Are prisons simply slave camps by another name? Chris Hedges makes a strong case
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On 10/10/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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The New Slave Revolt
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_new_slave_revolt_20161009/
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Posted on Oct 9, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Andrew Selsky / AP
A nationwide prison work stoppage and hunger strike, begun on Sept. 9, the
45th anniversary of the Attica uprising, have seen over 20,000 prisoners in
about 30 prisons do what we on the outside should do—refuse to cooperate.
“We will not only demand the end to prison slavery, we will end it
ourselves
by ceasing to be slaves,” prisoners of the Free Alabama Movement, the Free
Ohio Movement and the IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee wrote
in
a
communique(https://iwoc.noblogs.org/post/2016/04/01/announcement-of-national
ly-coordinated-prisoner-workstoppage-for-sept-9-2016/) .
This round of prison strikes—there will be more—has had little outside
support and press coverage. There have been few protests outside prison
walls. Prison authorities—unlike during the 1971 Attica
uprising(http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/riot-at-attica-prison)
when the press was allowed into the yard to interview the rebellious
prisoners—have shut out a compliant media. They have identified strike
leaders and placed them in isolation. Whole prisons in states such as Texas
were put on lockdown on the eve of the strike. It is hard to know how many
prisoners are still on strike, just as it is hard to know how many stopped
work or started to fast on Sept. 9.
Before the strike I was able to speak to prisoner leaders including Melvin
Ray, James Pleasant and Robert Earl
Council(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_slave_empire_20150621
)
, all of whom led work stoppages in Alabama prisons in January 2014 as part
of the Free Alabama Movement, as well as Siddique
Hasan(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_kill_our_revolutionaries_201502
22 ) , one of five leaders of the April 1993 uprising at the Southern Ohio
Correctional Facility at Lucasville, Ohio. (The Ohio revolt saw prisoners
take control of the facility for 11 days after numerous grievances,
including complaints about deaths allegedly caused by beatings from guards,
went unanswered.) Now, authorities have cut off the access of these and
other prisoner leaders to the press and the rest of the outside world. I
have not been able to communicate with the four men since the strike began.
These prison strike leaders put no hope in a “national conversation” about
race and mass incarceration. They know that corporations, the courts and
politicians will never halt the lethal police violence against unarmed men
and women of color or dismantle the vast gulags for the poor that dot the
country. The mechanisms of repression are by design. They are the logical
consequence of deindustrialization. The corporate state uses fear, police
violence and huge networks of jails and prisons to keep hundreds of
millions
of underemployed and unemployed poor people from revolting.
“We have to shut down the prisons,” Council, known as Kinetik, one of the
founders of the Free Alabama
Movement(https://freealabamamovement.wordpress.com/) , told me by phone
from
the Holman Correctional Facility in Escambia County, Ala. He has been in
prison 21 years, serving a sentence of life without parole. “We will not
work for free anymore. All the work in prisons, from cleaning to cutting
grass to working in the kitchen, is done by inmate labor. [Almost no
prisoner] in Alabama is paid. Without us the prisons, which are slave
empires, cannot function. Prisons, at the same time, charge us a variety of
fees, such as for our identification cards or wrist bracelets, and [impose]
numerous fines, especially for possession of contraband. They charge us
high
phone and commissary prices. Prisons each year are taking larger and larger
sums of money from the inmates and their families. The state gets from us
millions of dollars in free labor and then imposes fees and fines. You have
brothers that work in kitchens 12 to 15 hours a day and have done this for
years and have never been paid.”
These strike leaders say that, inside and outside the prison walls,
rebellion is the only option.
“We are not going to call for protests outside of statehouses,” Ray said.
