Angola 3 News

Medical Self Defense and the Black Panther Party --An interview with Alondra Nelson

2011-12-20T02:22:00.000-08:00

Medical Self Defense and the Black Panther Party

--An interview with Alondra Nelson

By Angola 3 News

Alondra Nelson, aprofessor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University, is the authorof a new book released last month, entitled Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. By documenting the multifaceted health activismof the Black Panther Party (BPP) and critically assessing the BPP’s strategyand tactics in a respectful and appreciative manner, Body and Soul presents an analysis that is rare and badly needed inUS colleges and universities today. In this interview, Nelson discusses how thePanthers’ legacy can both inspire and provide important strategic lessons fortoday’s new generation of political activists

In her book, Nelson writesthat “the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological.” Ona practical level, the BPP provided free community health care services,including preventative education. Simultaneously, the BPP railed against themedical-industrial complex, declaring that health care was “a right and not aprivilege.” Ronald “Doc” Satchel, the minister of health for the Chicago BPP,wrote in the BPP newspaper that “the medical profession within this capitalistsociety…is composed generally of people working for their own benefit andadvancement rather than the humane aspects of medical care.” A newsletterpublished by the Southern California chapter argued that “poor people ingeneral and black people in particular are not given the best care available.Our people are treated like animals, experimented on and made to wait long hoursin waiting rooms."

By 1970, People’sFree Medical Clinics had become a requirement for every BPP chapter. In 1972,the BPP revised point six of the founding ten-point-platform, adding a demandfor “completely free healthcare for all black and oppressed people…We believethat the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, healthfacilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have comeabout as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventativemedical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass healtheducation and research programs must be developed to give Black and oppressedpeople access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provideourselves with proper medical attention and care.”

While citing MartinLuther King’s 1966 declaration that “of all forms of inequality, injustice in healthcareis the most shocking and inhumane,” one chapter provides an importanthistorical context for the BPP’s health activism by detailing what Nelson calls“the long medical civil rights movement,” that began long before the BPP.“Mobilized in response to the distinctly hazardous risks posed by segregatedmedical facilities, professions, societies, and schools; deficient or nonexistenthealthcare services; medical maltreatment; and scientific racism, activismchallenges to medical discrimination have been an important focal point forAfrican American protest efforts and organizations. The Panthers were heirs tohealth activism that directly reflected tactics drawn from this tradition,”writes Nelson.

Nelson says thecentral focus of her scholarly work is on “the intersections of science, technology,medicine and inequality.” She has co-edited Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001) and Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (scheduled to be released in March, 2012).To learn more, please visit www.alondranelson.com.

Angola 3 News: In our recent interview with Billy X Jennings from It’s About Time BPP, one theme explored was how, with rareexception, the mainstream media has misrepresented the BPP. However, it seemsthat the even the radical and anti-capitalist media has generally underreportedthe health activism that is the focus if your book. How did the BPP’s healthactivism relate to their better-known stances against white supremacy,capitalism, and police violence?

AlondraNelson: Yes, it’s true. The Black Panthers’ health activism has beenunder-reported across the ideological spectrum. Their critics obviously did notwant to cast them in a positive light. And, as your question suggests, even theParty’s supporters said little about this important aspect of the BPP’s work. Ithink its plausible to say that many on the Right and some of us on theLeft--in very different ways and for completely opposite reasons--werecaptivated by a vision of the Party that did not include its health politics.Depictions of African Americans working in theirneighborhoods, wearing white medical coats, was unspectacular compared toimages of Black radicals wearing leather jackets and carrying guns.

It is ironic that our collective memory of the Panthers remains soincomplete because their health activism—from their political writing aboutmedical issues in The Black Panthernewspaper, to their practice of DIYhealthcare—exemplified the anti-racist, anti-capitalist stance for which theyare known. In fact, the reality of health inequality brought the BPP’spolitical perspective into sharper relief because it offered stark and specificexamples of how economic and racial oppression literally damaged bodies,families and communities.

As you know, the BPP was originally the Black Panther Party forSelf-Defense, a name that reflected that protecting communities from policebrutality was a primary motivation for the group’s founding. The BPP exposedthe misuse of power whether it was at the hands of police officers orphysicians. So, it’s also useful to think of the Panthers as being engaged in medicalself-defense.

In Los Angeles, Party members Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown, nursingprofessor Marie Branch, Dr. Terry Kupers, and others established that chapter’sPeople’s Free Medical Clinic. But, like all of the BPP’s health activism, thiswork extended beyond the clinic, including in this case, confronting policebrutality. (Branch shared meeting notes with me from the 1970s from herpersonal archive where the formation of BPP health programs and prisoners’ protectionfrom medical discrimination were seamlessly discussed). The LA Panthersadvocated for and provided health care for incarcerated persons; some of thesemen and women needed medical attention because they had been abused while inpolice custody.

A3N: How does the story of the BPP’s health activism, as presented in yourbook, contribute to and challenge the traditional presentations of the BPP byboth the mainstream and alternative media?

AN: Body and Soul offers an account of the BPP that moves away from the narrow confines ofthe so-called “culture wars,” in which the Party can only ever be a positiveforce or a negative element. Paying attention to the Party’s health activismcalls into question the inaccurate stereotype of the activists as aimless thugs.

We also gain a different perspective on things we thought we already knewabout the BPP, like the fact that the Panthers were avid followers of Fanon,Che and Mao, whose writings were required reading for all members. Through the prism of health, one can see very clearlythe influence of Fanon’s dissection of colonial medicine in Algeria on thePanthers’ understanding of medical discrimination in the U.S. We can takeseriously the fact that Fanon and Che were physicians as well as politicalthinkers. We can appreciate that Mao, who established the “barefoot doctors”lay health worker program, made available to the Party not only broadrevolutionary principles, but also specific ideas about health care aspolitical practice.

A3N: What do you think were the most successful tactics employed by the BPPas part of its health activism? Strategically speaking, what lessons from theBPP’s health activism do you think are most applicable for today’s activists tolearn from?

AN: Inaddition to setting up their own clinics, they used legal approaches notdissimilar from the NAACP to voice their opposition to problematic biomedicalresearch. The Party leadership realized early on that “policing the police”would not be the only method they used in their effort to topple racism andcapitalism. The Panthers were pretty flexible tacticians.

One of the lessons that the BPP offers today’s activists is that theyshould be more loyal to the desired outcome than to the tactic. The sit-in cameto be associated with the southern civil rights movement just as the mic checkis now emblematic of the Occupy movement. But these groups also used othertactics: marching, occupying, sermons, etc. Social movements are dynamicphenomena; circumstances are constantly changing. So too should tactics.

One of the BPP’s more fascinating tactics was what I call, aftersociologist Lily Hoffman, the “politics of knowledge.” Working in this vein,the Panthers engaged and reinterpreted scientific ideas about race and disease.They reinterpreted scientific theories about the causes of sickle cell anemia,for example, by placing the prevalence of the disease in the context of thehistory of the transatlantic slave trade, the medical-industrial complex andcontemporary racism.

The Panthers use of this tactic—the politics of knowledge—should remindtoday’s activists that “framing” matters. It is important to be able totranslate political arguments—health-related ones and other ones—into language,into stories really, that resonate with the broader public. The Party could beexpert at this.

The Nixon administration and mainstream philanthropies would ultimatelycoopt the issue of sickle cell anemia. But the BPP played a key role in raisingawareness about the disease and in situating it in a powerful politicallanguage that could mobilize communities.

A3N: Along with chapters focusing on the BPP’s free medical clinics and thecampaign to educate the Black community about and test for Sickle Cell Anemia,another chapter focuses on the BPP’s involvement with a diverse coalition thatsuccessfully organized against the formation of the Center for the Study andReduction of Violence at UCLA in 1973. You write that BPP felt that theCenter’s “biologization of violence” line of research would ultimately “craft anarrative of Black and Latino violent pathology” that would serve to “makealready marginalized populations more vulnerable to medicine as a tool ofsocial control,” and “effect the further criminalization of social groups—blackmales, the incarcerated—and in turn justify calls for increased surveillanceand social control.”

While writing that the defeat of the Center was a “notable triumph,” younote further that it “was somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory for Newton and hisallies, as blocking resources to the center as an entity would not preventindividual researchers from pursuing other sources of support for theirinvestigations.” With this in mind, how has biologization of violence researchprogressed since the 1970s? How much influence has it had on public policy?

AN: Attemptsto attribute the causes of violence to biology (and closely related to this,criminality) are a very old story. In the late 19th century, the influentialItalian criminologist Lombroso, claimed that new methods (e.g., phrenology) andtheories (e.g., social Darwinism) showed that the tendency toward criminalbehavior was inherited.

More than one hundred years later, similar ideas persist. In the 1990s,during the first Bush presidency, Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health andHuman Services set-up a “violence initiative” to explore the biological modelsof social unrest in urban settings. Your readers may recall that around thesame time another Bush official, referencing studies on violence amongnon-human primates, said that disproportionately black and brown “inner cities”were like “jungles.” (The initiative and controversial commentary around itwould recall to the heated debate the Panthers were engaged in over plans toform a “violence center” at UCLA in the 1970s that may have had an especiallyharmful impact on black and Latino youth and men).

Recently behavioral researchers have aimed to link the presence of what has been called the “warrior gene ” to violent , criminal behavior. At a time when we are learning even moreabout the complexities of genetic inheritance, about the epigenome and thesystems biology, it simply does not make sense that one single genetic marker could have such a dramatic, determinative effect.

A3N: What role has biologization of violence research played in justifyingthe mass incarceration explosion that began in the 1970s, increasing the prisonpopulation from 300,000 to 2.4 million today, giving the US the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prisoner population in theworld?

AN: Tothe extent that the longstanding efforts that I have just described have keptin circulation the fallacy that there is a definitive link between humanbiology and violence, theses ideas have indeed served as a justification forthe expansion of the carceral system.

This is where the policy implications of the biologization of violencecome to the fore: If violence is “in your genes” or “in your blood,” then onecan justify policies that lock people away because these people are “lost causes.”

And, in turn, the idea that there is a innate predisposition to violencecontributes to the decline of support for rehabilitation and reparative justiceprograms.

A3N: Since the 1970s, has the US come any closer to realizing the BPP’spublic health goals? If BPP co-founderHuey P Newton were alive today, what do you think he would say about PresidentObama’s “Affordable Care Act?”

AN: Therevised ten-point platform was prescient in capturing one side of the recentdebates about widening health inequality in the U.S. and what to do about it.If I had to venture a guess, I would say that Newton and the Party would haveappreciated the historic nature of what President Obama accomplished—a featthat many administrations before his had variously tried to accomplish andfailed to do. Perhaps Newton would have even observed that the Affordable CareAct is a very small step in the right direction.

However, some journalists and pundits have noted the similarity betweenPresident Obama’s historic Affordable Care Act and the national insurance planthat former President Nixon backed unsuccessfully. Given the animus betweenthe Party and Nixon, and the way this administration and its agents worked todestroy the BPP, it is hard to imagine that Newton would have been in strong supportof recent healthcare reform legislation. There would have certainly beenopposition to the fact that President Obama’s plan is a boon for insurancecompanies because the Panthers demanded, “healthcare for the people, not forprofit.”

--Angola 3 News is an official project of the International Coalition toFree the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com, where we provide thelatest news about the Angola 3. Additionally we are also creating our own mediaprojects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, likeracism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, andmore. Our articles and videos have been published by Alternet, Truthout,Counterpunch, Monthly Review, Z Magazine, Indymedia, and many others.

VIDEO: Resisting Gender Violence Without Cops or Prisons --An interview with Victoria Law

2011-11-29T03:24:00.001-08:00

Resisting Gender Violence Without Cops or Prisons
--An interview with Victoria Law

By Angola 3 News

(First published by Truthout)

Activist and journalist Victoria Law is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press, 2009). Law has previously been interviewed by Angola 3 News on two separate occasions. Our first interview focused on the torture of women prisoners in the US. The second interview looked at how the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s advocated for the decriminalization of women’s self defense. Taking this critique of the US criminal “justice” system one step further, Law presented a prison abolitionist critique of the how the mainstream women's movement, then and now, has embraced the same “justice” system as a vehicle for combating violence against women.

While citing the important work of INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, Law argues that “today, abuse is treated as an individual pathology rather than a broader social issue rooted in centuries of patriarchy and misogyny. Viewing abuse as an individual problem has meant that the solution becomes intervening in and punishing individual abusers without looking at the overall conditions that allow abuse to go unchallenged and also allows the state to begin to co-opt concerns about gendered violence.”

Furthermore, “the threat of imprisonment does not deter abuse; it simply drives it further underground. Remember that there are many forms of abuse and violence, and not all are illegal. It also sets up a false dichotomy in which the survivor has to choose between personal safety and criminalizing and/or imprisoning a loved one. Arrest and imprisonment does not reduce, let alone prevent, violence. Building structures and networks to address the lack of options and resources available to women is more effective. Challenging patriarchy and male supremacy is a much more effective solution, although it is not one that funders and the state want to see,” says Law.

In our new video-interview, Law builds upon her earlier prison abolitionist critique by discussing practical alternatives for effectively confronting gender violence without using the prison system. She cites many success stories where women, not wanting to work with the police, instead collectively organized in an autonomous fashion. Law stresses that at the foundation of these anti-violence projects is the idea that gender violence needs to be a seen as a community issue, as opposed to simply being a problem for the individual to deal with.

One group spotlighted, Sistah II Sistah / Hermana a Hermana, in New York City, was formed to confront both interpersonal violence and state violence. They formed discussion groups where experiences are shared and the women collectively decide what tactics and strategies to employ. In one instance, they confronted an ex-boyfriend who was stalking a member of the group by going to his workplace, where they demanded he stop and successfully enlisted the support of his employer and co-workers.

Self defense advocacy and training is another tactic employed by many of the groups cited by Law. For example, in the 1970s, two feminist martial artists founded Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts (BWMA), later renamed the Center for Anti-Violence Education in the 1980s. Along with teaching practical self defense techniques at sliding-scale classes, Law emphasizes that the Center also focused on the larger picture of how violence “holds different types of oppressions together,” resulting in a complex situation for poor women of color.

Our interview is being released in conjunction with the Unite to End Violence Against Women campaign first initiated in 1991 by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. This campaign began sixteen days of action on November 25, the International Day Against Violence Against Women, and will conclude on December 10, International Human Rights Day. We will be releasing two more segments of our video interview with Victoria Law during the sixteen days of action, so stay tuned to learn more about how Chinese sisterhood societies dealt with gender violence, as well as an update on new stories of women prisoners’ resistance that have happened since the first edition of Resistance Behind Bars was released in 2009 (a second edition is scheduled to be released next year).

--Angola 3 News is an official project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com, where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. Additionally we are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. Our articles and videos have been published by Alternet, Truthout, Counterpunch, Monthly Review, Z Magazine, Indymedia, and many others.

Bonding With Herman Wallace Inside a Louisiana Dungeon

2011-10-29T18:46:00.000-07:00

Bonding With Herman Wallace Inside a Louisiana Dungeon

By Ashley Wennerstrom

I first wrote to Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox after seeing In the Land of the Free last spring and learning of the horrendous injustices the Angola 3 have suffered. I felt compelled to offer my support and admiration for their commitment to social justice. Within just a few days, I received a response from Herman (Albert wrote me a beautiful letter the following week) and we began to exchange letters on a weekly basis. After several months of sparring about political philosophy, discussing literature, and discovering unexpected similarities, I was delighted when Herman asked me to join him for a special visit.

Two days before our scheduled visit, I received a letter from Herman explaining that he had not yet been notified of whether our visit was approved. I had to call the prison the morning I hoped to see him to learn that permission had indeed been granted. Upon my arrival at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, staff informed me I was not on Mr. Wallace’s visiting list and would not be allowed to enter. I persisted, and staff eventually located my name on their list of approved special visitors. I was instructed to pass through a metal detector and was given a full body pat down before boarding the bus to the maximum security prison.

I waited about 15 minutes in a Plexiglass and telephone lined corridor for Herman to appear. When he finally arrived, clad in a denim shirt and jeans, his quizzical look instantly revealed he was shocked to
find me on the opposite side of the visiting booth. Lifting the receiver with one shackled hand, he explained that in spite of his inquiries, the prison authorities never revealed whether approval for
my visit had been granted. He was in his cell writing a letter of complaint about this lack of information when a guard informed him a visitor had arrived.

Our two hours together passed quickly, with much laughter. Herman appeared well physically and joked that “such a physique for a man of my age” was attributable to regular running on the yard (albeit in an
enclosed cage). Herman spoke slowly and deliberately. His conversation drifted between topics, but he always returned to his original point. Although he claimed to be “a little bit senile,” his memory and
knowledge of outside world was remarkable. He knew better than I the geography of the New Orleans neighborhood where he grew up and, coincidentally, I now live. He was well-versed in current politics. He referenced social media and specific websites. Only a few remarks—namely his confusion of my large, flower-shaped earrings for Stars of David—reminded me that I was speaking with a man who had been without exposure to the outside world longer than I had been alive. Herman was concerned for my safety—had I driven far in the rain?—and asked after my family.   His smile waivered only when he mentioned the difficulty of not being able to attend funerals for the numerous family and friends he’s lost throughout his 44 years of incarceration. He quickly changed the subject when he saw my eyes well with empathetic tears. At the end of our visit, I told Herman that I would be honored to see him again.

One month later, Parnell Herbert and I found Herman distraught when we arrived for a visit. Prison authorities had just searched his cell to ensure that his property was “in compliance” with regulations. The thinly-veiled disciplinary action resulted in the seizure of many of his treasured photos, letters, and books. Herman realized that he had one piece of good news to share with us—his recent efforts to improve conditions had been successful. He and the other men in closed cell restriction had just been granted permission to spend an hour on the yard each day, rather than just four times each week.   Herman was back to being his usual boisterous self by then end of our 4-hour contact visit, in which the three of us were allowed to hug one another, sit in the same room together, and share a meal (if hotdogs and sodas can be considered to constitute a meal).

I spent time with Herman each of the last two weekends. He remained shackled throughout both 2-hour non-contact visits. At one point a guard checked to ensure that he had sufficient slack in the restraints to be able to hold the phone comfortably, but the handcuffs were kept tight enough to leave imprints on his wrists. Herman was un-phased and jokingly bragged about his extraordinary collection of “jewelry.” Our discussions drifted between the details of his case, personal stories about our lives and loved ones, politics, our unlikely friendship, the constant harassment he endures on a daily basis, and our mutual desire to improve the lives of others. Just before our visit came to a close last Saturday, Herman asked, “What inspires you?” The answer to the question—a human who has remained principled, positive and purpose-driven in spite of living a nightmare—was quite literally staring me in the face.

"We Called Ourselves the Children of Malcolm" --An interview with Billy X Jennings of It's About Time BPP

2011-10-17T12:05:00.001-07:00

"We Called Ourselves the Children of Malcolm"
--An interview with Billy X Jennings of It's About Time BPP

Video by Angola 3 News

This year marks the 45th year since the Black Panther Party was co-founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland. It's About Time BPP is organizing events in the SF Bay Area throughout the month, with the biggest events Oct. 21-23. Read the full schedule below (click on the graphic to enlarge it) and link to the main event website here).

Featured above is a new video-interview with Billy X Jennings by Angola 3 News, entitled "We Called Ourselves the Children of Malcolm," featuring archival photos and more graphics from www.itsabouttimebpp.com, including the photo exhibit "Women of the Black Panther Party and Beyond." Link to the full screen, high quality version of the video here.

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE BY IT'S ABOUT TIME BPP:

The It's About Time Committee is committed to preserving and promoting the legacy of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and its programs of community survival pending social change. We will commemorate the historic legacies of the BPP as well as the many sacrifices and constructive contributions that all of us made while serving the people body and soul. Voter Registeration

We have the responsibility to place our own experiences into historical context; otherwise the legacy of the Black Panther Party will be ignored, dismissed and distorted by today's commentators and tomorrow's historians.

We will maintain a network of Black Panther Party alumni and supporters for the purpose of providing educational information to community groups or the public at large regarding issues of social justice. This will include publishing a newsletter and maintaining a speakers' bureau. We also organize local community events and support other community organizations who promote social justice issues. We provide mentoring for urban youth groups to encourage positive community activity and voluntarism.

We commemorate the sacrifices of those who fell in body and spirit to the prevailing internal and external forces of those times. We must continue to bring attention to the plight of the many political prisoners and exiles who were victims of the government repression which contributed to the Party's demise.

We need to reclaim our history and dispel the many myths about the Party.

IT'S ABOUT TIME!

--Angola 3 News is an official project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Along with providing the latest news about a trip of Black Panther political prisoners known as the Angola 3, we are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. Our articles and videos have been published by Alternet, Truthout, Counterpunch, Monthly Review, Z Magazine, Indymedia, and many others.

15 Years of Giving Voice to Women and Transgender Prisoners --An interview with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners

2011-10-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

15 Years of Giving Voice to Women and Transgender Prisoners in California
--An interview with Diana Block, Pam Fadem, and Deirdre Wilson of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners

By Angola 3 News

On Sept. 26, the statewide prisoner hunger strike resumed after a postponement of almost two months to give the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) time to implement policy changes. The CDCR has reported that as of Sept. 28, almost 12,000 prisoners were striking and public support is needed in order for the strike to be most effective. An update posted October 7 at the “Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity” website stated that “medical conditions are also worsening for strikers throughout the state. We’ve received reports that after 12 days of no food, prisoners are once again losing severe weight and fainting. One hunger striker at Pelican Bay was denied his medication and consequently suffered from a heart attack and is now is an outside hospital in Oregon.”

The current hunger strike demonstrates once again that injustice fuels resistance, and California has a rich history of prisoners, former prisoners, and their supporters taking a stand. Among these freedom fighters is the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), self-publishers of a newsletter entitled The Fire Inside (archived here). CCWP will be celebrating its 15th year anniversary on October 14, with an event in San Francisco featuring longtime anti-prison activist and former political prisoner Angela Davis along with other speakers and performers.

Our previous coverage of the statewide hunger strike focused on the issue of solitary confinement, as well as statewide grassroots organizing against California’s prison system. In this interview with three members of CCWP, we examine the treatment of women and transgender prisoners in California and discuss how CCWP is fighting back.

Diana Block is a founding member of CCWP and has been working on The Fire Inside newsletter since it was started. She is a mother and the author of a memoir entitled Arm the Spirit – A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back (AK Press, 2009).

Pam Fadem is a long time member of CCWP and has worked on the Fire Inside for over 10 years. She is a mom, a health educator and a disability rights activist as well. Pam had her own experience with the criminal injustice system when she refused to cooperate with a federal grand jury targeting the Puerto Rican Independence Movement.

Deirdre Wilson is a former prisoner, a program coordinator for CCWP and a mother. She began to work with Free Battered Women/CCWP shortly after she got out of prison because “the whole FBW/CCWP community made me feel honored for surviving my experiences and accepted me just as I was—a rare feeling for people released from prison!”

Angola 3 News: When and how was CCWP first started?

California Coalition for Women Prisoners: First, we want to thank Angola 3 News for this opportunity to discuss the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and The Fire Inside newsletter. This 15th Anniversary of The Fire Inside gives us a chance to reflect on where things were 15 years ago and all the many struggles that CCWP has been a part of since 1995.

