Why prisons and prisoners must matter to the Occupy movement
[The following, from an article by Michael Novick, addressed to the Occupy Wall Street movement and Occupy LA, draws connections between the California prison movement's struggle for human rights and the Occupy movement. -- Frontlines ed.]
by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-LA
Prisons and the millions who are imprisoned are a critical issue in this society for the 1 percent and for the 99 percent. They must be a vital area of concern for the Occupy Wall Street movement and especially here in Occupy LA. Here’s why:
Social control
Dostoyevsky said that you can best understand a society by looking inside its prisons. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. We have 5 percent of the global population and 25 percent of all the prisoners.
Prisons expose the brutal violence at the base of social control, the iron fist hidden by the velvet glove of elections and by the weapons of mass distraction. After the mass rebellions of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the 1 percent made a conscious decision to de-industrialize the U.S. and drive poor people from the inner city to the outskirts of the cities, as in Latin America and Africa, or into the concentration camps.
Prison populations shot up from under 200,000 to over 2,600,000 and still rising. Millions more are in and out of jail or under custodial control by the parole and probation systems. This has resulted in painful and massive destabilization of communities, especially communities of color, and affected millions more in families disrupted by having members imprisoned and moved far away. Read more »
California Prison Officials offer hunger strikers retaliation and repression
Loved ones and human rights defenders rallied in Sacramento this week in solidarity with tortured California inmates
Deborah Dupre, Human Rights Examiner
October 7, 2011
Historical peaceful protest by 12000 California prisoners prompts officials to begin freezing them in small concrete cells
On Day 12 of the resumed historical peaceful Pelican Bay Prison Hunger strike, it has become apparent to human rights advocates with the major group supporting the inmates interviewed by CNN that numbers of strikers began dropping this week, from 12,000 refusing food, after the CDCR intensified retaliation against them, such as air conditioning the small concrete cells at 50 degrees. The hunger strike representatives at Pelican Bay who had been kept in D Corridor of the Security Housing Unit were moved to Administrative Segregation at Pelican Bay while at least one inmate on strike who was denied medications has suffered a heart attack. Read more »
California Prisoners Hunger Strike resumes
Gearing up for Round 2 of Hunger StrikeSeptember 23, 2011
On Monday, September 26th, prisoners at both Pelican Bay & Calipatria will resume the hunger strike to stop the torturous conditions of Security Housing Units (SHUs).
Prisoners first went on hunger strike on July 1st for nearly four weeks, until the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR) agreed to begin implementing some of the prisoners’ five core demands. The strike became one of the largest prison strikes in California history–stretching across a third of the California’s prisons (at least 13 State prisons), including more than 6,600 prisoners at its height. However, the CDCR’s response has been inadequate to say the least, giving prisoners & their families false hope of timely substantial change and an end to torture. For a detailed summary of the CDCR’s response to the strike, and why Pelican Bay prisoners are resuming it, read “Tortured SHU Prisoners Speak Out: The Struggle Continues.”
CDCR officials seem to be preemptively cracking down on prisoners in anticipation of the strike and have publicly said they were preparing to take harsh actions against strikers. Illustrating the CDCR’s hard-line stance, Undersecretary of Operations Scott Kernan said in a recent interview, “If there are other instances of hunger strikes, I don’t think the Department will approach it the same way this time around.”
- Lawyers who have recently visited Pelican Bay have taken testimony
from SHU prisoners who have been retaliated against by prison officials for their participation in this summer’s strike. “Prisoners are receiving serious disciplinary write-ups, usually reserved for serious rules violations, for things like talking in the library or not walking fast enough,” says Carol Strickman, a lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, “It’s clear that prison officials are trying to intimidate these men and to make them ineligible for any privileges or changes that may be forced by the strike.”
It’s these sorts of responses from the CDCR & forms of retaliation that show us prisoners are not recognized & treated as human beings, are constantly abused & tortured by the CDCR, and that the CDCR has no intention of stopping this. The prisoners clearly have no other recourse but to risk their lives, again.
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Hunger Strike Resumes in One Week!
Prisoners in the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit (SHU) will resume their hunger strike against torturous conditions of imprisonment next Monday, Sept. 26th 2011. Read Tortured SHU Prisoners Speak Out: The Struggle Continues for more details on why they are resuming the strike.
According to family members, prisoners at Calipatria State Prison will also resume the hunger strike on Sept. 26th in solidarity with the prisoners at Pelican Bay and also to expose the brutal conditions they are in at Calipatria, where hundreds of prisoners are labeled as gang members, validated and held in administrative segregation (AdSeg) units, waiting 3-4 years to be transferred to the Pelican Bay SHU indefinitely.
