spirit of prisoners, including “group therapy” sessions where prisoners were berated, degraded, and humiliated. In 1973, the first “control unit ” cells were developed at Marion : for 23 to 24 hours a day, prisoners were placed under a maximum security regime, confined to a small, one-person cell with no contact with other prisoners or the outside world. Detention in the control units was indefinite and, as their use was designated an “administrative” action, prisoners were denied due process. In 1983 , after a flash of violence the entire prison entered a lockdown that lasted twenty-three years.

Yet repression breeds resistance. Historically, the prisoners of Marion have organized and fought for better conditions, often with the support of those outside the prison walls. In 1972 , a coalition of Black, Indian, Puerto Rican, and white prisoners initiated a series of mobilizations and lawsuits against the prison. In 1976 , to coincide with the US Bicentennial, a group of inmates launched a prison strike to call attention to the brutality of CARE. Also in 1976, a small group of prisoners who called themselves “The Marion Prison Collective” produced an incredible document that both theorized the status of the prisoner within the prison, and explained the role of the prison in society at large. Titled “Notes of a Prison Collective,” it is a remarkable treatise on theory and practice, co-option, repression and counter-revolution, and on the difficult emergence of political and revolutionary consciousness. As part of our continuing commemoration of Black August, The Black Agenda Review reproduces it below.

NOTES OF A PRISON COLLECTIVE: MARION POLITICAL COLLECTIVE

Our collective has its origin in the concrete basis of the need for a collective force whose ideological base surpasses the narrow-minded nationalism and reactionary desire to imitate the Washington, D.C. form of gangsterism. As members of the convict class, we understand that we must be about the transformation of mice into conscious men of science, i.e., scientific social scientists. In order for anything to be changed, first it must be recognized that there is the necessity for change. This can only be accomplished through the development of theory out of practice and back to more theory and more practice. So it is out of the subjective recognition of the missing link in our objective surroundings that we have emerged.

The collective, which for purposes of identification we shall call: “The Marion Political Collective,” states in its prospectus, in part:

Objective: Primary short-term objective: elevation of political consciousness. Means: All available source material and manpower. Method: One-on-one political education; infiltration and politicization. Long Range Objective: Liberation of oppressed classes of this society. Method: Armed struggle and resocialization. Means: Propaganda and agitation. Need: Organizational structure as basis for future development. Method: Development and acceptance of Organization Programme. Foundation: Commitment to criticism/self-criticism; combat liberalism within self and organization; commitment to group study; commitment to practice.

Conscious discipline is self-initiated out of the recognition of necessity and is a reflection of political development. The primary method by which we maintain discipline is through raising the level of consciousness.

The preceding is not necessarily the order in which this statement of goals and aims appears. But it gives some indication of where we see ourselves heading and the guiding principles by which we intend to get there.

It has been some six or seven months now since we locked minds and efforts in an attempt to develop towards that more fully human, New Man. Those months included the period when we began to deliberately rap about what was needed. At the beginning, out of a population of four hundred men, we could only muster twelve. Three, however, turned tail and ran, and one very much needed brother is in segregation—the hole. So we have now dwindled to eight in population, moving among our peers. We are sure this problem is just a mirror of the overall internal and external problem that the total U.S. must accept and devise ways for dealing with. Still, the problem of indifference here in Marion among the “inmates” cannot be solely in [sic] dealt with, unless the tune which is being piped through the electronic-box station in the Washington, D.C.'s house of sinister plotters is understood. The tune’s lyrics go something like this: “Make Marion the most maximum of our cages, our behavior modification laboratory.” So in order to understand how, for instance, we discovered the need for “organizational structure as basis for future development,” it is necessary to have some idea of exactly what existed previously.

Mainly there were two loosely-knit organizations: one operated under the auspices of the chaplain's office, with its objective of bringing a more contemporary view to the religious context; the other was a black cultural group. In addition, there had been the ubiquitous prison presence of the Nation of Islam. Although the religious group and, under the regulations of the Bureau of Prisons, the cultural group were open to ethnic members other than blacks, both bodies were predominantly attended and operated by Afrikanamericans. (One reason for this, especially in relation to the religious group, might be found in the words of a white prisoner: “When you join an organization that’s mostly black, you have to function. And they're concerned with social problems and change.” Thus, most white prisoners are content to languish in socially inactive things, like the jaycees, etc.) So it is no exaggeration to say that these organizations were directly related to social problems that exist in the larger society-problems that do not cease to exist inside the prisons.

This is important to understand because of its direct relation to the consistent thread of development which gave substance to the recognition for a particular need, at another point in time. None of the postures that one would find in groups that function on the other side of prison boundaries were missing in these organizations. However, there is a real difference between what is happening in most federal joints as opposed to that which is happening in most of the state cages. Mainly, it is similar to the kind of illusionary democratic possibilities, or “humane” relations, that supposedly exist in the North, West, and East of the United States, as opposed to the South. The effect this has is that we recognize and relate to the truth of, say, George Jackson's or Martin Sostre 's thesis: we know that the conditions are equally killing here, as they are in any other joint--but the methods operate at a more subtle level. This means that the demands for social consciousness beckon from a level much higher than that primary immediacy which brutally stabs the physical being and churns through the flesh, making it cry out right on the spot. Just as in America, it is frightfully real that most people believe they have a “right to work”—at the whim of their bosses’ generosity; in the same way, most federal prisoners see (because they are able to make a few pennies more than state prisoners) that they are not obliged to agitate for changes inside the prisons. Behavioral programs come down in the forms of rehabilitative things, with distant promises of parole, and thus affectionately remove the militant postures that used to pass as revolutionary desire.

So it can be readily seen that initially, these two groups had the same kind of “revolutionary desire”—which has finally been diagnosed as a genuine revolt to change social attitudes, without being righteously grounded in principled revolutionary understanding that would project toward the complete overturning of social relations, i.e., the kind of revolutionary desire that sees itself dissolving throughout the country into the myth of democratic liberalism. Thus, there was the “militant” push for black studies and history, for equality of participation by blacks in jobs, etc.; and when some of these demands were fulfilled through token response, it became easy for the militants to be complacent. Finally, the aim of the cultural group extended no further than getting women visitors to the weekly meetings. What was in the early stages a broad popular move, infused with political reality, became simply “pop culture” and moved to proudly de-politicize itself, thus assuring the “controllers” that the boat would not rock. Help was naturally in the offing: first, in reaction to a mass work-stoppage in 1972, all known political activists were locked up. Then, the next move was to bring in a number of “cadres” who had sold themselves out to the behavior modification program--as trainees, guinea pigs, and what have you. The results were a completely altered atmosphere, all in favor of the controllers and the aims that they projected.

Overtly, the move is “anti-prison-reformism.” Generally, there is consistent harassment, badly prepared food, and tampering with personal mail and books that are sent in from family or comrades. One known activist in segregation, Paul Duhart, was found hanging in his cell, which they claimed was suicide (see RT: A Journal of Radical Therapy , Summer, 1975). This happened less than four months ago. It is in the “control units” (segregation; prisons within prisons) that these more direct methods of control come into play. By means of behavior modification programs (Transactional Analysis in the extreme), authorities seek to forcibly restructure prisoners' personalities and thought processes, reducing rebellious spirits to pliant automatons (those who succumb) or vegetables (those who resist). Repeat: truly rebellious and conscious prisoners are often murdered. Long-term segregation, wherein social contact is kept to a minimum and sensory deprivation is dominant, serves to further terrorize prison populations into docility.

The opposite result, in the broad sense, manifested itself when the last of those activists was ordered released back into the general population by the court in December, 1973 (Adams v. Carlson ). The nationalist tendency dominated the cultural group. It sought mainly to enhance the image of black history in the eyes of black prisoners, and to legitimize it in the eyes of the administration: the first related to and depended upon the second. So the primary political demand was to make it understood that black history legitimizes itself when it is correctly understood and critically examined, without an unbalanced glorification. To bring this political reality to the surface, it was necessary not only to become active in the group, but also to be involved in the organization's policy-making. This was accomplished. In the-meantime, Chicano prisoners made a move to establish a cultural group. Some members were involved with the Afrikanamerican culture group's political workshop. As they began to develop, during a so-called “probationary period,” the Latino population gave its wholehearted support. But at the end of the “probation, “they were declared to be too “political” by the administration. What remained to be done was the creation of an organizational structure that would transcend the popular limitations of administratively sanctioned groups. Thus, we arrived at the need for the collective, its goals, and its principles.

It was necessary to distinguish the difference between a “study group” and the collective as a political organization. The collective itself could not be a mere study group, although the membership of both would be primarily the same. We saw the study group as only a means to a greater end, with its purpose and function being determined by the need which created it. The central task of the collective, at this point in time, is to elevate the level of political consciousness among the prison population and among those who come directly or indirectly in line with the prison struggle situation. One of the means by which this mass politicization is realized is through political education via study groups. Considering the shortcomings of so-called “criminal mentality” and the gross lack of social understanding among prisoners, the need for political education is outstanding. It is a dire necessity to transform this “criminal mentality” into revolutionary consciousness; otherwise, the errors of past prison movements can only be repeated. Revolutionary consciousness turns historical errors into practical steppings stones. In prisons, there is a heavy need to recognize that the collective must first resolve the differences and contradictions in its understanding and application of the dialectical method to historical materialism--since it is from this basis that the principles of scientific socialist revolution arise and become clarified.

In the course of building a revolutionary collective in prison, contradictions arise during its development that are universal in nature; contradictions that could arise in any genuine revolutionary group. Initially, reliance is placed on past experience and on the manifestations of a particular level of consciousness relative to the individuals who are to make up the nucleus of the group.

The revolutionary consciousness that was presupposed, in some cases, did not exist. Accordingly, the practices of some individuals reflected the negation of revolutionary theory and practice, the negation of revolutionary principles, and total disregard for individual and organizational discipline. This contradiction emerged out of a superficial analysis of the individuals who were to become involved in the group. It is one thing to deal as an individual, and another thing altogether to deal collectively. This is a very important factor, for individualism manifests itself in many ways which are not readily comprehended until one moves to the higher sphere of collectivity. We recognized that in order to develop, to create theory and practice in its most concrete form, many contradictions would have to be resolved, and ideological clarity would have to be attained collectively. This way, we were prepared to combat all incorrect ideas, the success of which, in the final analysis, would be reflected in our practice.

The struggle to rid ourselves of all ideas and practices that impede growth and development caused some individuals to drop out. Rather than acknowledge their shortcomings, they blamed the organization. Those who remained, committed themselves to consistently struggle with their own shortcomings and the shortcomings of the organization as a whole. They realized that our strength and development depended on that of each and every member. With this in mind, steps were taken to utilize the methods of criticism/self-criticism on a collective and one-on-one basis. Also, get-acquainted sessions were instituted. Not only has this helped to resolve contradictions of a political nature, but also has aided us in understanding each other, which is an objective necessity. This is not to say that all contradictions have been resolved, for they will continue to arise as we continue to develop. But it has instilled in the minds of those still struggling that we are capable of resolving contradictions as a means to our organizational and individual development.

The collective now functions in the following way: as a collective we meet twice a week; the “study group” is also scheduled twice weekly. The sessions are devoted to studies for a minimum of one hour, with the remaining time used for political evaluations on the local level. Members are required to be active in the other loose-knit groups, which do not include the Nation of Islam. Criticism/self-criticism sessions are held monthly. We have elected a Responsible whose duties are to coordinate our studies and guide a correct political ideology and praxis. All members have an equal vote, including the Responsible. We evaluate problems on a collective basis by which democratic centralism rules. Thus, the majority voice, in any given situation, moves to convince the minority that decisions should be based on revolutionary principles.

