Police, prison and abolition

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 19, 2022 3:37 pm

ESSAY AND PETITION: Massacre at Attica, The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 1971
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 17 Aug 2022

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To commemorate Black August and in memory of the forty-two men massacred during the September 13, 1971 Attica Prison uprising we reproduce below an essay and petition from The Black Panther Intercommunal New Service. Initially published on September 18, 1971, it was reprinted with a short preface in the January 18, 1972 issue of The Black Panther. It needs no further introduction.

Massacre at Attica

One of the most brutal atrocities of the Nixon-Rockefeller Regime during this past year in the U.S. was, of course, the Massacre at Attica State Prison, in Attica, New York, on September 13, 1971. People around the world recoiled in shock and anger at this wholesale slaughter of 42 prisoners and guards and the wounding of countless others by Nixon Rockefeller directed State Troops.

Afterward, the State tried to hide its murderous acts by exhuming the bodies of the murdered guards. This was done in hopes of placing the blame on other victims - the prisoners. Even this old divide-and-conquer tactic failed. The families of the slain guards knew that the same bullets that had riddled the bodies of the prisoners had taken the lives of the guards. The State also tried to hide the fact that Bobby Seale, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, had tried to carry out the negotiations in behalf of the prisoners and that he had been barred from re-entering the prison on the very day of the Massacre. In a People's Tribunal in October, the People exposed the facts about this, as well as other lies the state had told. The State even employed strong-arm tactics in attempts to make all those that were involved conform to the State's story. The State failed, there, too, however. People saw through the smokescreen and they recognized the prisoners' rightful and peaceful bid for freedom.

The State's violence at Attica awakened many people. For many, more clearly than ever before, the barbarous cruelty, the injustice of the American Prison System was revealed. Along with this new insight came a rise in the level of consciousness and concern among the people in the community for all prisoners. The spirit and the idea of Freedom for All was not quelled at Attica. If anything, it sparked a larger movement, a stronger resolve on the part of the people and a more concentrated effort to transform this inhuman system into one where bars and chains, economic slavery and racism are merely part of the history of a dark past.

In the September 18, 1971, issue of the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, the following article was printed. Perhaps a review of these events would give us a frame of reference for the continuation and progression of our struggle:


They say violence erupted on Thursday, September 9th, at Attica State Prison in New York, when nearly 2,000 men wrested control of the facility from the hands of State officials and prison administrators. With this as a starting point and basis for "action", Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York and U.S. President Richard M. Nixon ordered and had implemented the outright murder, the massacre of at least 10 persons, four days later. Violence did not erupt at Attica on September 9th. The brutal beatings, the isolations cells, the secret murders, the overall inhumane conditions perpetrated by the prison administration, the State and Federal governments has existed for some time. For one group of men - the State - to claim the right to kill or otherwise destroy the lives of other men - the inmates - is certainly violence in the extreme.

The seizure of the Attica State prison by those it held by force, by the inmates there, was a human response to the violence and suffering the brothers had long endured. When in a quick and organized, united move those brothers declared in action that they would take authority over their lives, they stated that by capturing control of the prison and arresting approximately 38 of the institution's guards, they wished to make it clear that they no longer wished to be confined like animals, nor treated like animals. Their aim was not to control the prison to the degree where they would confine others, confine those who had dealt them such terrible blows, but to simply go free, live like human beings, outside the prison walls - and for those who would, to even leave the country to go to one where they could be treated and respond to others as human beings. Their goal was not to take any lives, but to save lives - their own. The capturing of guards was a move to exchange lives - theirs for the guards' - for they presumed that America placed value on human lives - especially when those lives were of people who upheld and enforced the very laws which are the foundation of the “Democracy".

Their declaration made all of this distinctly clear: “The entire incident that has erupted here at Attica is not a result of the dastardly bushwhacking of the two prisoners on September 8, 1971, but of the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administrative network of this prison throughout the years.

“We are MEN. We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. We will not compromise on any terms, except those terms that are agreeable to us.

“We want complete amnesty - freedom from all or any physical, mental or legal reprisals, We want - now - speedy and safe transportation out of confinement to a non-imperialistic country. We demand that the federal government intervene so that we will be under direct federal jurisdiction, We want the government and the judiciary, namely Constance B. Motley, to guarantee that there will be no reprisals, And we want all facets of the media to articulate this.”

During that first day, the brothers inside had taken complete control of the prison; but as armed police re-enforcements moved in, they were pushed back to be primarily concentrated in one cell Block - D. Later on in the day, a counter-attack was launched by the heroic inmates, who had only their hands and clubs; but this move was soon quelled by the submachine guns, rifles with telescopic sights and tear gas grenade launchers of police.

As things became more settled, the brothers began establishing a base of operation on the D-Block yard. Tents were set up for living quarters and the arrested guards were situated; also, an area was cleared for discussion and communication with news media and the group of outside negotiators for whom the inmates had called. When news of the uprising came to the Black Panther Party as well as a call from New York to have Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, come to Attica as a key negotiator, the Central Committee of our Party issued the following statement: "The Central Headquarters of the Black Panther Party was contacted September 10, 1971, by the office of New York State Assemblyman, Arthur Eve, which delivered a message from 1,280 of our Brothers who are political prisoners at the Attica State Prison in Attica, New York. The message from the political prisoners is that Huey P. Newton, of the Black Panther Party, Servant of the People, must, in fact, be a key negotiator in behalf of our incarcerated Brothers and their 27 demands for better prison conditions.

"The said prison guards, called hostages, have actually, in reality been placed under arrest by the 1,280 prisoners, who are rightfully redressing their grievances concerning the harassing, brutal and inhuman treatment to which they are constantly subjected.

“The New York State Prison Commissioner, the courts, and the federal and state governments' prosecutors have deliberately allowed the creation and maintenance of the oppressive and atrocious conditions to which our Attica prison Brothers are subjected. Also, the state has for too many years willfully and maliciously ignored the legal and lawful requests and redresses of grievances from the prisoners.

“Some 35 prison guards are under arrest; and the state wants those arrested guards to be bailed out, on the promise of the courts and prison commissioner that there will be no reprisals if the arrested guards are released.

"The U.S. District court order, however, that there will be no reprisals, is quite fallacious and irrelevant on its face, when the state commissioner, Russell Oswald, adds that our prison Brothers will face other criminal charges. To face more criminal charges means, in fact, nothing else other than out-right reprisals against our incarcerated Brothers. The state, the commissioner (Russell G.Oswald), the courts and prosecutors are acting in extreme bad faith by not going forth and obtaining an official New York State and court-ordered amnesty; Amnesty that there will be no reprisals whatsoever, in the form of criminal charges or otherwise. This is the first thing that must be done to start negotiations of the prisoners' 27 demands. This is the only bail the arrested guards can have, from the analysis of the Black Panther Party.

“The Attica Prison Move, composed of political prisoners and the lives of 35 arrested police guards in the hands of the prisoners, is a tactical move towards going forward to show the world's community people how to begin to end oppression and wretched, unjust prison incarceration."

The list of demands, summarily, on a general basis, requesting decent prison conditions, was read, with the chief demand being emphasized repeatedly. Essentially, the brothers wanted freedom, not only for themselves, but really all political prisoners; particularly they cried the demand to free David Hilliard - Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party - free Romaine “Chip’ Fitzgerald, Angela Davis, Ruchell Magee, the remaining Soledad Brothers, They no longer wished to be animalistically confined; they wanted freedom - immediately. In exchange for their freedom, they made it clear, they would release the arrested guards. The guards held by them were in no danger as long as negotiating could continue, to culminate in the satisfaction of the brothers. This was simply a move made to get a ticket to ride to the outside. The treatment of the guards, completely contradictory to Russell Oswald's (State Prison Correctional Commissioner) lies about the beastly actions of the brothers in regard to treatment of the guards, was human and kind, The guards themselves stated this - then, as now, after the fact, when no present “threat” exists.

One guard, Phillip Watkins, who came out after the prison was re-captured by attack, said that he was given cigarettes when there were few, medical attention when needed, and, “When they ate hot meals, we had hot meals; when they had sandwiches, so did we; we had mattresses - but they didn't." The brothers were preserving, protecting life, even under the unreasonable circumstances of Oswald's instructed refusal to guarantee no reprisals or to talk of amnesty, or freedom from confinement. The brothers even implored the State, the government of the country to consider all the lives - of both inmates and guards. On September llth, the brothers issued this statement in this regard: “We, the People, hereby present to the Administration officials of Attica Correctional Facility: That we are trying to be and act humane to the officers, as best we can under the existing, unmitigating circumstances. We have sent you four (4) of your officers out to the hospital for medical attention.

"Henceforth, we demand that you allow a doctor to enter this prison to attend to the medical needs of both the officers and inmates. If it is found that it is necessary to remove an officer for medical reasons, we demand a healthy officer in return."

Early on Saturday evening (September 11th), at the brothers' request, Chairman Bobby Seale arrived at the prison, representing the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party. After a short and overwhelmingly warm meeting with the brothers, he left the prison with the promise he would return after consultation with the Party Central Committee regarding the negotiative guidance the Party could offer. The next morning, Chairman Bobby was "greeted” at the prison gate by Oswald, who demanded the Chairman discuss with him his agreements with the brothers. He demanded and tried to invoke the Chairman's agreement that the Party would compromise, or otherwise betray the brothers. When Chairman Bobby emphatically stated he would compromise neither their demands, nor the lives of the beautiful brothers inside and repeatedly reminded Oswald that the inmates had promised no harm would come to the guards until the negotiating reached an impasse - which was all pending his return - Oswald absolutely denied the Chairman reentry to the prison.

The lives of the inmates was certainly of no concern to Oswald and his chieftains, Rockefeller and Nixon; but as would later shock most Americans, neither were the lives of the guards, who were gunned down, like the inmates, by police bullets. The guards themselves, along with the inmates, implored the State to use discretion and to listen to the inmates' reasonable demands, or that, in the words of one guard, "My Lai was only one-hundred-or-so-odd men; we're going to end up with 1,500 men (dead) here, if things don't go right.” Another guard inside, one day before the vicious police attack, spoke words expressing the feelings of the other guards inside, Sergeant Edward T. Cunningham, a 52-year old WW II Army Sgt. with a purple heart and bronze star, said amnesty was the only salvation: "Anything short of this is just as good as dropping dead." The next day, he too was murdered by police bullets. That was the answer the State gave him for his understanding plea,

While the vast majority of people were more concerned with saving life than face, Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon and Oswald plotted the vicious course that would leave over 50 dead at Attica. When importuned that he be present to aid in a peaceful settlement of the issues, Rockefeller refused to come, saying, "I am in full support of the Commissioner's actions and I will continue to help, in direct communication with him, in his untiring efforts to achieve a 'peaceful' solution."