The Calipatria hunger strikers have a similar, separate list of demands from the strikers at Pelican Bay, including abolish the defriefing policy & modify active/inactive gang criteria and expanding canteen/package items & programs/privileges for validated/SHU status prisoners (such as art supplies, proctored exams for correspondence courses, P.I.A. soft shoes, yearly phone calls & two annual packages).
Southern California: Irvine 11 trial begins after a week of jury selection
Demonstrating support for the Irvine 11
Nora Barrows-Friedman, Electronic Intifada
09/07/2011
Following a week of selections from a pool of nearly 400 potential jurors, opening arguments in the Irvine 11 trial formally begin Wednesday in Orange County, California.
Defense attorneys for the group of Muslim students from UC Irvine and UC Riverside who interrupted a speech by an Israeli official in February 2010 will argue against the “selective and discriminatory” nature of the Orange County Disctrict Attorney’s office’s year-long attacks and investigations that could result in up to two years in jail for each student on criminal misdemeanor charges.
I attended some of the jury selection process in the OC courthouse last week, and will again be on hand throughout the trial to update our readers on the ongoing process during the next few weeks and after the trial ends on 23 September with a final verdict. Read more »
California Prisoners Showed the Way!
[A summation from Kersplebedeb of the California prisoners hunger strike]
This spring, the news started going around that a hunger strike was being planned in the Security Housing Unit at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP). Prisoners at the SHU had apparently united across “racial” lines, and promised to hungerstrike to the death if need be, starting on July 1. Initially most of the attention paid to the planned strike came from a small collection of organizations, mostly based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a clear mandate to support prisoners’ struggles and resist the prison-industrial complex. While much of the left ignores prison issues, or considers them at best a peripheral symptom of more fundamental social dysfunction, these groups recognized the potential importance of prisoner-led resistance in Pelican Bay’s SHU, California’s flagship torture unit.
Isolation Torture in the USA
Pelican Bay was built in 1989, on the remote northern edge of California, in the economically depressed town of Crescent City. One section of the new prison was designated the “Security Housing Unit” (SHU) – essentially a control unit, in which people are condemned to conditions of solitary confinement. The Pelican Bay SHU was just one of many such facilities built around this time, an indirect consequence of the United States’ ongoing mass incarceration policies.
As eloquently described by Michelle Alexander in her recent book The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration began as a ruling class response to the Black Liberation Movement in the 1960s, the result of the so-called “war on drugs”, crafted so as to replicate many of the effects of segregation but without the embarrassing bigoted rhetoric. Forty years later, the result is over two and a half million people in U.S. prisons, a majority of them people of color.
Units like the Pelican Bay SHU were partly a result of the “law and order” ideology that accompanied and supported mass incarceration, partly they were intended to neutralize any resistance from those who were now slated to spend their lives behind bars. As Manuel LaFontaine of All of Us or None and the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition has explained, “The minute one becomes politically engaged inside, and you begin to challenge the conditions of confinement, or begin to organize others to look beyond themselves and to focus on the things that led to their incarceration, such as social, political and economic oppression here in America and throughout the world, it’s the minute you’re deemed a candidate for the SHU.” Read more »
Maintaining the de-humanized and beastly myth of prisoners: Facebook’s “Blow to Prisoner’s Rights”
August 18, 2011
Facebook Caves to the Prison-Industrial-Complex
By KENNETH E. HARTMAN
In a decision setting back prisoners’ rights and helping to advance the interests of prison bureaucrats and their guard union allies, Facebook announced plans to work with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to shut down pages set up for prisoners. Spokespersons for the Department claimed that prisoners were using their Facebook pages to “stalk victims” and “conduct illegal activities,” and that this was all related to the increased incidence of cell phones found inside the prisons.
What a load of crap!