Politically conscious prisoners are concerned with concrete issues. Of particular consideration is the function of prisons in capitalist society. During the course of study, each theoretical concept must be analyzed in terms of its relation to the day-to-day activities of prisoners in an economic, social, and political context. Such critical examination enables a collective to develop insights into the particular contradictions between prisons and society in general, and more importantly, the particular contradictions within particular prisons. The basic understanding is that the main function of prisons is to serve as the apex of social coercion within the capitalist economy. The warehousing of prisoners, therefore, serves a two-fold purpose: 1) it removes from the community those who refuse to submit to economic deprivation; and 2) it extracts exploitative profits through compulsory labor at slave wages.

Once captured, the concept begins to expand. One comes to recognize the means and methods utilized within prisons as amplified versions of the coercive tactics used on society-at-large, for (again) prisons are microcosms of the national situation.

In “population,” i.e., where the bulk of prisoners reside that parallels the external community, manipulation is the rule. Make-work programs divert attention from the conditions. Trivia dominates prisoners’ minds: movies, outside shows, purpoless education (both academic or outmoded vocational training), and dysfunctional “rehabilitation programs,” e.g. drug therapy, jaycees, historical societies, and so forth. For the opportunistic, subtle Transactional Analysis groups function as channels for capitalist values. Rehabilitation rhetoric is projected, while in actuality all prospects for genuine rehabilitation are thwarted, or deliberately subverted by careful selection of those most apt to fail on such experimental projects as work release, furloughs, etc.

As in the large society, racism is perpetuated by administrators through discriminatory practices in quarters assignments, job placements in preferred positions, allocation of funds to prisoners groups, and paroles. It is also rewarded when employed by reactionary prisoners, predominantly opportunistic whites. Political whites are rare. Those few who might seek communication with Third World prisoners, the most politically active, are subject to peer pressure which ultimately hinders development. The conscious and active, however, irrespective of color, are harassed or negated ceaselessly, which necessarily evolves into a pariah situation once issues are joined. Clearly, racism is a tool in the interest of the enemy and defeats any attempt to combat common problems among prisoners, especially when repression comes down.

In dealing with repression, where the principal contradiction between the administration and prisoners has heightened, our historical analysis has proven that a given course of action is advantageous to our position. The most necessary move is to have some base for a united action front. It is our most formidable weapon. We have to bring, as much as possible, discipline into the broad ranks of the prisoners so that we can operate as a unit, with as many as possible being aware of what is going on at all times. In whatever situation, no matter what degree the crisis, letter-writing campaigns are utilized as a means to expose the fascist-like atrocities enacted by the authorities. In terms of reaching broad masses of people, and at the same time raising the level of prisoner consciousness, the courts have proven to be an effective means. But it is highly important that we always understand that they are a means and not the solution to the problem of prison or social problems in general. We have referred to the Adams v. Carlson class-action suit; presently another suit, Bono v. Saxbe, which challenges the control units in this joint, is being heard. A favorable decision, releasing many of those who are politically active and who have been stuffed in the control units without having entered the general population, could very well push the contradiction to another level.

Aside from this article, the collective has not published as a collective. Our outlet has remained the cultural newsletter, which generally reflects our development. This outlet has provided us numerous contacts with the developing movement in the “open society” and with prisoners in other state and federal joints. This, in turn, has enabled us to get most of the resource materials we need and to engage in dialogues with organizations, staff people working with periodicals, and others concerned with the movement for social justice.

At the moment, for the purposes of developing a collective understanding of revolutionary socialist theory and practice, we are dealing with the philosophical essays of Mao, studying Marx, and moving to deal with Lenin. Since most of us have previously studied, on an individual level, and devoted more than a little time to a scientific understanding of racism and its ramifications in this advanced capitalist society, we find it relatively beneficial to relate our past experience to our developing understanding.

The stage at which we are now is in itself a development; a qualitative leap from the old to the new. It represents the struggle to develop ideological clarity, collectivity, consistency, and a greater understanding of what is necessary in order to build the revolution. Just as ideas do not fall from the sky, neither do revolutionary consciousness, revolutionary practice, or the revolutionary people who must understand the needs of the masses and be capable of fulfilling them with the masses. We are consistently seeking to realize this reality. The development achieved has posed and will continue to pose other contradictions, and will necessitate the struggle to resolve the old which will bring in the new. But we will resolve them. For our direction is to develop, to struggle with ideological clarity, and to manifest consistency in all we say and do. We see the value of this as being applicable to the basic development of any prisoners’ political collective.

Originally published in Crime and Social Justice, No. 5 (Spring-Summer 1976).

*Previous posts from our “Black August” 2021 focus have included “Two Letters on Black August,” written in 1979 by men incarcerated in San Quentin, and the 1971 Attica Liberation Manifesto.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/honor ... ugust-1979
https://www.blackagendareport.com/manif ... tform-1971

https://www.blackagendareport.com/docum ... ctive-1976
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 26, 2021 1:00 pm

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Open Carry March for Teenager Killed in Downtown Indy
By Niko Georgiades, Unicorn Riot August 23, 2021

Indianapolis, IN – Led by the family of Dorian Murrell, a teenager who was killed during George Floyd protests, an open carry march snaked through downtown Indianapolis demanding justice for Murrell and calling for Black unity. Murrell was 18 years old and unarmed when he was fatally shot last year.

The mid-July march was led by Murrell’s grandmother and organized by his cousin. It started near the City-County Building, went to the Pan Am Plaza, and then to the Monument Circle where Dorian was killed before finishing at the starting point. Speeches were made at each stopping point discussing Murrell’s murder, racist policies preventing a just prosecution, and Black power and self-determination. During the march, Unicorn Riot heard from Artonia Armstrong, Dorian’s grandmother, and Corey, Dorian’s cousin.


Watch the full live stream of the march below.


Dorian Murrell was with friends and family when he was killed in Monument Circle in the early morning of May 31, 2020. Thirty-one-year-old Tyler Newby confessed to the killing, claiming self-defense.

Newby, who’s been free on bond since last August, was originally charged with murder for “knowingly or intentionally kill[ing] another human being” and given a ‘no bond hold’ until a secretive agreement between prosecutors and the defense on August 10, 2020, when he was granted a $250,000 bond, of which 10% needed to be paid. Murrell’s family said they were ushered out of the court room as the prosecution and defense made their arrangement.

Recently, a felony count of voluntary manslaughter was added to Newby’s charges and his trial is now scheduled for October 5, 2021, after being rescheduled from August 2021.

Dorian Murrell: Killed During George Floyd Protests, Family Seeks Answers https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/dorian-m ... s-answers/
Charge Added to Dorian Murrell’s Alleged Killer as Family Speaks Out https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/charge-a ... peaks-out/

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Dorian Murrell (l), Tyler Newby (r)

During the open carry march, call and response chants of “Who do we want?” “Tyler!” along with “justice,” and “Black Power” were continuous. Many of the participants came from across the U.S. and were members of several different gun rights groups in the Black power movement including but not limited to; the Black Liberation Militia, New Black Panther Party, Not Fucking Around Coalition (NFAC), Huey Newton Gun Club, Fred Hampton Gun Club, and Panthers Special Operation Command (PANSOC).

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Dorian’s grandmother Artonia told Unicorn Riot it was her third time visiting the site of her grandchild’s death. She thanked those who marched and asked for prayers for her daughter, Dorian’s mother.

Murrell’s cousin Corey said it was his first time at the scene and the family was dealing with the situation the best they could.

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Both Artonia and Corey mentioned Newby’s bond during their speeches. Both blaming institutional racism and white privilege, “You had let that been a Black boy who shot and killed a white boy, they’d have fried his ass,” said Artonia.

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The march took place a day after a press conference was held outside the City-County Building and a town hall discussion on racism was held at the Hovey Street Church of Christ in east Indianapolis. Dorian Murrell’s family attorney, Malik Shabazz, announced at the presser that the Black Lawyers for Justice were starting an investigation into the city of Indianapolis and state of Indiana.

https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/open-car ... town-indy/

The Black Panthers were right all along...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 27, 2021 2:02 pm

Jailhouse Lawyers Speak 25 Aug 2021

Jailhouse Lawyers Speak calls for National Shut ‘Em Down Demonstrations

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Jailhouse Lawyers Speak call for Shut 'Em Down prison abolition actions in 2022.

It is with a collective heavy heart, but a raging spirit of Abolition that Jailhouse Lawyers Speak announces the call for National Abolition Demonstrations inside the prisons and Jails of America! Jailhouse Lawyers Speak members around the nation are making a direct appeal for people locked up to disrupt the normal prison operations of America. These demonstrations will be known as National Shutem Down Demonstrations. Scheduled to take place August 21 – September 9th 2022. This announcement comes early to give our friends, families, comrades and supporters on the outside enough time to get the word inside to every jail, prison, and ICE facility by any means.

People have asked why we fight to end legalized enslavement and to abolish prisons in America?

We fight to end legalized enslavement because it’s wrong, promotes prisons, demands profits off the convicted, and it violates human rights.

Ending legalized enslavement will open cell doors, but like other countries with no slave laws on the books, Amerika will adjust when it amends the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. The same way it did in maintaining White Supremacy through infrastructure racism. We too must adjust in tactics and strategies. Never forget that American prisons, jails and the police are the legacy of slavery.

Part of JLS adjusting is moving harder against the system core fascist tool: prisons and jails. We must shut them down. And for those that desire to see America do better, the fight must be to divert those funds back into disadvantaged communities. Poor communities are where over the majority of US prisoners come from. We would argue that we (people in prisons) are products of our environment.

As one human rights organization in the historical Prisoners Resistance Movement, we understand that everything has its season. The leaves are turning, freedom cries are in the air. Abolition must meet and seize the times.

SHUT’EM DOWN DEMONSTRATION METHODS

People in prisons, jails, or ICE can select one or multiple ways to participate in the Shut ‘Em Down demonstrations

1.Work Strikes: Prisoners will not report to assigned jobs. Each place of detention will determine how long its strike will last. Some of these strikes may translate into a local list of demands designed to improve conditions and reduce harm within the prison.

2.Sit-ins : In certain prisons, men and women will engage in sit – in protests.

3.Boycotts: All spending should be halted throughout demonstration dates. We ask those outside the walls not to make financial judgments for those inside. Men and women on the inside will inform you if they are participating in this boycott.

4.Hunger Strikes: Men and women shall refuse to eat. This is usually the only options some may have in order to participate

5.Sabotaging prison work equipment to ensure it will not function

Jailhouse Lawyers Speak placed an inside demonstration call in 2018 on the behalf of prisoners nationwide. With that strike call came a list of 10 demands. Today 2021 we are still calling on people on the inside and outside around the nation to lift back up those human rights demands (as amended). These are demands that thousands of people in prison around the nation agreed with by demonstrating and suffering horrible retaliation over. We will not abandon them. Those demands are steps in the right direction to dismantle the prison industrial slave complex.

