Instead of Correction Facilities, we should call prisons by their
honest name. Terror Camps.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/22/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I had not seen this when I wrote my response to Carl this morning.
America's Slave Empire
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_slave_empire_20150621/
Posted on Jun 21, 2015
By Chris Hedges
IBWC KC / YouTube
Three prisoners-Melvin Ray, James Pleasant and Robert Earl Council-who led
work stoppages in Alabama prisons in January 2014 as part of the Free
Alabama Movement have spent the last 18 months in solitary confinement.
Authorities, unnerved by the protests that engulfed three prisons in the
state, as well as by videos and pictures of abusive conditions smuggled out
by the movement, say the men will remain in solitary confinement
indefinitely.
The prison strike leaders are denied televisions and reading material. They
spend at least three days a week, sometimes longer, without leaving their
tiny isolation cells. They eat their meals seated on their steel toilets.
They are allowed to shower only once every two days despite temperatures
that routinely rise above 90 degrees.
The men have become symbols of a growing resistance movement inside
American
prisons. The prisoners' work stoppages and refusal to co-operate with
authorities in Alabama are modeled on actions that shook the Georgia prison
system in December 2010. The strike leaders argue that this is the only
mechanism left to the 2.3 million prisoners across America. By refusing to
work-a tactic that would force prison authorities to hire compensated labor
or to induce the prisoners to return to their jobs by paying a fair
wage-the
neoslavery that defines the prison system can be broken. Prisoners are
currently organizing in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
"We have to shut down the prisons," Council, known as Kinetik, one of the
founders of the Free Alabama Movement, told me by phone from the Holman
Correctional Facility in Escambia County, Ala. He has been in prison for 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."
"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. We have focused our first boycott on McDonald's.
McDonald's uses prisoners to process beef for patties and package bread,
milk, chicken products. We have called for a national Stop Campaign against
McDonald's. We have identified this corporation to expose all the others.
There are too many corporations exploiting prison labor to try and take
them
all on at once."
"We are not going to call for protests outside of statehouses," Ray went
on.
"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."
The three prisoners said that until the prison-industrial complex was
dismantled there would be no prison reform. They said books such as Stokely
Carmichael's "Ready for Revolution" and Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim
Crow," along with the failure of prison reform movements, convinced them
that the only hope to battle back against a prison system that contains 25
percent of the world's prisoners was to organize resistance. And they find
no solace in a black president.
"To say that we have a black president does not say anything," 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] and political action committees that see in
prisons a business opportunity. Their goal is to increase 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."
In Alabama prisons, as in nearly all such state facilities across the
United
States, prisoners do nearly every job, including cooking, cleaning,
maintenance, laundry and staffing the prison barbershop. In the St. Clair
prison there is also a chemical plant, a furniture company and a repair
shop
for state vehicles. Other Alabama prisons run printing companies and
recycling plants, stamp license plates, make metal bed frames, operate sand
pits and tend fish farms. Only a few hundred of Alabama's 26,200
prisoners-the system is designed to hold only 13,130 people-are paid to
work; they get 17 to 71 cents an hour. The rest are slaves.
The men bemoaned a lack of recreational and educational programs and basic
hygiene supplies, the poor ventilation that sends temperatures in the cells
and dormitories to over 100 degrees, crumbling infrastructures,
infestations
of cockroaches and rats, and corrupt prison guards who routinely beat
prisoners and sell contraband, including drugs and cell phones. These
conditions, coupled with the overcrowding, are, they warned, creating a
tinderbox, especially as temperatures soar. There was a riot in St. Clair
in
April. There has been a rash of stabbings and fights in the prison.
Prisoners have assaulted 10 guards in St. Clair during the last four weeks.
"The worst thing is the water," said James Pleasant, a St. Clair prisoner
who has served 13 years of a 43-year sentence. "It is contaminated. It
causes kidney, renal failure and cancer. The food causes stomach diseases.
We have had three to four outbreaks of food poisoning in the last four
months."
He said that the prolonged caging of prisoners and the closing of
rehabilitation programs, including education programs, guarantee
recidivism,
something sought by the corporations that profit from prisons. An estimated
80 percent of prisoners entering the Alabama prison system are functionally
illiterate.