Some of the founding members of CCWP are still involved with the organization, but many have gone on to other work and different parts of the country. Far too many prisoners and former prisoners have made their transition and are not around to remind us of our roots.

Luckily, The Fire Inside itself offers first-hand documentation of this history which is invaluable for building our movement forward through the next fifteen years and beyond.

CCWP was started by prisoners, former prisoners and advocates on the outside in 1995 when a lawsuit, Shumate v. Wilson, was brought by a team of legal organizations to challenge the cruel, inhumane, and unconstitutional medical care that women prisoners were enduring. The prisoner plaintiffs in the lawsuit recognized that they couldn’t expect that legal challenges alone would improve their conditions of confinement. They wanted to ignite a grassroots movement to challenge not only health care conditions but the entire prison system. CCWP was born from this vision and from the beginning it included members on both sides of the walls.

Soon after CCWP was started, prisoners decided that they wanted to put out a newsletter in collaboration with members outside. As founding member Charisse Shumate put it in the very first issue of the newsletter: “I, Charisse Shumate, wish I could be there with you because as you grow in numbers, for us behind the walls of CCWF, the big cover up is going on inside . . . Is it because they have forgot we are human? If walls could talk, we would not have to beg help.” (FI #1, June 1996).

From that first issue, published in June 1996, The Fire Inside has allowed the “walls to talk,” making visible the lives of tens of thousands of women and trans prisoners who have been literally disappeared from society.

(Video documentary by Freedom Archives and CCWP entitled, Charisse Shumate –
Fighting for Our Lives, can be viewed online here.)

A3N: What is published in The Fire Inside? How is it used as an organizing tool?

CCWP: For us, the newsletter has always been more than a printed set of words and some photos. When Dana, a former prisoner, suggested the name “The Fire Inside,” it clicked with all of us immediately because it signified that this newsletter could be a means of nurturing the fire of creativity and resistance on both sides of the walls.

As we say in the editorial for our special 15th Anniversary Commemorative issue: “Spirit and character shaped in resistance to systematic dehumanization give rise to profound expressions of humanity. The lessons are deeper than the news of particular issue or events…As long as we have a voice and can hear the voice of another, we can transform our conditions. It is not only those on the inside who suffer. It is not only those on the outside who provide the inspiration.” (FI #45, fall 2011)

The Fire Inside (FI) has always dealt with news, issues, events and the many dimensions of activism and resistance inside the women’s prisons. FI has been on the front lines of exploring and contesting the multifaceted ways in which gender oppression constructs the entire prison system. Many of the subjects it has opened up have subsequently been further investigated, documented and analyzed by advocates, academics, policymakers and authors across the United States.

Health care, motherhood and parenting, lesbianism and transgender experience, immigrant prisoners, racism, parole, spirituality, the school-to-prison pipeline, decarceration strategies and resistance are among the many topics that FI has explored over the years. Since Fall 2001, a portion of each newsletter has been translated into Spanish, since many prisoners do not speak or read English. FI has also engaged in dialogue about the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the ravaging impact of Hurricane Katrina, the racist legacy leading to the prosecution of the Jena 6 (young black men in Jena, Louisiana), and the racist prosecution and incarceration of the New Jersey 4, four young black lesbians in New York State.

FI has provided an opportunity for people who might not think of themselves as “writers” to see their own words and thoughts in print, whether as a full article, an interview, or a collage of many short statements woven together. These conversations have provided direction for CCWP’s activist program that addresses the range of problems identified in the pages of FI. The newsletter’s purpose is not just to describe existing conditions but to support an action program which will transform them.

A3N: What are some of the key projects that CCWP is involved in today and what role do current and former prisoners themselves play in CCWP?

CCWP: Our programs are all developed through the guidance and collaboration of the prisoners and former prisoners with whom we work. Since the overwhelming majority of women in prison are women of color, we prioritize the input of people from these communities – inside and outside of prison. Our current projects fall into four main categories:

(1) We monitor and challenge the abusive conditions inside the women’s prisons, including grossly inadequate health care, sexual abuse, and economic exploitation. We are actively supporting the Supreme Court ruling that requires California to reduce its prison population by 44,000 over the next three years. With regular input from prisoners, we are closely monitoring the state’s realignment process, which is shifting prisoners from state to county institutions in order to reduce overcrowding.

Unless realignment means the actual release of prisoners AND providing those returning to the community with the livelihood, shelter, trauma recovery services and peer support they need to succeed, it is just a matter of channeling prisoners from one inhumane facility to another.

(2) We fight for the release of women and transgender prisoners from life sentences as directed by law. We advocate for changes in the dysfunctional parole system in order to insure that all of those eligible for parole are actually released. We put a focus on the campaigns for release and change of the laws regarding survivors of intimate partner battering and those convicted as juveniles.

Recently we have expanded our work with young lifers - women and trans prisoners who are sentenced to life terms, or life without parole, when they were juveniles, an increasing trend in California. The U.S. is the only country in the world that sentences juveniles to life without parole and California has 270 juveniles in this category, the largest number in the country. We are working closely with a group of young lifers at the Central California Women’s Facility to educate the public about this issue and pass legislation that will change this policy. Currently, SB9, which is pending legislative approval, is a small step in this direction.

(3) We support women and transgender prisoners in their process of re-entering the community so they are able to survive, grow and become fully involved in the struggle for civil and human rights. It is extremely difficult for women and trans people coming out of prison after many years to sustain their survival and also become involved with social change activities unless they receive support and become part of a community that is dedicated to safety and to making change.

CCWP is developing new methods of offering peer support for sustainable re-entry and community involvement through our PAR program (Peer Advocates for Reentry). Through this program, we pair up women and trans people coming out of prison with former prisoners who have been out for a while to share their experiences, help navigate the system and encourage people to become involved with challenging the prison system.

(4) We organize against prison expansion and advocate for prison population reduction. As part of the CURB alliance, we develop campaigns that shift budget priorities away from incarceration and towards education and other forms of community investment. Unless we can reverse the tide of prison expansion in California and achieve a shift in public consciousness toward health and justice instead of destruction and death, we will not be able to achieve our other long term goals.

The CDCR has a history of trying to coopt activists working for women prisoners into supporting so-called “gender responsive” programs which actually feed into the expansion of the PIC. We are committed to insuring that any positive changes for women and trans prisoners do not lead to more prison beds or buildings.

A3N: Why do you think the number of women prisoners has increased so sharply as of late? How, if at all, has the mainstream media presented the rising incarceration rate?

CCWP: The growth surge for women prisoners began in the 1980’s and has continued steadily ever since. The population of women in prison has grown by about 800% since 1980. A large part of the increase has to do with the drug war and the way sentencing for drug-related offenses accelerated during the eighties. Approximately one third of all women in prison are now there due to drug-related offenses. Many women are serving long sentences for participation in incidents they were coerced into by men they were involved with.

The rising incarceration rate for women has had a devastating impact on children, families and the fabric of community life, especially in communities-of-color. From a structural perspective, undermining community fabric is part of the state’s strategy to destroy the capacity of communities to effectively resist.

When women prisoners are discussed by the corporate media, the focus is usually on sensational cases which involve violence and sex. The majority of offenses which land women in prison are ignored along with such chronic, crucial problems as health care, aging, and family relations. Legal and economic factors which have led to the dramatic increases in the women’s incarceration rate are rarely discussed. Still, it is important to recognize that women-centered advocacy organizations have forced the media to pay more attention to women prisoners over the past ten years, overcoming some of their invisibility.

A3N: What is different about conditions for female prisoners in California and throughout the US, as opposed to their male counterparts?

CCWP: We want to be careful in how we discuss the differences in conditions between men and women’s prisons. There are real differences, but our goal isn’t to make the conditions in women’s prisons “as good” as the ones in men’s prisons. Rather, our goal is to decrease the incarceration of all women, transgender and men prisoners and to improve conditions of confinement as much as is possible given the repressive nature of the PIC.

Prisons are organized to reinforce gendered forms of behavior based on a strict male/female dichotomy. So in women’s prisons this means that passivity, femininity, and obedience are consistently stressed in order to control the prisoners. There is rampant sexual abuse of large numbers of women by male officers and the trading of sexual favors for privileges. Since 80% of the women in prison have experienced abuse either as children or adults, the continuation of abusive treatment in prison is especially damaging. Women who exhibit so-called “male” behavior and transgender prisoners who identify as male or are transitioning from female to male are targeted for abuse and punishment by correctional officers. This is also true for prisoners who have transitioned from male to female.

Approximately 70% of people in women’s prisons are mothers and the majority were the primary caretakers of their children before they went to prison. This means that custody and parenting issues are extremely important for most women prisoners in a different way than they are for men. Many women are pregnant when they come to prison. Adequate healthcare during and after their pregnancy is a key issue which men do not have to face. Women face other specific health care issues over the course of their confinement as do trans prisoners. Women are also less likely to be supported by their former spouse or partner once they come to prison, leading to greater isolation.

Recently, in response to the US Supreme Court ruling mandating a reduction in the prison population, a plan has been floated to dramatically reduce the women’s prison population and possibly close a women’s prison. Of course, in and of themselves these are very positive steps which CCWP has been advocating for over the years.

However, it is important for us to insure that such plans are implemented in a way that will allow them to work. Unless women receive support and services when they are released, there is little chance that they will succeed in the current brutal economic environment with the types of stigmas and restrictions that all prisoners face.

We also need to insure that the remaining women prisoners are not subjected to more overcrowding and further reduction in basic necessities, as has been occurring over the past couple of years. And we need to counter any media formula which exceptionalizes women prisoners while it demonizes male prisoners. We need to be clear, mass incarceration is a racist, unjust and dysfunctional system for men as well as women.

A3N: What are some of the challenges to building public support for women prisoners? How do you address these challenges?
CCWP: Women prisoners have historically been invisible to the public. Over the past decade, largely as a result of demands from women prisoner organizations, this has become less true. However, the prototypical image of the violent, gang-involved, black or brown male prisoner is still the one the public is inundated with. It is the one that drives public discourse about prisoners and prisons.

CCWP’s main strategy has always been to create opportunities for prisoners, former prisoners and their family members to give voice to their own experiences and their own humanity. This is key in countering both invisibility and the demonization of prisoners.

A3N: Andrea Smith, co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence argues that “the criminalization approach proffered in the mainstream anti-violence movement doesn’t work. And, also, this criminalization approach obfuscates the role of the state in perpetrating gender violence.” Similarly, in our previous interview, author/activist Victoria Law presented a variety of reasons why activists need to work outside of the criminal "justice" system. What do you think of Smith and Law's arguments? What is the best way to reduce and prevent violence against women both inside and outside prisons?

CCWP: We strongly agree with Smith and Law’s perspectives. Our work with incarcerated survivors of domestic violence has been rooted in exposing the role of the state in perpetrating gender violence. We have shown how domestic and state violence are part of a continuum of patriarchal, gendered violence through our campaigns to free incarcerated survivors starting with Theresa Cruz (see Fire Inside Issue #5 & #15). Not only are women consistently imprisoned for self-defense against violence, but once they are incarcerated they are required to accept guilt and show remorse for these acts in order to be released.

Violence reduction and prevention is a very complicated issue. Developing community based alternatives to the state is a necessary but protracted process. Such alternatives need to be rooted in consciousness raising and public education to expose how a violence-steeped patriarchal state promotes violence on all levels of the society.

It is absurd to look to this type of state to remedy problems with violence. Instead we need to work together to create healthy communities and new transformative structures that uproot the multi-dimensional causes of violence.

A3N: In what ways did CCWP and women prisoners participate in the recent statewide hunger strike in California prisoners? [Editor’s note: This interview was conducted before the strike restarted on September 26.]

CCWP: We have been an active part of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition from the beginning. Our members have visited prisoners on strike at Pelican Bay, fasted in solidarity with the prisoners, attended rallies, the legislative hearing in Sacramento, and have mailed in information to prisoners.

People in the women’s prisons told us that they had not known about the strike until they received information from us. Once they knew about it, some women fasted for a period of time. We have an article about the strike in the commemorative issue of our newsletter.

To us, the hunger strike exemplifies the leadership that prisoners can take in organizing against the most torturous of conditions and the ways in which prisoners can overcome their divisions to act together.

It shines a spotlight on the way in which the state is increasingly using prolonged solitary confinement as a means of pressuring prisoners to inform against each other. It also exposes how the issue of “gang affiliation” is being used to silence vocal and active prisoners and keep prisoners from organizing in any way.

A3N: How can our readers best support CCWP and subscribe to The Fire Inside?

CCWP: If you are in the Bay Area, consider volunteering with CCWP. We are a volunteer-based organization with only a couple of paid staff members, so we are always in need of committed volunteers. In these challenging economic times, financial support is also critical. You can donate online or send a check to: California Coalition for Women Prisoners, 1540 Market St., Suite 490, San Francisco, CA 94102.

You can also join our Women’s News email list, which is a low volume list-serve which covers issues and articles concerning women and transgender prisoners. You can subscribe to The Fire Inside through our website or by sending us a check for $25 (to the address in the previous paragraph). And if you are in the area, please join us at our Fire Inside celebration on Friday, October 14th, 2011 (Silent Arts & Crafts Auction of donations by local artists begins at 6:30 pm; Program at 7 pm; $20 donation, no one turned away for lack of funds; At The Women’s Building, 3543 18th St. @ Valencia, San Francisco, near 16th St. BART station, Wheelchair accessible; Childcare available - please call 415-255-7036 x314 by Monday, Oct. 10.)

Thank you again for the opportunity to share information about our vision and our work.

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. Our work has been published by Alternet, Truthout, Counterpunch, Monthly Review, Z Magazine, Black Commentator, SF Bay View Newspaper, and many others.

Robert King Touring UK With New British Film About the Angola 3

2011-09-29T17:04:00.000-07:00

MEDIA COVERAGE OF TOUR: Oct.4 at the Frontline (Podcast and Written Article), at Liverpool John Moores University

Saturday and Sunday, October 1&2

Black History Live at Wembley Stadium: Robert speaking & exhibition stand (campaign action, DVD’s and book sales).

More information here.

Tuesday, October 4, 7:00 PM

Frontline Club: Robert King in conversation with Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve

More information here.

Tuesday, October 11, 7:00 PM

Private Event: Middle Temple Screening - with Criminal Bar Association. Followed by Q & A with Robert King & Vadim Jean.

Wednesday, October 12, 4:00 – 7:00 PM

John Moores University Liverpool Department Humanities & Social Sciences: Screening followed by a discussion with Robert King.

More information here.

Thursday, October 13, 6:00 PM

Grenadian Overseas Association: Screening followed by Q & A with Robert King
More information here.

Friday, October 14, 5:00 PM

International Slavery Museum: Screening followed by Q & A with Robert King & Vadim Jean.

More information here.

Monday October 17, 6:00 PM

King’s College London: Screening followed by Q & A with Robert King & Vadim Jean

More information here.

Tuesday October 18, 6:00 PM

Oxford University: Screening followed by Q & A with Robert King & Vadim Jean

Wednesday October 19, 6:00 PM

ULU: Screening hosted by Goldsmiths Students' Union, LSE SU and the NUS Black Students Campaign, followed by Q & A with Robert King & Vadim Jean

Filming the Inspiring Life of Eddy Zheng, a Bay Area Community Leader Facing Deportation --An interview with Ben Wang

2011-09-25T23:20:00.000-07:00

Filming the Inspiring Life of Eddy Zheng, a Bay Area Community Leader Facing Deportation
--An interview with Ben Wang

By Angola 3 News

(First published at Alternet)

Ben Wang is the Director/Producer of the upcoming documentary film Breathin’: The Eddy Zheng Story. The film’s website explains that “after serving over 20 years behind bars for a robbery he committed at age 16, Chinese American community leader Eddy Zheng now faces deportation to China, a huge loss to the Bay Area community. Released from prison in 2007, Eddy has dedicated his life to preventing youth violence and delinquency through his work at the Community Youth Center, Community Response Network, and many other SF Bay Area programs and organizations.”

This month, Wang and other film makers initiated a fundraising drive as they enter into the major phase of filming. As this interview is being release there is one week left. You can visit their Kickstarter page to donate and learn more. Complementing Eddy Zheng’s own website, news articles from 2002, 2005, and earlier this year, describe the various stages of the successful battle for his freedom from prison and the continued fight against deportation.

Currently a resident of Oakland, California, Wang is the co-chair of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee. Wang co-edited with Eddy Zheng, the 2007 book Other: an API Prisoners’ Anthology. In the accompanying video interview, Wang discusses working on the book with Zheng, the book’s central themes, including the urgent need to give voice to API prisoners and the legacy of the WW2-era imprisonment of Japanese Americans in US concentration camps (view photos from "relocation" in San Francisco).

Ben Wang also co-directed the documentary film entitled, AOKI, about Richard Aoki (1938-2009), a third-generation Japanese American who became one of the founding members of the Black Panther Party. According to the film’s website, AOKI also “highlights how Richard’s leadership also made a significant impact on individuals and groups in the contemporary Asian American Movement. Richard’s contributions to the groundbreaking organization Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and its involvement in the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) student strike led to the formation of ethnic studies at U.C. Berkeley.”

Angola 3 News: How did you first meet Eddy Zheng?

Ben Wang: I first met Eddy when I was a student at UC Davis. At the time, Eddy had gathered a great deal of community support for his parole and release from state prison. I read about Eddy's case and was really moved by his story. Since getting locked up when he was 16 years old, he taught himself English, took every self-help program available, published his poetry and writings, started the first-ever poetry slam at San Quentin, and mentored at-risk youth through a program called SQUIRES.

I read some of his writings and poetry and felt that there needed to be more stories from people like him. Even though I majored in Asian American Studies at UC Davis, I felt that Asian American prisoners like Eddy had been very marginalized, even in our own communities. Their experiences and perspectives really aren't included in our education, media, or policy debates--even though criminal justice issues continue to be a topic of growing concern today.

I started corresponding with Eddy and bringing a group of UC-Davis students for regular visits at Solano prison with Eddy and a group of Asian prisoners. Through that experience, I began working with him to publish the first ever anthology of writings and artwork from Asian and Pacific Islander prisoners.

It was a very educational and inspiring experience for me to work with Eddy and so many other talented writers and artists on the book project.

A3N: When did you first start working on the film? Is there a release date yet?

BW: We are starting principal photography now, which is the major phase of filming. We are gearing up to film key scenes over the next few months with Eddy, his family, formerly incarcerated friends, and youth.

We are still fundraising for production of the film, so if readers are able to make a donation, or would just like to learn more about the project, please visit our Kickstarter page.

There is no release date set yet. Check for updates at www.eddyzhengstory.com.

A3N: So far, what have you gotten video footage of?

BW: We have already filmed some really interesting footage including Eddy's Ninth Circuit court hearing regarding his appeals, two reunions of Eddy's formerly incarcerated friends, and the grand opening of the new office of the Community Youth Center in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco.

You can check out our trailer at the Kickstarter site or Youtube.

A3N: Why do you want to make a film about Eddy?

BW: I've personally witnessed Eddy's impact on other prisoners, formerly incarcerated people, and youth. I've seen how people have changed as a result of Eddy's guidance and inspiration. So I feel that Eddy is unique in his ability to motivate change--in people and society as a whole.

At the same time, I feel that Eddy's experience is unfortunately not unique at all. There are over 2.3 million prisoners in the U.S. and the Asian and Pacific Islander (API) prisoner population has grown remarkably--increasing by over 250% from 1990 to 2000. I hope that this documentary is able to shine a light on the stories of API prisoners--this segment of our community that is too often forgotten, shunned, or persecuted because of mistakes they may have made as a kid or harsh sentencing laws (e.g. 3 strikes).

A3N: Can you tell us more about how Eddy’s situation similar to other API prisoners in the US?

BW: Unfortunately for many immigrants, all “non-citizen aliens” who commit an aggravated felony or crime of moral turpitude are mandatorily deportable, even if they immigrated to the U.S. legally or with refugee status. Between 1998 and 2006, there was a 61.6% rise in total deportations of people of Asian nationalities.

Despite the growing trend of incarceration and deportation for many Asian Americans, these individuals have largely remained invisible in public policy, the media, and in our own communities.

Eddy’s story speaks to critical issues such as the way our criminal justice system treats its youngest criminal offenders, the growth of the prison population, and how immigrants are often deported for crimes they committed decades earlier.

A3N: How has the post-Sept. 11, 2001 so-called “war on terror” affected APIs living in the US?

BW: I think that many communities have been unfairly scapegoated as result of the war on terror, including some API immigrant communities.

In addition to the war on terror, I feel that the recession has resulted in a great deal of anti-immigrant backlash. Instead of placing the blame on the root causes of 9/11 (U.S. foreign policy) or the recession (Wall Street greed), there are some very powerful people who have used these crises to rally support for their conservative causes and against people of color and working-class immigrants.

A3N: Anything else to add?

BW: Thank you to all of our very generous supporters!

We are blessed to have an incredible team working on this film including Producer Christine Kwon, Executive Producer Deann Borshay Liem, Director of Photography R.J. Lozada, Writer Momo Chang, Associate Producer Geraldine Ah-Sue, and more!

You can also visit Eddy's website at www.eddyzheng.com for legal updates and his blog.

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

California Prison Crisis Sparks Statewide Hunger Strike --An interview with Isaac Ontiveros of Critical Resistance

2011-08-09T15:00:00.000-07:00

(ABOVE: Protest at CDCR headquarters in Sacramento on July 25, photo by Indybay.org)

California Prison Crisis Sparks Statewide Hunger Strike
--An interview with Isaac Ontiveros of Critical Resistance

By Angola 3 News

On July 20, hunger strikers at California’s infamous Supermax, Pelican Bay State Prison Secure Housing Unit (PBSP-SHU), declared victory and ended their nearly three-week fast for human rights. The strike had been announced several months beforehand and when it began on July 1, the hunger strikers at Pelican Bay were joined in the fast by thousands of other prisoners across the state. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), at least 6,600 prisoners in at least one third of California’s 33 prisons participated in the hunger strike.

In response to the hunger strike, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and the Public Safety Committee in the State Assembly of California will hold an informational hearing on August 23 regarding conditions and policies of the Security Housing Units at Pelican Bay. Activists have initiated a statewide mobilization around this hearing, in order to pressure state legislators and the CDCR to make substantial changes.

A statement written by the Short Corridor Collective, composed of some Pelican Bay hunger strike leaders, explains that on July 1:

a collective group of PBSP-SHU inmates composed of all races began an indefinite hunger strike as a means of peacefully protesting 20-40 years of human rights violations.... The decision to strike was not made on a whim. It came about in response to years of subjection to progressively more primitive conditions and decades of isolation, sensory deprivation and total lack of normal human contact, with no end in sight. This reality, coupled with our prior ineffective collective filing of thousands of inmate grievances and hundreds of court actions to challenge such blatantly illegal policies and practices (as more fully detailed and supported by case law, in our formal complaint available online here) led to our conclusion that a peaceful protest via hunger strike was our only available avenue to expose what’s really been going on here in CDCR-SHU prisons and to force meaningful change.... We ended the hunger strike the evening of July 20, 2011, on the basis of CDCR’s top level administrators’ interactions with our team of mediators, as well as with us directly, wherein they agreed to accede to a few small requests immediately, as a tangible good faith gesture in support of their assurance that all of our other issues will receive real attention, with meaningful changes being implemented over time."