SHUT ’EM DOWN ABOLITION DEMANDS

Based on the 2018 national prisoners strike 10 demands and the overall scope of the 10 demands we are demanding:

1.The end to prison slavery. The 13th Amendment punishment clause to the US Constitution be repealed. (Popular language “amended”). Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Rep. William Lacy Clay of Missouri introduced a joint resolution that would remove the 13th Amendment’s “punishment clause,” or language that excepted convicted prisoners from the ban on slavery and involuntary servitude. Jailhouse Lawyers Speak agrees with this historical move to end legalized enslavement of the people in the US

2.The closure of a majority of jails and prisons in every state. This includes federal prisons and ICE. (Outside organizers and/or people currently inside should select and educate the public as to why certain confinement hell holes must be shut down). Closures should be followed by laws being enacted to reduce the use of cells. And force resources that would have been allocated to those jails and prisons into the poorer communities to aid in ending poverty crimes.

3.Immediately closing down all private prisons

4.Freeing All Political Prisoners in the US prisons

WHAT CAN YOU DO ON THE OUTSIDE TO HELP

*Share this press release everywhere, especially to media outlets
*Create promotional materials to send inside, share on social media, and to pass out at events
*Organize Abolitionist events to promote ShutEm Down 2022
*Promote the Shut’em Down Abolition demands
*Organize event to educate and demand the closure of prisons, jails, and ICE

Consider applying for the following Committee/seats:

– Abolition Convention Planning Committee.


This Committee will be responsible for organizing the Convention.

Contact: JailhouseLawyersSpeak@protonmail.com

– JLS International Law Project.

Volunteer lawyers and law students only.

Contact project attorneys: Jenipher Jones and Audrey Bomse for an application

micjlsnlg@gmail.com

– NSD Political Prisoners Freedom Committee

Will be responsible for Political Prisoners campaigns.

Contact: JailhouseLawyersSpeak@protonmail.com

– NSD Lobbyist Committee

At least one volunteer lobbyist will be needed for every state.

Contact: JailhouseLawyersSpeak@protonmail.com

People inside that would like to share their ideas on places that should be closed down or notice that their place of confinement will be participating can write to:

KC IWOC
PO Box 414304
Kansas City, MO 64141

All media inquiries contact: media@incarceratedworkers.org

Kan’t Stop, Won’t Stop! ShutEm Down!

[Jailhouse Lawyers Speak]

#ShutEmDown2022 #PrisonStrike #Abolition

https://www.blackagendareport.com/jailh ... nstrations
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 30, 2021 1:47 pm

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Harm reduction guided by the coal of the abolition of prisons and capitalism: an interview with former Direct Action member and ex-prisoner Ann Hansen

Originally published: Kersplebedeb by Kersplebedeb (August 24, 2021 ) - Posted Aug 30, 2021

Ann Hansen was imprisoned in 1983 for her involvement in the urban guerilla group Direct Action. She is the author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla and Taking the Rap: Women Doing Time for Society’s Crimes. She wrote the introduction for Margrit Schiller’s Remembering the Armed Struggle: My Time with the Red Army Faction. This interview was conducted in the summer of 2021.

How would you like to introduce yourself?

Ann Hansen: I am a 67 year old white cis gender female anarchist on parole for life after being convicted of a number of actions in 1984 along with some members of the urban guerrilla group, Direct Action. Since being released from prison, I have been living for almost 25 years now on a small farm that I own near Odessa just west of Kingston, Ontario. I am active with the Prison for Women (P4W) Memorial Collective which has been fighting for a Memorial Garden at the site of the now closed Prison for Women, and a Gallery where the women’s art and writing can be seen in order to give some context to their lives and deaths. We also agitate to improve prison and parole conditions as a harm reduction tactic in order to alleviate some of the suffering, but always within the context of the abolition of prisons and capitalism as the goal, the light that guides us through the darkness.

I should also add that my parole conditions have a direct impact on my political activism. In 2012, my parole was suspended for allegedly not telling my parole officer about a Prisoners Justice Day (PJD) film I screened at the Kingston public library in conjunction with a lawyer who outlined our civil rights in the context of large civil disobedience actions. My parole was reinstated by the Parole Board but only after adding this new parole condition in which I must “notify” my parole officer about any political activity in which I am engaged, such as attending events, public speaking, writing, etc. Even though the word is “notify” as opposed to “approve,” they could revoke me for anything. This seems shocking to activists, but any prisoner who has been on parole knows that you can be revoked for anything, anytime. It is very common to be suspended for obscure things like “deteriorating behavior” or “having a bad attitude,” especially if you are not a politicized prisoner. Politicized prisoners usually have some community support and a radical lawyer, so parole suspensions are more likely in the public eye and thus parole officers and the Parole Board are more accountable. “Social prisoners” on the other hand are usually invisible and are less likely to have legal representation so parole officers feel less constrained in terms of suspending them for ridiculous reasons.

Whenever I hear people expressing shock at the restrictions placed on political prisoners in countries like China and Russia , I smile cynically, because conditions for prisoners and parolees are not much better in Europe and North America. I bring this up because this particular parole condition has a big impact on what I can do or say. In the Kingston public library in 2012, my decision to show a PJD film at the same event as the lawyer explaining citizen’s rights during civil disobedience actions, was interpreted by my parole officer as and as a result I was “reverting to a pattern of behavior similar to that which led to my ‘index offence.’”

It is very important to note that this condition is applied to many prisoners who are not politicized, even if it is not an actual condition of their parole. Many prisoners are warned that if they take up speaking or writing about their experiences on parole or even in prison that they will be revoked. So it is also very important that our activism be extended to cover all prisoners whether they were arrested for so-called political actions or a prisoner who committed a crime they do not consider political. I will expand on this later.

The effect from these kinds of conditions is to cause prisoners to self-censor both their words and deeds. Whenever I am engaged politically I find myself subconsciously asking myself “Is this action or article worth having my parole revoked and possibly years and years back inside?” Many people who have had their parole revoked have told me that without a good lawyer, the odds are very low that you will be released or reinstated. In my case, I was privileged to have a good radical lawyer offer his services pro bono, but even then Legal Aid still charged me $4,000.00 because I own a home. I am not complaining about the $4,000.00 Legal Aid fee because I am privileged to even “own” a home, but the point remains, that pro bono lawyers are hard to come by, and that without one, your odds of being released after your parole hearing are low.

So I constantly am weighing the worthiness of writing political articles or participating in political actions relative to my freedom. A lot of people who have never been on parole, condemn people on parole for giving up activism or not being hardcore enough, shaming them for being “sell-outs.” I challenge them to imagine risking their home, family and life just to attend a demonstration.

How would you describe your politics?

AH: I think a person’s political views are better described through their value system than by some ideological brand, such as anarchism, communism, capitalism or socialism. Any country or individual can claim to be “communist” or anarchist but in practice, still be capitalist. If the most important value that guides either a country or individual is the accumulation of individual wealth, then whether they have a strong State or not, they are not communists or anarchists.

I would describe myself strategically as an anarchist revolutionary who believes that harm reduction tactics are valid in order to achieve our ideals. I have used the following story before to succinctly explain why I believe that fighting for improved prison and parole conditions are valid within a revolutionary context. If you were to visit someone in prison who has been in isolation for over a year, and they asked you what your activist group was doing, and you said writing pamphlets or speaking out at events about the need for revolutionary change, I would literally bet the farm, that they would either be crying inside or outright yell at you for not doing something to actually get them out of “the hole” now. Most of us, especially us white privileged folks, do not have a clue what it is like to be in a prison isolation cell or special handling unit or even just the general prison population. It is not out of line to call it “hell on earth.” Prisoners would either laugh or cry at the idea they should wait for the revolution before expecting to be “free,” or even released from isolation.

At 67, I have developed a certain level of cynicism about the revolution happening, not just in my lifetime, but perhaps anyone’s lifetime, and so it seems cruel to ask the majority of the world’s population to wait for the revolution if they want their suffering alleviated. They need food, drinking water, shelter, their land and freedom now, not on paper or in their dreams, but right now. This harm reduction philosophy originated within the drug-user communities where activists realized that the all-or-nothing “just quit” philosophy wasn’t going to work for lots of people, so why not get them clean needles and maintenance drugs such as methadone, tools and practices for minimizing risks and reducing harm?. By reducing misery and desperation in our communities, these practices also benefit people who aren’t using criminalized drugs.

In your Introduction to the new English translation of Margrit Schiller’s time in the Red Army Faction (German urban guerilla group), you trace how the exceptional conditions designed to break down political prisoners in the 1970s (23 hour lock-up, isolation, constant video surveillance, etc.) became regular features of the present-day prison system. Can you talk a bit about this? Why do you think this has happened?

AH: Capitalism is nothing if not resilient and adaptable. Over the past 500 years, capitalism has evolved into the dominant global economic system, distinguished from other economic models by values rooted in materialism, hierarchical power structures and competition. Historically, capitalism has weathered many storms: communist revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba, not to mention various national liberation movements and sieges. Although the communist revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba were guided by communist ideals in the beginning, they quickly got stuck in the mire of greed during the “dictatorship of the proletariat” phase of the revolution. Soon these fledgling “communist” countries replaced private corporations with State-owned corporations, and replaced the powerful ruling elites of private corporations with the vanguard of the Communist Party and State bureaucrats. These State-run corporations and their communist vanguard quickly evolved into a different strain of capitalism, commonly referred to as State capitalism.

Historically, capitalism has continued to adapt to changing social conditions. So, when the State introduced isolation, sensory deprivation, intensive surveillance, drug “therapy,” and other psychological techniques to break down political prisoners, it didn’t take long for the State to replicate these techniques to breakdown any prisoner who resists in either thought or deed. Since the closure of P4W (Prison for Women), these psychological techniques of breaking down a person’s identity are very evident in the “new” federal prisons for women.

P4W was the only prison for women in Canada from 1934 to 2000. When it closed down in 2000, six new federal prisons for women were opened, allegedly to create prison conditions that were more women- and Indigenous-centered, and would provide more job skills training and education. If anything, since the closure of P4W, prison conditions have deteriorated and opportunities for job training and education have diminished, while the security apparatus has evolved and become much more sophisticated and all-pervasive. Modern repressive security conditions that were once applied to political prisoners globally in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, have now become ubiquitous and used against any prisoners that resist whether they are politically enlightened or not.

For example, the segregation unit in P4W was only separated from the main range by an electrical/plumbing corridor running along behind all the cells on both sides of the range which facilitated communication between segregated and general population prisoners. All day long, as women went up and down the stairs from the general population main range to the upper tier, they would shout through the crack in a fire escape door to the women in segregation. It was very comforting to the women in seg to hear women yelling down to them all day long.

In the six regional federal prisons for women, segregation units are located in the maximum security units which are tiny separate buildings with a maximum capacity of approximately 30 women. Even within the max units, the segregation area is usually isolated on the main floor, separated by thick concrete walls from the pods so that it is difficult to even hear women screaming, let alone yelling back and forth through the doors like we did in P4W.

In P4W there was a heavy metal gate that opened and closed electronically, clanging noisily on its metal tracks each time it opened or closed. These doors opened up onto 100 cells that made up A and B range, including the segregation cells that made up the back half of B range. This clanging as the metal doors hit the metal door stop gave the women lots of warning that a guard or even tradesman was coming down the range.Other than the guards marching through the ranges doing hourly counts, there was no other means of surveillance. There wasn’t even an intercom system on the ranges, only in the newer social development addition that was constructed during a progressive period in the 70’s, when governments embraced education and job skills training in an attempt to lower the recidivism rate.