I’m one of the prisoners with a Facebook page that will be shut down to appease the shrill hate groups that continue to try and own the public debate about prisons, about crime and punishment, and about what kind of justice should be practiced here in the Land of the Free. It’s past time to address some of this fear mongering head-on, even if my keepers surely won’t appreciate it. Read more »
School district disgraced by top cop’s racist slurs, replaces him with cop who killed Black man
[An article in OAKLANDSEEN in February, 2011, described the killing of Raheim Brown:
"On Saturday, January 22nd, 20 year old Raheim Brown was shot and killed by the Oakland Unified School District’s police force outside Skyline High School. Police statements and media have reported that Brown tried to stab an officer with a screwdriver, and a second officer shot Brown five times—once in each arm, once in his chest, and twice in his head—in defense of his partner....On Thursday, February 3rd, outside the OUSD headquarters, Brown’s mother, Lori Davis, spoke at a press conference. Calling the killing an “assassination” she was horrified by the excessive use of force by school police officers. Davis believes that Sergeants Barhim Bhatt and Jonathan Bellusa, the two cops identified at the rally as the two involved in Brown’s killing, should 'never to be able to work in another police department ever.' Tamisha Stewart, the only civilian witness to the killing who was in a car with Brown outside Skyline High, spoke for the first time publicly about the event. The screwdriver Brown was accused of using as a weapon, according to Stewart, was being used in an attempt to hotwire a car, and it “never left the ignition.” While hotwiring a car might be cause for police attention, it is not cause for five bullets, including two to the head. Stewart added that “There was nothing that Raheim did that he deserved to die.” According to statements at the press conference, after Brown was killed Stewart was beaten badly and jailed for almost a week."
Nearly seven months later, the cop who killed Raheim Brown was named Chief of the Oakland Schools Police force, replacing a chief who had blurted too many racist slurs (at Black cops!) to be ignored any further.
The only justice in this story is in the ongoing struggle of the people in the streets. -- Frontlines ed.]
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Oakland schools’ top cop quits over slurs
Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, August 18, 2011
OAKLAND — The Oakland school district’s police chief, accused of aiming racist remarks at an African American sergeant during a drunken outburst after a charity golf tournament, resigned from the department Wednesday.
The departure of Pete Sarna, 41, from the force he led for two years also means the end of an investigation that the Oakland Unified School District began earlier this month into his alleged comments, said district spokesman Troy Flint. Read more »
San Francisco: BART backs off tactic of cutting cellphone service to thwart protests
After taking heat from the ACLU and being hacked by Anonymous for shutting down cellphone service to four stations last week, the Bay Area’s BART kept cell service on during Monday protests.
(BART police officers push back a protester at the Civic Center station in San Francisco, Monday, Aug. 15. Cellphone service was operating as protesters gathered at a San Francisco subway station during rush-hour several days after transit officials shut wireless service to head off another demonstration. Photo by Jeff Chiu/AP)
By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer, Christian Science Monitor
August 16, 2011
Officials at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) decided Monday that cutting cellphone service to thwart another planned protest would cause more trouble than the protests themselves. Instead, four stations were temporarily closed, creating a chaotic rush-hour commute.
About 50 activists protesting two BART police shootings managed to disrupt local train service Monday evening as transit officials closed several central stations to commuter travel. Read more »
People’s Hearing: “Charge the SFPD with Murder of Kenneth Harding and Serial Murders in the Black Community!”
People’s Tribunal on Racism and Police Violence
http://peopleshearing.wordpress.com
- Charge the SFPD with Murder of Kenneth Harding and Serial Murders in the Black Community!
- Unite to Create an Independent Investigation to Indict the Murderers!
- Justice for Kenneth Harding! Stop the Cover-up!
- Stop Pushing Black People out of San Francisco! NO to “Ethnic Cleansing”!
On Saturday, July 16, 2011, the SFPD killed Kenneth Harding, a 19 year-old Black man, in the Bayview area of San Francisco. Kenneth had just stepped off of a Muni-Metro train and onto the platform, where police were checking people for proof of fare payment.
Called “checkpoints,” these are common ways of criminalizing poor people, especially in neighborhoods undergoing gentrification and resettlement. Checkpoints have multiple purposes. They are used to harass and trap people, violating the human right to freedom of movement. They also help to facilitate the displacement of communities of color and families who come from the Bayview area and have lived there for generations. Checkpoints allow the police to monitor community members’ movements, putting people of color in great fear and ultimately forcing them to relocate from their homes and neighborhoods to ensure their own safety. This paves the way for the area to be redeveloped by major corporations and resettled by whites. In effect, checkpoints are a necessary tool of apartheid and genocide, historically used both in the United States and throughout the world.
The case of Kenneth Harding is a perfect example. When the police approached Kenneth, he ran for his life and they fired at him repeatedly. He died at the hands of the police and another life was lost in their ongoing campaign of genocide against the Black Nation. This terror campaign is happening not only locally and not only to African Americans, but it is happening statewide and nationally, to people of color and poor people overall. Read more »
California: Protests Against Police Brutality Spread Across Central Valley
by Modesto Anarcho
Saturday Jul 23rd, 2011
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/07/23/18685780.php
This week, protests took place in Stockton, Manteca, and Sacramento around incidents of police brutality and murder. All three demanded answers and the releasing of information by the police in regards to the cause of death of those in question.