And, while human beings were joining together in response to the human cries of the inmates, Nixon was consulting with Rockefeller, with Oswald. and so on, delivering the death orders, As well as guards and inmates coming to understand something of the nature of each other, the brothers inside were breaking all the treacherously divisionary, phony barriers that have separated races of people in America for so long, in common understanding of the State's oppression and the right of all human beings to be free, One of the white inmates, Blease Montgomery, born and raised in the small, Southern town of Hamlet, North Carolina, spoke clearly to this, as, in his native drawl he said, "Man, there's people in here we treated like dogs down home...but, I want everyone to know we gon' stick together, we gon' get what we want, or we gon' die together...I've learned so much that if I get out of this, I want a plane ticket out of this country."

The horrendous end to this magnificent strike for freedom and human dignity came on September 13, 1971, with police helicopters firing tear gas onto the yard full of people, and then the invasion of the 1,700 police troops, armed with the machine guns, the rifles and the pistols. No person on the yard was safe from the invaders. Oswald had lied - he had not kept his promise of more time to discuss his ultimatum to those inside to restore "order" and to give up the "hostages"; and he lied again - when he said the very reason he carried out his instruction to attack was because the brothers inside had been seen, by helicopter, slitting the throats of eight guards (later that figure was changed by Oswald's assistant, Houlihan, to two guards).

But the whitewash this time was unsuccessful. For although the people, particularly Black people who know the lying, vicious, racist nature of the power structure, did not believe Rockefeller's and Oswald's lies, the cold and concrete evidence of murder, of the massacre came in the coroner's report, State officials didn't have to lie about the brothers in there; they felt no one would care. They admitted readily to those murders. But when Monroe County (New York) Medical Examiner, John F. Edland, gave his report regarding the condition of the bodies of the guards, the lies and the fact of out-right murder on the part of the State could not be denied. Dr. Ealand, at a press conference, told the American people that no guard's throat had been slit. “They all died of gunshot wounds.” Many could not believe it, until he elaborated even further: Of the condition of the guards' bodies, he said, “Some were shot once, some as many as five, ten, twelve times... with two types of missiles, buckshot and large caliber missiles.” He went on and contradicted Houlihan's suggestion, after the first lie was exposed, that possibly the inmates' zip guns could have been used to kill the guards, and said emphatically, “No”. In answer to the original statement that the guards were killed prior to the attack and that the rigor mortis which had set into their bodies proved this, Dr. Edland stated, "All died yesterday morning (September 13th).” Regarding a report of castration of one inmate (said to indicate the inmates had acted like the U.S. Army animals who massacred the people of My Lai), Edland said, "There is no evidence of that." In summary, as though responding to the potential threats he may receive from the State for his disclosures, Dr. Edland stated: "I am my own man and I call things as I see them. All I know is I have 27 bodies in my office which is more than I ever want to see again in one day...I'm used to not finding what people tell me I will find."

Let us briefly speak, then, of what our beautiful brothers incarcerated at the Attica State Prison have dramatically demonstrated. Their heroic move, singly, brought into a cold and harsh light the bitter reality that is America. It is them we must praise. They sealed a bond of love among many who otherwise may have never known each other. Black people across the U.S. and oppressed people in the many communities of the world shall not ask why, nor seek to find underlying secrets that may, through lengthy investigation and discussion, reveal what "really" took place at Attica on September 13th. We shall leave that to the liberal intellectuals, the more refined racists, the undercover fascists, the defenders of the bourgeoisie, the oppressors themselves to discuss and to dissect. Their stories shall be junked in our history. We shall say and know that a massacre occurred at Attica. A massacre of our heroic brothers, whose actions of supreme courage on those few days made men of us all. We shall not forget. We shall bury them, but not forget. For their individual lives, the men at Attica, and certainly their goals were so much a part of our lives, our very existence that it was our blood that was painfully shed; so much a part of us all that no mother or father or sister or brother of any of the men at Attica shall know a pain as great as ours. But, we will not be defeated - we are not defeated. We will surely win. For, their deaths were victories, because they died with glory and dignity - as men. There will be songs and poems and writings and books and words said for the men at Attica. But, in their names, and the thousands before them, and the painfully countless number that shall surely follow, there shall be People's Victory.

As for now, in the unknown names of our fallen soldiers at Attica, we re-dedicate ourselves, our lives, reaffirm our commitment to each other to the long and arduous struggle that shall lead us to that glorious victory.

In the words of one of our beautiful brothers, when asked his name, let each of us say, "I am Attica- I am all of us."

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE.

During the negotiations at Attica (in the days prior to the Massacre), the Black Panther Party was represented by Chairman Bobby Seale (at the prisoners' request).

When the Brothers at Attica made their peaceful bid for freedom, they were met with the guns and violent aggression of the Nixon-Rockefeller Regime. This has been the typical response of this regime to all human, peace-loving and non-aggressive peoples.

Therefore, during October, a visit to the People's Republic of China was made by Huey P. Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party and Servant of the People, along with Elaine Brown, Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, and Comrade Robert Bay, in which the opportunity was taken to present the following petition to the Chinese People, in behalf of the oppressed peoples of the rest of the world:


SO LET IT BE HEARD:

A short time ago, the prisoners at Attica requested the Black Panther Party to negotiate with Nixon, Rockefeller and Oswald for their freedom. The Black Panther Party at this time asks Chairman Mao Tse-tung of the People's Republic of China to negotiate with Prison Warden Nixon for the freedom of the oppressed peoples of the world.

We recognize that the criminal activities of trigger-happy Nixon show clearly that he has no respect for peaceful negotiation, when the victim is divided and weak. He not only killed the prisoners at Attica, but he also murdered his exploited workers, the prison guards. Although most of the prisoners at Attica are Black and all the guards are white, Nixon killed regardless of color, because they were all victims. When the oppressed people of the world ask for negotiation, such as the Vietnamese people, Prison Warden Nixon shows again he has no respect for the people nor his agents, the U.S. Military. HE LEAVES NO ALTERNATIVE BUT VIOLENT, ARMED RESISTANCE. He is responsible for the murder of Vietnamese people and the deaths of the U.S. soldiers. Both the Vietnamese People and the U.S. soldiers are victims of the reactionary Nixon regime. This is why we approached Chairman Mao Tse-tung, because we know of his peace-and freedom-loving nature. There can be no peace without freedom.

We are asking all the agents of Prison Warden Nixon (whom he despises) to join forces with the victims of the world: The U.S. soldiers to join forces with the victimized Vietnamese People; the guards and the families of the deceased guards at Attica and the guards of the State prisons across the U.S. to join forces with the victimized inmates,

It is clear that Mr. Nixon is trigger-happy and could trigger off World War III. And because we knew of his impending visit to the People's Republic of China, we asked the Chinese People to receive us first, so that we might ask the peace-and freedom - loving Chairman Mao Tse-tung to be the chief negotiator to Mr. Nixon for the peace and freedom of the oppressed peoples of the world. And this is why we ask for unity of all the victims against the common enemy, the Nixon - Rockefeller regime.

SO LET IT BE DONE.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 20, 2022 3:06 pm

Black August: Jalil Muntaqim on the Black Liberation Struggle Inside and Outside Prison Walls
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 19, 2022
Natalia Marques

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Jalil Muntaqim was first imprisoned in 1971, when he was only 19 years old, after being involved in revolutionary Black liberation groups the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Jalil spent 49 years behind bars before himself and his supporters won his freedom in October 2020.

Black August is a recognition of former political prisoners such as Jalil Muntaqim, who spent 49 years behind bars in US prisons


Revolutionary activists in the US, particularly those involved in struggles to free political prisoners and to end mass incarceration, celebrate and honor the tradition of Black August. According to these activists, Black August is a month to remember those who have died or been imprisoned in the fight for Black liberation in the United States, and a reminder that despite grave setbacks, this struggle lives on.

To illuminate the history and importance of this month, Peoples Dispatch spoke to former political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim. Muntaqim was first imprisoned in 1971, when he was only 19 years old, after being involved in revolutionary Black liberation groups the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Jalil spent 49 years behind bars before himself and his supporters won his freedom in October 2020.

Like other political prisoners, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jalil was convicted of killing a police officer in a trial that supporters and activists maintain was unjust. And also like other political prisoners, his struggle against “white supremacy and capitalist imperialism”, in his words, did not end with his conviction. Muntaqim elaborated on his rich history and experience in the fight for Black liberation, both inside and outside prison walls.

Origins of Black August

“Black August began primarily in 1978 by prisoners in the San Quentin, California prison system,” Jalil told Peoples Dispatch. “[The prisoners] are known as the Black Guerilla Family (BGF). BGF came into existence…as a result of the murders of several black activists who were in prison, by prison guards.”

“[The activists] were being attacked by Aryan Brotherhood, white supremacists and were murdered by prison guards,” Jalil said. On January 13, 1970, respected Black militant and prisoner W.L. Nolen was murdered by a “notoriously racist” prison guard in what some view as an attack staged by prison authorities between racist neo-Nazi prisoners and Black prisoners. As a result, celebrated incarcerated revolutionary George Jackson and other prisoners founded the Black Guerrilla Family, a group which was closely allied with the Black Panther Party, and a critical part of the emerging Black Power movement behind prison walls.

“[T]he California prisoners began to organize themselves…in a group they called the Black Guerrilla Family. It was a self-defense organization, to defend themselves against white supremacist guards and other prisoners,” Jalil elaborated.

Not too long after Nolen’s death, on August 21, 1971, Jackson himself was assassinated by prison guards. “1971, Comrade George Jackson…allegedly made an effort to escape, and he was murdered in San Quentin prison. He was the field marshal for the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. He was a major writer, author and revolutionary inside the prison system,” said Jalil.

Shortly after Jackson’s death, Black California prisoners began the tradition of celebrating Black August, to honor those who fought and are fighting for Black freedom. August was chosen for the many historic moments in the Black liberation struggle that occurred during that month: the assassination of George Jackson, the indirect assassination of BGF leader Khatari Golden (August 1, 1978) by prison authorities, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, the start of the Haitian revolution, the arrival of the first kidnapped African slaves in the Jamestown colony, as well as many other events.

Prisoners of War

Jalil Muntaqim, alongside others in the Black liberation struggle who have at one point been incarcerated, call themselves not only political prisoners, but prisoners of war. This is carefully chosen language.

“We are in opposition to a system of capitalist imperialism and racist exploitation, of white supremacy. And as a result, we are oftentimes targeted for annihilation, for termination. Or as it says in the COINTELPRO documents, for neutralization. And so by virtue of our being captured by what we consider to be our enemies, a system of governing that in and of itself is illegal, illegitimate…we identify ourselves, having been captured, as political prisoners, according to the Geneva Accords: Political prisoners and prisoners of war.”