There was absolutely no audio-video surveillance like there is today in the maximum security units, where 2 round bluish eye-like cameras record everything within a 360 degree radius, on each end of a roughly 80 foot long by 30 foot wide pod. The maximum security units consist of 3 pods each and a segregation unit. Each pod is long enough for 5 cells, a bath/shower cell and a laundry/dryer unit, and wide enough for a 3 foot walking corridor in front of the cells and another 20 feet in which chairs, a TV, kitchen cabinets, a fridge and sink flank the walls.

The maximum security units alone are a prime example of how enhanced security features, originally designed to control political prisoners, are now used to target any prisoner that is resisting or not conforming to the prison regime. When Millhaven, the first super max penitentiary in Canada, was opened in 1971, followed by the “Correctional Development Center” in Quebec, the Correctional Services of Canada (CSC) incorporated a “special handling unit” (SHU) where they could isolate small groups of prisoners who had killed a cop or guard or even another prisoner, from general population for an indefiniate period of time. With the exception of the nationalist movement in Quebec, there was very little organized resistance in Canada at the time.

The CSC needed no cause to embrace any technological advancements that would enhance their capacity to surveille and control general population prisoners. So when 360 degree 24/7 audio-video surveillance became viable, the CSC incorporated these systems into all their prisons, putting a sinister spin on the motto “build it, and they will come.”

The maximum security units in the women’s prisons are by design and function special handling units, except instead of being reserved for prisoners who have killed cops, guards or other prisoners, they are used to hold any prisoner who is convicted in institutional court for anything from having a syringe in their cell to fighting. The maximum security units are also used to hold women convicted of murder for at least 2 years, most of whom have killed someone who was abusing them.1

When I was suspended in 2012, I was placed in the maximum security unit, even though I had neither been convicted in institutional court nor murdered anyone. I had been suspended for screening a Prisoners Justice Day film in the public library in conjunction with a lawyer giving a talk on an individual’s civil rights during mass civil disobedience actions. I put in a complaint immediately because clearly this was a form of punishment in and of itself, considering I had been out since around 1992, owned a small farm and was not engaged in any illegal or dangerous activity. Aftermy parole was reinstated by the Parole Board, and about 3 months after I had filed my complaint, it was returned with an apology for the bureacratic error of placing me in the maximum security unit.

I was definately shocked at the level of security in this unit for a group of roughly 20 women seperated into 3 pods, plus a segregation unit. There was virtually no work for the women in max. They had to stay on the pod all day except for one hour of exercise in a yard the size of a doubles tennis court, and the women in the different pods were never allowed to exercise with or have any contact with one another. When you arrive in the maximum security unit, you start off at the highest security level 4, which means that you must be handcuffed and shackled, and accompanied by a guard every time you leave the pod. If you conform and remain charge-free, your security level can drop to level 3 after a few months, at which time you can leave the pod in handcuffs without leg shackles but still with a guard in tow. Level 2 involves being escorted off the pod with a guard but without restraints, and finally at level 1 you can leave the max unit with just a pass, no guard or cuffs. It is ridiculous.

You also went to prison for urban guerilla activity, but in Canada in the 1980s and as a member of a much smaller organization (Direct Action). What were some of the similarities and differences you noticed between Schiller’s experience and your own, both in the underground and once you were imprisoned?

AH: As you say, our group, Direct Action was much smaller than the Red Army Faction (RAF). The revolutionary movement which fostered Direct Action was also much smaller and not as advanced ideologically. We really only had 2 underground cells at any given time, whereas the RAF was one of two urban guerrilla groups supported by a significant revolutionary movement in West Germany alone, and both the June 2nd Movement and the RAF were much larger than Direct Action. There was also significant urban guerrilla activity throughout Europe during the 70’s and 80’s, with the Red Brigades in Italy, the Angry Brigade in Britian, the IRA in Ireland, and ETA, the Basque separatist group in Spain, to name just a few. This significant number of guerilla groups throughout Europe reflected the fact that the European revolutionary left had a much more sophisticated politial analysis and practice, resulting in a large extra-parliamentarian left which metaphorically created a significant body of water in which the fish could swim.

Here in Canada, the FLQ had been decimated when the War Measures Act was implemented in 1970 after the kidnapping and killing of Quebec’s Minister of Immigration and Labor, Pierre Laporte. The American Indian Movement (AIM), which began in the US, did influence Indigenous people in Canada, as the arrest of Dino and Gary Butler in 1981 in a shoot-out with the cops in Vancouver demonstrated. Dino Butler had been directly involved in the resistance to the FBI’s presence on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in the context of which Leonard Peltier was eventually sentenced for the killing of an FBI agent.

The women involved in the network of AIM supporters who flocked from the U.S. for the Butler’s trial, stayed in our collective women’s house during their trial. This network included John Trudell and his wife, who were incredibly influential, in terms of our political and philosophical growth. Through John Trudell we realized that the most important goal was to protect the Earth and the Water. The Indigenous supporters from AIM never took a break from “politics” but began a campaign, “Water for Life” which is still a center-piece of Indigenous struggle today. We listened to everything John Trudell said as though he were Jesus, the son of God reincarnated. Any politics we developed that emphasized the importance of Mother Earth was directly related to the influence of the Indigenous people staying with us in 1981.

I believe Direct Action was also heavily influenced by the anarchist punk rock music scene that was active all along the west coast of Canada and the US. Gerry Hannah was the bass player and song-writer for the the anarchist punk rock band, the SubHumans who had the second highest following in the Canadian punk rock scene behind only D.O.A. When we met Julie Belmas, she was also a musician with deep roots in the anarchist punk rock scene.

The Red Army Faction was rooted in Marxism-Leninism, a more hierarchial and materialist political philosophy which, in many ways, was the antithesis of the spiritual and wholistic Indigenous philosophy from which the American Indian Movement sprang. True to our anarchist punk rock and political influences, at least on a theoretical level, we aspired to operate as a collective with no official leadership. Leadership in anarchist collectives is supposed to be earned through the respect the grass-roots population have naturally bestowed upon those who have made good decisions. In other words, if a person shows that they make the best decisions because they work hard, listen and learn from others who have proven themselves already, their ideas will be listened to more earnestly and respectfully than someone who tries to earn a place of leadership through intimidation and fear.

However despite our differences in terms of anarchism and marxism, both Margrit Schiller and myself experienced the unchecked patriarchal dynamics that were rampant throughout the radical and revolutionary movements of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. This period represented the dawn of feminist awareness throughout Western Europe and North America. Feminist critiques of male domination and hierarchial leadership patterns can be found in the literature of the Black Panthers, RAF, Red Brigades and the IRA, just to name a few, but this represented a growing consciousness amongst women moreso than a change in practise. It would be decades before these feminist critiques made their way into the mainstream and even longer before women actually earned leadership roles by way of an enlightened, feminist, grassroots demographic.

There were major differences in terms of the prison conditions Margrit Schiller and I experienced. The RAF was clearly a bigger, more sophisticated and threatening organization to the State. The West German government designed and built a special courtroom and holding cells for the guerrilla prisoners at Stammheim, whereas our trial was held in a regular courtroom but with a larger police presence than normal, and both spectators and prisoners were subjected to more intensive daily surveillance rituals every time we entered or left the courtroom. As with all things security and surveillance, once the guerrilla movements in Europe and North America had died down, the new repressive surveillance and security regimes did not, but instead were adapted to control and surveil regular prisoners who the prison regime now classified or branded as “gang members” or “organized criminals.”

In your 2018 memoir, which covers from your arrest in January 1983 through to your parole suspension (re-incarceration) in 2012, you mention going inside as a young revolutionary in the 1980s with a lot of romantic notions about prisoners and how to conduct yourself in prison. Can you talk a little about what those ideas were and how they squared up with reality?

AH: I still remember activists I knew back in the 70’s saying that if they went to prison, they would teach and organize the other prisoners to resist the prison regime. The way a lot of activists talked, you could tell they did not have a clue what the majority of prisoners were all about. They did not realize that most of the prisoners had been brought up in the criminal justice system, from foster homes when they were little children, where they were often abused sexually and/or physically, to juvenile detention centers as young adolescents. Eighty percent of all federally-sentenced women have been physically and/or sexually abused as children, a statistic that has been consistent for decades. So there is definitely a statistical link between criminalization and childhood abuse. Eventually these adolescents move on to their final destination, the federal pentitentiary, where they will survive in a revolving door cycle: a couple of years in the “pen,” then a couple of years on “the street.”

A lot of people assume that people who have done time, or have “lived experience,” are stupid. Yes, “65% of the people entering prisons have less than a grade 8 education level of literacy skills, and 79% of people entering Canadian prisons don’t have their high school diploma,2 but school is not a reflection of an individual’s intellectual capacity. How well a person does in school is more a reflection of their capacity to function well in a system of memorizing and storing information by sitting in classrooms listening to lectures for long hours five days a week, and then perhaps another couple of hours in the evenings reading and writing. Characteristics that lend themselves to high grades are a person’s ability to be obedient and loyal to authority figures, especially those in places of so-called “higher learning.” The ability to be sedentary for many hours a day. The capacity to retain factual information in large quantities. Obviously this is not the same thing as intelligence.

Most prisoners have qualities that make up for their lack of schoolbook knowledge: resilience, adaptability, short-term memory capacity, ability to compartmentalize emotional trauma, determination, courage, and perceptiveness.

It would be a huge mistake to walk into any remand, provincial or federal prison and act like you are smarter or know more than the average prisoner, or to try to organize them or to even initiate conversations as though you know them. I am going to make some sweeping generalizations here, but they are based on statistics that are true for the vast majority of prisoners. As I stated earlier, prisoners are more perceptive than the average person: a survival skill they have honed in foster care, training schools and just plain old living on the street. People living in institutional settings learn very quickly that survival is dependent on how fast they can pick up on unspoken signals or language, and how to react to threatening signals. A whole book could be written on this topic. But your best bet, if you find yourself in a prison at any time in your life, is to shut up, watch, listen and learn. Do not speak unless spoken to, and quietly try to figure out who to align yourself with amongst the prisoner population.

Radical movements often experience tension between supporting political prisoners and supporting all prisoners. Some people see campaigning for political prisoners in particular as implicitly creating a division between people who don’t deserve to be in prison and those who do. What do you think about this question? How can political prisoners be supported without undercutting a movement for the freedom of all prisoners? Is it particularly important that we support people who are sent to prison as a result of movement activity?

AH: I think the same philosophy that applies to how we, as political activists, engage with the people in general in our communities, also applies to how we engage with prisoners in general? Like the answers to most questions, the answer is not black and white.

If we see ourselves as a vanguard, more enlightened and entitled to political power than the average person, then of course, we will treat political and regular prisoners differently. I think the tendency to treat political prisoners as a special vanguard who must recieve most of our attention is a philosophy that is compatible with Marxism-Leninism, and with those who believe in hierarchy. But anarchists, such as myself, do not see ourselves as special or necessarily more enlightened.. When it comes to living and surviving in prison, experienced prisoners are the PhD graduates of prisons whereas those who have never done time before are wearing the metaphorical dunce cap that only those with “lived experience” can see.

The values upon which our resistence is rooted are going to determine what kind of revolutionary society we create. It is very difficult to live by a different set of values than the mainstream society in which we were raised. From the moment we leave the womb, we are indoctrinated with the values of capitalism, to value material goods, to be competitive, and strive for power over others. We see ourselves as a superior species relative to every other living thing on this planet. If our resistance movement is not rooted in the alternative values of communalism, cooperation, and conservation, then we will essentially reproduce a new society that appears different, but in essence is the same. In other words, same game, same players…just different clothes, language, and hair styles.