On August 3, the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition announced that it had just received a letter from the hunger strike leaders at Pelican Bay, dated July 24, explaining that strikers have given the California Department of Corrections and Reform (CDCR) a deadline of two to three weeks from July 20 to come up with some substantive changes in response to their five core demands. Todd Ashker, one of the leaders of the hunger strike, explains that if the CDCR does not follow through, prisoners at Pelican Bay plan to go back on hunger strike:

It's very important that our supporters know where we stand, and that CDCR knows that we're not going to go for any B.S. We remain as serious about our stand now as we were at the start, and mean what we said regarding an indefinite hunger strike peaceful protest until our demands are met. I repeat − we're simply giving CDCR a brief grace period in response to their request for the opportunity to get [it] right in a timely fashion!

Hugo Pinell, one of the hunger strikers at Pelican Bay State Prison, has now been held in continuous solitary confinement for over 40 years—longer than any other US prisoner known to date. In a letter written during the strike to journalist Kiilu Nyasha, Pinell explained why he was fasting:

I have to get with it because it’s for a great cause and if good changes come about, I could get a break too. At this point, a move to a mainline would be great, being that my keepers are determined to keep me until I die. On a mainline, we could have contact visits again! It’s been too long since I’ve touched my Mom and all of my loved ones…I wasn’t prepared for a hunger strike, so I don’t know how well or how long I can hold on, but I had to participate…I don’t even think in terms of doing or saying something wrong, for that would strike against everything I live for: freedom, becoming a new man and the New World. So, Sis, this hunger strike provides me with an opportunity for change while also allowing me to be in concert with, and in support of, all those willing to risk their precious and valuable health.

Our previous interview with Solitary Watch about the Pelican Bay hunger strike examined the broader issue of solitary confinement in prisons throughout the US. In this follow-up report, we place the strike in context, alongside a statewide grassroots movement calling for cuts in prison spending to address California’s budget crisis, and a recent US Supreme Court ruling that calls for the reduction of California state prisoners by at least 30,000, in response to overcrowding.

We interviewed Isaac Ontiveros for an inside look from within California’s anti-prison movement. Ontiveros is the Communications Director for Critical Resistance, a national organization that is working to abolish the prison-industrial complex and is a member of the Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) alliance and the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition.

Angola 3 News: What is the latest news from the hunger strikers?

Isaac Ontiveros: As far as we know, the leaders of the strike at Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit have called an end to the strike—based on what they see as some movement on the part of the CDCR beginning to address some of their demands.

At the peak of the strike at least 6,600 prisoners across at least a third of California’s 33 prisons participated. These are official CDCR numbers, so we can confidently assume actual numbers were higher. Right now, our struggle is to determine how many other prisoners, in what prisons, are continuing to strike. Given how isolated prisoners are throughout the system, this is a challenge, to say the least.

A3N: Why have the Pelican Bay hunger strikers declared victory?

IO: The prisoners made very important, historic gains. That the strikers were able to move the CDCR at all was no small feat, especially when working under some the most horrendous conditions possible. The fact that they were able to coordinate among themselves despite extreme isolation is also impressive. Furthermore, solidarity was able to spread throughout the California system. This solidarity crossed the racial and geographic lines that we are taught are uncrossable; and strike leaders were able to incite strong support of people outside of prison on an international level. This is all very important when we think about victories, especially if we understand victories as being stepping-stones to further and greater victories.

As far as the specific concessions made by the prison administration, the details are still coming, but it seems that CDCR has moved a bit on the prisoners demands around providing and expanding some of the privileges and programs they have access to in the SHU. These gains—for example, some around cold weather clothing and access to calendars—may seem modest, but for people in such extremely oppressive conditions, these things take on a different weight. Also, it seems like there could be some movement on some of their other demands, perhaps some review of the “debriefing” process.

A3N: How can our readers support the next phase of this struggle?

IO: The next phase is to hold the CDCR to good faith negotiations, and to continue our push for all of the strikers’ demands to get met. It is very important for supporters to continue their solidarity work on the outside, with particular attention toward defending strike leaders from retaliation from the prison administration.

Many people are coordinating actions all over the US and in other parts of the world. A potentially important legislative hearing on conditions in Pelican Bay’s SHU is happening on August 23rd in Sacramento—there is lots of talk about that being a big point of mobilization.

Folks should stay tuned to the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity website for more information.

A3N: In recent months, CURB has organized statewide mass protests against California prison politics. In response to the use of California’s budget crisis as an excuse to cut state programs serving low-income residents, CURB presented a “Budget for Humanity” that called for dramatic reductions in prison spending and the number of prisoners. How does this campaign support the recent hunger strike?

IO: I think CURB’s fight is absolutely related to the strike because more prisons mean more torture, more SHUs, more people be locked up, more communities devastated economically and socially—all of it.

The demands of the strikers were particular to the conditions of Pelican Bay’s SHU, and the SHU has a very specific function-- but the fact that solidarity spread throughout the California system also speaks to how common the conditions the strike leaders were talking about are to all prisoners—deadly lack of healthcare, poor food, torture, overcrowding, breaking up of political organizing, and more. These conditions are also connected to those on the outside, primarily in Black and Brown communities.

Right now CURB’s main platform, as outlined in the Budget for Humanity, is demanding an end to all prison and jail construction; an immediate reduction of prison and jail overcrowding; the releasing of tax dollars from the grip of imprisonment; and an end to cuts to the most vital services, along with a reprioritization of how California uses it resources, to create what, and for whom. These demands feed and are fed by each other. Ending prison and jail construction frees tens of thousands of people along with billions of dollars. Ending the attack on basic resources like education, healthcare, meaningful employment, creates strong communities for people to come home to and to thrive in.

We also have to understand that this is not just a matter of fiscal sense-making and balancing the budget. This is also about political power. This is about capitalism and white supremacy. We need to understand that SHUs, the prison system in general, and police are tools of repression used to thwart peoples’ efforts and abilities to fight back, build up their communities, and build self-determination.

This also links CURB’s work with prisoner strike solidarity, along with community struggles against gang injunctions, police violence, ICE raids, and more. So I think CURB’s work—along with the work of so many other organizations and coalitions—is a step toward building larger and stronger grassroots movements that will make larger, stronger, and more thoroughgoing economic and social changes.

A3N: Can you give a history of California's "budget crisis"? How far back does this go? How does it relate, if at all, to the accelerated incarceration rates in the US that began in the 1970s, where the number of prisoners increased from 300,000 to over 2 million today?

IO: The best answer to this question is the wonderful and very important book Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. The book explores these questions in great detail and I really can’t recommend it enough.

But roughly, we can understand that in the late 60s and early 70s, the powers-that-be in the US responded to social uprisings against racism, social and economic inequality, and other forms of oppression in the US —linked to anti-imperialist struggles happening all over the planet at the time—by making war primarily on communities of color in a variety ways, including the expansion and further militarization of policing and the expansion of imprisonment. This is intertwined with a crisis in the capitalist system occurring at the same time. So we saw an assault on organized labor and social services and programs that was basically the rise of neoliberal economic models—creating a deepening in the divide between the haves and have-nots (already pretty deep for those marginalized to begin with).

Into the 1980s we saw the war on drugs—which we should understand as a war on Black and Brown communities—go into full gear with the passing of thousands of laws, tougher and longer sentences, and the activation of all sorts of media stories and images that aggressively criminalize and dehumanize poor people and people of color, especially Black people.

Even though the so-called crime rate started dropping steadily in the early 80s, the economy, this fear-mongering, increased policing, mixed with the proliferation of anti-social ideas that social services are a waste, created the perfect storm for a gigantic increase in imprisonment. And the cycle perpetuated itself from there with harsher probation and parole conditions that made it easier to deny essential services and to land more people back in cages for longer amounts of time. Tying it back to the 60s and 70s, this cycle makes it more difficult for social movements to change the oppressive social and economic relationships the system is predicated on.

So, California, with one of the largest economies in the world, is situated in this history. The gutting of social services, the attack on labor, the loss of jobs, tax revolts , the abandonment of certain industries, financial speculation, the disuse of farmland, housing bubbles, energy speculation, “dot-com bubbles”, the criminalization of people of color, anti-immigrant hysteria, the passage of the three strikes law, etc., leads to one the largest prison expansions in world history.

Between 1982 and 2000, California's prison population grew 500%. Between 1984 and 2005, at least 20 prisons were built. In this period, only one university was built. And right now, these prisons are close to 200% of their holding capacity.

Obviously this history is cursory, simplistic, and leaves out a lot, but in engaging with any crisis there are questions we need ask, patterns we need to identify, and actions we need to take. In thinking about budget crisis, we need to ask ourselves: why does everything (education, healthcare and services, wages, jobs, etc.) except corrections get cut? What does this mean for the health of our communities? How does this relate to further economic crisis? How are we prepared to organize around this crisis? What are our opportunities?

A3N: Have there been any examples of other states reducing their prison populations as a response to budget issues?

IO: Yes, even right now, states are reducing prison spending, closing facilities and releasing people in response to the economic havoc caused by prisons. To be clear, much of this reduction is not based on progressive or humanitarian politics, or even an opposition to imprisonment. But, in the past year, New York, Kentucky, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, and Connecticut have all implemented a variety of schemes to shrink imprisonment. Some of them have to do with sentencing reforms and parole and probation reforms, some schemes involve outright prison closure.

I think the key here is for organizations and individuals that want to see longer-term and deeper changes to organize around making these shrinkages permanent, and then to battle to have funds no longer wasted on prison spending be put towards repairing and building up the communities imprisonment has devastated—so that people coming home can stay home.

A3N: Further influencing California prison politics is a recent US Supreme Court ruling that calls for the reduction of California state prisoners by at least 30,000, in response to overcrowding. How significant is this ruling?

IO: This ruling is very significant. It says even the Supreme Court—which is far from a politically progressive entity—recognizes that the California prison system is scandalous, devastating, and deadly. It says change needs to happen immediately.

The Supreme Court decision gives us a chance to address the human rights crisis in California prisons, and to change the system itself, hopefully so that we can avoid further crisis.

Acting strongly here also positions us to take steps to address human rights crises happening outside the prisons, in the communities from which these thousands and thousand of prisoners are taken.

A3N: Since the CDCR released their proposal responding to the US Supreme Court ruling (that has been criticized by CURB in an open letter to Gov Brown) has there been any response from the state government?

IO: Unfortunately, but maybe not surprisingly, Gov. Brown and the CDCR’s plan is to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. They came up with a scheme called realignment where--rather than let people out of cages, reforming parole conditions, and using the tens of millions of dollars that would free up to support these prisoners return to their communities—they have decided to shift these 33-40,000 prisoners to the county level, ie. jails. Brown and the CDCR are responding to one crisis by creating the conditions for 58 crises.

For example, Los Angeles County is 33% of the entire California prison system. Its jails are already overcrowded and have been the subject of human and civil rights abuse scandals. Brown and CDCR’s realignment scheme would add at least an extra 11,000 to that system. Their scheme does nothing to address sentencing guidelines, and there seems to be a not-so-hidden construction scheme bubbling away on the side burner already. So, they propose more disaster.

What’s hopeful is that, luckily, people all over the state are more imaginative and humane than Brown and Co. and are ready for some serious changes. A recent poll shows a vast majority of Californians oppose cutting key state services and increasing taxes to pay for more prisons and jails: 80% of Californians favor paroling people who are terminally ill or medically incapacitated, and 60% support reducing life sentences for third strike prisoners.

People are ready for changes, and I’d wager they are ready to think about even greater changes. If Brown and the CDCR want to shift the burden to the county-level, then, with some strong organizing, residents, organization, and coalitions like CURB can meet them on their own turf, and say, “the only solution is to bring our friends, family member, and neighbors all the way home.” And we can move forward from there.

(This article was first published by Alternet. Permission is granted to reprint if Alternet is cited as the original source.)

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

Showdown at Angola: God’s Warden vs. Veteran Muckraker

2011-07-28T17:50:00.000-07:00

(Illustration of Burl Cain by Jack Unruh, Mother Jones)

Mother Jones writer James Ridgeway has written a new article about his recent visit to Angola Prison and his many failed attempts to interview Warden Burl Cain. While published in the July/August issue of Mother Jones, it has just been released online this week, and the full article can be viewed here.

For several years prior to this article, Ridgeway has been writing an excellent series of articles about the Angola 3, and this did not make him a favorite of Cain and Angola authorities. He writes that “when I requested permission to visit the prison and interview Cain, back in 2009, Fontenot turned me down flat. Cain, she said, was not happy with what I had written about the Angola Three, a trio of inmates who have been in solitary longer than any other prisoners in America…After more than a year of trying to get into Angola, I…turned to a lawsuit. In March 2010, the ACLU agreed to represent me on a First Amendment claim arguing that to keep government information from a reporter merely on the basis of what he's written is an infringement on press freedom.” Then, as “the ACLU prepared to file suit in federal court, Fontenot wrote to them, inviting me down for a tour.”

Ridgeway, traveling from out of state, writes that he was expecting to finally interview Cain: “When we'd scheduled the tour, she'd promised me an interview with Cain provided he was at Angola when I visited, which she expected him to be. But when I asked, ‘Where's the warden?’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘Oh, he's in Atlanta today.’”

Despite Ridgeway’s visit and subsequent attempts by telephone and email, he has never been granted an interview with Warden Burl Cain. Below is a short excerpt from Ridgeway’s article, where he focuses on the Angola 3. He writes that while Cain is publicly praised for his efforts to convert inmates to Christianity:

With those who resist salvation, Cain takes a somewhat different approach—as the men known as the Angola Three found out. When they came to Angola in 1971 for armed robbery, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were Black Panthers, and they began organizing to improve prison conditions. That quickly landed them on the wrong side of the prison administration, and in 1972 they were prosecuted and convicted for the murder of a prison guard. They have been fighting the conviction ever since, pointing out that one of the eyewitnesses was legally blind, and the other was a known prison snitch who was rewarded for his testimony.

After the murder, the two—along with a third inmate named Robert King—were put in solitary, and Woodfox and Wallace have now spent nearly four decades in the hole—something Cain has suggested has more to do with their politics than with their crimes (King was released in 2001 when his conviction in a separate prison murder was overturned). In a 2008 deposition, he said Woodfox "wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant...He is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them."

Wallace's and Woodfox's lawyers have pointed out that the two men, now in their sixties, have had a near-perfect record for more than 20 years. In response, Cain argued that "it's not a matter of write-ups. It's a matter of attitude and what you are...Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace is locked in time with that Black Panther revolutionary actions they were doing way back when...And from that, there's been no rehabilitation." Wallace has said that Cain suggested that he and Woodfox could be released into the general population if they renounced their political views and embraced Jesus.

I asked Fontenot about the Angola Three, and she told me matter-of-factly that they just hadn't played by the rules. Anyway, Wallace and Woodfox had recently been shipped off to other prisons in the state system. I asked about solitary confinement. The prisoners in what Angola calls "closed cells" had everything they needed, she said. It was like having a little apartment.

**We in the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3 would like to thanks James Ridgeway for all his work shining a light on Angola Prison and the unjust frameup of the Angola 3. Be sure to read our recent interview with Ridgeway and Solitary Watch co-author Jean Casella, here.

Solitary Watch Confronts Torture in US Prisons --An interview with James Ridgeway and Jean Casella

2011-06-12T18:07:00.000-07:00

Solitary Watch Confronts Torture in US Prisons --An interview with James Ridgeway and Jean Casella

By Angola 3 News

Prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison in California have announced that they are beginning an indefinite hunger strike on July 1, 2011 to protest the conditions of their imprisonment, which they say are cruel and inhumane. An online petition has been started by supporters of the strikers. While noting that the hunger strike is being “organized by prisoners in an unusual show of racial unity,” five key demands are listed by California Prison Focus:

1) Eliminate group punishments; 2) Abolish the debriefing policy and modify active/inactive gang status criteria; 3) Comply with the recommendations of the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons (2006) regarding an end to long term solitary confinement; 4) Provide adequate food; 5) Expand and provide constructive programs and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates.

Notably, Pelican Bay is ‘home’ to the only US prisoner known to have spent more time in solitary confinement than the 39 years that Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox of the Angola 3, have spent--since April 1972. Imprisoned now for a total of 47 years and held at Pelican Bay since 1990, Hugo Pinell has been in continuous solitary for over 40 years, since at least 1971--probably even since the late 1960’s. Pinell was a close comrade of Black Panther leader George Jackson, who had organized a Panther chapter inside California’s San Quentin Prison, similar to the prison chapter organized by the Angola 3 in Louisiana.

Journalist Kiilu Nyasha writes that on Aug. 21, 1971, the day of George Jackson’s assassination, “three prison guards and two inmate trustees were also killed. Subsequently, six prisoners, including Hugo Pinell, were singled out and put on trial. Reminiscent of the slave auctions, they were each forced to bear 30 lb. of chains in a Marin courtroom after being charged with numerous counts of murder and assault.” They became known as the San Quentin Six. Johnny Spain, the only defendant to be convicted of murder, was released in 1988, making Pinell the last of the San Quentin Six behind bars, despite having being convicted of a lesser assault charge (read more).

Robert King, of the Angola 3, released in 2001 after 29 years in solitary, has expressed support for Pinell, saying that he "is a clear example of a political prisoner." In January 2009, Pinell was denied parole for the ninth time, despite a clean record with no-write ups for the past 25 years. Now, in 2011, with 27 years of ‘clean time,’ Pinell is eligible for parole once again, but his hearing has been postponed for six months and is expected later this year.

For decades now, human rights activists have criticized the infamous Pelican Bay supermax prison. Journalists James Ridgeway and Jean Casella, co-founders of the new Solitary Watch website, are similarly critical of conditions at Pelican Bay, and they argue that the treatment of prisoners at Pelican Bay is a reflection of a widespread human rights crisis throughout the US prison system.

Angola 3 News: How did you first become interested in the issue of solitary confinement and ultimately become inspired to start Solitary Watch?

Solitary Watch: We started Solitary Watch because this issue grabbed us by the throats. The solitary confinement of tens of thousands of prisoners may be the most grievous mass human rights violation that’s taking place on American soil, yet it’s been largely concealed from and ignored by the public, and seriously under-reported by the press.

Solitary confinement is a hidden world within the larger hidden world of the prison system, and prisoners in solitary are an invisible and dehumanized minority within the larger population of prison inmates in general--who also remain remarkably invisible and dehumanized, considering that they now number nearly 2.3 million and constitute one in every 100 adults in this country.

We don’t mean to sound self-righteous about any of this, because until two years ago we were as ignorant about this subject as anyone. Like so many other people, we were outraged by the abuses taking place at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, yet we knew relatively little about the abuses happening here at home, in our own prisons and jails. What changed that was Jim’s reporting for Mother Jones on the Angola 3. To discover that there were men who had been living isolated in 6 x 9-foot cells for nearly 40 years—well, that clearly shocked the conscience.

That was the beginning of our education. We began to learn more and more about this torturous netherworld of solitary confinement that exists, in one form or another, in every state of the union. And we discovered that there were activists and lawyers and scholars and prisoners’ families and even a handful of journalists out there who were trying to draw attention to the issue, but no centralized, comprehensive source of information.

A3N: Can you please briefly tell us about your background before Solitary Watch?

SW: Jim has more than 40 years of experience as an investigative journalist, and Jean has been an editor for independent media and run small nonprofit organizations. It seemed like together we had the skills we needed to start up a web-based project that would serve as an information clearinghouse on solitary confinement, as well as a forum for whatever original reporting we might do on the subject. And we’ve been fortunate enough to get some funding from several generous donors. That was the genesis of Solitary Watch, which went online a year and a half ago.

A3N: What is a SHU?

SW: SHU is just one of many euphemisms prison systems have developed to avoid using the term “solitary confinement.” In California, it stands for Security Housing Unit; in New York it is Special Housing Unit. Elsewhere we see Special Management Units, Behavioral Management Units, Communications Management Units, Administrative Segregation, Disciplinary Segregation—the list goes on. There are nuances of difference among them, but they all consist of 23- to 24-hour-a-day lockdown. Most of these systems—including the federal Bureau of Prisons—deny that they use solitary confinement, even while they have tens of thousands of prisoners locked alone in their cells for months, years, even decades.

A3N: When was the first SHU made?

SW: Solitary confinement was actually invented here in the United States, in the early 19th century in Philadelphia, as a supposedly humane alternative to things like floggings and hard labor. Prisoners were locked up alone, with absolutely nothing to do but contemplate their crimes, pray, and supposedly become “penitent”—thus the term “penitentiary.” Of course, nothing like that happened. The U.S. Supreme Court looked at conditions in the Philadelphia prison in 1890 and found that "A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community."

For nearly 100 years after that, solitary confinement was rare; the famous Birdman of Alcatraz spent six years in solitary, and that was unusual. Things really began to change in 1983, when two guards at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, were killed by inmates on the same day. That was the beginning of the notorious Marion Lockdown, where prisoners were permanently confined to their cells without yard time, work, or any kind of rehabilitative programming.

A3N: How have they developed since?

SW: Other prisons followed suit, and in 1989 California built the first supermax—Pelican Bay. There was a supermax boom in the 1990s, and today, 40 states and the federal government have supermax prisons holding upwards of 25,000 inmates. Tens of thousands more are held in solitary confinement in lockdown units within other prisons and jails. There’s no up-to-date nationwide count, but according to best estimates, there are at least 75,000 and perhaps more than 100,000 prisoners in solitary confinement on any given day in America.

Solitary confinement has become the disciplinary measure of first resort, rather than of last resort. Today you can be placed in solitary confinement not only for violence, but for any form of “insubordination” toward prison officials. Others are put there for having contraband—which includes not only drugs but cell phones or even too many postage stamps. Still others—including many of the juveniles in adult prisons--end up in solitary for their own “protection” because they are targets of prison rape. A lot of the men in Pelican Bay’s SHU are there because they’ve been “validated” as gang members, based on the say-so of inmate “snitches” who are rewarded for informing. The reasons are countless, and sometimes absurd. In Virginia, a group of Rastafarian men was in solitary for a decade because they refused to cut their dreadlocks, in violation of prison rules.

A3N: What are effects of the SHU on prisoners’ health and well-being?

SW: As one prisoner at the Tamms supermax in Illinois said, "Lock yourself in your bathroom for the next 10 years and tell me how it will affect your mind."

If it weren’t already obvious enough, research conducted over the last 30 years confirms solitary confinement has an extremely damaging effect on mental health. One study found that a single week in solitary produced a change in EEG activity related to stress and anxiety. There’s evidence that long-term isolation profoundly alters the brain chemistry, and that longer stretches in solitary produce psychopathologies—including panic attacks, depression, inability to concentrate, memory loss, aggression self-mutilation, and various forms of psychosis--at a considerably higher rate than other forms of confinement. Yet we have prison systems that insist they are placing prisoners in solitary so that they can “learn self-control,” and many cases where inmates are released directly from long-term isolation onto the streets. Unsurprisingly, they have a notably higher recidivism rate than other prisoners.

It’s important to acknowledge, also, that a huge number of prisoners who are placed in solitary suffer from underlying mental illness. After 40 years of cuts to funding for mental health care, prisons and jails in general—and solitary confinement cells in particular--have become America’s new asylums. Prisoners are placed in solitary for being disruptive, when what they are doing is simply exhibiting the untreated symptoms of mental illness. One report by Human Rights Watch found that in prison systems around the country, one-third to one-half of the prisoners held in solitary were mentally ill. Other studies have found that two-thirds of all prison suicides take place in solitary confinement.