The United States champions itself as a bastion of freedom, often juxtaposing itself with governments that it deems “undemocratic”. While the US will often parade the cause of political prisoners in nations that it is hostile towards, such as China or Venezuela, it refuses to recognize that it detains people for political reasons, and especially has never acknowledged the incarceration of any “prisoners of war” domestically. Jalil himself has worked to shatter this narrative, starting from when he was still behind prison walls.

“Back in [1978], I initiated the first UN prisoners petition campaign to the United Nations, raising the question about political prisoners. In [1979], international jurists had a conference here in the United States. They did a tour to investigate whether political prisoners exist in the United States. They…ruled that the United States had political prisoners,” Jalil told Peoples Dispatch.

“1981 I had the opportunity to raise a question with then-Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young…I had [a] journalist ask him a question, ‘do political prisoners exist in the United States?’ He answered in the affirmative. ‘Yes, perhaps thousands.’ And for having answered that question truthfully, he was called to the carpet in the White House by Jimmy Carter, who was president at that time.” For his stunning admission that the US indeed had “thousands” of political prisoners, President Carter subsequently fired Andrew Young from his post.

According to Black revolutionaries like Jalil, the US government not only incarcerates political prisoners, but also is in an active state of war against Black people.

“We’re in a state of genocidal war…we identify those who have been captured by our enemy, as political prisoners. And some identify themselves as prisoners of war.”

Prison activists argue that the idea of the US engaging in a “genocidal war” is validated in the ways that the state represses political prisoners.

Much like a trophy of war, the gun that killed George Jackson is mounted on a wall display at the San Quentin prison “museum”, alongside a bronze plaque memorializing the name of the guard that shot the rifle.

The Black Guerrilla Family is currently classified as a gang by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). In fact, it is the only Black “prison gang” that will lead to placement in solitary confinement for any prisoner thought to be “affiliated”. Solitary confinement is defined as torture by the United Nations.

Prisoners testify that CDCR represses political dissent by falsely classifying prisoners who struggle for Black liberation as members of BGF. Prisoner Mutope Duguma wrote to Solitary Watch in 2012, from behind bars in Corcoran State Prison solitary confinement (SHU), claiming he had been in solitary for over a decade as a result of being misclassified as BGF. “My cell has a concrete slab bed, the cell is white with a concrete brick slab for TV holding…No trees. No animals. No sun. No life. Just prisoners isolated from the world,” he wrote. Duguma describes himself as a “New Afrikan Nationalist Revolutionary Man”, New Afrikan being a political current that advocates for nationhood and self-determination for Black people.

In 1998, while still behind bars, Jalil founded the Jericho Movement, “the premier organization in the United States…speaks on behalf of US political prisoners and prisoners of war,” in his own words. Jalil founded the organization alongside fellow political prisoners Safiya Bukhari and “Baba” Herman Ferguson, both of whom are now deceased.

Jericho aims to gain recognition of the fact that there are indeed political prisoners in the US, something that most people in the country are not aware of. Jericho also fights to free all political prisoners.

“We charge genocide!”

Jalil’s organizing did not end with his release in 2020. In 2021, Jalil, alongside a coalition which Jericho is a part of, the Spirit of Mandela Coalition, organized an International Tribunal which convened on October 22 through 25. This Tribunal, held at the Shabazz Center, the same building in which Malcolm X was assassinated, convened international jurists to rule on whether or not the United States was guilty of human rights abuses against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.

This jurists found the United States guilty on five counts, which, according to Spirit of Mandela, are:

Racist police killings of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.
Hyper incarcerations of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.
Political incarceration of Civil Rights/National Liberation era revolutionaries and activists, as well as present day activists.
Environmental racism and its impact on Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.
Public Health racism and disparities and its impact on Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.
Genocide of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people as a result of the historic and systemic charges of all the above.
This last charge has enormous historical implications. In 1951, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Dubois, William Patterson, and others compiled a petition to the United Nations, charging the US with genocide against Black people. “We Charge Genocide” cited lynchings, legal discrimination and disenfranchisement, and police brutality against Black people, as well as other injustices, as being part of a United States genocide against Black people. The petition left a powerful legacy, with many around the world following in its footsteps (recently in May 2022 the Brazilian Black Coalition for Rights charged the Brazilian state with genocide).

However, due to the Cold War context, the UN did not acknowledge that it received the 1951 petition. The US also suppressed the petition, barring Robeson from obtaining a passport to deliver it and forcing Patterson to surrender his passport after presenting the document to the UN in Paris.

The 2021 tribunal was, according to Jalil, was the “first time in the history of the United States, that the United States has been found guilty by international jurists of the charge of genocide.” The victory was critically important, says Jalil, based on the fact that Malcolm X himself advocated for taking “the civil-rights struggle to a higher level — to the level of human rights.”

“As long as we keep our struggle confined within the parameters of civil rights, then anyone will be able to dictate the terms of that struggle,” Jalil said. “When we take our struggles into the international community…then it’s an international issue, and the United States has no way of controlling or dictating how to respond to it.”

“We have the control. The international community has the control. And so for us, it’s extremely important to bring to the international community these five charges, that [the US has] been found guilty of genocide, because the United States continues to honor itself as being the police of human rights around the world.”

Jalil is currently involved in building decolonization programs, which are modeled after Black Panther Party survival programs, providing direct aid as well as political education to the masses. “People are organizing themselves to try to alleviate some of the immediate issues like housing, education, homelessness, hunger, medical neglect, those kinds of things that we can address immediately when we organize ourselves,” Jalil said. These include the People’s Programs in Oakland, California and the People’s Liberation Program in Rochester, New York.

Jalil is also involved in building a “People’s Senate”, which, in his words, is “a tool in which we can organize ourselves and build a consensus amongst those who really, sincerely, authentically, genuinely want real change.”

“I’m talking about solutions, we know what the problem is, the problem is capitalist imperialism, white supremacy,” Jalil continued.

“We understand that the system in and of itself cannot be redeemed. It has to be destroyed.”

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 24, 2022 2:24 pm

ESSAY: Racial Genocide: The Case of the Martinsville Seven, William L. Patterson, 1969
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 24 Aug 2022

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For Black August, read William L. Patterson on racial genocide, the law, and the Martinsville Seven.

The political career of radical lawyer and Black communist William L. Patterson is marked not only by his dedication to raising awareness of the unjust and racist nature of the United States legal and penal systems – but also to liberating those swept up in the systems’ demonic machinery. Born in 1891 in San Francisco and raised between Oakland and Mill Valley, Patterson studied law, flunked the California bar, and, after a failed attempt to emigrate to Liberia, ended up in Harlem. Patterson eventually passed the New York Bar examination and became a successful Sugar Hill lawyer. But Patterson was radicalized through his conversations with Caribbean militant Richard B. Moore. It wasMoore who urged him to use his legal skills in support of Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian anarchists condemned to death in 1927 for their alleged involvement in a murder and robbery.

From 1927 on, Patterson’s agitation was unceasing. He quit his law firm, joined the Communist (Workers) Party, studied at the New York Worker’s School and the University of the Toiling People of the Far East in Moscow, before returning to the US were he headed the International Labor Defense (ILD ). The ILD led the successful campaign in the early 1930s to stop the execution of the Scottsboro “boys,” eight African Americans facing the death penalty for allegedly raping two white women in Alabama. In 1951, Patterson and Paul Robeson spearheaded the efforts to petition the United Nations charging the United States with the genocide of African Americans. A decade later he would provide legal counsel to Angela Davis and the Black Panther Party.

In Patterson’s pedition to the United Nations – published as We Charge Genocide – he and his co-petitioners presented as evidence a cruel archive of cases where Black people had been incarcerated or executed by the state after their appeals to the US Supreme Court were ignored. They documented cases of Black prisoners who were shot when they refused to work, of a Black farmer murdered for sport by a white game warden, of “the Trenton Six, of Paul Washington, the Daniels cousins, Jerry Newsom, Wesley Robert Wells, of Rosalee Ingram, of John Derrick, of Lieutenant Gilbert, of the Columbia, Tennessee destruction, the Freeport slaughter, the Monroe killings—all important cases in which Negroes have been framed on capital charges or have actually been killed.” Among their evidence was that of the Martinsville Seven – seven Black men “who died in Virginia’s electric chair for a rape they never committed, in a state that has never executed a white man for that offense.”

In 1969, almost two decades following the execution of the Martinsville Seven, Patterson revisited the case in a short essay for San Francisco Black newspaper, the Sun-Reporter. Patterson’s essay, reprinted below, reminds us that today, Black genocide still occurs “under color of law.” It makes for critical Black August reading.

Racial Genocide: The Case of the Martinsville Seven

William L. Patterson


It happened in Richmond, Virginia, 18 years ago [1951]. Seven young black Americans went to a premature death in the State's electric chair. It was all done "legally." A white woman crazed from the myths of white superiority, bereft of all sense of honor or respect for human dignity, cried . . .. A trial court of racists heard the case and passed the death sentence. The all-white Virginia Supreme Court listened to the appeal but refused to grant a new trial. The United States Supreme Court could not find in the conspiracy to murder seven black men a violation of their constitutional rights. It was legally carried out -- this genocide under color of law.

Caborn Taylor, Frank Hairston Jr., Joe Henry Hempton, James Hairston, Booker F. Miller, Francis Grayson and J. L. Hairston had been sentenced to death for the alleged mass raping of a white woman. According to the evidence, they could not have been guilty.

The Martinsville Seven were thrust into the electric chair. But the case had many lessons. It revealed the murderous course of racism when that crime is made a policy of government. It exposed the complicity of the Supreme Court in the victimization of literally tens of thousands of innocent black Americans. It offered proof that to save our country, racism must be ended.

The Martinsville Seven were not just seven innocent men. They were the symbol of a system of government rotten unto death with the curse of racism. Yet, it will not die of itself.

Now it is part of the history of our country. That is why we return to commemorate this murder. It is not part of the mythology of American history that proclaims all men to have been created equal and proceeds to glorify all that is white and impeach all that is black. This genocidal vent is part of the story of the first three centuries of slavery and inhuman racist terror and part of the history of the century after the Civil War. Historians with few exceptions have ignored the decisive role of black men and women played in this war drama. They have concealed the magnificent contributions of black men to the growth and development of our country since then, and through the press, in school and church, they have sought to create an image of the black man as a rapist and a buffon.

Those who rule, our ruling class and power elite, have made this false imagery a major ideological weapon. The purpose: that we should be a nation divided along the color line and unable as one people to recognize the main enemy -- our monopolists -- and meet together the problems of poverty, miseducation, unjust and unequal taxation, deteriorating cities, joblessness and insecurity it has produced, to say nothing of its wars of aggression.