The Russian revolution in 1917 was led by the Bolsheviks, who had studied Marxism and Leninism, leading them to believe that the transitional phase between capitalism and communism, would be led by the proletariat, the social class of industrial workers whose income is derived solely from their labor. This phase would be necessary to fight foreign capitalist armies who would no doubt present a unified international front against any successful national revolutionary forces that had acquired a grip on the capitalist economy of any single country. During this phase the proletariat are supposed to suppress resistance to the revolution by the bourgeoisie, destroy the social relations of production underlying the class system, and create a new, classless society. Unfortunately, this transitional phase was taken over by the Communist Party which claimed to represent the proletariat. It did not take long for this intoxicating power to get into their heads, to such a degree that they would not relinquish it and instead, the transitional phase known as the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” became a permanent dictatorship by the Communist Party.

The problem lies in the fact we are indoctrinated with capitalist values from birth within a capitalist economy. So the same individuals who are leading the communist revolutionary resistance, still have the ubiquitious vestiges of capitalism embedded in their behavior and thoughts. So it is important to prioritize reinforcing the new values and to embrace people in the general population so they too can become revolutionary individuals. If we do not believe in setting up a political or economic hierarchy, then we must embrace diversity, equality, and cooperation. A person’s skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, national origins, and physical capabilities are not relevant in terms of their capacity to make decisions, their ethical and moral choices, their work ethic, their courage, compassion and natural leadership qualities.

How can we expect to win any kind of revolutionary resistance, struggle or war if we do not have the involvement or support of the general population? And the only way that is going to happen is if we share the same values, goals and experiences. It is the same in prison. F or example, let’s say some political prisoners are on a hunger strike with the goal of being taken out of isolation and placed in general population. If the whole prison population began a hunger strike in solidarity with our political prisoners, odds are the administration is going to capitulate a lot faster. Also, if we work with the other prisoners, then it is more likely they will understand and perhaps even embrace our goals and values.

Perhaps it sounds like a contradiction, but there are times when political prisoners will need special attention because there is no doubt that historically, the government has focused more attention on political prisoners than social prisoners because they are organized and more of a threat to the political/economic order. So there will be times when we must focus more energy on the struggles of political prisoners but that shouldn’t mean that we ignore the plight of social prisoners. Historically the repression focused on breaking down the will and identity of political prisoners, will eventually be used on social prisoners. Plus if we also focus on social prisoners, we can expect more of their support for the struggles of political prisoners…something the prison regime fears more than anything: a unified resistance of both social and political prisoners. That is our goal.

Prison issues have been a big part of your political life, even since before you were arrested. Beyond it being a form of social violence that you have experienced (and continue to be affected by), what draws you to this work? Aside from prisons, what other political questions or concerns do you find yourself particularly drawn to?

AH: When I was younger, before I was in prison, I gravitated towards prison abolition work because I saw prisoners as one of the most abused people on the planet. My years in prison did not dispel this view. When I was finally released on full parole in the early nineties, I continued working towards prison abolition, not so much because I felt it was the most important issue, but more so because I had experiennced prison first-hand and there were so few people with lived experince involved in the prison and capitalist abolition struggle.

It has been a long time coming, but I can honestly say that at this year’s Prisoners Justice Day in 2021, we had 10 women come to Kingston to the site of the now-closed Prison for Women, who had done significant periods of time both in P4W over 40 years ago, and the “new” federal prisons for women. Some of these women are now prison abolition activists and in my lifetime, it is rare to find people who have done time and are involved in prison abolition activism. I am very happy because it is extremely important that those with lived experience lead the prison abolition movement. By leadership, I mean those who have earned a place of respect and trust from the people with lived experience in prison as well as prison abolition activists who have no lived experience. These are natural “leaders” who have proven themselves to be wise, courageous, and knowledgable as opposed to “leaders” who have risen through the ranks on the coat-tails of ambition, greed, and power.

However as I head into the last 2 decades of my life, I find myself being drawn more and more towards spending time trying to save what little wilderness and wildlife there is left. I find myself becoming more cynical about the potential for humans to actually create a revolutionary movement that is not materialistic, hierarchial and competitive. We, as a species seem to have this ingrained belief that we are special; smarter, and more self-aware or self-conscious than any other species of life. I don’t see any evidence of this. There is not a species on this planet so thoughtless and stupid as to shit and piss—metaphorically and literally— in their own drinking water and food. Despite repeated warnings from our own experts that we only have a decade left to prevent irreversible damage, we continue to consume natural resources at a suicidal rate, and refuse to even contemplate abandoning capitalism, an economic paradigm rooted in endless economic growth, consumerism and planned obsolescence. Is that a sign of an intelligent species?

However, I still believe in resistance, doing the right thing, and living according to our ideals, despite the possibility that we could fail, despite the possibility that a sixth extinction could wipe out most if not all of our species. There is never any guarantee that our efforts will be rewarded or that we will win in this struggle to eradicate capitalism. But this is not a gloom and doom message. This is a message of hope, resilience and reality. Do we want to be guided by fairy tales and wishful thinking? If so, we are doomed to failure. I believe that revolutionaries fight or struggle, not because we know we will win, but because we know it is right. We will always have a deep inner satisfactfion knowing that we are fighting to save all oppressed creatures and our natural world from being consumed by this capitalist death culture. I would rather be executed knowing that I had lived according to my ideals and done what I believed was right, regardless of whether or not we are successful in our struggle against capitalism.

Notes:
↩ “Evidence suggests that women’s violent offences tend to be reactive in nature. As a result, violent crimes are more often committed against intimates, not strangers, and many of these women–some report the majority–experienced abuse at the hands of their partners before committing a violent offence. In 1998, the majority of the 68 women serving a life sentence for murdering their intimate partners had been abused by their partners prior to their offence.” www.justice.gc.ca
www.womensprisonnetwork.org
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Sat Sep 11, 2021 1:27 pm

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Police in Brazil Killed Record Amount of People in 2020
By EmiciThug, Contributor, Niko Georgiades, Unicorn Riot September 8, 2021

An average of 17 people a day, totaling at least 6,416 people, were killed by police in Brazil during the year of 2020. These staggering totals set the highest amount ever recorded since tracking police killings in the country of over 211 million people. The 2020 numbers, compiled by the Brazilian Public Security Forum, are a 190% increase from 2013. Black Brazilians were killed at the highest rate, accounting for 79% of the deaths by police while only representing 56% of the population.

Non-profit Brazilian Public Security Forum released the data in their annual Brazilian Yearbook of Public Security which analyzes information provided by state, public security, civil, military, and federal police, among other sources. Over 11,000 people were killed by police during the five-year period of 2009-2013, averaging around 2,240 killings a year by police.

The vast majority of the families of those killed by police never receive justice and the lack of accountability has led to the Human Rights Watch seeking a dedicated prosecutorial body, not directly connected to the police, to handle cases of police abuse.

Large criminal organizations controlling swaths of heavily populated Brazilian cities are deeply connected to security forces controlled by the military and state and draw their roots from the two decades of Brazilian military dictatorship that ended in 1985. Evidence shows police involvement in criminal factions, militias, and death squads, like those linked to President Jair Bolsonaro’s family that killed Marielle Franco in 2018, a human rights advocate and politician. These connections have helped to fuel the rise in police killings and allow for little accountability.

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Marielle Franco tribute mural in São Paulo, Brazil – photo via Elias Rovielo/Creative Commons

In the state of Rio de Janeiro, well known worldwide for its city with the same name, beautiful beaches and its nightlife, police killed 1,245 people in 2020. Based on the population of the state, one in every 12,851 residents are killed by police. Comparatively, police killed 1,126 people in the U.S. in 2020, which is one in every 291,296 residents. According to research collective Mapping Police Violence, of the 1,126 killed by U.S. police last year, 28% were Black, despite the Black population being only 13% of the total country.

Ultimately, the numbers from Brazil are staggering in comparison to the U.S. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, the police are 2,167 times more likely to kill you in than in the U.S.

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Police operation in the communities of Cantagalo-Pavão-Pavãozinho, Rio de Janeiro – photo via Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil/Creative Commons

The state of Rio de Janeiro also recorded seven of the top ten cities with the highest rates of police violence: Japeri, Itaguaí, Angra dos Reis, São Gonçalo, Queimados, Mesquita and Belford Roxo.

Those killings have continued in 2021, despite the Federal Supreme Court (STF) prohibiting police raids in the favelas (ADFP 635) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In late March 2021, Rio de Janeiro resident, Thainã de Meideiros, told Unicorn Riot that although ordered to stop raids, the police keep “coming up with excuses” to violate the legislative ruling.



Meideiros is part of the Papo Reto Collective, an organization focused on human rights, culture, harm reduction, health, and education in Complexo do Alemão, a large group of favelas in Rio de Janeiro.

Papo Reto was among a coalition of other collectives, including Black movement groups and those ran by mothers and relatives of lost loved ones from the favelas, as the initial groups to conjure up the motions that the STF ruled upon, the ADPF 635, or ‘ADPF of the Favelas’. Setting a historical precedent, with ADPF 635 enacted, these collectives are recognized as amici curiae (advisors with the court based on their special expertise).

An ADPF is a Claim of Non-Compliance with a Fundamental Precept, a lawsuit claiming a violation of the Brazilian constitution by a governmental agency. Citing excessive police violence and new security policies allowing further abuses, the lawsuit was filed by the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) in 2019.

In August 2020, the STF confirmed the claim of non-compliance and ordered the halting of violent police operations. Yet, police operations continued in certain favelas. In April 2021, Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin ruled in favor of requests in the motions and in June 2021, the STF issued an emergency restraining order on the police.
In short, it is proposed that the State of Rio de Janeiro prepare and submit to the STF, within a maximum period of 90 (ninety) days, a plan aimed at reducing police lethality and controlling human rights violations by the security forces in Rio de Janeiro, which contains objective measures, specific timetables and forecast of the necessary resources for its implementation. In addition, ADPF 635 addresses the following topics: end of the use of helicopters in police operations, protection of schools, guarantee of the right to participation and social control in public security policies, allowing participation and access to justice, expertise, and evidence to civil society and social movements as one of the main tools in resolving investigations into cases of murder and enforced disappearances.

ADPF 635 – Public Ministry of the State of Rio de Janeiro
Enforcing the ‘ADPF of the Favelas’ has, however, proven difficult after the STF ruling. Civil and military police made what many deem as reprisal killings in several districts to show they don’t answer to the courts. Prosecutors have also been overruling Access to Information laws and making police records inaccessible to the public. For a deeper look into ADPF 635, see RioOnWatch‘s two part installment: 1, 2.


Meideiros lives in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro, which has seen its share of military and police occupations and terror. Three months before STF ordered the suspension of police operations, 13 people were killed by police in one operation in Complexo do Alemão.

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Just 15 minutes away from Alemão is Jacarezinho, Rio de Janeiro. On May 6, 2021, authorities committed the deadliest massacre in Brazilian history, killing 28 people during a failed police operation targeting drug traffickers in the favela. One officer died during the operation that lasted nearly seven hours with many of the 28 deaths occurring execution style.