There has been less research done on the physical effects of solitary confinement, but evidence from recent court cases suggests a relationship to things like extreme insomnia, joint pain, hypertension and even damage to the eyesight—which makes sense when you are talking about not being able to walk or look more than ten feet in any direction for years or decades on end. We will clearly see more evidence of health damage as more and more prisoners grow old in long-term solitary confinement.

A3N: The hunger strike at Pelican Bay will begin on July 1, and the strikers have made five demands. Do you think these policies being protested are violations of international human rights standards? Of domestic US laws?

SW: First, we want to say what a remarkable document this is, remembering that it was written by a group of men who are largely unable to communicate with one another or with the outside world, and who have limited access to research materials. It’s a tribute to their perseverance and dedication to their cause, as well as their courage.

Second, we should emphasize how measured and reasonable their set of demands is. It draws heavily on the findings of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, which was a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission that studied U.S. prisons and jails. As one of its three major findings on prison conditions, the Commission said that the growing use of “high-security segregation” was counterproductive and often cruel. The Pelican Bay hunger strikers have adopted the recommendations of the Commission for reforming and limiting the use of solitary confinement. Beyond this, they are simply asking for an end to group punishment and guilt by association, which are used to confine prisoners to the SHU indefinitely. And finally, they are asking for decent, nutritious food. This is hardly a radical agenda.

There’s no doubt that solitary confinement, as it’s practiced in the United States at Pelican Bay and elsewhere, stands in violation of international human rights standards, including the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the UN’s Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners. Recently, the European Court of Human Rights delayed the extradition to the United States of several British terrorism suspects, because of the possibility that they would be sentenced to life in a supermax prison, which was deemed to violate the European Convention on Human Rights (read more).

Unfortunately, U.S. courts have been more reluctant to take a stand against solitary confinement. We are not Constitutional scholars or even lawyers, but to us it would seem obvious that long-term solitary, at least, violates Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. However, the courts, with a few exceptions, have not found that to be the case. The exceptions for the most part have to do with prisoners with mental illness.

In a few cases, courts have found that holding prisoners in solitary violates their Constitutional right to due process, since they can be placed in isolation based on a system in which prison officials act as prosecutors, judge, and jury. Prisoners have no real opportunity to defend themselves, and no way to “earn” their way out of solitary through good behavior. That’s certainly the case at Pelican Bay, and it’s one of the things the hunger strikers are protesting.

At the moment there are two important cases pending in federal court, which claim that long-term solitary violates the Constitution. One is the case of the Angola 3, now in their 40th year of solitary in Louisiana; the other is the case of Thomas Silverstein, who has spent 28 years in extreme solitary confinement in federal prison under a “no human contact” order.

A3N: Looking beyond these specific demands, what are some other characteristics of the Pelican Bay SHU?

SW: California is particularly bad when it comes to holding prisoners in solitary confinement indefinitely based on highly questionable determinations of gang status, which as we said are often based on a system of snitching in return for various rewards. Otherwise, conditions in Pelican Bay are similar to those in most supermax prisons and SHUs.

These prisons have made a science out of isolation. The cells usually measure between 60 and 80 square feet, and those cells are a prisoner’s entire world. They are fed through slots in the solid steel doors, and if they communicate with prison staff, including mental health practitioners, that also takes place through the feeding slot. If they’re lucky they get to exercise one hour a day, alone, in a fenced or walled “dog run,” and leave their cells a few times a week to take a shower—in shackles, of course. In some cells the lights are on 24 hours a day, and there’s round-the-clock video surveillance.

Prisoners may or may not be permitted to have visits. They may or may not be allowed reading and writing materials, art supplies, or other things to help them pass the time, and they may or may not have television, with close-circuit programming supplied by the prison. At ADX, the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado, they have black and white televisions that actually had to be specially retrofitted for the Bureau of Prisons, reputedly because they didn’t like the PR implications of prisoners having color TV.

In fact there’s a lot of concern about inmates being perceived as having it “too easy”--so they often don’t have air conditioning in summer or enough heat in the winter, and the food is barely adequate. Some states still use “the loaf”—made of a tasteless puree of foods—as punishment.

(PHOTO: Hugo Pinell, 1982)

A3N: For over 40 years, Hugo Pinell has been in solitary confinement, most recently at Pelican Bay. Considering the political context of solitary confinement in Pinell’s case, as well as that of the Angola 3, what do you think this says about how prison authorities have used solitary confinement as a political tool against prisoner activists and organizers? Is the practice widespread?

SW: There’s no doubt that solitary confinement is widely employed against prisoners who are perceived as representing any kind of threat to the absolute power and control of prison authorities. This is true even if inmates are seeking to organize for positive change and even if they are completely nonviolent.

In the case of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, the two still-imprisoned members of the Angola 3, and of Hugo Pinell at Pelican Bay, we are talking about men who have had virtually clean disciplinary records for several decades, and who are now in their sixties. The fact that they continue to be held in solitary confinement clearly has everything to do with their involvement as prison organizers.

We have the warden of Angola, Burl Cain, saying under oath in a deposition that Wallace and Woodfox have to be kept in solitary because they are still “trying to practice Black Pantherism,” and if he let them into the general population they would “organize the young new inmates” and “have the blacks chasing after them.” And we have a prisoner in California being sent to the SHU simply for having reading materials written by George Jackson and contact information for Hugo Pinell.

But you don’t have to be associated with the Black Panthers, or indeed any organized political group, to be punished for prison activism. In Massachusetts, an inmate named Timothy Muise was sent to solitary after he tried to expose a sex-for-snitching ring run by guards at his prison; they said his offense was “engaging in or inciting a group demonstration or hunger strike.” A prison journalist in Maine named Deane Brown was isolated and eventually shipped out of state for sending broadcasts called “Live from the Hole” to a local radio station.

Solitary confinement is routinely used to punish prison whistleblowers, and to suppress nonviolent dissent and free expression.

(PHOTO: Hugo Pinell, 2001)

A3N: How well do you think both the mainstream and progressive media have covered the issue of solitary confinement in prisons?

SW: Well, there has actually been some outstanding reporting on this subject in the mainstream media. Of course there’s dreadful stuff as well, like the “Lockup” and “Lockdown” TV series. But as far as print media goes, there are a few of cases where journalism helped spur grassroots movements against solitary confinement. We are thinking, in particular, of the investigations by George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer on Tamms supermax in Illinois, by Lance Tapley on Maine State Prison, and by Mary Beth Pfeiffer on suicides in New York’s SHUs. Atul Gawande’s 2009 article in the New Yorker was excellent, as well.

In the progressive media, there’s been some powerful reporting by Anne-Marie Cusac in The Progressive, Jeanne Theoharis in The Nation, and Glenn Greenwald at Salon. And of course, Mother Jones has been extremely supportive of Jim’s reporting on the Angola 3 case, and on the broader issue of prison conditions as well.

The problem we have with media coverage is that there isn’t nearly enough of it. And it doesn’t get anything close to the attention it deserves or produce the kind of outrage it should, considering the fact that this is one of the major domestic human rights issues of our day. Our impression is that the media—including, to a lesser extent, the progressive media—is simply reflecting how effectively prisoners have been marginalized in our society.

A3N: Today, in the post-9/11 so-called “War on Terror” era, do you think that the US public supports the use of torture against US prisoners?

SW: We do think that the public is tolerating the torture of prisoners—some because they don’t know about it, others because they simply don’t care. But we’d actually like to turn your question around, because we believe that a tolerance for the torture of U.S. prisoners helped to produce a tolerance for the torture of foreign terrorism suspects, rather than vice versa. The “War on Crime” predates the “War on Terror,” and places like Pelican Bay and ADX Florence made it that much easier for Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and Bagram to exist.

To discuss what produced this tolerance for torture in the first place, we need to return to the point we made at the beginning of this interview: Prisoners are today by far the most dehumanized members of our society. This has been the case to some extent historically, but the dehumanization has grown more intense since the advent of the War on Crime, which dates back to the 1960s but really heated up in the 1980s and 1990s. For at least the last 30 years, politicians from both parties have been cynically exploiting public fears about crime to win elections, and the prison population has grown by leaps and bounds with tacit public approval.

Racism clearly plays a role in all of this: A highly disproportionate number of prisoners are African American, and a majority of people today accepts the mass incarceration and abuse of black prisoners just as a majority once accepted racial segregation and before that slavery. Again, it comes down to depriving a certain group of people of their full humanity. Once you do that, it becomes a lot easier to deprive them of their basic human rights, not to mention their civil rights.

A3N: Strategically speaking, how do you think supporters of human rights can best use media-activism to challenge the powerful forces currently trying to convince the US public that torture is good policy? What are key points that we should be making?

SW: When it comes to solitary confinement, we probably need to emphasize different key points with different audiences. For those people who already have a firm opposition to all torture, we simply need to share information about the nature and widespread use of solitary confinement, and try to bring this issue out of the shadows and into the public square. The American Friends Service Committee has shown real leadership on this issue, and more recently the ACLU and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture have been trying to draw attention to solitary confinement, so that's a positive development. We need to encourage people to see the torture of all U.S. prisoners as a human rights issue just as pressing as the torture of Bradley Manning, or of the captives at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib—because torture is torture, and if you believe this, it shouldn’t matter whether or not the victim has committed a crime.

For those who think that prisoners are criminals who deserve whatever they get, we can still emphasize the fact that solitary confinement is not only cruel, but also costly and counterproductive. It can cost two to three times as much to keep a prisoner in a supermax, rather than in the general prison population. And it simply doesn’t “work,” in that it makes prisoners more likely to re-offend.

A3N: You have just released the first print edition of Solitary Watch. What are your future plans for this? Anything else coming up that we should be looking for?

SW: We launched the print edition, which includes just a small selection of our stories, because we began receiving letters from prisoners nearly every day, telling us about their own situations and asking for information. Prisoners, of course, do not have Internet access, so we needed to become more than just a web publication.

In addition, we’re going to be publishing a series of fact sheets on different aspects of solitary confinement; we’ve just posted the first one, and there are many more to come. We just began shooting our first video interviews with some survivors of solitary confinement. Along with the writings we publish under “Voices from Solitary,” we hope the videos will help provide a forum for a group of people who actually know what it’s like to be buried alive.

(This article was first published by Alternet. Permission is granted to reprint if Alternet is cited as the original source)

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

Another Loss

2011-06-10T14:52:00.000-07:00

The A3 Coalition is also sad to announce the death of Herman's brother, Leon Williams Jr. who died unexpectedly at the age of 52 of a massive heart attack on June 6th. The family will have a small service in New Orleans. Please call Victory Wallace if you want further details at (504) 278-4887 and check back to this posting, which will be updated as more information is available.

Amnesty International Launches Global Angola 3 Campaign

2011-06-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

TAKE ACTION HERE!

This week Amnesty International launched a global campaign calling for the authorities in the United States to end the solitary confinement of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. They state that "the treatment to which the two men have been subjected was 'cruel and inhumane' and amounted to a violation of the US' obligations under international law".

Guadalupe Marengo, Amnesty's deputy director for America said "We are not aware of any other case in the USA where individuals have been subjected to such restricted human contact for such a prolonged period of time." Amnesty has also raised questions about the legal aspects of the case including the lack of any physical evidence linking Herman and Albert to Brent Miller's murder, lost DNA evidence and convictions based on questionable inmate testimony.

Amnesty is calling for people around the world to contact Governor Jindal via email or post and let their outrage regarding this injustice be heard. The spotlight on injustice which Amnesty International is now shining on the case of the Angola 3 is a monumental step of support to the campaign. We hope Albert and Herman's supporters will lead the charge in responding to Amnesty's call for action.

Please join us and take action today at Amnesty's action page.

Read/Download the full report: USA: 100 years in solitary: 'The Angola 3' and their fight for justice.

Watch the Amnesty International video, featuring Robert King, here.

Below is the full press release, also available online.

Amnesty's call to action has been spotlighted by the international media, including: The West (Australia), Bangkok Post, Radio Netherlands, France 24, AFP, Free Malaysia Today, Monsters and Critics, Canada Views, The Province, I Africa, Times of Oman, Oman Tribune, Euronews, Irish Times, ABNA, Countercurrents, Le Figaro, Au Troisieme Oeil, Corriere Della Sera, News 2U, la Repubblica, Affaritaliani

And, the US media, including: Solitary Watch, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, MSN, Yahoo News, Press TV, Bayou Buzz Louisiana, All Gov, The Raw Story, Louisiana Prison Watch, Real Cost of Prisons, Op Ed News, Activist Post, Infoshop, Reader Supported News

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE

EMBARGO: 7 June 2011, 00:01Hs GMT.

USA urged to end inmates' 40 year-long solitary confinement

The US state of Louisiana must immediately remove two inmates from the solitary confinement they were placed in almost 40 years ago, Amnesty International said today.

Albert Woodfox, 64, and Herman Wallace, 69, were placed in "Closed Cell Restriction (CCR)" in Louisiana State Penitentiary - known as Angola Prison - since they were convicted of the murder of a prison guard in 1972. Apart from very brief periods, they have been held in isolation ever since.

"The treatment to which Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have been subjected for the past four decades is cruel and inhumane and a violation of the US's obligations under international law," said Guadalupe Marengo, Americas Deputy Director at Amnesty International.

"We are not aware of any other case in the USA where individuals have been subjected to such restricted human contact for such a prolonged period of time."

Over the course of decades there has been no meaningful review of the men's designation to CCR. The only reason given for maintaining the men under these conditions has been due to the "nature of the original reason for lockdown."

Both men were originally arrested for armed robbery.

The men are confined to their cells, which measure 2 x 3 metres, for 23 hours a day. When the weather permits, they are allowed outside three times a week for an hour of solitary recreation in a small outdoor cage.

For four hours a week, they are allowed to leave their cells to shower or walk, alone, along the cell unit corridor.

They have restricted access to books, newspapers and television. For the past four decades they have never been allowed to work or to have access to education. Social interaction has been restricted to occasional visits from friends and family and limited telephone calls.

They have also been denied any meaningful review of the reasons for their isolation.

The men's lawyers have told Amnesty International that both are suffering from serious health problems caused or exacerbated by their years of solitary confinement.

Amnesty International has also raised questions about the legal aspects of the case against the two men.

No physical evidence linking the men to the guard's murder has ever been found; potentially exculpatory DNA evidence has been lost; and the convictions were based on questionable inmate testimony.

Over the years of litigation on the cases, documents have emerged suggesting that the main eyewitness was bribed by prison officials into giving statements against the men and that the state withheld evidence about the perjured testimony of another inmate witness. A further witness later retracted his testimony.

Apart from ongoing legal challenges to their murder convictions, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace are suing the Louisiana authorities claiming that their prolonged isolation is "cruel and unusual punishment" and so violates the US Constitution.

"The treatment of these men by the state of Louisiana is a clear breach of US commitment to human rights," said Guadalupe Marengo.

"Their cases should be reviewed as a matter of urgency, and while that takes place authorities must ensure that their treatment complies with international standards for the humane treatment of prisoners."

For more information or to arrange an interview with an Amnesty International expert, please contact: Josefina Salomon, jsalomon@amnesty.org, mobile: +44 7778 472 116.

Transition of a Soldier

2011-06-09T14:12:00.000-07:00

(Written by the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3)

On 2 June 2011 we lost a soldier... geronimo ji jaga. It's no exaggeration to say that without geronimo's initial efforts, the Angola 3 Coalition would have never existed. In 1997, Colonel Bolt, who had spent 20 years in CCR with Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King, went to geronimo's release party to talk to him about the Angola prisoners, and so the campaign to free the Angola 3 was born.

From that moment on, the effort took on a life of its own, but geronimo ji jaga was always there to support. In 2001, geronimo provided us with a statement of support for the Angola 3 Coalition's first newsletter. It barely seems possible that just a few weeks ago, geronimo attended the commemoration of Herman and Albert's 39th year in solitary confinement in New Orleans.

geronimo's generous nature and philanthropic efforts were given full reign during his fourteen years of freedom. His work through the Kuji Foundation, which he founded, and his deep ties to Africa are just two of the many highlights of what he contributed during his years in minimum security.

We are thankful that his passing was swift and know that those of us whose lives he touched will forever keep him in our hearts. To the thousands of political prisoners in America's Gulags his contribution is an inspiration and his warrior spirit lives on wherever freedom struggles continue.

(*His way of being humble, geronimo never capitalized his name, so out of respect for him here, we spelled it as he did.)

PHOTO: geronimo speaks at the recent A3 event in New Orleans.

In 2001, geronimo issued the following statement in support of the Angola 3:

Robert King Wilkerson, Albert Woodfox, and Herman "Hooks" Wallace are very dear to me because they come from my home state of Louisiana. The Louisiana chapter of the Black Panther Party was one of the best chapters we organized and they were some of our best, most disciplined soldiers. They were the kind of soldiers who never cried out to anyone for help, even though they were facing life imprisonment.

Understand that after being in that kinda situation for so long, I can personally attest to the highly disciplined and dedicated nature of these askaris. They endured, and they survived, over all the years, with very little help from the outside world. They are the kind of unsung heroes who we must come forward to help, because they never asked for anything from us in exchange for suffering what they have suffered.

To Struggle for the People and not expect anything selfish in return is a rare thing and this is what King, Wallace, and Fox have personified throughout all those hard years. They most certainly deserve our strongest salute.

There will be a memorial service at 10AM on June 18 at the Morgan City Auditorium in Morgan City, Louisiana, geronimo's hometown. For more info call Jones Funeral Home at: (985) 384-8643.

There will also be a memorial service for geronimo at the Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland on July 15th at 6pm. This is a celebration of the life of a Revolutionary. East Side Arts Alliance is located at 2277 International Blvd. For more info call Billy X at (916) 455-0908.

Geronimo Ji Jaga from Freedom Archives on Vimeo.

The Real Cost of Prisons --An interview with Lois Ahrens

2011-05-10T20:46:00.000-07:00

The Real Cost of Prisons
--An interview with Lois Ahrens

By Angola 3 News

Lois Ahrens is the Founder/Director of The Real Cost of Prisons Project (RCPP) and has been an activist/organizer for more than 40 years. First started in 2001, RCPP brings together justice activists, artists, justice policy researchers and people directly experiencing the impact of mass incarceration to work together to end the U.S. prison nation. RCPP created workshops, a website that includes sections of writing and ‘comix’ by prisoners, a daily news blog focused on mass incarceration and three comic books that were first created in 2005: Prisoners Town: Paying the Price, by artist Kevin Pyle and writer Craig Gilmore; Prisoners of the War on Drugs, by artist Sabrina Jones and writers Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens; and Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children by artist Susan Willmarth and writers Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens.

Hundreds of organizations around the country use the comix in workshops, outreach and organizing. 135,000 have been printed, while over 115,000 have been sent, free of charge, to organizations and thousands of people held in prisons and jails. Due to lack of funding, Prison Town is now out of print and Prisoners of A Hard Life will soon be as well. Prisoners of the War on Drugs is still available. Print-ready versions of all three are available to view and download here.

In 2008, the three comix were published in an anthology, edited by Ahrens, entitled The Real Cost of Prisons Comix, (PM Press, 2008). Through the RCPP, Ahrens has been fortunate to have built an extensive correspondence with prisoners, which has grown into working relationships and friendships. In Massachusetts where she lives, Ahrens is involved in working to stop the state from charging $5/day jail fees to convicted prisoners and those held "pretrial." She is also working to stop new "3 Strikes" legislation from being passed.

Angola 3 News: Who is your target audience and what is the message that you are communicating with the comix?

Lois Ahrens: The comic books were created to communicate complex ideas in language that could be easily understood despite the fact that they are filled with information, research, analysis and a glossary. We wanted them to look and feel like comic books since people are not intimidated by comic books.

Initially, my goal was to create useful materials for organizers working to challenge and change punitive and destructive drug policies, activists opposing the building of new prisons and jails, as well as educators, and health workers. After publishing the comic books, we realized that prisoners were extremely interested. Comic books have been sent to prisoners every day since April 2005, with many requesting that comics be sent to family members and other prisoners.

The comic books place an individual’s experience in a political context by describing how the prison system is built on racism, sexism, and economic inequality. They include alternatives to the current reality so that readers can strategize and act to make change no matter where they are. The goal of the comic books is to politicize.

A3N: Have you ever had problems from prison authorities when sending comic books to prisoners?

LA: Yes. I think of this as the “tyranny of the mail room.” Often an individual working in a mail room sends the comic books back. Generally, I have found county jails are the worst in turning back comic books. For prisoners who are in “administrative segregation” there are often rules against receiving materials. Because the Real Cost of Prisons is the publisher of the comic books, usually, after a phone call, or an appeal letter, comic books do get in. Since comic books have been sent to prisoners in every state, I always cite many examples of other prisons within that system where they have been accepted. I appeal every refusal.

Interestingly, women’s prisons are more apt to return comic books; however, once I write and say that a prison for men in that state has accepted them, they do get in.

A3N: In your 2008 book The Real Cost of Prisons Comix you wrote that “every year from 1947 through the beginning of the 1970s, approximately 200,000 people were incarcerated in the US. Today, there are more than 2.3 million men and women incarcerated [now 2.4 million], with more than 5 million more on parole and probation.” Subsequently, the US has become the world’s #1 jailer. According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London, only China, with 1,620,000 prisoners, and the Russian Federation, with 819,200 prisoners, have a total prison population that is remotely close to the US.

Furthermore, with 751 out of 100,000 people, and one out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, the US also has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The Russian Federation is second with 577 per 100,000 and China is 116th with 120 per 100,000. How do you explain this astonishing level of mass imprisonment in the US during the last 40 years? What are the forces behind this and why have they employed this particular strategy?

LA: In the workshops we first developed, in our trainings, and in the comic books, we wanted to create a bigger picture about how we came to this place. To do this, I think we need to understand how Ronald Reagan and the neo-liberal agenda came to power in 1980 by using covert and overt racist messages fabricating the myth of the welfare queen, capitalizing on fears of affirmative action, tearing away at the gains made in civil rights movement---specifically voting rights—while fostering alarm about rampant crime.

The racist sub-text of the neo-liberal political agenda succeeded in creating acceptance of mass incarceration while simultaneously creating the laws and industries to police, prosecute, cage and control millions of people—almost all poor people and people of color.

Neo-liberal policies have been in place for more than thirty years. As a result many people are not aware that our current political and economic situation is not the result of a natural course of events, but rather, of a systemically created ideology that has pervaded every aspect of our daily lives. Deregulation and globalization have caused: the loss of U.S. manufacturing by outsourcing; corporate agriculture and the disappearance of the family farm; reduction of protections for workers; huge decreases in number of unionized workers; privatization of hospitals, water, education, prisons, and the military; drastic cuts in public spending for welfare, public schools, public transportation, housing, and job training. These policies have created huge disparities in wealth.

Democrats and Republicans capitalized on this “perfect storm”. They ran and won on “tough on crime” platforms and passed legislation that has resulted in one in 31 people now under the thumb of the criminal justice system.

A3N: The corporate media’s support for the prison system has ranged from stoking public fears by over-reporting crime, to portraying prisoners as pampered and over-privileged. The comic books, therefore, provide an important counter-narrative. A major focus of the comic books has been the so-called “war on drugs.” Why do you feel that this issue is so important?