The murder of the Martinsville Seven was an act of racist terror. As was the Scottsboro case before it, it was calculated not only to terrorize a people and quell their militancy and deathless courage, but more particularly to create a massive white backlash and hide from white slum dwellers and labor the mutuality of interests of whites and blacks in this society.

But terror cannot materially strengthen a government steeped in the degenerating myths of a superiority based on color.

Josephine Grayson, wife of Francis Grayson, one of the victims of this colossal racist conspiracy, and mother of five children, brought the arrest of these men in Martinsville, Va., to the attention of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC). I went at once to Richmond. The accused had been carried there and I wanted to talk with them.

The tasks of the CRC were clearly defined: to create a united front of organization for the defense; to free these innocent men and in the process to place details of the case before the peoples of the world, mobilizing protest sentiment in every. possible country against this terrorization; to expose the hollowness of the doctrine of States' Rights and the role of U.S. Government in the persecution of black nationals; to reveal the social forces that it served in this capacity and to prove that the courts would not move from the racist position of the class for which they conducted business unless the mass rejection of their sentences moved hundreds and hundreds of thousands into protest action.

The matter of struggle was discussed with the leadership of the Virginia State NAACP. Joint action was agreed upon but the National Office repudiated that agreement and the CRC went on alone.

In the history of Virginia no white man had ever been executed for the crime with which these men were charged. The men had been playing games when the woman approached. As the evidence goes, she solicited them. She was a prostitute. She declared that all of them raped her.

It is not hard to analyze the interrelationship between virulent racism and crisis in our country. Racism is a constant companion of crisis. The frame-up of the Martinsville Seven came at a moment of deepening and sharpening struggle on the part of America's black and oppressed millions.

I visited the men in the death house of the State Penitentiary. There were thirteen men in the house of doom. Nine of them were black. I inquired as to the composition of the prison population. The warden said that more than 65 per cent were black. This in a state where the black population approximated 20 per cent. Thus was the image of black criminality built up.

The murder of the Martinsville Seven poses in perpetuity a question the white masses -- and especially labor in a white skin -- must answer. Racism is not the property of white America. It is a weapon of its ruling class. It serves to divide, to separate, to pit those who should by virtue of social conditions be natural allies against each other. What are the white masses of America, what is labor going to do about it? Labor needs an anti-race program that will draw millions of black men into its ranks. It needs a program consistent with the political and economic demands from the ghetto. It needs unity with the black community.

William L. Patterson, “Racial Genocide: The Case of the Martinsville Seven,” Sun Reporter, (15 February 1969).

For more on Patterson see Gerald Horne’s Black Revolutionary: William L. Patterson and the Globalization of the Black Freedom Sruggle and Patterson’s The Man Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography .

Image: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. "William L. Patterson, executive director of the Civil Rights Congress, addressing the Bill of Rights Conference, circa 1940s ." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1940 - 1949.


https://www.blackagendareport.com/essay ... erson-1969
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 26, 2022 3:03 pm

Nehanda Abiodun and the Legacy of Resistance to the Prison Industrial Complex
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 25, 2022
Abayomi Azikiwe

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African American revolutionary exemplified the movement to end national oppression and the criminalization of a people

Black August Series No. 4

Since the early 1980s, the prison population in the United States has grown exponentially with African Americans, Latin Americans and other working class people making up the majority of those incarcerated in the dungeons of the world’s leading capitalist state.

During the previous decade on September 9, 1971, several thousand inmates at the Attica Prison in New York State took control of the correctional facility to demand radical changes in the way people are treated while incarcerated.

Less than three weeks prior to the Attica Rebellion on August 21, George L. Jackson (1941-1971), was martyred during an escape attempt from San Quentin prison in California. One year earlier on August 7, 1970, George Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan Jackson, just 17-years-old at the time, was killed along with William Christmas and James McClain. Jonathan Jackson had walked into a Marin County, California courtroom where Christmas, McClain and Ruchell Cinque Magee were on trial. Christmas, Magee and McClain were given weapons by Jonathan Jackson as they took Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, prosecutor Gary Thomas and three jurors hostage.

As they walked the hostages outside the courthouse and into a rented van, other law-enforcement officers opened fire on the vehicle killing Jackson, McClean, Christmas and Judge Haley. Ruchell Magee was wounded and was the only survivor among the armed guerrillas. These events were covered widely in the corporate press. Later that same year, George Jackson would publish his book of prison letters entitled “Soledad Brother.”

Angela Davis, at the time a member of the Communist Party, was terminated from her teaching position at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) during 1969. The then Governor Ronald Reagan deliberately interfered with the administration of colleges and universities throughout the state. The year before in 1968, the longest student strike in U.S. history took place at San Francisco State College, where an alliance led by African Americans, fought pitched battles to make sure the institution did not function on a normal basis. The SFSC strike of 1968-69 included at one point the faculty union which was under attack by the board of regents and Reagan.

Davis later became involved with the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee in 1970 and worked with Jonathan Jackson in political and legal efforts to exonerate his older brother George. Law-enforcement and media sources claimed that the guns utilized in the Marin County rebellion led by Jonathan Jackson were registered in the name of Angela Davis.

As prosecutors in Marin County focused on Davis as a suspect in an alleged conspiracy, the professor and activist went underground for two months. She was captured and imprisoned in October 1970. An international political and legal process would result in her acquittal on all charges by the summer of 1972.

It was the African American inmates which led the Attica insurrection in 1971 after being politicized by the numerous organizations operating on the outside including the Black Panther Party (BPP), Nation of Islam and the Young Lords Organization (YLO). The advent of the movement for Civil Rights and Black Power during the 1960s attracted thousands of youth activists who were committed to total freedom within their lifetimes.

Nehanda Enters the Struggle for Black Liberation

One such young person was Nehanda Abiodun of New York City. Abiodun had been politicized through the housing struggles in West Harlem which opposed the expansion of Columbia University that would displace African Americans. Her parents were activists and would have a profound influence on Nehanda’s political trajectory.

Abiodun studied at Columbia University and worked as an organizer for the West Harlem Community Organization (WHCO). During her tenure with the WHCO, she and other co-workers realized that the injustices they were fighting stemmed from the inherent racist and exploitative system of U.S. capitalism. As the years passed she was influenced by the emerging BPP.

While working at a methadone clinic in New York during the period of widespread heroin addiction among Black and Brown peoples, she realized that other methods of addressing the drug crisis were needed. She would join the efforts of Dr. Mutulu Shakur at the Hamilton Hospital clinic in the Bronx during the late 1970s. The clinic which utilized acupuncture and other methods to treat substance abuse, posed a direct threat to the federal government sponsored methadone maintenance programs. The clinic at Hamilton was closed by the City of New York in 1978.

Later Dr. Shakur would reopen a clinic in Harlem in defiance of the city administration. The people around the acupuncture clinic were treated for drug addiction, however, there was a political education component which taught the impoverished patients that their conditions were rooted in the history of racism and capitalism in the U.S.

After the liberation from maximum security prison in New Jersey of Black Liberation Army (BLA) cadre Assata Shakur on November 2, 1979, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local law-enforcement agencies began dragnet operations against members and supporters of several revolutionary organizations including the BLA, the Republic of New Africa, Weather Underground and the May 19th Communist Organization.

When a Brink’s armed robbery was carried out on October 20, 1981, in an area north of NYC resulting in the deaths of one security guard and two Nyack, New York police officers, the FBI and state authorities began to arrest members of the organizations working with the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA). The BLA, Weather Underground and the May 19th Communist Organization were targeted for death and incarceration.

Abiodun went underground during this period and eventually would surface in the Republic of Cuba during the early 1990s. She was granted political asylum along with Assata Shakur and other activists from the U.S. who were being pursued by federal and local police agencies.

In an interview with Abiodun she discussed her political life: “In 1982 a federal warrant was issued for my arrest for violating the Rico Racketeering and Conspiracy laws. I choose to go underground for political reasons and while living clandestinely I learned how important it is to struggle from a position of love and not hate. It was the love of humanity, freedom and justice that were the dictates that led me to where I was then, and the love given from comrades that kept me mentally and spiritually healthy when I thought that I would die from a broken heart because of being separated from my family. And be assured that it is that same kind of love that has given me the resolve to continue daily in our quest for freedom. I recognize how blessed I am to have so many beautiful people in my life that genuinely care for me, individuals who are willing to make the sacrifices needed to carry on the traditions of principled struggle.” (http://www.assatashakur.org/nehanda.htm)

Her work in Cuba included the promotion of young artists influenced by the hip hop movement in the U.S. and internationally. She along with Assata Shakur represented the legacy of the Black Liberation Movement and its victories. In 2019, Abiodun died in Cuba leaving a profound history of local, national and global struggles.

Prison Industrial Complex Continues to Grow in the U.S.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. has continued to be a cause for concern for the African American liberation struggles. A series of laws and policy measures have resulted in the rapid expansion of the prison population.

These laws and measures include the growth in the numbers of police officers; draconian local, state and federal legislation which have stiffened penalties for crimes; the further deterioration of public school systems in rural, suburban and urban areas leaving millions uneducated and prone to arrest and imprisonment; federal programs which provide military grade weapons to local and state police agencies therefore encouraging the use of deadly force; an escalation in illicit narcotics use which has captured millions in a cycle of dependency and criminalization.

In an entry published by the Sentencing Project website it emphasizes that: “The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration. There are 2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails—a 500% increase over the last 40 years. Changes in sentencing law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase. These trends have resulted in prison overcrowding and fiscal burdens on states to accommodate a rapidly expanding penal system, despite increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not an effective means of achieving public safety.” (https://www.sentencingproject.org/crimi ... 20increase.)

These grim statistics confirm what Nehanda Abiodun, Assata Shakur, George and Jonathan Jackson, among many others, have illustrated through their writings and activism. The existence of mass incarceration is clearly related to the racist, capitalist and imperialist system of the U.S. and its allies around the globe. Until these realities are transformed, the process of social containment and exploitation which the prison system represents will remain as a major impediment to the realization of liberated and just society.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/08/ ... l-complex/

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The system cannot be redeemed, it has to be destroyed

Black August is a month to honor those who have died or been imprisoned in the fight for Black liberation in the United States, and a reminder that despite grave setbacks, the struggle lives on.

August 26, 2022 by Peoples Dispatch



Former political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim, who spent 49 years behind bars before his release in 2020, speaks to Peoples Dispatch about the origins of Black August and its importance, especially in this specific political context marked by the 2020 uprisings against police brutality.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/08/26/ ... destroyed/
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 20, 2022 4:16 pm

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The Horror of Police (University of Minnesota Press, 2022)

“The Monster is Actually the Police”
Originally published: Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life on September 11, 2022 by HC Editor (more by Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life) (Posted Sep 20, 2022)

We sat down with Travis Linnemann, a professor of sociology at Kansas State University and a distinguished cultural critic, to discuss his provocative research into the supposed meth epidemic and the ongoing humanitarian disaster of policing in the United States.