The police denied wrongdoing, saying there were no irregularities or excesses of abuse. The operation had the initial objective of arresting 21 people under investigation, and led to the death of 28, not all of whom had arrest warrants. Three were arrested in total. This initially led to many organizations and even governmental agencies coming out in defense of the dead and the residents before falling silent with the fear of possible retaliation looming.


Over time, the “massacre” of Jacarezinho has fallen into national oblivion. Despite the murderous raid being so recent, there are almost no media discussions or local or national conversation about the operation anymore. This can likely be attributed to the fact that many peripheral Brazilians (those living in the favelas and peripheries of inner cities) have become desensitized to this type of violence. Decades of military occupations and urban pacification by armed authorities in Brazil have caused widespread cognitive dissonance and mental trauma.
“In no country in the world would the 28 deaths in one police intervention have been accepted and forgotten. But, we are in Brazil and here everything ends up in samba and/or pizza.“

Anonymous Brazilian
Beyond Rio de Janeiro, there were over 5,000 more people killed by police throughout the country last year, including 814 killed in São Paulo. In lower-income territories, police abusing their authority is common and mistrust occurs between them and the community they serve.

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Police occupies the Lins de Vasconcelos favela in northern Rio de Janeiro – photo via Gustavo Oliveira/Creative Commons

Due to continuing police killings, many states are taking steps in attempts to reduce the number of deaths. A total of 18 police battalions in the state of São Paulo now have body cameras. This has resulted in a 53% reduction in the amount of police killings in the state and in June 2021 no one was killed by officers outfitted with cameras. Yet, military police not outfitted with cameras killed 22 that month.

Even with the new measures starting to be enacted to quell police terror throughout the country, already 6,160 people in Brazil have been killed as of September 7, 2021; pacing the country for another record-setting year of police killings.

Cover image by Gustavo Oliveira/Creative Commons. Translation of Portuguese to English by Jules Rey.

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 14, 2021 1:27 pm

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Prison Abolitionists Target Architectural Firm
By Niko Georgiades, Unicorn Riot September 10, 2021

St. Louis Park, MN – Red paint and posters reading “No new jails” were plastered on the door of architectural firm Klein McCarthy at the beginning of the work day on September 9. Responding to a nationwide call-out for #ShutEmDown2021 actions on the anniversary of the Attica Prison Rebellion, autonomous prison abolitionist groups took part in the action which also featured graffiti and a banner drop over Highway 100.

Unicorn Riot received a statement from anonymous participants in the action who said they targeted Klein McCarthy Architects because their contract “to design a new $28-million jail” in Winona.


Headquartered in St. Louis Park, Klein McCarthy is one of the top “justice architecture and public facility design” firms in the Midwest.

The Winona County Jail was given a deadline of September 30, 2021, by the Minnesota Department of Corrections, to update their facility or downgrade to a 72-hour holding facility, after a 2018 inspection. Planning for a new jail has taken Winona County years and the proposed projects have faced plenty of community opposition.

Klein McCarthy has designed the proposed jail with updated security features and the county has another ‘jail design and construction committee meeting‘ on September 30 at 9:00 a.m.

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Construction on the new jail is slated to be finished sometime in 2023. Until then, Winona County Jail can’t house inmates for more than 72 hours starting at the end of September. Inmates will be transported into Winona County Jail for court in the county and will be sent to Wabasha and Houston County jails for longer terms. Winona County laid off 13 of its detention deputies on September 7 in preparation of the downgrade.

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“Klein cages kill” and “Avenge Attica” graffiti on a semitrailer near the firm of Klein McCarthy Architects

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“Klein McCarthy: Architects of White Supremacy” banner dropped over Hwy 100 on September 9, 2021

Last month, Unicorn Riot heard from community members involved in Abolition Is a Practice, a bi-monthly abolitionist working group based in South Minneapolis. They told us about efforts to halt the new jail while building connections to the Winona-based Community Not Cages.

After the September 9 morning action at Klein McCarthy, anonymous participants sent us the following statement revealing their reasoning behind the action:

“On the morning of Thursday, September 9, 2021, in response to Jailhouse Lawyers Speak’s call for #ShutEmDown2021 actions, autonomous crews crashed the offices of a key player in the vast prison-slavery complex.

Operating out of so-called St. Louis Park (occupied Dakota land), Klein McCarthy Architects is a white-collar architecture firm that has designed much of the upper Midwest’s brick-and-mortar infrastructure of genocidal white supremacy. They’ve been in business since 1977. We believe it’s time they face the people’s wrath.

The firm has recently been contracted by Winona County, in the southern part of so-called Minnesota, to design a new $28-million jail, in the face of mounting grassroots resistance. We saw an opportunity to strike back against a parasitic firm that has had a significant behind-the-scenes role in imprisoning working people.

We took direct action in solidarity with Community Not Cages, a group leading the fight in Winona against the proposed jail and all carceral institutions.

Employees driving in to work saw the large words ‘Klein Cages Kill’ and ‘Avenge Attica’ graffitied on the road and across a semitrailer directly opposite the office park driveway.

We greeted workers coming into the building and made conversation with them about the architects of white supremacy who share their office building, as well as distributing literature about the struggle for abolition. Our message was clear: your neighbors have profited from the construction of nearly 100 jails, courts, and police stations on this land, and continue to grow rich from the capture of working-class, overwhelmingly colonized people.

Most workers were receptive to the information, glad to talk, and happily took the literature—a small stack of zines we had carefully bound in twine—on the Attica Rebellion, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak’s Shut ‘Em Down, Racial Capitalism and Prison Abolition, Winona communities’ opposition to the proposed jail and what abolition means to us.

Separately, Klein McCarthy employees arriving to their 4th-floor office suite found their door, window and entryway slathered in red paint with posters reading “No new jails” and “Quit your job to wash the blood from your hands”—letting them know that their complicity in the murderous system of modern-day slavery can no longer be obscured by a dreary suburban office park.

An employee of Colliers International, the commercial real-estate giant that owns the building, called the pigs. Eight of them showed up quick, but we evaded arrests.

We parted ways with Klein McCarthy, but not before making sure every car and neighborhood passerby had information on the quiet, routine planning of new concentration camps happening down the hall or down the street.

Soon after, another crew dropped a banner over the nearby highway, displaying boldly ‘Klein McCarthy: Architects Of White Supremacy.’

In memory of the prisoners who rose up at Attica 50 years ago today, and in solidarity with Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, we stand with imprisoned revolutionaries everywhere, from Turtle Island to Palestine and beyond. This #ShutEmDown action is just a start, we all must continue to reveal the many ‘respectable’ cogs in the blood-soaked carceral-capitalist machine. Onward to Abolition!

Fire to the prisons, free them all!”

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 09, 2021 1:40 pm

‘Crime Is Defined and Constructed by Police and Other Elite Interests’

CounterSpin interview with Alec Karakatsanis on 'crime surge'
JANINE JACKSON

Janine Jackson interviewed Alec Karakatsanis about the “crime surge” for the October 1, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Alec Karakatsanis: “Over the course of the last hundred years, police have systematically organized to prevent progressive social change.”
Janine Jackson: New York Times readers have seen a couple of stories recently about a reported rise in the country’s murder rate. Among the top driving forces, readers were told: “increased distrust between the police and the public after the murder of George Floyd, including a pullback by the police in response to criticism.”

But reference to the unsupported, inflammatory so-called Ferguson effect is only one of the problems with the Times’ reporting here, which sparked a thoughtful Twitter thread by our next guest. A former civil rights lawyer and public defender, Alec Karakatsanis is founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Alec Karakatsanis.

Alec Karakatsanis: Thank you so much for having me.
NYT: Murder Rose by Almost 30% in 2020. It’s Rising at a Slower Rate in 2021.
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New York Times (9/22/21)
JJ: There’s some overlap in the problems in the September 22 story, bylined Jeff Asher, and then the September 27 Neil MacFarquhar piece on what’s called a “murder spike” in cities across the US. But maybe start with Asher’s, as it originally ran—because that’s relevant—what was so wrong and so troubling about that report?

AK: There are a number of concerns. I think that the most obvious and simple concern to highlight, first, is that Asher has a long history, first working with the CIA, then working covertly with Palantir, the CIA venture capital-backed tech firm that works with police departments, military and Defense contractors, and also ICE and other carceral entities, on a wide range of both public and secret programs.

And then he went on to found what appears to be a lucrative private consulting business, where he worked for the New Orleans police department and Palantir together on a very controversial secret program that even many elected officials in New Orleans didn’t know about. And then he consulted for the prosecutors’ office in New Orleans.

None of this history, or these conflicts of interest, both financial and journalistic, were even mentioned by the Times, who allowed him a column in the Upshot section of the Times, as if he were some kind of neutral data expert, just telling people about objective, neutral data about crime in the United States. That’s the first problem.

JJ: Yeah.

AK: The second problem is that Asher repeats many of the problems that we see in Times coverage generally: wild speculation about the connection between police and things like murders. It reminds me a lot of climate denial, back in the ’90s and early 2000s. It reminds me a lot of the coverage leading up to the Iraq War. Things are just asserted, and because they’re just asserted commonly, every single day, in paper after paper and news outlet after news outlet, things can become normalized. And what would be a radical, anti-science, fringe view, that lets the police determine murder rates….

By the way, the scientific consensus is pretty overwhelming. Things like murder rates and harm in our society are much more correlated with poverty, inequality, mental illness, drug addiction, lack of access to decent healthcare and housing and jobs, lack of social cohesion—and, in particular, toxic masculinity is one that’s often left out of these explanations. But a lot of violence is intimate partner violence committed by men.

And none of these things are things that the police are connected with. And, in fact, almost all of them are things that, over the course of the last hundred years, police have systematically organized to prevent progressive social change in each one of these areas, just crushing and infiltrating and surveilling every major social movement for justice.

None of that background is given in any of these Times pieces. You’re told that the murder rate is skyrocketing. And Asher used a number of very misleading graphs to make people think that murder is extraordinarily high, when it’s at near 30-, 40-, 50-year lows, even though there was an increase in murder during the beginning of the global pandemic, which caused a lot of mental health issues in people, and there’s many other explanations.

But the bigger context is that it’s just seen as totally normal in the New York Times, and in the media generally, to talk about murder and then right away pivot to talking about explanations that deal with the police, when we all know that things that correlate with murder are things that are much more profound features of our society.

JJ: And one of the ways that they create that just implicit understanding that more police equals less crime. First, crime’s very scary, and the response is more police. Well, it has to do with who they talk to, right, who gets to speak in the context of the reporting?
NYT: Murders Spiked in 2020 in Cities Across the United States
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New York Times (9/27/21)
AK: One of the stunning things about both Asher’s piece and the piece by Neil MacFarquhar, which in many ways was worse, because not only did it quote almost exclusively police and police-paid consultants, but it also then quoted Asher as an expert on this issue without, again, noting any of his conflicts of interest, just several days after Asher himself had written that problematic article in the Times.

I think one of the really key things that you never see in this reporting is an acknowledgement that the concept of crime is defined and constructed by police and other elite interests in our society. So, for example, police crime data on which all of these articles are based does not include the crimes committed by the police. And in my analysis of these studies, and in using what I think are reasonable estimates, I think if you actually included the crimes committed by police, it would entirely reverse the crime trends in most major US cities.

That’s just one very minor example. Other things that are just not included here are the several hundred thousand violations of the Clean Water Act every single year. They’re not reported in local crime data.