"Sleeping on a concrete slab is not going to teach you how to read or
write," Pleasant said. "Sleeping on a concrete slab will not solve mental
health issues. But the system does not change. It does what it is designed
to do. It makes sure people are driven back into the system to work without
pay."
"For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth and
that anything could be done to us," Ray said. "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."
Prisons, the men said, have increasingly placed larger and larger financial
burdens on families, with the poorest families suffering the most.
Prisoners, too, suffer as a result.
"If you don't get money from your family, your poverty blocks you out from
buying items at the commissary or making phone calls," Council said. "You
can't communicate with your family. If you don't have someone to send you
money you can't even buy stamps to write home. They [authorities] are
supposed to give us two free stamps a week, but I have never seen them do
it
in my 16 years of incarceration. We pay a $4 medical co-pay if we make a
sick call. Every additional medication we receive is $4. If you have a cold
and you get something for sinuses, pain meds and something for congestion,
that becomes a $16 visit. And if you get $20 from a family member, the
state
will take $16 off the top to pay for the visit. You end up with $4 to spend
at a jacked-up canteen. There are a lot of brothers walking around in debt.
..."
"It takes brutality and force to make a person work for free and live in
the
type of conditions we live in and not do anything about it," Ray said. "The
only way they made slavery work was to use force. It is no different in the
slave empire of prisons. They use brutality to hold it together. And this
brutality will not go away until the system goes away."
The men described numerous horrific beatings by guards.
Pleasant said, "They stood me up against the wall [with my hands cuffed
behind me]. There were about 10 officers. They started swinging, punching
and hitting me with sticks. They knocked my legs out from under me. My face
hit the floor. They stomped on my face. They sent me to the infirmary to
hide what they did, for 30 days. When I looked in the mirror I could not
recognize my facial features. This was the fourth time I was beaten like
this."
I asked the three men, speaking to me on a conference call, what prison
conditions said about America. They laughed.
"It says America is what it has always been, America," said Ray. "It says
if
you are poor and black you will be exploited, brutalized and murdered. It
says most of American society, especially white society, is indifferent. It
says nothing has really changed for us since slavery."
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
America's Slave Empire
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_slave_empire_20150621/
Posted on Jun 21, 2015
By Chris Hedges
IBWC KC / YouTube
Three prisoners-Melvin Ray, James Pleasant and Robert Earl Council-who led
work stoppages in Alabama prisons in January 2014 as part of the Free
Alabama Movement have spent the last 18 months in solitary confinement.
Authorities, unnerved by the protests that engulfed three prisons in the
state, as well as by videos and pictures of abusive conditions smuggled out
by the movement, say the men will remain in solitary confinement
indefinitely.
The prison strike leaders are denied televisions and reading material. They
spend at least three days a week, sometimes longer, without leaving their
tiny isolation cells. They eat their meals seated on their steel toilets.
They are allowed to shower only once every two days despite temperatures
that routinely rise above 90 degrees.
The men have become symbols of a growing resistance movement inside
American
prisons. The prisoners' work stoppages and refusal to co-operate with
authorities in Alabama are modeled on actions that shook the Georgia prison
system in December 2010. The strike leaders argue that this is the only
mechanism left to the 2.3 million prisoners across America. By refusing to
work-a tactic that would force prison authorities to hire compensated labor
or to induce the prisoners to return to their jobs by paying a fair
wage-the
neoslavery that defines the prison system can be broken. Prisoners are
currently organizing in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
"We have to shut down the prisons," Council, known as Kinetik, one of the
founders of the Free Alabama Movement, told me by phone from the Holman
Correctional Facility in Escambia County, Ala. He has been in prison for 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."
"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. We have focused our first boycott on McDonald's.
McDonald's uses prisoners to process beef for patties and package bread,
milk, chicken products. We have called for a national Stop Campaign against
McDonald's. We have identified this corporation to expose all the others.
There are too many corporations exploiting prison labor to try and take
them
all on at once."
"We are not going to call for protests outside of statehouses," Ray went
on.
"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."