Hard Crackers: Your first book Meth Wars (NYU Press, 2016) deals with the role of methamphetamine in American culture. In particular, you look at laws and law enforcement strategies, but also cultural products like the TV show Breaking Bad. Tell us a little bit about the approach of analyzing these sources side by side.

Travis Linnemann: It’s hard to disentangle them. I learned fairly quickly that they play off one another, they’re mutually constitutive of one another. What you see on TV, whether it be Breaking Bad or the nightly news, you will hear parroted by cops, probation officers, and judges. It’s hard to nail down the origin point for a lot of that ideology, and I don’t think I necessarily wanted to. I was more interested in seeing how these ideas circulate, and trying to reckon with the political work they do on everyday life.

Meth Wars was driven by the general question: Mass imprisonment is this totalizing project in American social life, so how does that manifest in little small towns in rural Kansas, like where I grew up and where I used to live and work? It doesn’t materialize in the way that perhaps, Michelle Alexander might say, but it certainly materializes! Looking at the specificities of these rural places, and their cultural texture, gives you an entrée into a particular way mass incarceration unfolds, and how it is reproduced every day.

HC: So what does meth tell us about the United States?

TL: I use this idea of a “death wish,” the drug war being a death wish, that constantly recycles a different sort of enemy population associated with particular drugs. So it’s not necessarily a “moral panic,” but more of a sigil to organize police, organize courts, organize the tremendous amount of money that’s behind the massive carceral apparatus. We can see it just over and over again, with different drugs rising as the vehicle or instrument to criminalize people, to push new policies into new territories, and to get really punitive political work done. So that’s how I understand meth. It’s part of the war on drugs, which is always a low intensity class war meant to articulate and organize a whole host of punitive energies and disown underlying anxieties about the fragmentation of social life.

HC: And you had a lot of personal experience with the meth panic.

TL: I am a slow learner. I was working in a beef packing plant between college semesters. It was back-breaking work, too hard for me. A friend gave me a way out: a job working in a group home taking “children in need of care” (state custody) on activities, the swimming pool, the park and so on. It’s still the best job I’ve ever had. It taught me a lot about people and the world. Fast forward fifteen years and I was “working with people” but in “community corrections,” “intensive probation” in the heart of “methland” as some would have it. That’s never what I imagined I’d do with my young life, and it took me some time to figure out where I fit into it, despite my best intentions. I’d also never have imagined I’d be working as a professor, but that work, which I finally left behind, led to this, again, despite my best intentions. But thankfully I’ve run into a lot of writing that’s helped me make better sense of the world.

So when I was working “in the field” I heard a whole lot about how meth was the next big thing, how it was something that we needed to be worried about, and be on guard for. I didn’t see it. I even pulled the state’s own data: arrest statistics, drug test trends. The data didn’t support the myth, and of course, they knew what they were doing. It was quite easy to see this was all propaganda. I started tracing its effects, and seeing how meth and similar threats are really a good way for states to access federal dollars.

HC: Something that we really loved about Meth Wars is how you contrast this discourse coming from the cops, the federal government, television shows, and anti-drug campaigns, with your own experiences in places that were supposedly ravaged by meth.

TL: The ideology and the politics of the drug war are so damned effective that people don’t even stop and question it, and tend to believe what they’re told and not what they see. We hear it on the television, we hear coming from important people, that something like meth is the next problem, and it materializes like a ghost. Our best evidence doesn’t really matter. In the end, I discovered meth didn’t necessarily even have anything to do with meth. It was a believable artifice to put over the situation in a particular sort of location.

For instance, I had people tell me in plain language: “Crack’s not a problem here. We don’t have black people. This is a small town in rural Kansas. So crack’s not a problem. But meth! We got all these poor whites. Meth is our problem.” And people would say this, despite not having actually any meth problems to speak of, or anything that they could point to, to show that there was actually a meth problem. They did have poor people that maybe seemed threatening, or fit a general stereotype, and the meth trope worked nicely to help people understand them. Never mind that meth has been sold under the brand name Desoxyn for seventy years!

HC: So you argue that meth is a convenient stand-in for a whole host of social problems that are far more difficult to explain than simply attributing them to the effect of one particular drug.

TL: Yes, absolutely so. I think you can really see that in the well-known “meth mouth” trope.

Dentists and medical doctors will contest that it’s not as simple as: “You do meth, your teeth rot out.” Naomi Murakawa was very early in upending this trope. Nevertheless, it persists, and people believe it and put it to work. So when they see somebody with bad teeth they don’t class disparities, they don’t see somebody who has lived hard and worked hard, and had poor health, bad diet, or lack of insurance. They see meth. So there’s so many other things that can go on in somebody’s life that would contribute to this visible marker. But all of that is erased by the trope of the meth mouth. It’s Cesare Lombroso born anew.

HC: You have a new book that deals with two of our favorite topics here at Hard Crackers: the misdeeds of the American cops, and the genre of horror. It’s called The Horror of Police (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). How, by your estimation, are these things related?

TL: There’s a basic reading: every day we’re bombarded by horror stories about the police. We don’t have to look very hard to find something that would rise to the level of most people’s understanding of horror. But what I try to argue in the book is that American police reveal various other aspects of what we might consider horror. They do a piss poor job of keeping people safe. Oftentimes they’re a greater threat than anything else a person might encounter. They don’t prevent crime.

Ultimately, though, I was trying to get at the idea that the police apparatus is just one thing that we as a society erect as an avenue towards security, which remains evasive. So all the horrible things that we witness the police doing, their failures, their inability to do what we expect them to do — these things are often ignored, because enough people believe that the cops are a means to security in an insecure world. So we ignore or forgive their sins, lest we face this greater horror of insecurity — the reality of things that ultimately can’t be secured, things that are immovable in our lives, our own frailty, our mortality, which I guess would be the ultimate form of insecurity that police relate to directly. Our trust in the police is a half measure that we clutch to in the dark at night and hope that maybe it’ll work. And thanks to it, we have to put up with all the shit that they do that’s horrendous.

HC: That leads to one of the most interesting parts of the book, when you talk about these recurrent images of police violence that we get through smartphone footage and bodycam footage. You compare these moments, when we are confronted with the violent nature of the police, to the early moments in a horror film, when the protagonist first glimpses evidence of a terrifying world that exists just beneath the surface of the known one. As you point out, the narrative tension in the opening act of many horror films revolves around a protagonist being disbelieved by others, or even forced to disbelieve themselves: “Did I really see what I saw?” Relating this popular narrative device to images of police violence, you pose the question: “What if we really saw what we saw?”

TL: Right. I think we can relate that to the idea of the bad apple or the bad case. Police defenders are constantly telling us how these incidents wouldn’t happen if we just had better policy, better equipment, more or different types of police. “This is only a one-off situation. Trust us that this is not representative.” Ultimately, though, in the horror trope we are discussing, the protagonist realizes that they actually did see what they saw. In this case, the same sequence applies, except the monster is actually the police. It is at least one of many monsters, and it’s a monster that we’ve created, and licensed to fight these other monsters that stand in for insecurity.

HC: A related argument you make, which can be traced back to Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” is that something exists at the center of law enforcement that is either extra-legal or outright illegal. You discuss this in a very clever way, through a discussion of the first season of HBO’s True Detective.

TL: That’s basically how I got on this topic. So, disclaimer: I’m not an authority on horror. I don’t even know if I’m necessarily much of a horror fan. But my interest was piqued by the first season of True Detective. I was reading Benjamin, along with Mark Neocleous’s engagement with Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Thomas Hobbes. Mark’s assertion is that not only do we license the police as monster fighters, but we know that they themselves are monsters, and they even tell us constantly! So while I’m reading all this, I hear Matthew McConaughey say: “Of course I’m dangerous, I’m police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity.”

Great cinematic line, very effective. But you don’t have to work very hard to hear real cops say this. This is one of their mantras, harkening back to Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth! You need me on that wall!” That sort of thing. Real cops often tell us: if you knew how the world really worked, then you wouldn’t complain so goddamn much, and you’d know you should be thankful for your life, that we grant you. There’s that often misattributed quote about how people sleep safely in their bed, because of rough men standing ready to do whatever whatever. The police tell us they are the debt that must be paid so that we can live the lives we choose.

So with True Detective, even though I like the show, my interest came from how the show, whether it meant to or not, clearly displays some of these ideas about the open violence of police, and how it’s understood, at least tacitly, as the very heart of liberal order.

HC: You demonstrate well how these cultural artifacts, like True Detective and especially The Wire, which purport to offer a nuanced or critical view of American policing, end up, perhaps against the best wishes of their creators, actually endorsing police violence.

TL: Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s the famous McNullty quote from The Wire wire where he calls himself “natural police,” and he says there’s only a few people in the Baltimore Police Department who have the will to do what needs to be done. Natural police. But for me, maybe the best example of that is Bad Lieutenant. The character is not a man, he’s just a cop: “the Lieutenant.” And I don’t suppose you could create a worse cop than Harvey Keitel’s character. Yet, at the end of the day, he does what we are supposed to think cops do. He chases down the bad guys, and brings justice for this very sanctified, pitiable victim, a Catholic nun. My reading of that film is no matter how bad the cop may be, they nevertheless stand on the right side of the rule of law. Their violence is always just, regardless of who gets hurt.

HC: Meanwhile, if you subtract the police procedural elements from Bad Lieutenant, it would probably be a pretty realistic view of the NYPD.

TL: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I assume you could trace any facet of that guy’s character and find some real world examples.

HC: Another film that you analyze in a really interesting way is the Paul Verhoeven classic Robocop. You begin by saying that there’s a common defense of the police, that we often hear from the cops and their admirers, that they are “just doing their jobs.” That’s supposed to exonerate them. But in your discussion of Robocop, you turn that formulation on its head and say: What if cops “just doing their job” is the problem?

TL: We can see that really well with Robocop, who is, like all cybernetic machines, bound by code to do the job a certain way. So I played around with the idea of the police being assembled like a machine, where they are absolutely bound to a certain sort of set of tasks. And their main task simply boils down to the administration of violence.

I also focused on Robocop because I wanted to find some vehicle to critique the common critique of “police militarization,” which either doesn’t go far enough, in the best case, or amounts to an insidiously pro-police narrative in the worst, by sanctioning non-militarized policing. So Robocop, as a human turned machine, allows us to think through what exactly is taking over, as a human turns into a machine, or as a person turns into a cop. Underlying it all is this primary directive of legal lethal violence in the service of the racist liberal-capitalist social order. So keeping that in mind, the ordinary critique of police militarization becomes unnecessary. We just need to keep an eye on the underlying kind of commands and codes of the police. All of them should be an object or a target for critique: militarized cop, non-militarized cop. All that is part of the same architecture.