LA: Of the more than 2.4 million people imprisoned, more than one million are African Americans. Almost 5 million men and women are on probation and parole, a disproportionate number due to the “war on drugs.” (According to a Pew Report in March 2009, “One in 11 African-Americans are under correctional control, one in 27 Latinos, and one in 45 white people are in prison, jail, or under correctional supervision.”)

The war on drugs includes aggressive policing, centralized data bases for people stopped and frisked for no cause, surveillance cameras in streets and buildings, police or security in schools, and SWAT teams for communities as small as 25,000, and long and punitive mandatory sentences.

From its inception, African-Americans and their communities were the primary target of the war on drugs. In terms of drug use: African Americans constitute 13% of the nation’s monthly drug users, 37% of drug possession arrests, 56% of drug possession convictions, and 74% of those sentenced to prison for drug possession.

There are mandatory sentences for drug convictions and disproportionate sentencing for crack vs. powder cocaine. After years of organizing against this, the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine has changed from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, with no retroactivity for those already convicted under the old law. 80% of people sentenced to crack cocaine charges are African American.

A3N: What have been the consequences of this mass incarceration, fueled by the war on drugs?

LA: The consequences for individuals, families and communities are huge, cumulative, and long-lasting. According to Dina Rose and Todd Clear, in African American communities where 15 to 20% of adults are incarcerated community stability is undermined, resulting in more crime instead of less crime, especially when aggressive policing is added. In addition to less safety, what are the effects of removing the earning and spending power of so many who are incarcerated? What are the long term costs of the disruption of the family as both an economic and emotional unit?

There are other costs and consequences of the punitive legislation especially directed at people with felony drug convictions---read African Americans---that prevent them from creating a sustainable life once they leave prison. These include, for some, a ban on higher education and vocational training, as well as a ban on receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) if convicted of possessing or selling drugs, although some states have opted out. Legislation in 1996 and 1998 also prevented people with felony drug convictions and their families from federally subsidized housing, serving to increase homelessness and make family reunification much more difficult—for women especially. For women who are incarcerated, there is always the possibility of losing custody of their children.

A3N: How has the corporate media presented the war on drugs? Strategically speaking, how do you think activists can best confront this and work to publicly discredit the war on drugs?

LA: The media has portrayed the war on drugs as a fantasy of good vs. evil. There is little or no acknowledgement of the truth about who is targeted and why, of the system’s cruelty and destructiveness, nor of its lasting consequences to people’s lives, the evisceration of communities, and the bankrupting of governments. Only now, with huge state budget deficits, have some states begun to look at what 40 years of these policies have created; not because they think they are unconscionable, but because they are no longer financial sustainable. If they could find a way to continue to finance the bloated prisons and jails, I don’t think they would be looking for alternatives.

Despite this, I do think there is a small opening now to look at the catastrophic “war on drugs.” Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, details how in many ways, the war on drugs has created a more potent, strangulating and oppressive system than the old Jim Crow.

I agree with her and think this framework can re-energize people who took part in the Civil Rights and Black Empowerment movements of the 1960’s and millions who did not. I believe that what is important about her book is that she articulates the convergence of economic, legal, legislative, governmental policies and political forces which led to the mass incarceration of African Americans.

To overturn these policies and the beliefs on which they were built, we must understand the complexities of why and how they have been put in place. Then we can build the new and strong movement we need now.

A3N: Alongside the printed comic books, how do you use the RCPP?

LA: Early on, we developed a website and a little after that a news blog. Together, every day they receive a minimum of 2000 unique visitors. The website is filled with new research, links to hundreds of organizations, and the comic books. A few years ago I began adding political writing and comix by prisoners. This is now a big part of the website. People inside and outside the country are now using the comix and essays in other publications, which is how I had hoped it would work.

As the website has developed, so has a list-serve that keeps me connected to hundreds of organizers, as well as the media and family members of prisoners.

A3N: Of the many news stories featured on the website in the last couple years, could you tell us about a few important stories that you think were the most under-reported and/or misreported by the corporate media?

LA: There are thousands of stories because the true story about prisons is almost completely missing from not only the corporate media, but the left media as well.

First, there is almost no coverage at all about the growth of solitary confinement in the U.S. The best website for this is Solitary Watch and the RCPP website and blog publishes writing and comix from prisoners in solitary.

Second, there are a number of stories involving prisoners organizing, notably the Georgia Prisoners strike and the hunger strike in Lucasville, Ohio. There are a number of stories posted on the RCPP blog. The Human Rights Coalition (PA) is working to bridge the divide between outside and inside organizing (see The Movement).

Third includes "How prisons and jails are becoming debtors prisons," “Criminal Justice Debt: A Barrier to Reentry” by the Brennan Center, and “In For a Penny: The Rise of America's New Debtors' Prisons” by the ACLU .

Finally, the excellent work by The National Advocates for Pregnant Women, whose groundbreaking work brings together issues of women, reproductive rights, criminal justice, and racism.

A3N: Besides the website, how else has the RCPP evolved since the first comic book was published?

LA: The RCPP has evolved greatly since its beginning in 2000. When I started, I barely knew anyone in prison. That began to change once we started conducting our workshops and created a Train the Trainers program which involved many people who had been incarcerated.

Then, the comic books started flying out the door and the daily stacks of letters began arriving. Reading thousands of letters and beginning long-lasting correspondence-relationships with many prisoners, my focus shifted to their efforts to connect and remain a part of the world outside of prison. I saw how the longer someone’s sentence is, the more difficult it becomes to maintain connections—especially after a loved one has passed away.

Because of my daily connections with prisoners, I have become much more involved in conditions of confinement, sentences of life without the possibility of parole, the lengthening of sentences, the parole process or lack of it, and the non-use of compassionate release—even in states where it is policy.

I am constantly aware of the daily cruelties and indignities that men and women endure at the hands of others. I witness how so many people (against circumstances designed to dehumanize and crush their body and mind) manage to overcome and create lives of meaning to themselves and others.

A3N: What do you focus most of your energy on these days?

LA: In addition to sending out comic books, answering mail, and updating the website, I spend some part of everyday attempting to track down research, contacts, and other information for a large number of prisoners who are writers, researchers and activists/organizers.

In Massachusetts, where I am located, I have led an effort to stop the jails from charging fees to prisoners who are convicted and “pre-sentenced.” We are now waiting for a report that will hopefully recommend against these outrageous fees. I am engaged in various efforts to stop “three strikes” legislation from being law in MA. I regularly write and speak to classes and organizations about what is going on all around them, if they will allow themselves to look.

A3N: In your opinion, what are the best forms of practical action that those of us living outside the prison walls can do to help to improve present conditions for those incarcerated, and to challenge the broader criminal “justice” system, with abolition as the long-term goal?

LA: As abolitionists we must find smaller and larger steps along the way to stay engaged and connected to activists inside and out. There’s a lot of work to do:

--Connect to prisoners via books through bars projects and pen pal programs.

--Create true community-based alternatives programs that are not affiliated with sheriff’s departments and other law enforcement, for people with non-violent convictions to stay at home, connected to family and communities, and not go to jail.

--Create bail reform programs so that jails are not debtors prisons- examples include unsecured appearance bonds, setting lower amounts of bail and lowering bail based on the circumstances of someone’s life. For example, do they have children they are taking care of? Do they have a job that will be jeopardized? Many people plead guilty and then end up jail because they know they can’t make bail.

--Create affirmative action campaigns for people with criminal records, based on models of other affirmative action categories, to begin a conversation with employers about the need for second chances. Expand the campaign to housing fairness.

--Talk about the growth of solitary confinement in the U.S. People will be disbelieving but Solitary Watch is a great resource for information and activism.

--Work to expand parole, rather than restricting it! Attend parole hearings and write letters in behalf of people seeking parole

--Communicate with your governor to reinstate commutation. Most governors no longer commute sentences, although this used to be standard practice. Actively support people seeing commutation through letter writing campaigns and public events.

--Work to end the unnecessary and costly systems designed to send parolees back to prison based on minor violations. Strategically speaking, right now with state budget deficits, is a good time to focus attention on this.

--Challenge the drug laws that criminalize addiction and work with “harm reductionists” to provide needle exchange, safe injection sites, community education.

--Decriminalize sex work by joining forces with organizations of sex workers and make public the harassment from the police suffered by sex workers.

--Work with organizations such as Families Against Mandatory Minimums nationally and in your state to end mandatory minimum drug sentences.

--Begin a conversation with state legislators on the extreme length of sentences, not only for people convicted of non-violent offenses, but for those convicted of violent offenses as well. The new report by the Justice Policy Institute, "Finding Direction: Expanding Criminal Justice Options by Considering Policies of Other Nations,” provides models of what other countries are doing.

--Model the successful organizing strategies and legislation in NY State to end the shackling of women in labor and childbirth.

--Join with family groups and others organizing to end “life without the possibility of parole.” Introduce parole review for everyone beginning at 15 years.

--Make compassionate release real for states where it is already a law. Work with faith-based groups and involve faith-based communities in organizing for compassionate release.

--Work with Families to Amend California's Three Strikes (FACTS) and other organizations to end three strikes and habitual offender sentences.

--Join forces with community-based mental health and addiction treatment centers to advocate for money needed for treatment in communities, rather than jails and prisons filled with people suffering from untreated mental illness and no drug treatment. Drug addiction is a mental illness.

--Question the propaganda about who is criminal and the unchanging nature of people who have committed crimes and how they are portrayed in the media.

--Finally, each of us must fight racism wherever we find it. Fighting racism is a blow to mass incarceration.

A3N: How can our readers support your work?

LA: Your readers can support the work of the RCPP by becoming actively engaged in any areas I suggest in the previous answer. People need to know that they can spend a few hours a week and it can have political meaning.

They can financially support effective grassroots organizations that receive no funding or little funding, including of course, the Real Cost of Prisons Project. Our total yearly budget is approximately $4,000 which provides postage, envelopes and maintaining the website. You can make a donation here.

Mostly, I believe people need to wake-up and get engaged wherever they live in whatever they find most compelling. The fact that there is so much to do is not a reason to do nothing.

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

Troy Davis Execution Date Expected Anytime --An interview with Laura Moye of Amnesty International

2011-05-04T23:33:00.000-07:00

(PHOTO: Troy Davis with family during a prison visit.)

Troy Davis Execution Date Expected Anytime
--An interview with Laura Moye of Amnesty International

By Angola 3 News

Laura Moye is director of the Amnesty International USA Death Penalty Abolition Campaign. In this interview, Moye talks about 42-year-old Troy Davis, an African American who has been on death row in Georgia for over 19 years—having already faced three execution dates. The continued railroading of Davis has sparked outrage around the world, and public pressure during the last few years of Davis’ appeals has been essential to his survival today.

However, on March 28, 2011, the US Supreme Court’s rejected his appeal against a federal district court’s ruling that Davis did not prove his innocence in an evidentiary hearing held last year. This week Amnesty International released an email action alert, emphasizing that now, more than a month after the Supreme Court ruling, Davis' execution date can literally be scheduled any day. The situation is dire, and public support is currently needed more than ever before.

To take action and learn more, visit Amnesty International’s page focusing on Troy Davis, as well as the Color of Change petition, www.justicefortroy.org and www.troyanthonydavis.org.

Angola 3 News: Why does Amnesty International consider Troy Davis’ case to be so important?

Laura Moye: Troy Davis’ case is emblematic of a broken and unjust death penalty system. His story speaks volumes about a criminal justice system that is riddled with bias and error and is fixated on procedure more than it is on fairness.

It is often difficult to get people to understand or to be interested in systematic and large-scale injustice, but Troy Davis’ story has gotten through to a lot of people and has made the abolition cause more tangible and real for a lot of people.

A3N: What do you think are the most compelling facts about this case?

LM: The case against Davis has unraveled, yet he still faces execution. The conviction rests primarily on nine key witnesses, but six have recanted and one contradicted her trial statement. The police recovered shell casings at the crime scene, which were naturally present given that there was a shooting. However, they never found a murder weapon or any other physical evidence linking the shell casings to Troy Davis.

Almost all of the witnesses were vulnerable for one reason or another. One witness was illiterate, others were minors that were questioned without their parents or supportive adults, some had criminal histories, and most were African American.

The murder of the white police officer enraged local law enforcement, and indeed it was a terrible crime. Officer Mark MacPhail was rushing to the aid of a homeless man who was beaten unconscious in a Burger King parking lot on the other side of a Greyhound bus station in a poor end of town. When he came running to the scene, he was shot, and he fell to the ground without even having drawn his weapon. He left behind a wife and two very small children. Outrage was appropriate in the wake of his death. However, reports about how the investigation was conducted call into question how fair and proper things went. Many speak to the intense pressure on the African American community to find the perpetrator. Most of the witnesses allege coercion by the police in obtaining statements.

Strangely, one of the two witnesses who did not recant his testimony has been implicated in at least nine affidavits and by a new eyewitness account as being the actual perpetrator. This very same man was the one who first reported to the police that Davis was the shooter. He was never treated as a suspect himself. He was not put in line-ups and he was present at the crime scene with other witnesses for a reenactment of the events.

Davis had a heck of a time trying to seek relief once his case moved from the trial level to the post-conviction habeas process. The Georgia Resource Center was hit with a two-thirds budget cut, which reduced the number of staff attorneys to two, representing about eighty prisoners. Triage was not even possible with the remaining resources. Yet this was the time for Davis to assemble evidence and an argument about his innocence claim.

Also, in the mid-1990s, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), was passed on the heels of the Oklahoma City Bombing. It limited access by death row prisoners of the federal appeals process, placing time limits on introduction of new evidence for example. Davis’ case was negatively impacted along with others.

Troy Davis has been confronted with a system that would rather hold onto a decision a jury made twenty years ago than admit that some fundamentally wrong things have happened. It is a system bent on preserving itself more than on being absolutely sure that injustice and inaccuracy are filtered out.

A3N: Please tell us more about the racism in Davis’case.

LM: Davis is African American. MacPhail, the murder victim, was White. The perpetrator was indisputably African American. The crime happened on a poor end of town, near housing projects and behind a Greyhound bus station. The racial dynamics in the community were inflamed by the murder and the ensuing investigation. Many African Americans have talked about the fear they felt in the midst of a very intense manhunt.

A3N: Do you think the injustices in his case are symptomatic of the overall criminal justice system in the US?

LM: Many death penalty cases have issues of unfairness. Davis’ is less common in that there is a serious innocence claim.

However, how people are treated by the criminal justice system because of their background, particularly race and class, is illustrated by this case. The lack of resources for people’s defense and appeals work is very common. And the difficulty in accessing the appeals process for meaningful relief is also very difficult.

A3N: Why have the appeals courts been so opposed to granting a new trial?

LM: The county superior court in Savannah, Georgia would not grant Davis’ “extraordinary motion for a new trial.” He appealed this all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and was denied. Interestingly, the Georgia Supreme Court denied his appeal by one vote.

The courts are very hesitant to re-open death penalty cases. Witness recantations are considered suspect and testimony by the many people who implicate the other suspect are dismissed as “hearsay.” And yet we know that most of the 138 exonerees from death row did not have DNA at their disposal, just like Davis, who had no other kind of physical evidence.

At trial, the state has the burden to prove the defendant is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” After a conviction, that standard disappears. The prisoner then has an uphill battle to prove that the conviction was wrong or faulty.

A3N: When do you expect that an execution date will be set?

LM: As soon as Georgia announces that it has a protocol for carrying out executions again, we expect an execution warrant to be signed against Davis. From that point, an execution date could be two weeks away.

A couple months ago, the DEA seized Georgia’s supply of lethal injection drugs after a complaint was filed about how they accessed their supply of Sodium Thiopental. Davis would already have received a date if this issue was not at play. So time is very much of the essence.

A3N: What can our readers do to support Troy Davis right now?

LM: We know many people have signed the petition, but this is a hugely important thing we need. If you have not signed the petition this year, please sign it again – by going to www.justicefortroy.org and if you have signed it, please share it with ten friends and ask them to do the same. You can print out the petition and circulate it. That’s downloadable from the website too.

If you know clergy or legal professionals, ask them to please sign the sign-on letters for Troy. And when a date is set, join us for an international day of solidarity, where we will have demos around the world in advance of Davis’ clemency hearing to show the parole board that the world is watching and demands a stop to the execution!

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. In 2007 and 2011, Amnesty International issued statements in support of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, the two members of the Angola 3 who remain in prison today, after more than 39 years of solitary confinement.

SOUL ON FIRE --Online play portrays Herman Wallace of the Angola 3

2011-04-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

Activist, writer, and actress Linda Carmichael explains that she "first wrote the play SOUL ON FIRE about seven years ago, and has had several staged readings performed since, including one Off Broadway. I had been corresponding with Herman and he knew I was an actress and suggested I write a play. It was called ‘Life's Morsel’ and was a multi media theater play for seven characters. A lot of the dialogue was from actual letters that Herman and I wrote to each other over many years. Some of the play is fictionalized and I wrote some of his lines from 'channeling' him. With his approval I later changed the name to SOUL ON FIRE."

Last year, Carmichael wrote a version for two speakers, and a performance of this new version has been videotaped for the internet. The full version is still being edited and finalized. Until then, Carmichael has just released these two short segments to give audiences a preview. One video features Carmichael herself and the other features the eminent Shakespearian actor, Johnny Lee Davenport.

Carmichael's daughter, Lauren Muchan (previously interviewed by Angola 3 News) used some of the script for her award-winning short documentary film, "Letters to Angola," (embedded below) which is featured on the DVD for the new British film about the Angola 3, entitled "In the Land of the Free." Carmichael directed the voice over for Lauren's movie, with Johnny Lee Davenport playing Herman.

Carmichael would love the play to be used more as a tool for spreading the Angola Three story. The new version for two actors is particularly easy to use for readings, and she can rewrite it to accommodate the part of Elizabeth being played by an American. If anyone wants to do a reading, please email her at this address: lindacarmichael13@gmail.com.

Linda Carmichael with the late Anita Roddick, who was a supporter and friend of the Angola 3.

Letters to Angola from joseph sharp on Vimeo.

Congressional Briefing About Solitary Confinement and Other A3 Events

2011-03-27T20:15:00.000-07:00

(View Media Coverage: The Guardian UK, Free Speech Radio News)

After years of legislative advocacy that resulted in significant support of the plight of the Angola 3 in DC, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA), and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) have joined together to jointly sponsor a Congressional Briefing on "The Abuses of Solitary Confinement in the Criminal Justice System" scheduled for Wednesday, April 6th at 3:30pm in the Rayburn House Office Building Room 2226, followed by a screening of the A3 documentary "In the Land of the Free," which features both Rep. Conyers and Rep. Richmond (download the event flyer here).

The Briefing panel will include experts on solitary from all over the country, including A3's own Robert King, and a second panel discussion following the film will include Rep. Richmond, Robert King, and Carine Williams, a member of both the criminal and civil A3 Legal teams. The event will be moderated by Tory Pegram, Campaign Coordinator for the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3, and is open to the public.

We encourage you to both consider attending and contacting your Congressional Members and urging their official involvement in the event to help end abuses of solitary confinement in the US.

In addition to speaking out about the injustices in the case for years, Rep. John Conyers and then Chair of the Louisiana Judiciary Committee, now Congressional Rep. Cedric Richmond, led a Congressional delegation to visit Herman and Albert in Angola in 2008. Their visit resulted in an unprecedented 8 month move of both men from solitary to a dorm. Although both Herman and Albert were unceremoniously transferred back to solitary only 8 months later without explanation or reason, both officials have remained involved in efforts to expose the Constitutional abuses rampant in their cases.

SAN FRANCISCO

"In the Land of the Free" continues to be prominently featured at the many Human Rights Watch film festivals around the world. In San Francisco, on March 31, the 4 PM screening is at the Presentation Theater, 2350 Turk Boulevard. The 7:30 PM screening is at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street (buy tickets here). Robert King, will be speaking at both events, and at the 4 PM event he will be joined by Richard Brown and William Crossman. Read more about the March 31 screenings here.

NEW ORLEANS

We'd like to invite you to be our special guest at the New Orleans debut of "In the Land of the Free," at Warren Easton High School Auditorium at 7pm on Thursday, April 14th as a part of Patois: The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival. Robert King and Emily Maw, the Director of the New Orleans Innocence Project will lead a Q&A following the event.

Get your free tickets now! Just send your name and email to landfree@patoisfilmfest.org and we will be happy to put your name on the will call list at the door. If you have any guests you'd like to bring, just send their names along too and we'll do our best to accommodate them.

On April 17-18 please join us at the RAE Building to mark the 39th year anniversary of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox’s unjust isolation in solitary confinement. 39 people will spend one hour each in a 6x9 ft replica cell. Our program of events over the weekend will also include:

- Screenings of documentaries In the Land of the Free and The Farm, followed by panels of former Black Panthers, artists and legal experts.
- A display of arts & crafts from Angola inmates, and The House That Herman Built by Jackie Sumell and Herman Wallace
- Undoing Racism workshop, round-table discussions, educational workshops with local high school students and a teach-in.
- Theatrical excerpts from Angola 3, The Play written by Parnell Herbert, and Voices performances by Louisiana exonerees.
- Press conference and vigil at dusk.
- A book-signing by Robert King.
- Musical entertainment by local performers.

For more info about the events in New Orleans, click here or visit: www.angola3action.org

Dancing With Dynamite --An interview with Ben Dangl

2011-03-11T14:15:00.000-08:00

Dancing With Dynamite

--An interview with Ben Dangl

By Angola 3 News

Benjamin Dangl, author of the new book Dancing With Dynamite (AK Press), was video-interviewed by Angola 3 News this week while visiting the San Francisco Bay Area, on tour with his book, which has been positively reviewed by a range of publications and writers, including Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, who proclaimed that “Ben Dangl breaks the sound barrier, exploding many myths about Latin America that are all-too-often amplified by the corporate media in the United States.”

Dangl has previously written The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007), and contributed to Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Latin American Issues (McGraw-Hill, 2006). He has written about politics and social issues in Latin America for The Guardian Unlimited, The Nation Magazine, The Progressive, Utne Reader, CounterPunch, Alternet, Common Dreams, Z Magazine, La Estrella de Panama and more. While currently teaching Latin American history and politics and globalization at Burlington College in Vermont, he also works as editor of the news websites: Upside Down World, focusing on politics and social movements in Latin America (founded by Dangl), and Toward Freedom, a progressive perspective on world events.

In Dancing With Dynamite’s introduction, Dangl writes that “this book deals with the dances between today’s nominally left-leaning South American governments and the dynamic movements that helped pave their way to power in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil, and Paraguay. The discussion surrounding the question of changing the world through taking state power or remaining autonomous has been going on for centuries. The vitality of South America’s new social movements, and the recent shift to the left in the halls of government power, make the region a timely subject of study within this ongoing debate. Though often overlooked in contemporary reporting and analysis on the region, this dance is a central force crafting many countries’ collective destiny.”

Dangl feels that US activists can learn much from studying this “dance,” telling Angola 3 News that “because South American social movements have been so successful in the past decade, I think it is important to learn and understand what’s been successful and to apply those strategies and tactics here, where we are facing very similar challenges.” Because the political climate in the US today is different from Latin America in many ways, Dangl argues that “these strategies and tactics shouldn’t just be taken and applied directly to our communities, but should instead be considered and made useful in our own context and realities.”