“Legislators are owned by corporations. To go up there with the achy-breaky
heart is not going to do any good. These politicians are in it for the
money. If you are fighting mass incarceration, the people who are
incarcerated are not in the statehouse. They are not in the parks. They are
in the prisons. If you are going to fight for the people in prison, join
them at the prison. The kryptonite to fight the prison system, which is a
$500 billion enterprise, is the work strike. And we need people to come to
the prisons to let guys on the inside know they have outside support to
shut
the prison down. Once we take our labor back, prisons will again become
places for correction and rehabilitation rather than centers of corporate
profit.”
These striking prisoners are far more effective, and far more threatening
to
the corporate state, than the outside multitudes entranced and manipulated
by the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Goon Show. Denied the right to
employment, to vote and to public assistance because of felony convictions,
denied the right to justice because they are poor, and denied a voice
because they have been silenced by state censorship and a bankrupt media,
these prisoners were some of the first to understand the totalitarian
nature
of the corporate state.
“We do not believe in the political process,” said Ray, who spoke from the
St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Ala., and who is serving
life without parole. “We are not looking to politicians to submit reform
bills. We aren’t giving more money to lawyers. We don’t believe in the
courts. We will rely only on protests inside and outside of prisons and on
targeting the corporations that exploit prison labor and finance the
school-to-prison pipeline.”
The 2.3 million human beings, most of them poor people of color, who are
locked in cages across the country provide billions in salaries and other
revenues for depressed rural towns with large prisons. They provide
billions
more in profits to phone card companies, money transfer companies, food
service companies, merchandise vendors, construction companies, laundry
services, uniform companies, prison equipment vendors and the manufacturers
of pepper spray, body armor and the many other medieval instruments used
for
the physical restraint of prisoners. They also make billions for
corporations—Whole Foods, Verizon, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Sprint,
Victoria’s
Secret, American Airlines, J.C. Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Eddie
Bauer,
Wendy’s, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Motorola,
Caterpillar and dozens of others—that collectively exploit 1 million prison
laborers.
Why pay workers outside the walls the minimum wage when you can pay workers
behind walls only a couple of dollars a day? Why exploit sweatshop workers
in countries like Bangladesh when you can exploit sweatshop workers in U.S.
prisons? Why permit prison reform that would impede profits? Why not
expand
a system that reduces labor costs to slave wages?
“The beauty of a work stoppage is that the prison administrators have to
bring in compensated labor,” Hasan told me last year when I visited him on
death row in Ohio. “This is what happened in the Georgia prison system in
2010 when the prisoners held a work stoppage for six days. It cost the
state
a lot of money.”
Prisoners are the ideal workers in corporate America. They earn from 8
cents
to about 44 cents an hour. In some states, such as Alabama, they earn
nothing. They receive no Social Security, pensions or other benefits. They
do not get paid overtime. They are prohibited from organizing or carrying
out strikes. They always show up on time. They are not paid for sick days
or
granted vacations. They cannot complain about poor working conditions or
safety hazards. If they protest their meager wages or working conditions
they instantly lose their jobs and are placed in isolation cells. They live
in an environment where they daily face the possibility of torture,
beatings, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, racial profiling,
rancid
food, inadequate medical care, little or no heating and ventilation, and
rape. In short, they are slaves.
The bondage that prisoners endure is, little by little, being imposed on
us.
The fight inside prison walls is our own. And the harsh repression inside
prisons to halt the new strike mirrors the harsh repression that awaits us
if we resist.
Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, the minister of defense of the New Afrikan Black
Panther Party (Prison Chapter), sent this
message(http://rashidmod.com/?p=2219 ;) out of his Texas prison a few days
ago:
Monday, September 5, 2016: Labor Day. Here at the William P. Clements Unit,
a prison in remote Amarillo, Texas, the prisoners awoke to a late
breakfast.
A single PBJ sandwich, a small bowl of dry cereal, and no beverage.
This grossly inadequate meal, which is our common fare during
institution-wide lockdowns, signaled that a weeks—or months—long lockdown
was in effect. Hunger pangs set in almost immediately.