HC: Late in the book you pose a question that’s very compelling: “Why must we collectively cling to what the police offer, when they offer very little?” Your answer seems to be, to some extent, that we as a society are unwilling to let go of the world that the police uphold. But more interestingly, you add that we are also unable to shed our own denial of the unsafety and insecurity at the core of human life, and ultimately, cannot let go of our denial of our own mortality.

TL: At the end of Meth Wars I get to the same conclusion, and quote James Baldwin from The Fire Next Time: “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.” It is a call for radical solidarity along all kinds of different lines, as human beings, but first and foremost, as finite and mortal.

To accept that the movie doesn’t end the way we hope it’s going to end might be a starting place, if we are going to let go of some of these things that we know not only don’t work, but are actually murderous and bloody. This would be to give up on the dream of a certain type of security, because security is illusory and never complete. It’s always something that’s unfulfilled, particularly if we’re talking about more existential questions. But even just everyday security is not something that can be accomplished absolutely. The police know that, and they play upon it. They get us to dance very well by playing on our insecurities and our desires for security.

HC: Right. When the police demonstrate the presence of what they say is safety, they say it’s evidence for more police. And when they demonstrate the presence of what they say is unsafety, that’s also evidence for more police.

TL: Exactly. Everything becomes evidence for more police. And as others have already noted, the challenge, faced by even the most radical police critics, is how to reject this, and not live our lives organized by the violence of police power, whether or not it comes in the form of the boys in blue.

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 01, 2022 2:51 pm

Alabama prisoners organize a system-wide shut down

On September 26 Alabama prison officials made a rare admission: prisoners had initiated work stoppages at every single major correctional facility in the state.

September 30, 2022 by Natalia Marques

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In a nation where over 80% of incarcerated workers are tasked with maintaining the prison itself, either through cooking, cleaning, laundry, or other essential needs, work stoppages can mean that the entire prison system shuts down.
“The state of Alabama is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis,” begins a demand letter authored by Alabama prisoners, who on September 26 went on strike across all major correctional facilities in the State. The letter continues, “This crisis has occurred as a result of antiquated sentencing laws that led to overcrowding, numerous deaths, severe physical injury, as well as mental anguish to incarcerated individuals.”

In a country where over 80% of incarcerated workers are tasked with maintaining the prison itself, either through cooking, cleaning, laundry, or other essential needs, work stoppages can mean that the entire prison system shuts down. The strike is ongoing as of September 30 according to reports from inside prison walls.

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In conjunction with the strike, activists from organizations such as the Alabama Prison Advocacy & Incarcerated Families United Group and Both Sides of the Wall joined family members of incarcerated organizers at a rally called ‘Break Every Chain.’ The rally took place outside the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) headquarters in Montgomery, with the demand that State accept the prisoners’ demands. Organizers attempted to hand-deliver the demands letter to ADOC, but had to leave the letter at the counter as no employee came forward to collect it.

On the day the strike began, Alabama prison officials admitted that there are “reports of worker stoppages at all major Correctional Facilities in the state,” and said “controlled movement and other security measures have been deployed.” Activists have pointed out that prison officials rarely acknowledge prisoner-led actions, indicating that this strike is too massive to brush under the rug.

Prison slavery

On September 26, ADOC Commissioner John Hamm claimed that “all facilities are operational and there have [sic] been no disruption of critical services.” But according to reports shared by the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), a human rights organization founded by Alabama prisoners, prison officials are scrambling. “Alabama prison Commissioner has lied.. We are getting reports that all major institutions are under lock down not ‘operational.’” said one report. A September 28 report claimed that the prison warden and officers at Fountain Correctional Facility were struggling to perform the kitchen duties that incarcerated workers had discontinued in protest.

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Alabama prisons are severely understaffed with non-incarcerated labor. Even without this shortage, however, incarcerated labor is the pillar on which the functioning of the prisons rests upon. Yet prison workers function essentially as slaves, working for little to no pay. Alabama is one of five states which forces prisoners to work under threat of punishment or no pay, and one of seven states which does not pay prisoners at all for the vast majority of work assignments. These material conditions have led many to draw the comparison to chattel slavery, especially as most incarcerated in Alabama prisons are Black.

Attacking mass incarceration at the root

The central demands of the striking prisoners, however, were attacking the legal structure of mass incarceration itself, not just labor conditions. The demands are as follows:
1.Repeal the habitual offender law immediately
2.Make presumptive sentencing standards retroactive immediately
3.Repeal the drive-by shooting statute
4.Create a statewide Conviction Integrity Unit
5.Create mandatory parole criteria that will guarantee parole to all eligible persons who meet the criteria
6.Create a streamlined review process for medical furloughs and review of elderly incarcerated individuals
7.Immediate release reduction of the 30 year minimum for juvenile offenders to no more than 15 years before they are eligible for parole
8.Victims should not be able to keep protesting after an incarcerated citizens’ second time going up for parole
Notably, these demands center around lengthy sentencing that sustains the system of mass incarceration in the US. This is especially clear in Alabama, where the parole board has become notorious for denying the vast majority of paroles. During the fiscal year 2021, the State’s parole rate fell far short of the Alabama Parole Board’s own recommended guidelines, with only 15% of eligible prisoners granted parole. Black prisoners were granted parole less than half as frequently as white prisoners. Michael Antonio Bettis, a Black prisoner who has served 12 years out of a 20-year sentence for marijuana possession and distribution, was denied parole in May.


According to the Alabama drive-by shooting statute, or Section 13a-5-40(17), Code of Alabama 1975, killing a person through a drive-by shooting is punishable by death. This statute is a relic of the 1990’s tough-on-crime era in which many laws that precipitated mass incarceration were passed, including current President Joe Biden’s infamous Crime Bill. According to FAM, this statute has been applied disproportionately against Black men.

The Alabama Habitual Offender Law is also a site of struggle. This law, similar to many laws such as California’s Three-Strike Law, allows those who have been convicted of three felonies to be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Many have criticized this law for not including any distinction between violent and non-violent felonies. Individuals who have committed three non-violent crimes can be given life sentences under this law. In practice, 350 individuals who have committed non-homicide crimes are currently serving life sentences in Alabama.

As of 2021, Alabama incarcerated 938 per 100,000 people, a rate higher than every country on Earth and the vast majority of States in the US. The state does not seem determined to change this. At one point during the COVID-19 pandemic, Alabama was averaging the highest number of COVID deaths in the nation—the epicenter of the epicenter. And yet it diverted $400 million in COVID relief to fund the construction of three mega-prisons.

A system with an appetite for violence
Apart from containing around 1% of Alabama’s total population, the state’s prison system is also notoriously violent.

Alabama, the State in which the Black Scottsboro Boys narrowly escaped the death penalty after being falsely accused raping two white girls in 1931, has the fifth highest execution rate in the US. Recently, ADOC’s botching of two executions made headlines. In the case of Alan Eugene Miller, ADOC executioners failed to find a vein through which to inject lethal poison on September 22 before Miller’s death warrant expired. In the case of Joe Nathan James Jr., Alabama prison officials delayed the execution for three hours without explanation. An autopsy later revealed that ADOC had mutilated James in their attempt to locate a vein. “My initial impression of James was of someone whose hands and wrists had been burst by needles, in every place one can bend or flex,” wrote a journalist who viewed James’ body.

Shortly before the strike, but unrelated, the ADOC once again came under fire for their alleged medical mistreatment of prisoner Kastellio Demarcus Vaughan. On September 21, Vaughan’s sister Kassie Vaughan revealed disturbing pictures of Vaughan looking emaciated and physically ill, claiming that her brother had been healthy only months prior. Vaughan is currently incarcerated at Elmore Correctional Center. Following a public outcry, ADOC claimed that Vaughan had refused medical treatment. Kassie Vaughan responded on social media, writing, “I don’t understand how Elmore Correctional Center can say this situation is not real. They have no sympathy or compassion to at least speak out on their wrong doings. My brother laid there in pain. Malnourished. Bones protruding out his body. His wound clearly open and susceptible to infection. He wasn’t recognizable as my brother. He looked lifeless.”

In December 2020, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against the state of Alabama due to the conditions in men’s prisons. In the DOJ’s own words, “Alabama fails to provide adequate protection from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, fails to provide safe and sanitary conditions, and subjects prisoners to excessive force at the hands of prison staff.”

Retaliation and government response
Incarcerated organizers are reporting from various prisons that ADOC is retaliating against the strike. According to FAM, one prisoner reported, “no yard time, no trade school, no rehabilitation programs, no law library, nooooo normal activities. Not to mention no adequate meals, even though they are bringing Decatur workrelease inmates in to make food.”

“This is punishment and retaliation… Tactics to break what is breaking ADOC,” the prisoner wrote.

The Alabama Political Reporter wrote that according to prisoners, “all rehabilitation and education programs have halted, with privileges like wall phones and television being taken away or shut down entirely. Tablets that incarcerated individuals use to communicate with family, friends and legal representation outside of prisons have also been taken away in at least one facility.”

Through social media, prisoners shared pictures of the paltry meals they were receiving from ADOC.

In Elmore County within the Staton Correctional Facility, prisoners reported that they would only receive meals twice a day “until they stopped protesting.” As a source told the Alabama Political Reporter, “Warden Cargle felt the need to incite the inmates by telling them last week that she didn’t give a damn if they protested; she was going to protest too by feeding them sandwiches every day for every meal…Any time she was asked if she would give them a hot meal, she refused, stating that she wasn’t going to feed them good, so they would stay protesting.”

A spokesperson for ADOC claimed that “all meals are happening.”

Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama responded to the striking prisoners’ demands. “Some of these demands suggest that criminals like murderers and serial child sex offenders can walk the streets,” Ivey wrote. “And I can tell you that will never happen in the state of Alabama where we will always prioritize the safety of our citizens.”

Reports continue to flow from behind prison walls. “No matter what they try we will not fold” wrote a prisoner, as reported by FAM.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/09/30/ ... shut-down/
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Wed Oct 12, 2022 2:33 pm

"Society Has Shut Down On Us:" Prison Strikers Across Alabama Demand Change Despite Severe Retaliation
Haley Czarnek 12 Oct 2022

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Families and supporters of prisoners on strike rallied outside the Alabama Criminal Justice Center in Montgomery on September 26, 2022. (Photo: Free Alabama Movement, Twitter @FREEALAMOVEMENT)

The 13th amendment allows slavery for incarcerated people. The state of Alabama pays nothing for prison labor, rarely grants parole, and retaliates against those who protest unsanitary and unsafe conditions.

This article was originally published in Labor Notes .

Across the state of Alabama, where the state’s longest-ever strike is currently ongoing at Warrior Met Coal after over 18 months, another historic labor stoppage is in its second week. Thousands of incarcerated people at every major male prison in Alabama have refused to report to their work assignments.