In the interview, Dangl cites several different lessons for US activists, including the need to “create the kind of social relationships within our own social movements that reflect the kind of world that we are fighting for every day. That’s been useful for neighborhood councils in El Alto, Bolivia where people work together every day, whether it’s to build roads, soccer fields, or pressure a mayor for better access to electricity and water. These kinds of social relations within the family and neighborhoods help to create the capacity to mobilize road blockades and protests when that’s needed.”

There are also lessons here for US activists seeking to push President Obama and other politicians further to the left, as Dangl thinks the question of “how to fight against a relative ally in political office without empowering the right” has been “negotiated very successfully throughout South America.”

Fortunately, US activists have already been learning from their neighbors to the south. In the book’s introduction, Dangl cites several examples, including “the 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago which drew from tactics in Argentina, the movements for access to water in Detroit and Atlanta, which reflected tactics and struggles in Bolivia, and the Take Back the Land movement in Florida, which organized homeless people to occupy a vacant lot and pairs homeless families with foreclosed homes, mirroring the tactics and philosophy of the landless movement in Brazil.”

When asked for a closing thought at the end of our interview, Dangl emphasized the larger global struggle against oppression by arguing that Dancing With Dynamite’s lessons extend well beyond the US and Latin America. “With what’s happened in Egypt with the overthrow of Mubarak, and what is going on right now in Madison,Wisconsin with the fight for collective bargaining, I think these struggles are related in the sense that they’re all about political power. With these recent examples, there is a shift in power from the government office to the streets, and recognizing that is important today in the fight for social change. In Madison, activists say they’ve been really inspired by activists in Egypt. Recognizing these common oppressors & common systems of exploitation, and working for solutions together across borders is really a solution for making the world a better place.”

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

War, Prisons, and Torture in the US & UK --An interview with Richard Haley

2011-03-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

War, Prisons, and Torture in the US & UK
--An interview with Richard Haley

By Angola 3 News

Richard Haley is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has been active in Britain's anti-war movement since 2003. He is a member of the Stop the War Coalition and is currently Chair of Scotland Against Criminalising Communities.

Last December, on Human Rights Day, Scotland Against Criminalising Communities initiated a “Stop Isolation” campaign with an online statement arguing that solitary confinement is a form of torture that must be abolished. The petition states that “We call upon the countries of the world to enact legislation that prohibits long-term prisoner isolation, and prohibits the transfer of prisoners to countries where they would be at risk of such treatment. Dungeons should not be tolerated in the 21st century.”

Angola 3 News: Can you please tell us about your organization Scotland Against Criminalising Communities (SACC)? In Scotland, which communities are being criminalized?

Richard Haley: SACC began as a group of Scottish-based anti-war activists who came together in the first months of 2003 after the arrest of 7 Algerian men on terrorism charges. The arrests were accompanied by an intimidating police trawl for information throughout the Algerian community in Scotland. The arrests got spectacular publicity, leading to a surge in racist incidents against Muslims. So our initial work was to counter these things. We soon saw that there was no evidence against the Algerians. The charges were dropped at the end of the year, after the maximum delay permitted under Scottish law.

Since 9/11 the community most conspicuously criminalized in Scotland has been the Muslim community. At first the focus was on Muslim refugees and immigrants, but later it widened to include British citizens. Muslims are the targets of official suspicion and are at risk of prosecution for activities that would once have been legitimate but are now called "terrorism." Muslim institutions – mosques and various community groups – are subject to state supervision, surveillance and interference.

The legal machinery for this is a series of anti-terrorism laws introduced over the last decade. Scotland has its own devolved Parliament, but anti-terrorism legislation is the responsibility of the British Parliament. Our group joined the London-based Campaign Against Criminalising Communities in calling for the repeal of all Britain's terrorism legislation. The Stop the War Coalition–the main group in Britain opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan–also shares our opposition to the attack on civil liberties. We work with other groups to campaign for prisoners of the "war on terror" throughout Britain and, in some instances, around the world.

Others besides Muslims have been criminalized. Kurdish and Tamil communities have been particular targets. The Kurdish separatist group PKK and the Tamil separatist group LTTE ("Tamil Tigers") are both banned under anti-terrorism legislation, although neither has carried out armed actions outside its homeland. Both groups enjoy wide sympathy in their respective communities in Britain, and community political and social activities reflect that. The banning of the groups has an effect on all that activity.

A3N: Along with focusing on prisons, the SACC website spotlights a range of issues, including the war being waged against Iraq by the US and UK. How do these two issues (prisons and war) relate to each other?

RH: The arrests of the Algerian men in Scotland occurred while the British Government was getting ready to join the US in its invasion of Iraq. Terrorism cases were being massaged or manufactured to create a heightened fear of terrorism and make people more receptive to the argument that the risk of a link between terrorists and Saddam Hussein's regime made the invasion of Iraq necessary.

Besides the arrests in Scotland, a number of Algerian men were arrested on suspicion of involvement in a plot to disseminate ricin poison. The supposed discovery of ricin was announced by the Metropolitan Police in January 2003. Prime Minister Tony Blair told a meeting of British ambassadors that the danger was "present and real" and that its potential was "huge." US Secretary of State Colin Powell included the discovery in his 6 February presentation to the UN Security Council in which he set out the US case for war with Iraq. But by the time that Tony Blair and Colin Powell made their statements, the British Government's Porton Down laboratory had already established that no ricin had been found. This wasn't widely known until the ricin case came to trial in 2005. Four of the five accused were acquitted on all charges; one man was found guilty of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. The story of the ricin plot is told in the book Ricin! by Lawrence Archer and Fiona Bawdon (Pluto Press, 2010).

The danger of terrorism, coupled with the hypothetical possibility of a link to the Iraqi regime, formed part of the British Government's case to Parliament in the crucial March 2003 debate that authorized the invasion of Iraq. Terrorism couldn't provide a legal justification for the war, but it went a long way towards persuading MPs to acquiesce in the flimsy legal justifications that were offered.

There are structural links between prisons and war. The so-called "war on terror" is at the moment focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than Iraq. Whatever its location, it is a war for resources and power. It is imperialist and racist and necessarily involves the denial of human rights. Since Britain is a multi-ethnic country and our population has religious, cultural and family ties to the theatres of war, the denial of rights necessarily extends to Britain. Prison walls obstruct solidarity and promote fear.

A3N: Looking at the “Stop Isolation” statement published online last December, why did SACC choose to focus on the issue of solitary confinement at this present time? As signatures collect, will you be submitting it to anyone in the form of a petition?

RH: We call "Stop Isolation" a statement rather than a petition because it isn't particularly directed towards being handed in somewhere. It is available on the internet for anyone – government or activist – to see. We may in due course post a copy to the justice ministers of a selection of countries. But we intend the statement to stand for as long as necessary as a rallying point for people who want to work together while putting pressure on their governments to end long-term prisoner isolation. "Stop Isolation" is independent of other campaigns that SACC supports. We hope to keep expanding the website to include more news and background from around the world.

We launched "Stop Isolation" because the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is considering the appeals of four British citizens--Babar Ahmad, Syed Tahla Ahsan, Haroon Rashid Aswat, and Abu Hamza--against extradition to the US to face terrorism charges. The court is considering whether the length of the sentences the men may face and the risk of long-term isolation at ADX Florence (for three of the men) would breach their right under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights not to "be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." The court's long-delayed judgment is expected in the next few months. It will be a landmark in the development of human rights law.

The ECHR is the last legal recourse for human rights appeals by people in the 47 member states of the Council of Europe--a grouping that is wider and distinct from the European Union.

If the court blocks the men's extradition it will send a signal to the US that the harshness of the US penal system is damaging its international relations. On the other hand, a ruling in favor of extradition could open the door to harsher prison conditions in Europe. In either case the challenge to human rights campaigners will be the same--we will need a vigorous international campaign against prisoner isolation.

The charges against the four men are different, but all the cases are marred by a range of worrying issues, in addition to the matters that the ECHR has agreed to consider. Some of the problems stem from Britain's Extradition Act 2003, which allows people to be extradited to the US without any need for prima facie evidence to be presented. US lawmakers have wisely failed to ratify the treaty that would create reciprocal arrangements for extradition from the US to Britain. Some of the British opposition to the Extradition Act has stressed the loss of sovereignty that it entails and the lack of balance created by the US position. But sovereignty and balance aren't the real issues. The real problem is that evidence-free extradition promotes injustice. For more background, see lawyer Gareth Peirce's article in the London Review of Books.

A3N: Can you tell us more about these four British citizens?

RH: Two of the men - Babar Ahmad and Syed Tahla Ahsan – have become particular friends of SACC over the years that it has taken for their appeals to reach the ECHR. Their cases are closely linked to one another. They relate to the men's alleged support – largely by means of the internet – for groups in Chechnya and Afghanistan over the period 1997-2004. The offences were all allegedly committed while the men were in Britain. Talha Ahsan has never visited the US. The evidence against the men has never been presented to a British court. Both men say that they should be tried in Britain. British prosecutors say they don't have enough evidence to do so.

Babar Ahmad has become very widely known amongst Muslims in Britain. His arrest marked the moment when British Muslims, as well as refugees and immigrants, began to feel threatened by the state. Babar was subjected to a serious and unprovoked assault by police officers during and after his initial arrest at his London home in December 2003. Much later (while in jail) he won a lawsuit against the police over his ill-treatment. He was released without charge six days after his initial arrest, but was arrested again 8 months later on an extradition request from the US. He has been held in high-security jails ever since. There is more information on his case on the website www.freebabarahmad.com and on the SACC website.

Talha Ahsan was arrested in London in July 2006 following an extradition request from the US and has been held in high-security jails ever since. The cases against both Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan rely on evidence seized by British police during their violent raid on Babar Ahmad's home, and then passed to the US.

A booklet entitled This be the Answer: Prison Poems by Talha Ahsan, has just been published and includes more background about his case. The Free Talha Ahsan website (www.freetalha.org) will be launched shortly.

If the four men are sent to the US, they are sure to be accompanied by damaging publicity. They will need all the support they can get if they are to stand a chance of a fair trial. Readers can find contact details for Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan on the SACC website. I'm sure that both men would be delighted to receive letters from the US.

We also need the support of US readers for our campaign against prisoner isolation. Spread the word about the "Stop Isolation" statement and website. Encourage people to add their names to the statement. Use it when campaigning for individual prisoners. Send "Stop Isolation" any news that might be of interest (contact details here). Tell your representatives on Capitol Hill about it. The statement is supported by senior legal and human rights figures around the world. Their support shows that the US is out of step with international best practice on this issue.

A3N: Why do you think that the use of solitary confinement is so widespread? Why do governments choose to use it as a form of punishment?

RH: Because they can.

Because prison authorities often believe that it is absolutely necessary to make prisoners conform, whatever the human cost.

Because solitary confinement is imposed on people who are in prison and lack easy access to legal remedy or public support.

Torturers often prefer methods that don't leave obvious marks. Solitary confinement is one such method. It is often thought to be near the margin of the practices prohibited under human rights law. So governments can use it to flex their muscles and to stimulate reactionary sentiment without colliding with international law and its enforcement mechanisms. I hope the "Stop Isolation" statement will make that harder to do.

A3N: Why do you think torture itself is a tactic used by governments?

RH: Anti-torture campaigners often say that torture doesn't work. They mean that torture doesn't yield reliable information, and of course they are right. But torture has worked very well for thousands of years to help rulers dominate the ruled. The recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt happened when torture stopped working. Our job is to stop torture working. Eradicating it will then be easy.

A3N: How often is solitary used in Europe? How does the European use of solitary contrast with how the US uses it?

RH: Prison Governors in Scotland may authorize segregation for a maximum of 72 hours. The period can be extended for a month at a time by Scottish Ministers or by officials to whom ministers delegate responsibility.

A lawsuit brought by a group of prisoners over their solitary confinement came to court in 2004. There were at that time 63 prisoners in segregation units in Scotland out of a prison population of a little under 7000. The litigants complained of episodes of segregation that had in some cases occurred some years previously. Several of them had been placed in segregation cells for periods of around five months. Another prisoner--not one of these bringing the lawsuit--was known at that time to have been in solitary for 18 months.

The Scottish Prison Service settled with the prisoners in 2009. Regrettably, the service insisted that it had settled "purely on economic grounds" and that it did not accept that the segregation of the prisoners had been unlawful. An inspection of Perth prison in 2009 found that 2 prisoners had been held in segregation for "more than a month." A 2007 inspection of Kilmarnock Prison found that one prisoner had been in segregation for 5 months and another for 3 months. Inspections of some other Scottish prisons in recent years have reported that segregation cells were rarely used.

In England and Wales punitive solitary confinement can be imposed on adults for a maximum of 28 days. Prisoners can be segregated without time limit to preserve "good order and discipline" or for their own protection. Their segregation is subject to frequent review.

The use of solitary confinement varies across Europe. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) has wide powers to visit and inspect prisons in the 47 member states of the Council of Europe. It says that "all forms of solitary confinement should be as short as possible." Some European states have chosen not to publish the CPT's reports on their country, as is their right. For example, no reports on CPT visits to the Russian Federation have ever been published.

Since 1999, Turkey has been holding PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in a specially built prison on the island of Imrali. For 10 years he was its sole inmate. The CPT visited the prison in 2007 and subsequently recommended that Öcalan should "be integrated into a setting where contacts with other inmates and a wider range of activities are possible." In November 2009 the Turkish authorities transferred several other prisoners to Imrali to alleviate Öcalan's isolation. Turkey has a very poor human rights record and Öcalan is its most notorious prisoner; it nevertheless felt unable to maintain his isolation.

Solitary confinement for periods of several years or more is very rare in Europe. Solitary confinement for periods of many months is generally unusual. Supermax-style conditions are almost certainly very rare or absent.

The use of solitary confinement is much more restricted by judicial process and legally-empowered monitoring in Europe than in the US. But I know of no Europe-wide survey of solitary confinement, so the picture of European practice is a very tentative and provisional one.

A3N: What strategies are European activists using to influence policy, that might be useful in the US?

RH: I think that European activists may have more to learn from US activists than vice versa. From here, it looks as if prison activism in the US is much wider, deeper and more politicized in the US than in Britain.

Excellent work is being done here by Paddy Hill and John McManus at Miscarriages of Justice Organisation Scotland. Paddy Hill is one of the Birmingham 6. He spent 16 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of the 1974 Irish Republican bombings in Birmingham.

Excellent work is also being done by Cage Prisoners. Former Guantanamo prisoner Moazzam Begg is one of its directors.

A3N: With recent revelations that Bradley Manning is also a citizen of the UK, SACC is calling for the British government to intervene. Can you please tell us more about this? Has there been a response yet from the British government?

RH: It turns out that Bradley Manning's mother is Welsh, so he is a British citizen as well as a US citizen. Britain normally offers only informal help to dual nationals detained in the country of their other nationality, but it makes formal representations where there are human rights issues. There are obviously human rights concerns for Bradley Manning, but the British government has so far given no help. A number of Members of Parliament have told constituents that they are concerned over this, but they haven't yet had a response from the Government. British Members of the European Parliament have also expressed an interest. So we'll be trying to keep the pressure up. There is more information on the "UK Friends of Bradley Manning" website.

If the allegations against Bradley Manning are true, we are indebted to him for helping to reveal what the war in Iraq was really like. Whether the allegations are true or not, his isolation in Quantico Brig puts him under pressure to incriminate himself and Julian Assange.

Manning and Assange both need support; support for either of them will make both stronger. Assange is pinned down dealing with allegations of sex crimes in Sweden. The US authorities are meanwhile trying to find a formula that will let them charge him without threatening the traditional media. The worldwide media have helped the US government tremendously by distancing themselves from Assange. Journalists who collude in this should be ashamed of themselves.

Britain's extradition court has unsurprisingly ducked the chance to see justice done over Sweden's request for Assange to be extradited there. The Chief Magistrate, Howard Riddle, ruled on 24 February that the extradition can go ahead. To rule otherwise wouldn't just have meant standing in the path of the juggernaut bearing down on Wikileaks. It would also have shone a spotlight on the operation of the already-controversial European Arrest Warrant. The warrants came into effect in August 2003 and allow extradition with minimal legal oversight between the various radically different jurisdictions within the European Union. Like the arrangements for extradition from Britain to the US, the system is an open invitation to injustice.

Riddle has accepted that Assange will be held incommunicado in prison in Sweden and will then be interrogated, held without bail and eventually tried in secret. But he held that these facts should not stand in the way of Assange's extradition. Assange's lawyer Mark Stephens says that, though Sweden's penal system has some progressive features, the country is a "human rights black spot in relation to solitary confinement." Stephens argues that extradition proceedings should not be a rubber-stamp but should instead be a tool to "improve the quality of justice throughout Europe" and eliminate "human rights blind spots." This is exactly the approach that SACC has long been advocating.

If the larger issues of Julian Assange's case are to be dealt with, it will be in a more elevated forum than the extradition court. Assange will appeal to the High Court and, if unsuccessful, may then appeal to Britain's Supreme Court and then to the European Court of Human Rights. Even these courts are only likely to stand up for justice and against state interests if public opinion demands it.

Riddle said in his 24 February ruling: "sometimes public comment damages the cause more than it helps." He was referring to comments made on the steps of the court last year by Assange's lawyer. Assange's legal team may get a rough ride. If they do, it won't be the first time that Britain's legal establishment has tried to keep an inconvenient lawyer quiet. In 2006, Scottish lawyer Aamer Anwar was accused of contempt of court after speaking out against the conviction of his client Mohammed Atif Siddique on terrorism charges. Campaigners rallied in Anwar's support, the contempt charges were thrown out by three high court judges and the appeal court in Edinburgh eventually ruled that Siddique had suffered a miscarriage of justice. People must be ready to give Julian Assange's lawyers the same sort of robust support that we in Scotland gave to Aamer Anwar.

Amy Jeffress, the US justice department's attaché to the American embassy in London, has dismissed concerns that Julian Assange could be at risk of detention at Guantánamo Bay if re-extradited from Sweden to the US. She told the BBC radio program Law in Action: "The President, of course, has decided to close Guantánamo Bay and so no one is going to Guantánamo Bay and that claim is baseless."

But Obama's deadline for closing Guantánamo expired over a year ago. His handling of the issue has shown the whole world that the White House has neither the will nor the authority to guarantee respect for human rights in the United States.

A3N: Anything else to add?

RH: The world is shrinking. Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world cooperate closely on matters they say are related to terrorism. They use extradition, rendition and the opportunistic torture of people who travel to countries whose governments can get away with it. Too often, the human rights standards that count are the lowest ones. We need to work together so that we all benefit instead from the highest standards.

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

Dylcia and Cisco on Panthers and Independistas

2011-02-26T22:23:00.000-08:00

ABOVE: Full, 39 minute version. BELOW: Edited, 10 minute version.

Dylcia and Cisco on Panthers and Independistas
--SF8 Hearing on March 2

By Kiilu Nyasha and Angola 3 News

This February 26, 2011 episode of Freedom is a Constant Struggle features Dylcia Pagan and Francisco Torres.

Dylcia Pagan is a Puerto Rican freedom fighter and Independista, who spent nearly 20 years in Federal prisons on charges of seditious conspiracy for her role in the underground wing of the Puerto Rican independence movement. One of 11 Puerto Rican political prisoners granted clemency in 1999 by President Clinton, she was paroled to Puerto Rico, where she has continued to struggle against U.S. colonialism nonviolently. Born and raised in New York City, Dylcia studied psychology, political science, and Puerto Rican studies at Brooklyn College where she founded the Puerto Rican Students Union. Her culture and politics are expressed through painting, ceramics, poetry, writings, and film.

She has participated in the production of a video about her life and compañeros in the struggle; and while in prison, she helped direct a documentary about Puerto Rican Women Prisoners of War. Her biography has been published in Puerto Rican Women: A History of Oppression and Resistance and she appears in the new film Machetero (view a clip with Dylcia here).

Francisco Torres (Cisco), 58, of New York City, was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. He is a Vietnam Veteran who fought for the grievances of Black and Latino soldiers upon his return to the states. A former Black Panther, he has been a community activist since his discharge from the military in 1969. Cisco continues to work with troubled youth in his Queens community.

Cisco is the last of the San Francisco Eight to still be facing charges. As Cisco discusses in this interview, he had an evidentiary hearing scheduled for March 2, 2011. However, three days after the interview, on February 28, this hearing was canceled. A short update published on the SF8 website states: "An evidentiary hearing had been planned to take up the question of wiretaps, whose existence had long been denied by the prosecution. It now appears that the question may be settled without a hearing. Details to be posted here as soon as available...Stay tuned for future court dates." For the latest developments in the case and what you can do to help, please go to www.freethesf8.org.

--This episode of Freedom is a Constant Struggle is a collaborative project by Kiilu Nyasha and Angola 3 News.

Kiilu Nyasha is a San Francisco-based journalist and former member of the Black Panther Party. Through the end of 2009, Kiilu hosted a weekly TV program, "Freedom Is A Constant Struggle," on SF Live, and many of her shows are archived at www.kiilunyasha.blogspot.com. Kiilu also writes for several publications, including the SF Bay View Newspaper and BlackCommentator.com. Also an accomplished radio programmer, she has worked for KPFA (Berkeley), SF Liberation Radio, Free Radio Berkeley, and KPOO in SF.

Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

Great News! Judge Brady Rules in Albert Woodfox's Favor!

2011-02-17T12:29:00.000-08:00

The hearing on Tuesday went so well that Brady has already ruled in Albert's favor, granting Albert an evidentiary hearing on the issue of discrimination in the selection of the Grand Jury foreperson (read the 2 page ruling here). The presumption that discrimination occurred is now technically in our favor and this hearing will be the State's chance to rebut it. Timelines are still being worked out but most likely the hearing will be scheduled by summer.

This is a small but important step towards again overturning Albert's unjust conviction. A huge congrats to the legal team for the months of unexpected legal work it took them to get us back to this stage of the game, and lots of gratitude to all the supporters who made the trip to Baton Rouge to fill the hearing courtroom. Thanks to a brilliantly argued case, the court is better poised to again give Albert yet another chance at freedom than it was when this process began.

Richard Brown: The SF8 and FBI Repression (video)

2011-02-03T15:10:00.000-08:00

Richard Brown: The SF8 and FBI Repression

Video by Angola 3 News

In this video, Richard Brown, of the San Francisco Eight, speaks at a protest outside the US Federal Court Building in San Francisco on January 25, 2011. Brown urges the public to support the 23 anti-war activists that were subpoenaed to testify before a Grand Jury that day. All activists refused to testify and can now be criminally charged for not testifying. Learn more, please visit: www.stopfbi.net

Richard Brown contextualizes the recent subpoenas with how the SF8 were similarly called before a Grand Jury, and were imprisoned because they refused to testify. Cisco Torres, the last of the SF8 still facing charges, has a court hearing in San Francisco on March 2 that supporters are being urged to attend. Learn more at: www.freethesf8.org

Lucasville Five Hunger Strike Begins --An interview with author Staughton Lynd

2011-01-02T22:35:00.000-08:00

Lucasville Five Hunger Strike Begins

--An interview with author Staughton Lynd

By Angola 3 News

January 3, 2011

In 1993, the maximum security Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio was the site of an historic prisoner rebellion, where more than 400 prisoners seized and controlled a major area of the prison for eleven days. Nine prisoners alleged to have been informants and one hostage correctional officer named Robert Vallandingham, were murdered. Following a negotiated surrender, five key figures in the rebellion were tried and sentenced to death. Known since as the Lucasville Five, they are Namir Abdul Mateen (James Were), Siddique Abdullah Hasan (Carlos Sanders), Bomani Hando Shakur (Keith Lamar), George Skatzes and Jason Robb.