On Tuesday 19th, family, friends, and community members marched over 70 strong on the Manteca City Council, demanding answers concerning the shooting death of Ernesto Duenez Jr. Also attending the march were several members of James Rivera and Rita Elias’ family. Ernesto was killed by Manteca police earlier in July during a traffic stop. Family of Ernesto report that the officer responsible for the fatal shooting was placed back on the force only two weeks after the killing. They demanded that the name of the officer be released as well as video that was taken during the shooting. According to a statement released by the family:
According to several witnesses, Ernesto posed no threat to the officer as he exited the back of the truck with his hands up. His leg became entangled in the seatbelt and as he fell to the ground he was shot by the officer without hesitation. Each shot ensuring death being the only outcome for Ernest including the final shot to the face. The officer made the decision to use excessive deadly force with such disregard for my cousin’s life. Read more »
The Struggle for Human Rights in California Prisons Continues
Another strong demonstration of family members and supporters of the courageous California Prisoner Strikers took place at the doors of the California Department of Corrections in Sacramento on Monday, July 25, 2011.
1. End Group Punishment & Administrative Abuse
2. Abolish the Debriefing Policy, and Modify Active/Inactive Gang Status Criteria -
3. Comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 Recommendations Regarding an End to Long-Term Solitary Confinement
4. Provide Adequate and Nutritious Food
5. Expand and Provide Constructive Programming and Privileges for Indefinite SHU Status Inmates.
A coalition of groups that organized the protest in Sacramento included the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition, Critical Resistance, ANSWER, All Of Us Or None, United for Drug Policy Reform, World Can’t Wait, California United for Responsible Budget, California Prison Focus, California Coalition for Women Prisoners and others.
California Prison hunger strike ends after 20 days; advocates say strike raised awareness about prison conditions
Thadeus Greenson and Kaci Poor/The Times-Standard
07/22/2011
California prison officials and prison advocacy groups announced Thursday the end of a three-week hunger strike that saw thousands of inmates at more than a dozen institutions refuse meals.
Dorsey Nunn, a mediator between the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the striking prisoners, said he spoke with Pelican Bay State Prison inmates over the phone Thursday who confirmed the news.
”The choices they were confronted with were torture or death,” Nunn said. “Those really aren’t choices. I think they chose to live to fight (for) justice another day.”
The strike began July 1 with 11 inmates in Pelican Bay State Prison’s Secure Housing Units, where suspected gang members are held in near complete isolation, sometimes for years at a time. The group issued a list of five demands — seeking better living conditions and treatment — and was quickly joined by more than 6,500 inmates in 13 institutions throughout the state who began refusing meals.
According to CDCR Deputy Press Secretary Terry Thornton, the striking inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison resumed eating state-issued food Wednesday night after a CDCR executive visited the prison and provided clarification on proposed plans to review and change policies. Changes implemented to date, according to the release, include “providing cold-weather caps, wall calendars and some educational opportunities for SHU inmates.” Read more »
More on the Murder of Kenneth Harding by the San Francisco Police Department
[The SFPD refuses to release the names of the cops who shot and killed Kenneth Harding on Saturday, July 16, 2011. Cops who have a history--who are serial abusers and killers--are protected from public scrutiny and condemnation by this official policy. At the same time, the police and their media mouthpieces spin alibis and excuses for the police attacks on the black community. But the people are not silent. Radio journalist Davey D of KPFA's Hard Knock Radio interviewed witnesses from the community. And Refa1, a revolutionary artist and "Panther cub", provides a picture of what the people are up against. -- Frontlines ed.]
Listen to Davey D’s report here: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/71633
Dying for Sunlight
a commentary by Mumia Abu-Jamal
July 15, 2011
Today, at the notorious California super-maximum prison, Pelican Bay, hundreds of prisoners are on a hunger strike. As of July 1, 2011 a number of men ceased eating state meals in protest of horrendously long-term confinement, government repression, lack of programs and the hated gang affiliation rules.
1. Individual instead of group responsibility.
2. Abolition of the “gang-debriefing” policy, which endangers both those who debrief and/or their families.
3. An end to long-term solitary confinement.
4. Adequate food, and
5. Constructive programs, such as art, phone privileges and the like.
A sub-demand is adequate natural sunlight – sunlight. There are few things more torturous than dying by starvation. These men are killing themselves potentially for fresh air and sunlight, and about a third of California prisoners, 11 out of 33 prisons, have joined them.
Contact the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition to find out how to support this effort for human rights. On the web at: prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com
From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal.