“The message that we are sending is, the courts have shut down on us, the parole board has shut down on us,” a strike organizer who goes by Swift Justice told a reporter for independent news site Unicorn Riot. “This society has long ago shut down on us. So basically, if that’s the case, and you’re not wanting us to return back to society, you can run these facilities yourselves.”

“It makes no sense for us to continue to contribute to our own oppression,” Kinetik Justice, another striking prisoner, told Unicorn Riot. “We finance our own incarceration through our free labor and spending every dime we get in the canteens and so forth. It is our money and our family’s money that is used to keep us incarcerated and oppressed like this.”

The strike has its roots in years of inside organizing. In 2016, the Free Alabama Movement successfully led a 10-day nationwide strike that aimed to spotlight how the 13th Amendment has allowed the institution of slavery to transform itself, in spite of its abolition on paper. (The 13th Amendment banned slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”) That strike spanned at least 40 facilities in 24 states.

The deplorable conditions across the state’s prisons also make them particularly dangerous. According to a 2020 lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, the Alabama prison system “fails to provide adequate protection from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, fails to provide safe and sanitary conditions, and subjects prisoners to excessive force at the hands of prison staff.”

Organizers have crafted a list of demands , aimed primarily at Republican Governor Kay Ivey and the Alabama legislature. These demands include:

*Establishing mandatory parole criteria to guarantee parole to all eligible
*Repealing Alabama’s Habitual Felony Offender Act, which requires stricter punishment for those with prior felony convictions among other mandates
*Eliminating life-without-parole sentences
*Ensuring eligible persons receive “good time”—incentive time shaved off a sentence earned through good behavior
*Create a statewide conviction integrity unit to investigate possible wrongful convictions

UNBROKEN LINE TO SLAVERY
S
wift and Kinetik argue that there is an unbroken line extending from the institution of slavery as it existed in the antebellum era to the modern prison industrial complex.

“Alabama wishes for its slaves to remain passive and obedient to continue bringing millions of dollars of profit from our backs and blood,” Swift said in an October 1 press release.

If slavery is characterized, as sociologist Orlando Patterson contends, primarily by social death, the thread is clear: a person who becomes an inmate gets a number for a name, loses access to communication channels uncontrolled by the institution, is typically moved far from their family, and exists according to the dictates of guards, at least some of whom have been charged with or convicted of assaulting those in their care. Death, in the literal sense, is also a constant feature of Alabama’s prisons , and the full extent of the violence is hard to measure given ADOC’s tendency to provide no updates .

BRUTAL SYSTEM

Politicians and administrators continue to find new ways to make a system widely condemned for its brutality even more brutal. The parole board, for instance, has drastically reduced grants of conditional release; 46 percent of applications were denied in 2017, but that number skyrocketed to 84 percent in 2021. The average for the decade prior to 2021 was 37 percent , with the drastic increase in part reflecting the fact that the board very often declines to follow their own guidelines, choosing instead to keep more people locked up even as the Department of Justice has found that the prisons are unconstitutionally overcrowded.

While the criminal justice system disproportionately targets communities of color at every point in the process, the racial disparities in parole denials are still increasing; a Montgomery Advertiser article reports “grants for Black applicants dropping at a much faster rate in 2020 and 2021 than for whites.” As officials strip away any remaining hope many have of ever seeing the outside world again, what remains for inmates to focus on is the trauma the carceral system inflicts.

STRIKEBREAKING
Perhaps unsurprisingly, ADOC’s strikebreaking tactics are extreme. For instance, where the hedge funds that own Warrior Met Coal have made clear they intend to metaphorically “starve out” the miners in Brookwood, ADOC is employing actual starvation. In addition to adopting a so-called “holiday meal schedule” of only two meals at facilities all around the state, prisoners say those meals are made up of trays containing no hot food and limited nutrients. Numerous images of items such as two “sandwiches” constructed from only cold slices of bread and cheese have made the rounds on social media.

ADOC claims this is merely because they have lost most of their supply of free, forced labor, although it is questionable how much extra labor it would take to serve up a larger scoop of mush or add more bread slices to a tray.

Even beyond the ongoing starvation, prison officials have forced inmates to provide scab labor. If someone on work release (i.e. those allowed to work outside the prison, returning when their shift is complete) declines to cross the metaphorical picket line, prisoners say they are at risk of immediately losing their release status and being moved to Donaldson, a prison notorious—even by Alabama standards—for its extreme violence.

A person brought in from the North Alabama Work Release Center to take the place of the striking Alabama prisoners at Limestone told his story to Kinetik on video, expressing solidarity with the strikers; not even two hours after the video was posted online, the person who recorded the footage, Kinetik, was beaten by guards and locked in solitary confinement—not for the first time . Even for those who are prepared both to face violence from guards and to lose their hard-won work release status, the tremendous isolation folks on the inside face makes it difficult to find out about the strike in the first place.

Thousands of people have built solidarity in these most unlikely conditions. The labor movement depends on all of us recognizing that there is more that connects us than divides us, and that there are many more of us ready to fight for our rights than there are bosses and oppressors.

“Regardless of where we are,” Swift said on Saturday, “we are humans.”

Haley Czarnek is the national director of Law Students for Climate Accountability and serves as a fellow for United Campus Workers Alabama and the co-chair of the Labor Committee of the Birmingham Democratic Socialists of America.

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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 18, 2022 2:51 pm

Image
photo: Florida Prisoner Solidarity

Statements from Alabama prisoners as strike enters third week
Originally published: Its Going Down (anonymous) on October 16, 2022 by It's Going Down (more by Its Going Down (anonymous)) (Posted Oct 18, 2022)

An estimated 80% of prisoners from Alabama’s “major male facilities” went on strike on September 26th, in response to a wide range of conditions and grievances. Inside organizer Kinetik Swift Justice stated,

Basically, the message that we are sending is, the courts have shut down on us, the parole board has shut down on us. This society has long ago shut down on us. So basically, if that’s the case, and you’re not wanting us to return back to society, you can run these facilities yourselves.

The strike has now entered its third week, and at least five facilities, each with around 7,000 prisoners, continue to participate. Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) has punished prisoners by drastically reducing their meals, essentially attempting to starve them off the strike. “They have been killed, they have been abused, they are being tortured right now as we speak,” said Eric Buchanan, a formerly incarcerated person who spoke at a rally for the strike.

They are retaliating against our brothers right now by giving them very little food to eat.


ADOC has also used lower-custody prisoners to help break the strike, threatening to re-classify them back to a higher security facility if they refused to scab. Some of these minimum custody prisoners have still refused, however. One prisoner, who was thrown in solitary for refusing to help break the strike, stated,

They forced me to come over here from Decatur to put my life in jeopardy by working against the inmates, my own people, in this peaceful protest… I believe in what y’all doing. I’ve got a 21-year sentence. Y’all are helping me.


While not called for by any one group, organizations like the Free Alabama Movement are active on the inside, releasing demands. Both Sides of the Wall, a group of family members, formerly incarcerated, and others are supporting on the outside. Over a hundred demonstrated at the State Capitol building in Montgomery on Friday, October 14th.


With more than 20,000 people still striking on the inside—comrades on the outside are encouraged to continue to show solidarity and raise awareness about this historic strike. Don’t let ADOC bury this! Share interviews with striking prisoners, paint the walls, drop banners, spread the word to your own contacts on the inside in your state. Make a ruckus!

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Statements From The Inside

From : All confined citizens in Alabama prisons.

Since the peaceful labor strike within the Alabama Department of Corrections began on September 26, those who are striking have faced relentless attempts to break our spirit by the correctional staff. We have been starved, placed into solitary confinement and suicide cells as retaliation, and forced into dangerous situations as ADOC tries to turn us against each other. In spite of this, international media and activists have turned their attention toward Alabama and its inhumane treatment of and policies around incarcerated individuals. The world is watching.

We will not relent under these retaliatory tactics. Our brothers, particularly those with health conditions, addiction and mental health challenges, have faced challenges not only to their psychological well-being but also their very lives.

Especially alarming is ADOC’S intentional “bird feeding” food deprevention, which presents a severe health risk to those who suffer from diabetes and other illnesses that require a wellness diet.

Unlike the ADOC we value life.

By no means are we waiving a white flag of defeat. We are still demanding our concerns be heard before our Legislators and other elected officials. We also demand that our outside representatives be given a platform to be our voice and the public hear our arguments.

At this time, some have chosen to returned to work to ensure that ADOC does not continue to target the most vulnerable in our population. Others will continue to strike.

We will continue to escalate our strike, peacefully, until our voices are heard.

Alabama Confined Citizens

Individual Statement from Prisoner at Donaldson

My name is Gerald Griffin#247505. I’m serving a 22 year sentence under the Habitual Offender Act that’s is unconstitutional and that has the Alabama prisons over crowded in inhumane conditions prisoners here in Alabama connected their daily struggles for humanity and survival to the broader political context we entered collectively as one whole.

The prisoners in Alabama are tiered. Prisoners across the United States right now are actively engaging in some of the most passionate, consistent and effective rebellion in the country. The Alabama prisoners want better living conditions, workers pay incentives for programs they’ve completed, stop the abuse mentally and physically by ADOC officials, to put in action to oversee these unconstitutional sentences from the Habitual offender act law, and for them to let go these elders that been in prison for excessive sentences at Donaldson Correctional Facility.

We are going to stay strong. Thank you for the ones that support us in this shutdown.

Break every chain to have a opportunity to hug my mother and sister again…

https://mronline.org/2022/10/18/stateme ... hird-week/

**********

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Protesters Converge on State Capitol in Solidarity with Alabama Prison Strike
By Zariya Williams and Ryan Fatica, Contributors October 15, 2022

Montgomery, AL – On the 19th day of the statewide prisoner work strike on Friday, about 100 people gathered in front of the Alabama State Capitol Building in support of the thousands of prisoners currently striking.

On Oct. 7, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) confirmed that five facilities remained at a standstill due to the historic statewide work stoppage. Posts to a private Facebook group run by family members of striking prisoners confirmed that prisoners at five facilities continued to strike as of this week.

The ADOC admitted the ongoing strike has caused significant disruptions to the functioning of the prisons. “All facilities remain operational,” the department wrote in a press release on Sept. 28, 2022. “However, these work stoppages have affected food services given that inmate workers make up a large part of the facility support workforce.”


Prisoners are demanding significant changes to the state’s prison and judicial systems, including reform of the state’s sentencing law and parole board policies, and a demand that the Habitual Felony Offender Act (HFOA) be repealed.

The HFOA was passed in 1977 and its mandatory punishments include a life without parole sentence for anyone convicted of a Class A felony with any three prior felonies on their record, and a life sentence for anyone who was convicted of a Class B felony with any three prior felonies on their record.