The Lucasville Five are now back in the news with an announcement last week that four of the five will be participating in a simultaneous “rolling hunger strike,” beginning today, January 3. They are using the hunger strike to protest their convictions (having always maintained their innocence) as well as their living situation, which is more restrictive than for most prisoners on Ohio’s death row. The statement issued by the Lucasville Uprising Freedom Network explains that “the hunger strike will proceed in an organized manner, with one prisoner, probably Bomani Shakur starting on Jan.3. The hunger strike becomes official after he has refused 9 meals. Therefore the plan is that 3 days later, Siddiquie Abdullah Hasan will start his hunger strike and 3 days later, Jason Robb will follow. Namir Mateen has a great willingness to participate and plans to take part to the extent that his diabetes will allow.”

Staughton Lynd is the author of the 2004 book, Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising, which asserts that the Lucasville Five are innocent men, who were framed by the State of Ohio. In a review of Lucasville, the news website, Solidarity, concludes that “Lynd presents sufficient evidence and argumentation to cast more than reasonable doubt on the convictions of the Lucasville Five.” The book’s “immediate agenda is to mobilize public opinion to achieve amnesty for the Lucasville Five. In the 1970s, the governor of New York was compelled to grant amnesty to the Attica rebels based upon revelations of state malfeasance. Lynd contends the Lucasville Five’s death sentences should be wiped clean on the same grounds.”

In the foreword to the upcoming second edition of Lucasville, being released by PM Press in February, death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal writes that the Lucasville Five "sought to minimize violence, and indeed, according to substantial evidence, saved the lives of several men, prisoner and guard alike…they rose above their status as prisoners, and became, for a few days in April 1993, what rebels in Attica had demanded a generation before them: men. As such, they did not betray each other; they did not dishonor each other; they reached beyond their prison ‘tribes’ to reach commonality."

Angola 3 News: Can you please give us some historical background on the 1993 uprising and the subsequent convictions of the Lucasville Five?

Staughton Lynd: There were revolts at the old Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus in the late 1960s. The state government decided to build a new maximum security prison in a town called Lucasville, just north of the Ohio River separating Ohio and Kentucky.

The new prison housed between 1,500 and 2,000 prisoners. More than half the prisoners at the new Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF) were African Americans from cities like Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown. Lucasville was all white and inevitably, most of the correctional officers at the new prison were Caucasian.

'Luke' developed a well-deserved reputation for violence. There was a horrible incident in 1990 when, in a sequence of events that remains ambiguous, a black prisoner followed a white teacher into a women's restroom. White guards broke down the door to the restroom and, as they did so, the prisoner cut the teacher's throat.

The State sent in a new warden who instituted 'Operation Shakedown.' Prisoners were allowed one short telephone call a year, at Christmastime.

In April 1993 the new warden proposed to test all prisoners for TB by means of an injection. More than fifty Muslim prisoners protested. They said the injection would contain phenol, a form of alcohol; that this was forbidden by their religion; and that there were alternative means of testing for TB, by sputum or X ray. Warden Tate said it would be done his way, by injection, beginning Monday, April 12.

On April 11, Easter Sunday, prisoners returning from the recreation yard occupied one large housing block, L side. Guards were overpowered. Persons severely injured in the takeover, both guards and prisoners believed to be snitches, were carried out to the yard. Eight officers were held as hostages. In the course of an 11-day standoff, nine prisoners and one hostage guard were murdered. There was a negotiated surrender.

A3N: Why was this story so important to you that you decided to write a book about it?

SL: In 1996 my wife and I became aware that as a result of the Lucasville uprising, a new maximum security prison called the Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP) was being built in Youngstown. We organized a community forum at which one of the speakers was Jackie Bowers, sister of one of five prisoners condemned to death after the surrender. We met her brother, George Skatzes (pronounced 'skates.') His lawyer told us that we could best help by investigating facts not presented at trial and we have been doing that ever since.

The importance of the story is that the five men sentenced to death are three blacks and two whites. Two of the three blacks, Siddique Abdullah Hasan and Namir Abdul Mateen, are Muslims. At the time of the rebellion the two whites were members of the Aryan Brotherhood. One is still an AB leader although Skatzes has withdrawn. These five men have acted in solidarity during their almost eighteen years of solitary confinement. They have refused to 'snitch' on each other.

A3N: What facts do you cite for arguing that the State of Ohio deliberately framed innocent men?

SL: My allegation that the State of Ohio has deliberately framed innocent men is presented in a book, Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising (Temple University Press, 2004), a second edition of which will be published in 2011 with a Foreword by Mumia Abu Jamal, and in a law review article, "Napue Nightmares: Perjured Testimony in Trials Following the Lucasville, Ohio, Prison Uprising," Capital University Law Review., v. 36, No. 3 (Spring 2008) The key fact is that the State made it clear early on that they wanted to put the alleged leaders of the disturbance to death, and built cases against the Five almost wholly on the basis of testimony by prisoners who, in exchange for their testimony, received benefits such as early parole.

A3N: Why you believe the trial itself was unfair?

SL: The trials were unfair for a variety of reasons, but the two basic facts were: 1) the Five were tried before so-called 'death-qualified' juries, that is, juries from which persons opposed to the death penalty were excluded; and 2) the prosecution's evidence, as I indicated earlier, came almost entirely from prisoner informants in exchange for bargained-for benefits like parole.

A3N: How has your 2004 book been received?

SL: My book was banned from all Ohio prisons and it provoked a good deal of discussion in Ohio. In 2007, a play based on the book was presented in seven Ohio cities. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed friend of the court briefs, based on the book, in the trials of Skatzes and Hasan.

A3N: Can you please tell us more about the hunger strike? How do prison officials publicly justify these conditions that are being challenged?

SL: As to the goals of the hunger strike, I refer the reader to Keith LaMar's statement. LaMar emphasizes that he understands the prison system's concern for security, but, he insists, a 'privilege" such as the opportunity to touch a parent or other relative does not threaten security. The more than 150 other death-sentenced prisoners in Ohio enjoy such privileges. On the other hand, the Lucasville Five are held alone in their small cells 23 hours a day, and when released for an hour of so-called recreation cannot be in the same space as any other human being.

A3N: Can you please explain why George Skatzes is not currently housed alongside the other four members of the Lucasville Five and how his conditions differ from the others?

SL: George Skatzes was transferred to OSP when it opened in 1998 along with the other members of the Lucasville Five. He was transferred out two years later because the authorities feared that he was so depressed that he might commit suicide. He is held with about thirty other death-sentenced prisoners considered seriously mentally ill at the Mansfield Correctional Institution, north of Columbus.

A3N: How can our readers best help to support the upcoming hunger strike?

SL: Readers can help by contacting Professor Jules Lobel, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, <jll4@pitt.edu>, and Professor Denis O'Hearn, director of graduate studies in sociology at the State University of New York, Binghamton, <denisohearn@googlemail.com> They are circulating a statement of support nationally and internationally.

Bradley Manning and GI Resistance to US War Crimes --An interview with Dahr Jamail

2010-12-22T16:07:00.000-08:00

Bradley Manning and GI Resistance to US War Crimes

--An interview with Dahr Jamail

By Angola 3 News

Independent journalist Dahr Jamail spent nine months reporting directly from Iraq, following the US invasion in 2003. His stories have been published by Inter Press Service, Truthout, Al-Jazeera, The Nation, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, the Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Independent, and many others. On radio as well as television, Dahr reports for Democracy Now!, has appeared on Al-Jazeera, the BBC and NPR, and numerous other stations around the globe.

Jamail is the author of two recent books: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From An Unembedded Journalist (2008) and The Will To Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse To Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (2009). He also contributed Chapter 6, “Killing the Intellectual Class,” for the book Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered (2010). Learn more at www.dahrjamailiraq.com

Angola 3 News: On April 4, 2010, WikiLeaks.org released a classified 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter in Iraq, firing on civilians and killing 11, including Reuters’ photojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, 40 year old Saeed Chmagh. No charges have been filed against the US soldiers involved.

In sharp contrast, a 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning has been accused of leaking the classified video. Arrested in May and facing up to 52 years in prison for a range of charges, Manning is now being held under what lawyer/journalist Glenn Greenwald has termed “inhumane conditions.”

Manning’s support website declares that “exposing war crimes is not a crime.” Indeed, the Nuremberg Laws, established after the horrors of WWII, declare that soldiers have a legal obligation to resist criminal wars. Let’s please take a closer look at this issue of US war crimes. What do you think are the strongest arguments that have been made for why US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are criminal?

DJ: To be clear, while I’ve covered Iraq extensively, I’ve not covered Afghanistan. Thus, I’ll keep all my answers in the context of my expertise, that being Iraq.

That said, the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq could not have more clearly violated international law. Even former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, said in September 2004 that the Iraq war was illegal and breached the UN Charter.

An illegal war is thus the mother of all war crimes, for from that stem all the rest. What I’ve seen in Iraq has been a parade of war crimes committed by the US military: rampant torture, collective punishment (Fallujah is an example), deliberate firing on medical workers, deliberate killing of civilians for “sport,” and countless others.

Then, there is the fact that both occupations are so clearly about control of dwindling resources and their transport routes, that the excuses given for them by the US government (both Bush and Obama) are both laughable and insulting to anyone capable of a modicum of critical thought.

A3N: How do you rate the corporate media’s coverage of the Bradley Manning story?

DJ: It’s been a farce. A classic case of “shoot the messenger.” When someone becomes a soldier, they swear an oath to support and defend the US constitution by following “lawful” orders. Thus, they are legally obliged by their own oath to not follow unlawful orders. What Manning did by leaking this critical information has been to uphold his oath as a soldier in the most patriotic way. Now, compare that with how he has been raked over the coals by most of the so-called mainstream media.

A3N: How do they address the argument that “exposing war crimes is not a crime?”

DJ: Usually they don’t, because the corporate media, and the government for that matter, avoid the words “war crime” as though they are a plague. Thus, they avoid the issue at all cost.

A3N: In your opinion, how do the corporate media present the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to the US public?

DJ: With Iraq, the occupation is presented as though it was a mistake, as though the great benevolent US Empire was mistakenly mislead into the war. But since “we” are there, it is good that at least Saddam Hussein has been removed, and now of course the US has only done the best it can in a tough situation.

With Afghanistan, the occupation is presented to the public as the ongoing frontline battle against “terrorism,” while in reality, they should call Afghanistan “pipeline-istan” because it’s all about securing the access corridors for natural gas and oil pipelines from the Black Sea, through Afghanistan (the 4 main US bases there are located along the exact pipeline route) to the coast of Pakistan.

A3N: How does the corporate media narrative contrast with what you have seen first-hand in Iraq?

DJ: The difference is night and day. The whitewashing and outright lying by the corporate media is offensive to me. It is repulsive, in fact, when compared to what the reality on the ground is in Iraq. The brutality of the US military there against the civilian population would shock people. More than 1 million Iraqis have been slaughtered because of the US occupation. As you read this you can know that one in every ten Iraqis remains displaced from their homes. Can you imagine that? The US policy in Iraq has been so destructive, that one out of every ten Iraqis is currently displaced from their home, now at more than 7 years into the occupation?

A3N: Returning now to the issue of soldier resistance, what are the various reasons that anti-war soldiers give as motivation for their opposition to the occupations?

DJ: Mostly from what the soldiers see once they arrive in the occupation: the buckets of money being made by the contractors, the lack of goals for the occupation beyond generating huge amounts of profit for war contractors, and that the reasons given for the invasion/occupation were entirely false. So most seem to become anti-war when they see that they’ve been lied to, used, betrayed, and that they are putting their lives on the line so that war contractors can get richer.

A3N: What are some of the ways that anti-war soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have resisted?

DJ: Myriad ways. The most common, and least dramatic, is going AWOL. More than 60,000 soldiers have now taken that route since 11 September 2001. So, often, folks will go do a deployment, come back for a break, then simply not show up when it’s time for their unit to redeploy.

Some of the more interesting means of resistance I’ve found entailed doing what soldiers refer to as “search and avoid” missions. One soldier told me how they would go out to the end of their patrol route in their Humvees, find a big field, and park. They’d call in to base every hour to check in and say, “We’re fine, we’re still searching this field for weapons caches.” And they would sit there doing nothing until the time was up for their patrol, and they’d return to base. I met more and more soldiers who shared similar stories, from all over Iraq, during different times of the occupation. That’s when I realized how low morale was and how widespread different kinds of resistance had become.

Other soldiers found out how to manipulate their locator beacon on the GPS unit in the Humvees, so they’d sit and have tea with Iraqis, while someone moved their beacon around so their base thought they were patrolling.

A3N: How has US military leadership responded to this resistance?

DJ: They don’t know about much of it when it’s happening. Although there have been times when a unit has been caught doing something like the aforementioned, and they’ve broken up the unit, but that has been quite rare overall.

With AWOL troops, the military doesn’t have the manpower to send their MPs after them, so they let them go, wait for them to get a traffic ticket, for example, then the cops hand them over to the MPs who throw the AWOL soldier in the brig to await a court-martial. Then, often, the soldier is told he/she can go back to Iraq/Afghanistan, or they will be court-martialed.

A3N: In your book The Will To Resist, you document many different cases of soldiers that faced criminal charges for their opposition to US wars. We discussed Bradley Manning’s case earlier in this interview, but can you please tell us about any other recent, ongoing cases that have begun since the publication of your book in 2009? How can our readers best support these soldiers?

DJ: Most of those I followed that took place after my book was published have been completed, time served by the soldiers, and then their release into freedom from the military. Two cases of this type really stand out: Victor Agosto and Travis Bishop. Both of these men stood up and refused to be deployed, were court-martialed, served their time, and are now free.

There will be more to come as these occupations persist. A group to follow who regularly supports these resisters is Courage To Resist. They are based in Oakland and are run by Jeff Paterson, himself a resister to the first Gulf War. They do a great job of tracking resisters and what folks can do to support them. Support includes donations, but also making phone calls, writing letters, and other forms of activism.

A3N: In the months leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the anti-war movement in the US was relatively strong, but since the invasion began, the anti-war movement seems to have lost considerable momentum and strength. On a practical level, what do you think the US anti-war movement needs in order to be re-energized and finally end these wars?

DJ: At the risk of sounding like a cynic when I feel I’m making an honest assessment, I don’t feel there will be a mass organization of an anti-war movement. We already live in a police state. What is left of the anti-war movement is completely infiltrated, and is being torn apart by sectarianism and profiteering (the peace-industrial-complex).

In addition, I feel that the main reason for the failure of the anti-war movement is that most folks involved in it still believe they can work within the system to generate change, when the system is completely corrupted already. By “system,” I mean the federal government. That apparatus is broken beyond repair, it is completely corrupted, and needs to be dissolved. Thus, any movement that seeks to work within the parameters set by the system (such as weekend permitted demonstrations, thinking you can effectively pressure your representative, etc) is doomed before it begins, because it is still playing by the rules set out by those in power. Rules guarantee never to jeopardize the loss of power by those who hold it.

Only truly radical actions, meant to subvert the system and shut it down to a point where business as usual is impossible until demands are met, are all that is left.

Kiilu Nyasha reviews the new film “In The Land of the Free...”

2010-11-22T23:33:00.000-08:00

The Case of the Angola 3

--A review of the new film “In The Land of the Free...”

Produced by Vadim Jean, in memory of Anita Roddick

Film review written by Kiilu Nyasha

“They will never be able to break me,” said Herman Wallace, despite the torment and torture of 37 years in a 6 x 9 cell in the “bloodiest prison in the nation.” He and his comrade, Albert Woodfox, suffer such solitary confinement to this day.

Targeted for their militancy, co-captives Wallace, Woodfox and Robert King had organized a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party and they became known as the Angola 3 after they were falsely convicted by kangaroo courts and all-white juries. Wallace and Woodfox were convicted for the murder of prison guard, Brent Miller in 1972, and King was convicted separately for the death of another inmate in 1973.

Brent Miller’s widow, Teenie Miller, who appears in the film, asks, “Who really killed my husband?” At a 2008 hearing she said, “If they did not do this – and I believe that they didn’t – they have been living a nightmare for 36 years!”

This movie gives us a rare look at Angola prison, built on 18,000 acres in Louisiana that was a plantation where slaves, mostly from Angola, Africa, worked the cotton fields. It pictures the ugly daily existence of the plantation’s 5,000 captives -- more prisoners per capita than any other prison in the world – forced to work 17 hours a day for 2 cents an hour in fields of corn, cotton and sugar cane at gun point. A modern-day slave plantation.

This is the story of three Black Panthers who made a difference in the prison and in the lives of their fellow inmates, stopped the systematic rapes and brutalities against “fresh fish” by guards and inmates; organized and raised the consciousness of other prisoners for which they were railroaded and isolated.

At a very young age, Albert Woodfox robbed a truck and drove it to New Orleans where he was arrested. He escaped and went to Harlem where he found the New York Panthers and joined the Party. He was recaptured and wound up in Angola. Footage of the New York chapter and other Panther events are pictured, as well as testimony from activist, Malik Rahim, another Panther from New Orleans who grew up with Robert King and helped him win release in 2001, after 31 years of incarceration.

“I may be free of Angola, but Angola will never be free of me.” So said King upon leaving prison as he vowed to fight for the freedom of his comrade brothers.

King’s story and that of Wallace and Woodfox provide viewers with a stark look at today’s prison realities, as well as the widespread suffering of families and friends involved.

Much of the narration is done by Samuel Jackson, with commentary from Congressmen, Cedric Richmond and John Conyers, who visited Wallace and Woodfox, and the lawyers, Scott Fleming and Nick Trenticosta who took up the case.

This is a remarkable film, very enlightening, and should raise the consciousness of those who have no idea. It exposes mind boggling criminality and corruption, as well as overt, ongoing racism within the system. A must see.

--Kiilu Nyasha is a San Francisco-based journalist and former member of the Black Panther Party. Through the end of 2009, Kiilu hosted a weekly TV program, "Freedom Is A Constant Struggle," on SF Live, and many of her shows are archived here.

Kiilu also writes for several publications, including the SF Bay View Newspaper and BlackCommentator.com. Also an accomplished radio programmer, she has worked for KPFA (Berkeley), SF Liberation Radio, Free Radio Berkeley, and KPOO in SF.

Resisting Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex --An interview with Victoria Law

2010-11-11T21:48:00.000-08:00

Resisting Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex

--An interview with Victoria Law

By Angola 3 News

Victoria Law is a longtime prison activist and the author of the 2009 book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press). Law’s essay “Sick of the Abuse: Feminist Responses to Sexual Assault, Battering, and Self Defense,” is featured in the new book, entitled The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, edited by Dan Berger.

In this interview, Law discusses her new article, which provides a history of radical feminist resistance to the criminalization of women who have defended themselves from gender violence. Furthermore, Law presents a prison abolitionist critique of how the mainstream women’s movement has embraced the US criminal justice system as a solution for combating violence against women.

Previously interviewed by Angola 3 News about the torture of women in US prisons, Law is now on the road with the Community and Resistance Tour.

Angola 3 News: In your essay “Sick of the Abuse,” you write that “a woman’s right to defend herself (and her children) from assault became a feminist rallying point throughout the 1970s.” You focus on the four separate stories of Yvonne Wanrow, Inez Garcia, Joan Little, and Dessie Woods. All four women were arrested for self-defense and their cases received national attention with the support of the radical women’s movement. Can you briefly explain their cases and why they were so important for the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s?

Victoria Law: Yvonne Wanrow was an American Indian mother of two living in Washington State in the 1970s. In 1972, her 11-year-old son was grabbed from his bike by William Wesler, a known child molester. He escaped and fled to the house of a family friend named Shirley Hooper, whose 7-year-old daughter had been raped by Wesler earlier that year. When Hooper called the police, they refused to arrest Wesler.

Understandably shaken, Hooper called Yvonne Wanrow and asked her to spend the night. Wanrow, who was 5 foot, 4 inches, and had recently broken her leg, brought her gun. At five in the morning, Wesler came to their house. When he refused to leave, Wanrow went to the front door to yell for help. She turned around to find Wesler, who, at 6 foot 2, was towering over her. She shot and killed him.

At her first trial, the judge instructed the jury only to consider what had happened at or immediately before the killing. This omitted (1) Wesler’s record as a sex offender; (2) Wesler’s assault on Hooper’s 7 year old; (3) His attempted assault on Yvonne’s son

Wanrow was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years.

However, various groups and people involved in the women’s movement and the American Indian movement had taken up her cause. They recognized that a woman had the right to defend herself and her family from assault. They held events that raised awareness, educated people, and tied her case into issues of violence against women and the systemic violence against Native people in the US. They also raised funds for her legal defense, which enabled her to have a better defense than she might have been afforded otherwise.

As a result, in 1977, the Washington State Supreme Court granted her a new trial, partially on the basis that the jury should have considered ALL relevant facts when considering self-defense. At her new trial in 1979, Wanrow pled guilty to reduced charges & received a suspended sentence, 5 years’ probation and 1 year of community service. The court decision also established that that women’s lack of access to self-defense training and to the “skills necessary to effectively repel a male assailant without resorting to the use of deadly weapons” made their circumstances different from those of men.

Two years later, in 1974, Inez Garcia shot and killed the man who had blocked her escape from rape. She was arrested and charged with 1^st degree (or premeditated) murder. Like Wanrow, her cause was taken up by the women’s movement, which organized teach-ins and fundraisers and galvanized popular support with the recognition that women had the right to defend themselves against rape.

During her first trial, the judge did not allow testimony about the rape as part of the evidence. After her conviction, the women’s movement continued to rally on her behalf and hired feminist attorney Susan Jordan to take over her defense.

Two years later, an appeals court reversed her conviction because the trial judge had instructed the jury not to consider the rape

During the re-trial, Susan Jordan challenged potential jurors about their preconceptions of rape, making the assault an integral part of the case from the beginning. Garcia was acquitted. The entire jury agreed that the rape and threat of further harm were adequate provocation for Garcia’s action.

That same year, Joan Little, a black woman and the only female prisoner in North Carolina’s Beaufort County Jail, killed Clarence Alligood, a sixty-two-year-old white male guard, after he had entered her cell, threatened her with an ice pick and forced her to perform oral sex. Little was charged with first-degree murder which, in North Carolina, carried a mandatory death sentence.

Again, there was a HUGE outpouring of support from various movements, including people and groups in the women’s liberation and Black Liberation movements as well as more mainstream groups. During her trial, Little’s defense exposed the chronic sexual abuse and harassment endured by women in the jail and prison system. Countering the prosecution’s argument that Little had enticed Alligood into her cell with promises of sex, the defense team called on women who had previously been held at the jail. They testified that Alligood had a history of sexually abusing women in his custody.

Little herself testified about Alligood’s assault.

After seventy-eight minutes of deliberation, a jury acquitted Little, establishing a precedent for killing as a justified self-defense against rape.