Such lockdowns are routinely imposed twice yearly so guards can conduct a
prison-wide search of each prisoner’s living area and property. But this
was
not a routine lockdown. For one, those lockdowns almost never occur during
holidays (however minor). If a holiday is set to fall during the period of
a
scheduled lockdown, the lockdown is postponed until the day after the
holiday. Secondly, those lockdowns happen exactly six months apart, almost
to the day. The next one wasn’t due until mid-October, making this lockdown
over a month ahead of schedule. Thirdly, for a couple months preceding this
lockdown, officials had been rejecting a lot of mail and media on grounds
that it contained information on or “advocating” “prison strikes,” “prison
disruption,” or “work strikes.” During late August and early September I
received a number of these rejections, including for letters from the
editor
of the San Francisco Bay View newspaper, Comrades from the Houston, TX
branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, and others.
Officials were also illegally opening and reading privileged legal and
media
mail outside my presence. They were obviously focused on discovering,
scrutinizing, and blocking any information coming into the prison about the
work stoppage/strike planned for prisons across the U.S. in protest of
prison slave labor and perpetual abuses, which were set to begin on
September 9, 2016—the 45th anniversary of the uprising at Attica State
Prison, that exposed to the world the inhumanity and savage brutality that
Amerika imposes on those it imprisons.
And here we find the clue to this untimely lockdown which officials here
have been falsely portraying to us as just another routine lockdown.
The actual aim of this lockdown was/is to pre-empt the prisoners at this
Unit from participating in the September 9th protest by confining everyone
to their cells in advance of it, and well into the period during which it
might last.
Johnson and other prison strike leaders see through the political theater
and illusions that the corporate elites employ to mask Americans’ surrender
of freedom. They are not fooled by the clever branding—including the
presidency of a black man and possibly the presidency of a woman—used to
cover over oppression.
“To say that we have a black president does not say anything,” Melvin Ray
said. “The politicians are the ones who orchestrated this system. They are
either directly involved as businessmen—many are already millionaires or
billionaires, or they are controlled by millionaires and billionaires. We
are not blindsided by titles. We are looking at what is going on behind the
scenes. We see a coordinated effort by the Koch brothers, ALEC [the
American
Legislative Exchange Council(http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed)
]
and political action committees that see in prisons a business opportunity.
Their goal is to increase [corporate] earnings. And once you look at it
like
this, it does not matter if we have a black or white president. That is why
the policies have not changed. The laws, such as mandatory minimum
[sentences], were put in place by big business so they would have access to
cheap labor. The anti-terrorism laws were enacted to close the doors on the
access to justice so people would be in prison longer. Big business
finances
campaigns. Big business writes the laws and legislation. And Obama takes
money from these people. He is as vested in this system as they are.”
Items once provided to prisoners, such as shoes, extra blankets and toilet
paper, now often must be bought from the prison commissary, run by
corporations such as Keefe Supply Co. These commissaries are, in effect,
company stores where prices are exorbitant and the buyers are hostage.
Companies such as GTL force prisoners to pay phone rates five or six times
higher than those on the outside. JPay, a money transfer service for
prisoners, imposes fees as high as 25 percent. The incarcerated are
increasingly being charged for electricity and room and board. This bleeds
the prisoners and their families of the little income they possess. Those
who run out of money are forced to take out prison loans to buy
medications,
cover legal and medical fees and purchase commissary items such as soap and
deodorant. Debt peonage is as common among prisoners as it is among the
wider public. And when prisoners are released they often owe the state
thousands of dollars in debt they incurred while locked up. When they can’t
pay it back they are tossed back into prison. The U.S. Bureau of Justice
Statistics reports that 75 percent of released prisoners are rearrested
within five years. This keeps the perpetual cycle of neoslavery lubricated.
“For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth and
that anything could be done to us,” Ray told me. “Then the word ‘nigger’
became politically incorrect. So they began calling us criminals. When you
say a person is a criminal it means that what happens to them does not
matter. It means he or she is a nigger. It means they deserve what they
get.”
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