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Demonstrators raised handmade signs at the Alabama State Capitol reading, “Abolish Segregation, We Demand No More Retaliation” and “Break the Chains, End Slavery!” Source: Zariya Williams
Friday’s protest was organized by Both Sides of the Wall, an organization of prisoners and their supporters. Many of those in attendance have loved ones who are currently on strike or are formerly incarcerated themselves.

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Eric Buchanan, a formerly incarcerated activist, spoke at the rally in Montgomery Friday. Source: Zariya Williams

“They have been killed, they have been abused, they are being tortured right now as we speak,” said Eric Buchanan, a formerly incarcerated person who spoke at the rally.

“They are retaliating against our brothers right now by giving them very little food to eat. I even pushed my plate back while I was eating supper last night,” Buchanan continued. “I said ‘Lord help me to push my plate back’ as if I was still in the struggle with my brothers.”

Striking prisoner Swift Justice told Unicorn Riot at the beginning of the strike: “Our meals consist of two bologna sandwiches in the morning time and two bologna sandwiches at dinner time. And when you do the calorie intake on that right there, a bologna sandwich with cheese, and on wheat bread, only equals up to 240 calories. So basically what we’re getting daily on that right there is just barely reaching 1000 calories a day.”


Hear directly from prisoners Swift Justice, Logical Solutions, and Kinetik Justice in our previous article by clicking here. https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/Alabama- ... e-Striking

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A crowd of around 100 people rallied in support of Alabama’s striking prisoners. Source: Zariya Williams

Nikki Davenport, wife of imprisoned striker Kinetik Justice, said she came out to the rally “to protest the fact that they’re not releasing anyone on parole, they’re not trying to rehabilitate, educate or let people have a second chance to be productive members of society.”

“They’re warehousing them and using them for slavery.”

Nikki Davenport
According to Davenport, prison authorities placed Kinetik in solitary confinement for his participation in organizing the strike and cut off all his communication. “They blocked three different numbers that I’ve had,” said Davenport. Last week, Davenport continued, “they cut all his clothes off of him and put him in a crisis cell like he was suicidal.”

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A protestor on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol held a sign reading, “Alabama Prisons are Death Camps.” Source: Zariya Williams

Striking prisoner Bernard Jemison spoke to the crowd via phone from inside one Alabama prison:

“They place us in an environment that is so hostile, so violent, so hopeless, so drug infested, I could go on and on. And our governor say the remedy to these issues is to build new prisons. But who is going to work at these new prisons? I don’t think she realizes, we’ve got one officer watching six dormitories by himself.”

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Protestors placed gravestones on the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama to highlight the death rate of the state’s prison system. Source: Zariya Williams

https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/proteste ... on-strike/
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 22, 2022 2:54 pm

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U.S. police kill twice as many people every year as we’ve been told
Originally published: MintPress News on October 20, 2022 by Lee Camp (more by MintPress News) | (Posted Oct 22, 2022)



Most countries are far different from the U.S. when it comes to murderous police..

Denmark and Switzerland often have zero killings by police per year. Iceland has only had one murder by a police officer in its history.

This means U.S. police murder more people in the first few hours of each new year than Icelandic cops have murdered, ever. So I will admit, this sounds kind of bad for America. Almost as bad as that but a new report shows it’s far worse.

A month ago, the Department of Justice released a report about the number of people who die while in the custody of law enforcement.

That sounds like a real page-turner. As one article from The Appeal put it, “DOJ Admits It Has No Idea How Many People Die in Law Enforcement Custody.” So, that 1,000 people number is just the victims we bothered to count.

The Appeal reports,

The report, authored by the Office of the Attorney General, offers an unprecedented accounting of the government’s neglect in tracking deaths in U.S. prisons and jails and at the hands of police … The federal government has failed to count thousands of deaths in law enforcement custody over the past three years…

How do you fail to track death? There’s a body laying there.

If the government has failed to count a lot of deaths—exactly how many deaths are we talking about here? As The New York Times reported in 2021,

Police killings in America have been undercounted by more than half over the past four decades, according to a new study … About 55 percent of fatal encounters with the police between 1980 and 2018 were listed as another cause of death.

Another cause of death? Like what? Taser-to-Face syndrome?

So if police killings are undercounted by 55 percent, how many would that be during this year? Well, as of October 7, 2022, The Washington Post reports that 1,039 people have been killed by police already. If that were only 45 percent of the actual total, then in reality 1,890 people would have already been killed by our police this year!

The Washington Post continues,

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Washington and published on Thursday in The Lancet, a major British medical journal, amounts to one of the most comprehensive looks at the scope of police violence in America, and the disproportionate impact on Black people.

How does this happen? How can such an extreme undercount of police killings take place? Well, for one thing, death certificates do not generally ask whether police officers were involved. So if a cop chokes someone to death, the certificate may just say “asphyxiation.” It likely will not say, “Roided-up sociopath with a badge strangled a guy!” And if the victim was Tasered to death, the certificate might read, “Heart attack brought on by excess electricity.”

Watch the full report above.

https://mronline.org/2022/10/22/u-s-pol ... been-told/

I am soo surprised.....

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Official autopsy reports released by Maryland's medical examiner to the Baltimore Sun reveal that Freddie Gray died from a single "high-energy injury" to the lower left side of his head, likely when the police van he was riding in stopped short and made him fall.

https://www.businessinsider.com/freddie ... sed-2015-6

(I've been on a couple 'rough rides' in a BCPD paddy-wagon, proly not as rough as Freddie got but fortunately I was young and healthy. Abuse and intimidation are standard tools of "law enforcement".)
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Re: Police, prison and abolition

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 25, 2022 2:11 pm

Alabama prison strike on hold after 3 weeks
October 24, 2022 Ryan Fatica

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On Oct. 14, about 100 people gathered in front of the Alabama State Capitol Building in support of the thousands of striking prisoners.

Alabama – Prisoners in Alabama announced on Oct. 14 that they had paused their historic three-week work stoppage. The strike, which started Sept. 26, involved thousands of prisoners throughout the state, causing the breakdown of normal operations at most major male prisons this month.

According to organizers, the strike’s end was announced following a protest at the state capitol in Montgomery hosted by Both Sides of the Wall. Diyawn Caldwell, founder of the prisoner advocacy group, explained that the strike may only be on pause, depending upon the government’s response.

“It’s been a collective effort from us on the outside and those on the inside that are organizing the strike to put it on hold to give the state, the governor, and the department of corrections time to address our grievances and concerns surrounding our demands,” said Caldwell. “If those grievances have not been addressed within an appropriate amount of time, we will resume the strike.”

Unicorn Riot interviewed Diyawn Caldwell and Christina Horvat, who is also with Both Sides of the Wall. They provided an intimate and in-depth look into the Alabama prison system:

(Audio file at link.)

On Oct. 18, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) confirmed that the prison work strike was over.

Strikers decided to put their protest on hold, in part, due to the impact that reduced caloric intake was having on prisoners with medical issues such as diabetes. During the strike, the ADOC reduced meal portions dramatically, feeding prisoners about 1000 calories or less per day.

“Our brothers, particularly those with health conditions, addiction and mental health challenges, have faced challenges not only to their psychological well-being but also their very lives,” strikers wrote in a public statement. “Especially alarming is ADOC’S intentional ‘bird feeding’ food [deprivation], which presents a severe health risk to those who suffer from diabetes and other illnesses that require a wellness diet.”

“Unlike the ADOC,” they wrote, “we value life.”

The Alabama Department of Corrections admitted at the beginning of the strike that their reliance on free prisoner labor meant that the strike had severely disrupted their ability to run their facilities.

In response to the reduction in food portions, attorneys representing more than 35 Alabama prisoners filed a motion in federal court on Oct. 7 requesting that a federal judge grant immediate injunctive relief to the strikers. The motion, which was filed in an ongoing federal lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against the Alabama Department of Corrections, claimed that the effect on the prisoners of the “bird feeding” “has been injurious, and their medical and psychological conditions will continue to deteriorate as their bodies are affected by inadequate dietary and medical access.”

“Some Plaintiff-Intervenors have lost a dangerous amount of body mass,” the motion reads. Prisoners “have had blood sugar drop to dangerous levels, and have experienced other acute medical symptoms (e.g., nausea) as a direct result of Defendants’ decisions to reduce calories and meal frequency.”

Judge R. David Proctor has yet to rule on the motion, although the Department of Justice has filed a motion in court opposing the prisoners’ attempt to intervene in the case, claiming that taking on additional considerations at this time would slow down the progress of the overall case.

The inhumane conditions in Alabama prisons have been extensively documented, including in a 2019 Department of Justice report that found that the ADOC “does not reasonably protect prisoners from rampant violence” and sexual abuse, and that conditions in Alabama prisons “violate the Constitution.”

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey’s solution to the ongoing crisis within the Alabama prison system is to use coronavirus federal relief funds to build three new prisons in her state. Ivey’s plan involves using up to $400 million of American Rescue Plan coronavirus relief funds on prison projects, according to the Associated Press.

Prisoners and their advocates have pushed back against this plan, claiming that building more prisons is not the solution to mass incarceration in Alabama.

The recent federal court motion in defense of the striking prisoners echoed these criticisms: “The Defendants and their affiliates are using this litigation to justify enormous expenditures on physical infrastructure, much of which is undoubtedly in poor repair (and practically all of which is unairconditioned, moldy and dilapidated, making recruitment of correctional officers difficult, especially at relatively low levels of pay).”

“As a result, the money that Defendants would use to hire correctional officers (not to mention feed or medicate prisoners) is going or will go to build new prisons that may improve conditions in the distant future, rather than to ameliorate the cruel and unusual punishment immediately at hand.”

Motion for Leave to Intervene

Incarcerated prisoner rights activist Kinetik Justice below told Unicorn Riot that during the first week of the labor strike, he was beaten by correctional officers and subsequently placed in solitary confinement:

(Audio file at link.)

When the strike was put on hold on October 14, strikers released a statement explaining why at least some prisoners were deciding to return to work. “Since the peaceful labor strike within the Alabama Department of Corrections began on September 26,” the statement reads. “Those who are striking have faced relentless attempts to break our spirit by the correctional staff.”

“We have been starved, placed into solitary confinement and suicide cells as retaliation, and forced into dangerous situations as ADOC tries to turn us against each other…The world is watching.”

Striking prisoners’ statement on Oct. 14

Organizers with Both Sides of the Wall say that the struggle is far from over. “We’re going to continue to fight,” said Caldwell. “It’s going to take the death of me if that’s what they’re looking for. We’ll fight tooth and nail.”

Source: Unicorn Riot

https://struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/10/2 ... r-3-weeks/

One wishes a whole bunch of 'kinetic justice' upon those bulls and their bosses.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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