The three prisoners said that until the prison-industrial complex was
dismantled there would be no prison reform. They said books such as Stokely
Carmichael's "Ready for Revolution" and Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim
Crow," along with the failure of prison reform movements, convinced them
that the only hope to battle back against a prison system that contains 25
percent of the world's prisoners was to organize resistance. And they find
no solace in a black president.
"To say that we have a black president does not say anything," 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] and political action committees that see in
prisons a business opportunity. Their goal is to increase 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."
In Alabama prisons, as in nearly all such state facilities across the
United
States, prisoners do nearly every job, including cooking, cleaning,
maintenance, laundry and staffing the prison barbershop. In the St. Clair
prison there is also a chemical plant, a furniture company and a repair
shop
for state vehicles. Other Alabama prisons run printing companies and
recycling plants, stamp license plates, make metal bed frames, operate sand
pits and tend fish farms. Only a few hundred of Alabama's 26,200
prisoners-the system is designed to hold only 13,130 people-are paid to
work; they get 17 to 71 cents an hour. The rest are slaves.
The men bemoaned a lack of recreational and educational programs and basic
hygiene supplies, the poor ventilation that sends temperatures in the cells
and dormitories to over 100 degrees, crumbling infrastructures,
infestations
of cockroaches and rats, and corrupt prison guards who routinely beat
prisoners and sell contraband, including drugs and cell phones. These
conditions, coupled with the overcrowding, are, they warned, creating a
tinderbox, especially as temperatures soar. There was a riot in St. Clair
in
April. There has been a rash of stabbings and fights in the prison.
Prisoners have assaulted 10 guards in St. Clair during the last four weeks.
"The worst thing is the water," said James Pleasant, a St. Clair prisoner
who has served 13 years of a 43-year sentence. "It is contaminated. It
causes kidney, renal failure and cancer. The food causes stomach diseases.
We have had three to four outbreaks of food poisoning in the last four
months."
He said that the prolonged caging of prisoners and the closing of
rehabilitation programs, including education programs, guarantee
recidivism,
something sought by the corporations that profit from prisons. An estimated
80 percent of prisoners entering the Alabama prison system are functionally
illiterate.
"Sleeping on a concrete slab is not going to teach you how to read or
write," Pleasant said. "Sleeping on a concrete slab will not solve mental
health issues. But the system does not change. It does what it is designed
to do. It makes sure people are driven back into the system to work without
pay."
"For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth and
that anything could be done to us," Ray said. "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."
Prisons, the men said, have increasingly placed larger and larger financial
burdens on families, with the poorest families suffering the most.
Prisoners, too, suffer as a result.
"If you don't get money from your family, your poverty blocks you out from
buying items at the commissary or making phone calls," Council said. "You
can't communicate with your family. If you don't have someone to send you
money you can't even buy stamps to write home. They [authorities] are
supposed to give us two free stamps a week, but I have never seen them do
it
in my 16 years of incarceration. We pay a $4 medical co-pay if we make a
sick call. Every additional medication we receive is $4. If you have a cold
and you get something for sinuses, pain meds and something for congestion,
that becomes a $16 visit. And if you get $20 from a family member, the
state
will take $16 off the top to pay for the visit. You end up with $4 to spend
at a jacked-up canteen. There are a lot of brothers walking around in debt.
..."
"It takes brutality and force to make a person work for free and live in
the
type of conditions we live in and not do anything about it," Ray said. "The
only way they made slavery work was to use force. It is no different in the
slave empire of prisons. They use brutality to hold it together. And this
brutality will not go away until the system goes away."
The men described numerous horrific beatings by guards.
Pleasant said, "They stood me up against the wall [with my hands cuffed
behind me]. There were about 10 officers. They started swinging, punching
and hitting me with sticks. They knocked my legs out from under me. My face
hit the floor. They stomped on my face. They sent me to the infirmary to
hide what they did, for 30 days. When I looked in the mirror I could not
recognize my facial features. This was the fourth time I was beaten like
this."
I asked the three men, speaking to me on a conference call, what prison
conditions said about America. They laughed.
"It says America is what it has always been, America," said Ray. "It says
if
you are poor and black you will be exploited, brutalized and murdered. It
says most of American society, especially white society, is indifferent. It
says nothing has really changed for us since slavery."
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