Wage theft, fraudulent overdraft fees by banks—you know, wage theft alone by corporate employers dwarfs all burglary, theft, shoplifting and all property crimes combined by a factor of about five. So we’re talking about $50–100 billion a year in wage theft. It’s not treated as a crime. It’s not reported in local crime data. It’s not part of a so-called crime surge narrative.

And so I could give you, and I have in some of my writing, hundreds of these kinds of examples of what the police count as crime and what they don’t.

JJ: Right.

AK: And you’re never really provided that kind of context and background when the New York Times talks about things like a crime wave.

JJ: One of the lines in the MacFarquhar piece that stood out to me was, he says:

Some argue that the police, under intense scrutiny and demoralized, pulled back from some aspects of crime prevention. Others put the emphasis on the public, suggesting that diminished respect for the police prompted more people to try to take the law into their own hands.

Now when I read that, I hear: Either Black people need police to protect them from themselves, or Black people need police to protect them from themselves. It’s presented as, it’s a range of views here, but it’s not really a range of perspectives, and there are a lot of perspectives missing from that.

AK: Absolutely. It’s a classic media technique, which I think is described really beautifully in Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. You make people think there are two sides having a very reasonable debate. And by limiting the debate to those two views, and excluding everything else from the debate, you make it seem like there’s a very narrow range of views, and all reasonable people either think that the police are a really great crime prevention tool, and that they’ve pulled back from that in the last year, or that civil rights criticism of the police is what’s causing the uptick in murders.

And I think it’s fascinating to think about what’s going on in the heads of these journalists. I know, because I’ve corresponded with MacFarquhar, although he’s never responded to any of my attempts to ask him questions about his prior journalism. But I know that he knows there are other views.

And so when a journalist writes something like, “Some people say this, but others say that,” but then excludes what they know many, many, many other people say, including every rigorous scientist who studies the causes and underlying nature of crime, you have to wonder what is the agenda there. And that’s why I thought it was particularly striking that MacFarquhar and the editors chose not to disclose some of the conflicts of interest that the experts they were citing had.

JJ: And I know that Jeff Asher just blocked you when you tried to communicate with him or engage with him about his piece.

I did want to give you a chance, finally, although the time is inadequate, but also in that MacFarquhar piece was the claim—and it had been in the earlier piece, but got maybe taken out in a second version—but there was the claim sourced to an officer, a particular law enforcement officer, he cited “what they called the revolving jailhouse door created by bail reform” as a factor driving up violence. And again, there was a tacked-on “but others differ” at the end of that sentence. But the statement of the sentence was that law enforcement believe that “the revolving jailhouse door created by bail reform” is a problem here. So in our remaining couple of minutes, can you address some of the mythology around bail reform?

AK: There is so much wrong with that it’s hard to know where to start. First, it’s asserted that there’s this revolving jailhouse door. And then what he says there’s a dispute about is whether the revolving jailhouse door has led to more crime. I just want to note, I don’t even know what a revolving jailhouse door is, but it highlights one of the key ways in which media furthered mass incarceration by creating this imagery of an out-of-control superpredator class. This vivid imagery, like a “crime wave,” right, is designed to make people feel like there’s this overwhelming force coming at them.

The thing is, too, a revolving door, what is the point of using a metaphor like that? It doesn’t actually accurately describe anything about what’s going on in the legal system. There’s no evidence or support or description given to what’s meant by that.

What they’re actually referring to is that in some places, consistent with all of the empirical evidence which shows that detaining people prior to their trial in cages just because they can’t make a monetary payment actually increases crime by huge margins for years in the future, because it makes people more likely to commit crime by destabilizing their lives, getting them out of treatment and mental care and losing their jobs and their housing and many times losing their children. This is a scientific consensus we’re talking about. Cash bail is actually really harmful to public safety.

So what they’re talking about is a series of very modest, pretty minor reforms which reduce detention of very poor people solely because they can’t pay. Those reforms still allow police, prosecutors and judges to detain anyone that they prove is a danger to the community, or at risk of flight or is charged with a really serious offense.

So it’s so hard to know where to begin, because basically every single aspect of what you just read, from the assumptions to the assertions to the implications, is just completely fabricated, and not consistent at all with what’s actually happening, and what we know the data says about cash bail.

JJ: We’ll direct folks to CivilRightsCorps.org as a way to follow up on some of that information, as well as your book. We’ve been speaking with Alec Karakatsanis of Civil Rights Corps. The book, Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, is out from the New Press. And I thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin, Alec Karakatsanis.

AK: Thank you so much.

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 11, 2021 1:32 pm

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Thousands of Police Killings Are Unreported

Police killings of Black people are a feature of American law enforcement and they are deliberately under counted.

The New York Times and other outlets report that most police killings in this country are “mislabelled .” The sanitized language is worse than an understatement because it implies that these murders are categorized improperly due to ordinary human error. In fact, there is a long and sordid history of covering up these crimes. The initial coroner’s report for George Floyd, whose murder was witnessed by millions of people, reported drug use and underlying health conditions as the causes of death.

According to a report in the Lancet , between 1980 and 2018 police in the U.S. killed an estimated 30,800 people. This number is 17,000 more than reported by the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), which is a misclassification rate of 55%. The deaths of Black people are the most likely to be undercounted, with 5,670 deaths missing out of an estimated 9,540.

It isn’t hard to see how this happens. Coroners are part of the law enforcement system and work closely with the police and prosecutors. Even if they are dedicated to telling the truth they are often pressured to do otherwise when police, their colleagues, are the perpetrators.

Not only have half of all these deaths gone unreported, but this new data once again comes from groups dedicated to keeping track of these crimes, and not from any governmental source. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s 2012 Operation Ghetto Storm report was the first to inform the public about the toll of police violence. It was through Operation Ghetto Storm that we learned a Black person is killed by police, private security, or vigilantes every 28 hours. Yet even this groundbreaking effort didn’t capture the full toll.

Thanks to Fatal Encounters , Mapping Police Violence , and the Guardian’s project The Counted , we have a fuller idea of the scope of police violence and how it is routinely swept under the rug. There is still no centralized government database of police killings. While their contributions are valuable, private citizens and the media should not be doing the job of the Justice Department. No one should have to guess how often the police kill when there is a federal agency charged with enforcing the law.

Then again, the law is the problem. All talk of reform and corrections and rehabilitation are farcical in a country dedicated to the use of brute force against Black people. The issue of under-reported police killings demonstrates the systemic injustice of law enforcement, which is dedicated to keeping Black people under physical control.

So great is the imperative to justify the killings that medical examiners often collude with the cops in their cover up schemes. In 47 documented cases, medical examiners falsely claimed that sickle cell trait (SCT) was the cause of death for Black men killed during police encounters. SCT is not a disease. It is a benign genetic condition that is not associated with decreased life expectancy. The President of the American Society of Hematology publicly stated, “The use of sickle cell trait to cover up the deaths of Black people while in police custody is abhorrent and has no scientific or medical merit.” Black lives don’t matter to the state or even to the medical community if telling the truth becomes inconvenient.

Discussions about policing must not skirt around what is undeniable. Anti-Black racism permeates every sector of society and guarantees everything from job discrimination to police killings and extensive efforts to cover up the crimes.

As a result of this corruption, medical examiners, prosecutors, and politicians never pay a price for their role in hiding the criminality. Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and that city’s lawyers forced Laquan McDonald’s family to hide the video which showed how he was killed as a condition of being compensated $5 million for his wrongful death. The deal was done the day after Emanuel won a close primary race in 2016. He has faced no repercussions for his actions and was recently confirmed as the U.S. ambassador to Japan.

Systemic racism, official collusion, and the lack of a consistent and strong movement ensure that the death toll will be high and the likelihood of justice will remain low. These new reports of hidden killings are important and are to be commended. But they must be the basis for forcing radical changes in policing and to punishing all those who aid and abet. If that is not the case, there will be endless exhortations to “say their names” without any hope of seeing justice done.

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 14, 2021 1:38 pm

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Targeted: Young, Black, and Harassed in Downtown Minneapolis
Part 4 in the series: 21st Century Jim Crow in the North Star City


By Marjaan Sirdar, Contributor October 13, 2021

Minneapolis, MN – Target Corporation co-created and funded a racialized surveillance network in downtown Minneapolis, beginning in 2004. This article focuses on the voices of their intended “targets” with youth telling their stories of harassment and brutality at the hands of the police.
“They came and walked up on us and said they’ll ‘Trayvon Martin our little Black asses.’ His exact words.”

A Downtown 100 youth retelling an encounter with MPD, in Reflections on the Downtown 100
As explained in Part 3 of this series—Minneapolis’ Downtown Dark Alliance—a program called SafeZone began with cutting-edge surveillance technology when Target donated 30 cameras to the city, and eventually grew into a citywide public-private surveillance state.

The Downtown 100 Initiative (DT100), an extension of SafeZone, is essentially a criminal registry compiled of downtown’s top ‘livability crime’ repeat offenders. DT100’s targets are tracked by a team made up of police, prosecutors, probation officers, social workers, and business community representatives who meet weekly to share intelligence and updates on individuals caught up in the program.

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Downtown 100 meeting/Photo courtesy of the Downtown Improvement District

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21st Century Jim Crow in the North Star City – A Series Contributed by Marjaan Sirdar
Part 1 – Policing and Punishment in Minneapolis’ ‘SafeZone’ https://unicornriot.ninja/21st-century- ... -a-series/
Part 2 – Minneapolis Faces Facial Recognition https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/minneapo ... cognition/
Part 3 – Minneapolis’ Downtown Dark Alliance https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/minneapo ... -alliance/
========================================================================================================
“It’s almost like being an invisible man in a Ku Klux Klan meeting.”

– Will Menday, a formerly homeless youth, describing his experience at the Downtown 100 meetings
In 2015, youths on the DT100 list, with support from arts nonprofit Kulture Klub Collaborative (KKC), created a short film, Reflections on the Downtown 100, giving them a platform to tell their own stories for the first time. As reported in Part 3, the non-profit social-service agency YouthLink partnered with KKC in producing Reflections, but because it was critical of the DT100 program and the police, YouthLink requested their name be taken off the project.

The first youth featured in the film, wearing a gray tank top and eyeglasses with his dreadlocks in a ponytail, opens up about being profiled thanks to the vast surveillance dragnet created from the public-private partnership between downtown businesses and cops. “Say you’re going to the Marriott downtown, or the City Center, or Target,” he said, “all of these people know your record.“
“Since you’re on the Downtown 100, your name goes right to the place and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, we don’t want you here, we recognize you,’… stuff like that.”

Reflections on the Downtown 100
Another unidentified young man echoed those sentiments of being profiled. He said nothing good came from him being on the DT100. A third young man featured in Reflections admitted to stealing from downtown stores out of survival, but doesn’t feel like that’s justification for the constant harassment he experienced from the police.
“Sometimes when I did bad, like steal, theft from stores, yeah that’s my fault. But don’t arrest me for walking down the sidewalk and minding my own business. Don’t arrest me for that.”

Reflections on the Downtown 100
All three youths featured in the film are Black.

Dr. Keith Mayes, Professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Minnesota, puts contemporary harassment that can have fatal consequences into historical context, saying, “coming out of slavery, vagrancy laws… were critical for white police officers to attack young Black people”. These practices have been imported with each generation, from slavery and Jim Crow, into contemporary times. According to Mayes:
“It’s the same practices that were instituted back in the late 19th century and early 20th century. They’re still doing it, they’re just updating it.”

Dr. Keith Mayes
As mentioned in Part 1—Policing and Punishment in Minneapolis’ SafeZone—former YouthLink case managers Anne Kent and Mickella Rolfes, who worked with youth on the DT100, said that the list is actually populated by those who’ve had the most police contacts rather than the most arrests. In other words, the list is made up at the discretion of downtown police based on who they target and harass. Consequently, year after year it’s almost entirely Black people on the list.

Kent said police brutality was something she saw when she first started working at YouthLink. “A lot of the kids that I worked with weren’t necessarily on the Downtown 100, but still experienced police violence and harassment daily.” In this series, Kent told the story of a former client who was beaten up badly by the Minneapolis police (MPD) after walking his bike along Nicollet Mall in front of Target’s flagship downtown store. “A kid came in the next day after he left the drop-in [center], beat up physically…by the police.” She remembered he begged for his life after thinking MPD was going to kill him. “He was beat up so bad… They brought him to the hospital instead of booked him,” she said.
“I don’t know if they didn’t want to have to deal with that image or what but they never booked him or charged him. And they knew that the crime was petty as fuck.”

Former DT100 case manager, Anne Kent
Kent said she got YouthLink’s executive director to talk to then-Minneapolis Police Chief Janee Harteau about what happened. Instead of talking, she said Harteau yelled at them and then left the meeting. “We never got to finish that conversation,” Kent laughed.

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Former Minneapolis Police Chief Janee Harteau (right) listens during a community discussion after Jamar Clark was murdered by Minneapolis Police on November 15, 2015. Former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges stands next to her with Urban League CEO Steven Belton (middle) and now-Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo. Still image taken from video by Niko Georgiades.

In Reflections, a young man told a story exposing the true essence of the MPD, whose brutality became known to the world after George Floyd was murdered on video by Derek Chauvin. “Four officers walk up and they approached us and asked us what the fuck was we doing downtown and just kinda got to harassing us.” The youths told the officers that they weren’t doing anything wrong.

He continued, “They came and walked up on us and said they’ll take us to jail and said they’ll ‘Trayvon Martin our little Black asses.’ Those his exact words.” Shocked and in disbelief at what he just heard from the cop, the young man asked for clarification. “What do you mean by that, you’ll kill us?” The cop replied, “‘If that’s the way you take it…’ They kinda been harassing me ever since then,” he disclosed.

Recently, a young man we’ll call Abdi (*real name is being protected), talked to Unicorn Riot about getting marched off the Metro Transit bus at gunpoint by MPD.
“And then they came on the bus, walked straight to me, and pulled his gun out, and put it dead on me.”

Abdi, formerly homeless youth
Abdi, who is now 30, was homeless as a teenager and in his early 20s and ended up in the streets of downtown Minneapolis sleeping wherever he could, including under a bridge. He wasn’t on the DT100 list but found himself frequently targeted by downtown police. Abdi believes they were trying to set him up to get him on the DT100. Abdi talked about a white cop who was obsessed with locking him up. He said one time the cop couldn’t believe Abdi didn’t have a criminal record. “You’re 18 and you don’t have a criminal record,” the cop said, stunned. Two years later that same cop would go on to arrest Abdi for a small bag of weed, which resulted in a felony conviction.

Abdi told a story of the same cop along with another officer pulling him off the bus at gunpoint. “They literally like watched me hop on the bus. And then one goes to the back door and one went to the front door. And then they came on the bus, walked straight to me, and pulled his gun out, and put it dead on me,” Abdi said, motioning his hand like a pistol. “And he said, ‘What did I tell you? You’re trespassed, get up.’ Took me up. Had the gun pointed. Took me off the bus.”

As this was happening, Abdi’s friend was recording with her cell phone. Then after five minutes of being publicly humiliated, the officers’ commanding sergeant came walking around the corner. To Abdi’s surprise the cop switched up. “Oh his trespass expired, he’s good to go,” he said to the approaching superior as he removed the handcuffs from Abdi’s wrists. Abdi said he was never trespassed in the first place. He believes God intervened that day.

According to Dr. Mayes, the DT100 program was never about public safety. “One of the scariest things for white folks was Black folks’ ability to go about their business … They have a tendency to over-target young Black people,” Mayes professed, “because they want to control their labor.”
“The way that you control their labor is you control their movement. And if I can control their movement then actually I can control all the other stuff.”

Dr. Keith Mayes
The dreadlocked youth featured in Reflections recalled being robbed and then charged with defending himself: “I got jumped and robbed by these two guys when I was 18 and I fought them back and now I got a third degree assault,” he said. “And if I would’ve tried to fight it I could be doing 84 months in prison. So I told them I’ll take the probation which puts me here today.” But the skeptical young man said, “I’m not really with that probation crap. I call it modern day slavery. I don’t like it.” He continued:
“It’s a lot of things to probation or the Downtown 100, you know, or things just going on in the world today, it just really don’t add up.”

Reflections on the Downtown 100
Will Menday, a 29-year-old IT professional, became homeless at 15 and found refuge at YouthLink’s drop-in center. Eventually Menday secured housing and became a youth worker himself, doing street outreach to kids in the predicament he once faced. Menday attended DT100 meetings while working for St. Stephen’s Human Services.

Menday saw up close the inner workings of the downtown surveillance state. He recalled hearing his friends’ names being discussed in some of the meetings. “It’s almost like being an invisible man in a Ku Klux Klan meeting. Most of the youth they were discussing, I personally knew.” He disclosed, “I was homeless with them as well.”

Menday even got to tour the control room known as the Downtown Improvement District (DID) fusion center located within MPD’s First Precinct station, where they watch dozens of networked downtown cameras. There’s a civilian staff “whose job is to watch those cameras and report to the police whenever anything suspicious occurs in downtown,” he said.


In February, former YouthLink case manager Mickella Rolfes organized a virtual discussion about the Downtown 100, just weeks after Unicorn Riot broke the first story about the racialized surveillance program. “They used to tell me they were watching me,” a former DT100 youth recalled of the police after learning of Minneapolis’ massive downtown surveillance network at the virtual forum.

Norman Irving was recently featured in Bloomberg Businessweek’s August cover story, “How Target Got Cozy With Cops, Turning Black Neighbors Into Suspects,” based in part on Unicorn Riot’s reporting. Irving is a former DT100 youth and also participated in the online discussion. He exposed how cops used trumped-up charges to create the Downtown 100 list. “They were stopping us for little petty things like spitting on the ground,” he said begrudgingly. “I got arrested for spitting on the ground.”

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Taken in the early morning of May 28, 2020, graffiti adorns the sign post of Minnehaha Mall housing East Lake St Target, Cub Foods, Dollar Tree, and two local high schools across from Minneapolis Police’s Third Precinct. Still image taken from video by Niko Georgiades.

In 2015, because of systematic racial profiling in cases like Irving’s, activists pushed the Minneapolis City Council to repeal spitting and lurking ordinances being weaponized by cops. But like Dr. Mayes stated, the system is always adapting. “Then I would get arrested for jaywalking or loitering,” Irving said. “I used to get arrested for petty things so that’s why I kept having a lot of contact with the police.”

Irving said they were just kids in need of support. “Where could we go? Who could help us?,” he asked. “That’s the one thing we don’t have is help.” Irving said he got arrested many times for little things. “That’s what made us start being geo-restricted.”

Controversial geo-restriction orders ban someone from an entire geographical area, in this case from the so-called SafeZone. “Now you’re kicked out of downtown,” Irving explained. He said it was painful losing his job downtown after getting geo-restricted. Irving inevitably landed in prison for four years; he said that’s how he eventually got off the DT100 list.

Another man who used the pseudonym Batman said being on the DT100 was demeaning. “It didn’t humanize anybody. It wasn’t for the benefit of human beings.” He said it made him feel reduced to a number. “It was more for show. Like, ‘Look what the city is doing.’”

Dr. Mayes said there’s a direct connection between the Black Code laws of the 1870s, crafted to essentially re-enslave Blacks after emancipation, and the post-9/11 SafeZone and DT100 programs. He stated:
“You can draw a direct line between 2011 and ‘12 when we started to see [the DT100] emerge in Minneapolis all the way back to the 1860s and ‘70s, for sure.”

Dr. Keith Mayes
Mayes posed the questions: “So what do you say when a government or a society purports to be more egalitarian than it was in the past? […] What do you say to a society that says that Black folks have made some serious advancements and that we are still moving forward in the area of civil rights and human rights? Well the evidence says something differently,” he countered.
“It almost feels that we are living in a parallel universe.”

Dr. Keith Mayes
Reflections closes with a somber voice talking about the effects of his mother’s death and how he ended up downtown during a grief-stricken period in his adolescence. The youth describes a type of empathy missing for Black kids like him.
“I made myself homeless. I can never walk a mile in anybody’s shoes, but I can understand what they’ve been through.”

Reflections on the Downtown 100
U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA07), a high-profile progressive member of the Congressional “Squad,” recently tweeted that the U.S. as a nation lacks empathy: “There is no deficit of resources in America. There is a deficit of empathy.”

Reflections on the Downtown 100, created by arts nonprofit Kulture Klub Collaborative can be seen below.



Today, the Downtown 100 still operates, only under a different name: The Strategic Justice Partnership. The website states that it is a collaboration between: “the DID, MPD, Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office, Hennepin County Community Corrections, St. Stephen’s Human Services, the Salvation Army, 1st Precinct neighborhood associations and other community and businesses and stakeholders.” They claim the program offers “housing and treatment services for offenders in need of assistance.”

After the murder of George Floyd by the MPD, and after the uprising claimed Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct police station and the Target across the street, the hashtag #LootEveryTarget began trending on social media, putting the corporation on blast for their long history of funding racist policing. Just a few weeks later, a group of police abolitionists called the They/Them Collective in D.C. held an “F the police” march which made a stop at the Columbia Heights Target store and demanded that the store stop calling the police on Black people. “Until you stop calling the police, we’ll continue to shut your business down,” leaders yelled into a bullhorn to crowds of protesters who repeated the calls for justice.

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Images of East Lake St. Target taken during the George Floyd Uprising of 2020 – photos via Yellow Helmet

Last summer, another group of activists called Concerned Shipt Shoppers created an online petition demanding Target CEO Brian Cornell cease all funding to law enforcement, stating: “As long as Target Corporation continues to invest in the very systems that perpetrate violence in Black communities, any statements it makes in solidarity with Black Lives Matter ring hollow. By providing funding and legitimacy to punitive policing strategies in Minneapolis and across the country, Target bears a unique responsibility for the circumstances that led to the death of George Floyd and countless other victims of police brutality.”

The petition was signed by a few thousand people. However, instead of divesting from police, Target—feeling the pressure from activists—pledged to invest $2 billion in Black businesses, which to activists is an admission of guilt. Although Target said they stopped directly funding the Safe City programs in 2015, which were an outgrowth of the SafeZone surveillance program that spread to 25 different cities across the US, it told Bloomberg it was sticking with police and wasn’t abandoning its investments in law enforcement, while claiming to push for reforms.

These stories of harassment and brutality at the hands of the Minneapolis police from youths who were experiencing homelessness make it clear that the Target sponsored SafeZone network was a racialized surveillance dragnet that served as a feeder program from the streets to prison, with the primary goal of keeping poor Black and homeless people, who threaten Target’s profitability, out of downtown Minneapolis.

https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/targeted ... nneapolis/
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