Dessie Woods was a Black woman in Georgia who shot and killed a man who tried to rape her and her friend while they were hitchhiking. She was sentenced to 22 years. Black nationalist women took up the case of Dessie Woods, framing it as a case of colonial violence. Radical (White) feminists also took up her cause and used it as a way to challenge white feminists to examine not only sexism and patriarchy but also racism and colonialism.

However, unlike the cases of Little, Wanrow and Garcia, the larger White feminist movement(s) did not rally to her cause.

Even though she did not have the massive outpouring of support as the other three women, the prolonged support that she did have eventually won Woods her freedom in July 1981. A lawyer from the People’s Law Center challenged the use of circumstantial evidence and the use of a special prosecutor (hired by the dead man’s family). The U.S. Court of Appeals determined that there had been insufficient evidence to convict and imprison her.

The first three cases were groundbreaking in that they established legal precedents stating that women had a right to defend themselves (and their children) from sexual assault. In the case of Inez Garcia, her lawyer Susan Jordan extended the legal interpretation of “imminent danger” beyond the immediate time period, thus laying the groundwork for battered women’s defense—that a woman who kills her abuser is acting in self-defense even if she is not under attack at that time.

A3N: What impact did activism have in these four cases?

VL: The activism and organizing around those four cases enabled the women to have better legal defenses than they would have otherwise been afforded. For example, $250,000 was raised for Joan Little’s defense. Almost $39,000 was spent on social scientists who devised an “attitude profile survey:” designed to detect patterns of (racial) prejudice. The defense used their findings to win a change of venue from conservative/racist Beaufort County to Raleigh, which was key in her acquittal. Without the money garnered by supporters, Joan Little, a poor Black woman, would never have been able to have that kind of legal support. Instead, she would have been convicted and executed.

A3N: How are things different today, in 2010?

VL: We don’t see the same outpouring of support for women arrested for self-defense today. We can look at the case of the New Jersey Four, who are four Black lesbians arrested and incarcerated for defending themselves against a homophobic attack on the street. Their case has garnered support from groups working around incarcerated women’s issues and queer issues, but it hasn’t been taken up as widely as, say, the case of Joan Little or even Dessie Woods. Women who are incarcerated for defending themselves against partner violence receive even less public attention and support.

A3N: Shifting our focus to the issue of domestic violence, you write that the early women’s shelters formed by the radical women’s movement in the 1970s “utilized the self-help methods, egalitarian philosophies, and collective structures that had developed within the women’s liberation movement, striving to be democratic alternatives in which women had the space to safely communicate, share experiences, examine the root causes of the violence against them, and begin to articulate a response. However, these efforts received nowhere near the amount of attention, publicity, and support that the women’s movement paid to Wanrow, Garcia, Little, and Woods.”

Why do you think these projects, as well as court cases where women defended themselves from intimates, did not receive the attention they deserved?

VL: Then (and now), people saw battering as a “personal” issue and were reluctant to get involved. Some felt that marriage (or partnership) somehow condoned abuse. Others felt that this was not an issue that a movement could be built on. Perhaps it was also recognized that the issue could divide a movement. After all, when reading histories of revolutionary groups during the 1960s and 1970s, we see that abuse and misogyny often went unaddressed.

A3N: What did these radical activists identify as the “root causes” of violence against women were? What is your personal opinion regarding these root causes?

VL: Radical activists identified society’s misogyny and patriarchy as root causes of violence against women. They pointed out that women are most often the ones who are attacked and abused because they are often the ones with less power (both physically and in terms of resources).

I strongly agree with this analysis and feel that only when we radically transform societal attitudes around gender and power will we be able to have a world without gendered violence.

A3N: The number of battered women’s shelters grew (by 1982, there were an estimated 300-700 shelters nationally), but you write that “the increased interest in the issue by those who did not identify with the women’s liberation movement resulted in a watering down of the radical feminist analyses that led to the first refuges for battered women. These emerging institutions emphasized providing services without analyzing the political context in which abuse occurred. There was a shift from calling for broad social transformation to focusing on individual problems and demanding greater state intervention.”

How do you think this watering down and shift towards greater state intervention has since played out in later decades, leading up to today?

VL: Today, abuse is treated as an individual pathology rather than a broader social issue rooted in centuries of patriarchy and misogyny. Viewing abuse as an individual problem has meant that the solution becomes intervening in and punishing individual abusers without looking at the overall conditions that allow abuse to go unchallenged and also allows the state to begin to co-opt concerns about gendered violence.

For example, 29 states have some form of mandatory arrest policy in a DV call. There is also the possibility of dual arrests (in which both parties are arrested). In addition, many states now have “no-drop prosecution” in which the District Attorney subpoenas the battered spouse to testify with threats of prosecution if she recants or refuses.

The shift towards greater state intervention has also resulted in resources such as battered women’s shelters mirroring some of these same abusive practices (such as isolating the survivor). It also ignores ways in which the state inflicts violence upon women. I would greatly recommend the INCITE! anthology, entitled The Color of Violence, which explores various aspects of violence against women.

A3N: If you were dialoguing with those sectors of today’s anti-violence movement that embrace the criminalization approach, what are the key points you would make in arguing that prisons are not the answer? What do you think is the best way to reduce and prevent violence against women both inside and outside prisons?

VL: The threat of imprisonment does not deter abuse; it simply drives it further underground. Remember that there are many forms of abuse and violence and not all are illegal. It also sets up a false dichotomy in which the survivor has to choose between personal safety and criminalizing/imprisoning a loved one.

Arrest/imprisonment does not reduce, let alone prevent, violence. Building structures and networks to address the lack of options and resources available to women is more effective. Challenging patriarchy and male supremacy is a much more effective solution (although not one that funders and the state want to see).

A3N: Can you please tell us about recent cases of women who are facing charges or have been wrongly convicted for defending themselves?

VL: There’s the case of the New Jersey Four, whom I mentioned above.

There’s also Sara Kruzan, a 31-year-old woman incarcerated at the California Institution for Women. When Sara was 11, she met a 31-year-old man named G.G. who molested her and began grooming her to become a prostitute. By the age 13, she began working as a child prostitute for G.G. and was repeatedly molested by him. At age 16, Sara was convicted of killing him. She was sentenced to prison for the rest of her life despite her background and a finding by the California Youth Authority that she was amendable to treatment offered in the juvenile system.

There’s been a letter-writing campaign to the governor urging clemency. Sara is also up for resentencing and needs letters of support. The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) are working on publicizing and garnering support for her case. However, we’re not seeing a fraction of the support from women’s or other non-prison groups that the cases of Wanrow, Garcia and Little received in the 1970s even though you would think that her story would provoke widespread outrage and calls for release.

I recently received an e-mail from CCWP about Mary Shields, a domestic violence survivor incarcerated for nineteen years on a seven-to-life sentence for attempted murder. This past September, Mary was found suitable for release by the Board of Parole Hearings. In 2006, the Parole Board had also found Mary “suitable for release” but rescinded its decision after Governor Schwarzenegger recommended against release. This time around, the governor has until January (when his term will be up) to either let the Board's decision stand or recommend that it be reversed and so CCWP is calling for people to send letters supporting Mary’s release.

A3N: Anything else to add?

VL: I want to remind readers that if we’re not coming up with solutions to gender violence, then the fall-back becomes relying on prisons and policing to keep women (and other vulnerable people) safe. It is also imperative to support women incarcerated for killing their abusers as well as to support battered women on the outside and to remember that abuse isolates people.

We should be working to end violence against women without strengthening government control over women’s lives or promoting incarceration as a solution to social problems.

--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

Film screening and events with Robert King

2010-11-04T00:10:00.000-07:00

This upcoming month will feature three different Angola 3-related events in California.

--Robert King will be at the Nov. 13-14 National Conference on Socialism in Los Angeles, where the Angola 3 will be honored alongside several other political prisoners. Read more here.

--On Nov. 16, at 7:30 pm, the new British documentary film about the Angola 3, entitled “IN THE LAND OF THE FREE...” will screen in San Francisco at ATA Theater, 992 Valencia St. at 21st St., SF. After the film, please join us for an update on the case and discussion with Marina Drummer from the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Read more here.

--On Dec. 1, Robert King will be speaking at the TEDx Alcatraz event, entitled "A Suspension of Disbelief," held at the Temple Nightclub in San Francisco. Read more here.

May 13, 1985 and the Legalization of Murder

2010-10-03T21:29:00.000-07:00

(VIDEO: Part two of our May, 2010 interview with Ramona Africa. In this segment, Ramona gives her personal account of May 13, 1985. Watch part one here.)

May 13, 1985 and the Legalization of Murder

By Angola 3 News

On May 13, 1985, a State Police helicopter dropped a C-4 bomb, illegally supplied by the FBI, on the roof of the MOVE Organization’s house at 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. The bomb started a fire that was allowed to burn, and eventually destroyed 61 homes, leaving 250 people homeless: the entire block of a middle-class black community (watch video).

The Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission (The MOVE Commission), appointed by Mayor Wilson Goode, documented that when the occupants of the house tried to escape the fire, police shot at them, blocking their escape. In the end, six MOVE adults and five children died. Ramona Africa and 13 year-old Birdie Africa were the only survivors, after successfully dodging the police gunfire.

The MOVE Commission concluded that the deaths of the five MOVE children “appeared to be unjustified homicides which should be investigated by a grand jury” (curiously the Commission did not similarly criticize the murder of the MOVE adults). However, two subsequent grand juries refused to press charges against any city or police official for murder or any other wrongdoing. In contrast, Ramona Africa spent seven years in prison.

Recognizing the racial implications of the massacre, The MOVE Commission wrote that the day’s many horrifying decisions, including “the use of high explosives, and in a 90 minute period, the firing of at least 10,000 rounds of ammunition at the house; to sanction the dropping of a bomb on an occupied row house; and to let a fire burn in a row house occupied by children, would not likely have been made had the MOVE house and its occupants been situated in a comparable white neighborhood.”

As death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal writes in his essay "When Massacre Is No Crime" MOVE is currently seeking murder charges against police and city officials for the deaths of eleven of their family members on May 13, 1985. The remainder of this article, organized into six sections, is a compilation of testimony and evidence that makes a compelling case for why murder charges are needed: The Legalization of Murder; The Morning Assault; Mayor Goode Refuses to Negotiate; Dropping the C-4 Bomb; “Fire As a Tactical Weapon”; Police Shoot at Fleeing Occupants.

The Legalization of Murder

As detailed in the article that accompanied the first part of our video-interview with Ramona Africa, the Philadelphia police had launched a previous military-style assault on MOVE’s home in the Powelton Village neighborhood of West Philadelphia on August 8, 1978. During the assault, Officer James Ramp was shot and killed by what many believe was actually police gunfire because MOVE was below ground in the basement and the bullet in Officer Ramp did not enter at an upward trajectory like a bullet from the basement would have. Furthermore, Philadelphia journalist Linn Washington Jr. has reported that several different sources of his within the Philadelphia Police Department told him that Ramp had in fact been shot by police gunfire.

However, nine MOVE members (known today as the “MOVE 9”) arrested in the house that day were jointly convicted of third-degree murder and conspiracy for the shooting death of Officer Ramp and sentenced to 30-100 years. In the years following the imprisonment of the MOVE 9, the headquarters for MOVE shifted to 6221 Osage Avenue, in a middle-class black neighborhood, where MOVE continually demanded an official investigation into the 1978 confrontation and the convictions of the MOVE 9.

Many of MOVE’s neighbors complained to the city government about MOVE’s use of a loudspeaker to air their own grievances with the city, which mostly centered around the MOVE 9 convictions. Along with sanitation complaints, the neighbors also expressed concern about a bunker built above the house, which MOVE said they had built to defend themselves from another military-style police assault on their home similar to Aug. 8, 1978.

Officially in response to these sanitation and noise complaints from neighbors, Philadelphia mayor, Wilson Goode, held a meeting with Managing Director Leo A. Brooks and Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor, District Attorney Ed Rendell (now the Governor of Pennsylvania), and others, where he first authorized Sambor to prepare and execute a tactical plan under the supervision of Brooks, allegedly to solve the neighborhood dispute.

On May 11, Judge Lynn Abraham approved DA Rendell’s requested emergency arrest and search warrants for four MOVE members on charges of disorderly conduct and terroristic threats, based upon statements MOVE made on their loudspeaker two weeks earlier, where, among other things, they stated that they’d defend themselves from a police attack.

Today, Ramona Africa challenges the legitimacy of these May 11 emergency warrants by citing the fact that during Ramona’s later trial, all charges listed on her arrest warrant were dismissed by the judge. Ramona says that “this means that they had no valid reason to even be out there, but they did not dismiss the charges placed on me as a result of what happened after they came out.”

Charged with conspiracy, riot, and multiple counts of simple and aggravated assault, Ramona Africa served the entirety of her 16-month to 7-year sentence after she was repeatedly denied parole for not renouncing MOVE.

Concluding Ramona’s 1986 trial, presiding judge Michael R. Stiles told the jurors not to consider any wrongdoing by police and city officials, because they would be held accountable in “other” proceedings. However, no official has ever faced criminal charges.

In 1996, Ramona successfully sued the City of Philadelphia and was awarded $500,000 for pain, suffering, and injuries. Relatives of John Africa and his nephew Frank James Africa, who died in the incident, were awarded a total of $1 million. Another $1.7 million was paid to Birdie Africa, now Michael Moses Ward.

The jury also ordered that Ramona receive $1 per week for 11 years directly from Sambor and Richmond, but this was overruled by Judge Louis Pollack on grounds that the two had not shown “willful misconduct,” and were therefore immune from financial liability.

The Morning Assault

At 5:35 AM, on May 13, after evacuating the neighbors, Police Commissioner Sambor declared on the bullhorn: “Attention, MOVE! This is America! You have to abide by the laws of the United States,” and gave them fifteen minutes to surrender.

After the fifteen-minute deadline passed, several “squirt gun” fire-hoses were directed at the bunker on MOVE’s roof, in an attempt to dislodge it. At 5:53, police tear-gassed the front and rear of the house, creating a smokescreen. Police then sent bomb squads to enter the row houses on either side of the building.

While the bomb squads entered, gunfire erupted, and in the next 90 minutes, police used over 10,000 rounds of ammunition, including 4,500 rounds from M-16s; 1,500 from Uzis; and 2,240 from M-60 machine guns. Simultaneously, the two bomb squads repeatedly detonated explosives in the side walls, and then blew off the front of the house.

Sambor later attempted to justify police gunfire by saying that police had first responded to automatic gunfire from MOVE. However, the only weapons found in MOVE’s house were two pistols, a shotgun, and a .22 caliber rifle: no automatic weapons. Sambor was unable to explain this contradiction when challenged by the MOVE Commission.

The MOVE Commission wrote that “the firing of over 10,000 rounds of ammunition in under 90 minutes at a row house containing children was clearly excessive and unreasonable. The failure of those responsible for the firing to control or stop such an excessive amount of force was unconscionable.”

Mayor Goode Refuses to Negotiate

As police ran out of ammunition and went to the armory for more, a quiet afternoon standstill began.

According to Philadelphia Tribune columnist and Temple University Professor Linn Washington, Jr., MOVE member Jerry Africa, who wasn’t in the house, attempted to negotiate with Mayor Goode during the afternoon standstill. He wanted to tell Goode that MOVE would disengage from the confrontation if Goode would agree to an investigation of the Aug. 8, 1978-related MOVE convictions.

Jerry Africa was supported and accompanied by civil rights activist Randolph Means and former Common Pleas Court Judge Robert Williams, who at the time was the Democratic Party’s nominee for Philadelphia District Attorney. According to Washington, the three of them repeatedly tried to call Goode on the telephone, but he would not take their call. Instead, Goode declared at a press conference that afternoon that he was now ready “to seize control of the house…by any means necessary.”

Notably, Washington filed this story with the The Philadelphia Daily News, who he worked for at the time, but it was not published.

Dropping the C-4 Bomb

At 5:00 pm, Managing Director Brooks telephoned Mayor Goode and said that Sambor, in Goode’s words, wanted to “blow the bunker off and to blow a hole in the roof and to put tear-gas and water in through that process.” Goode’s response: “Okay. Keep me posted.”

At 5:27 pm, a State Police helicopter dropped a C-4 bomb on MOVE’s roof, which exploded and started a fire on the roof.

Challenged at a press conference later that week, Goode was unable to offer a straight answer: “If…someone called on the telephone and said to me ‘We’re going to drop a bomb on a house;’ would I approve that? The answer is no. What was said to me was that they were going to use an explosive device to blow the bunker off the top of the house.”

Afterwards, Sambor continued to defend the decision to drop the bomb by arguing that the bombing was “a conservative and safe approach to what I perceived as a tactical necessity.”

The MOVE Commission concluded that “dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable and should have been rejected out of hand by the mayor, the managing director, the police commissioner and the fire commissioner.”

The Commission also reported that “in January, 1985, an agent of the FBI delivered nearly 38 pounds of C-4, a powerful military plastic explosive, to the Phila. Police bomb squad. Delivery of this amount of C-4 to any police force without restrictions as to its use is inappropriate. Neither agency kept any records of the transaction. The FBI agent told the Commission that he ‘never had to keep any kind of records or anything’ regarding C-4. Nor did the bomb squad keep any delivery, inventory or use of the C-4, or any other explosives under their control…Because of the absence of record keeping by the FBI and the Philadelphia Police Department, all the facts of the use of C-4 on May 13 may never be known.”

“Fire As A Tactical Weapon”

Initially, the fire was relatively small, but it was allowed to grow until it was eventually so large and powerful that it burned down the entire city block.

According to Mayor Goode, he first learned of the fire “at about ten minutes of six,” at which point he contacted Managing Director Brooks, and ordered that the fire be stopped. On behalf of Goode, Brooks told Police Commissioner Sambor over the phone to extinguish the fire, but upon discussing it, Sambor and Fire Commissioner William Richmond decided to continue to let it burn. Richmond would later claim that Sambor did not tell Richmond about Goode’s order. However, Sambor denied this and said that he did indeed tell Richmond about Goode’s order.

In defense of his decision, Richmond said that he let the fire burn because of danger from alleged MOVE gunfire, stating: “we regret what happened, but we are not going home with any firefighters with bullet wounds tonight, and I thank God for that.”

Explicitly challenging this argument made by Richmond, the MOVE Commission cited the use of the water cannons for hours, earlier in the day, at times alongside police gunfire. Even later in the day, the Commission notes that “from 5:20 to 5:25 P.M. the ‘squrts’ [water cannons] were turned on to protect the helicopter which was preparing to drop the bomb [at 5:27],” and since firefighters were safe these other times, the fire could have been extinguished “without exposing police or firefighters to any possible danger.”

The Commission concluded that the decision “to let the fire burn constituted the use of fire as a tactical weapon” that “should have been rejected out-of-hand. That it was not rejected cannot be justified under any circumstances.”

Police Shoot at Fleeing Occupants

Today, Ramona Africa recalls escaping from the fire on May 13: “We opened the door and started to yell that we were coming out with the kids. The kids were hollering too. We know they heard us but the instant we were visible in the doorway, they opened fire. You could hear the bullets hitting all around the garage area. They deliberately took aim and shot at us. Anybody can see that their aim, very simply, was to kill MOVE people—not to arrest anybody.”

Birdie later supported Ramona’s account of police gunfire when he testified that the children and remaining adults tried several times to escape the burning house, but were driven back by police gunfire, before he and Ramona successfully dodged gunfire and escaped.

Despite official police statements denying the shooting, The MOVE Commission confirmed Ramona and Birdie’s accounts, concluding that “police gunfire prevented some occupants of 6221 Osage Ave. from escaping from the burning house to the rear alley.”

Sources

For our investigation of May 13, 1985 and the validity of the murder charges being sought by MOVE today, we have cited evidence and testimony from a variety of published sources:

--“Attention, MOVE! This Is America,” by Margot Harry, Banner Press, Chicago (1987).

--Let The Bunker Burn: The Final Battle With MOVE, by Charles W. Bowser, Camino Books, Philadelphia (1989).

--“Let It Burn!” The Philadelphia Tragedy, by Michael Boyette with Randi Boyette, Contemporary Books, Chicago, (1989).

--Final Report of the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission, aka The MOVE Commission (1986), reprinted in full in “Let It Burn!” by Michael Boyette with Randi Boyette, pgs. 269-294.

--Visit www.onamove.com and www.move9parole.blogspot.com.

The FBI’s War On Democracy --Claude Marks discusses the new film COINTELPRO 101

2010-09-18T23:24:00.000-07:00

The FBI’s War On Democracy

--Claude Marks discusses the new film COINTELPRO 101

By Angola 3 News

Claude Marks, Director of The Freedom Archives, talks to Angola 3 News about the highly anticipated new documentary film, entitled COINTELPRO 101, which is premiering on October 10, at the Mission Cultural Center of Latino Arts in San Francisco.

According to its website, the Freedom Archives “contains over 8000 hours of audio and video tapes. These recordings date from the late-60s to the mid-90s and chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international solidarity movements. The collection includes weekly news/ poetry/ music programs broadcast on several educational radio stations; in-depth interviews and reports on social and cultural issues; diverse activist voices; original and recorded music, poetry, original sound collages; and an extensive La Raza collection.”

Freedom Archives has released other audio and video documentaries, including the recent video about the San Francisco Eight, entitled "Legacy of Torture." Legacy of Torture can be viewed online, as well as the previous films Voices of Three Political Prisoners (featuring Nuh Washington, Jalil Muntaqim and David Gilbert), Charisse Shumate: Fighting for Our Lives, and Self Respect, Self Defense & Self Determination (featuring Mabel Williams and Kathleen Cleaver, introduced by Angela Davis).

Angola 3 News: What can you tell us about your upcoming film COINTELPRO 101?

Claude Marks: We’ve been aware of the need to talk more about COINTELPRO since we made The Legacy of Torture – the video about the government torture of the Panthers in New Orleans in 1973 – which later became the unjust basis for the San Francisco 8 Case. In travelling with that film and organizing for the dropping of charges, we referred to COINTELPRO but often were talking to younger people in particular, who had not heard the term and had no historical frame of reference for that period of intense repression.

So we undertook to make this new film, knowing that no government agent or agency has ever been held accountable for the assassinations of leaders, the destruction of organizations, the imprisonment and political targeting of so many people – people who still remain prisoners of the wars against movements for liberation and self-determination within the US borders.

COINTELPRO 101 is not the first or only film on the subject, although there have not been many, but we hope it can help reinvigorate some organizing work, and reopen some thinking about the violence directed against progressive movements, this hidden history, and nature of the state and its agencies of repression.

A3N: How was the film showing and related workshop at the US Social Forum received by the audience?

CM: This was a good opportunity to infuse the very broad conversations at the Social Forum with a self-conscious discussion about the nature and continuity of government repression. From the European invasion & Middle Passage forward, we have always seen genocide. Prisons, COINTELPRO, Abu Ghraib…all represent the continuity of what any movements to change power relations are and will be up against.

A3N: Your website states that the film’s “intended audiences are the generations that did not experience the social justice movements of the sixties and seventies.” Given that COINTELPRO officially ended in the early 1970s, why is this story so important for the younger generation to know about?

CM: Well, the mission of the Freedom Archives is to help educate people, and especially the rising new generations, as to the true nature of recent radical history. The high point of struggle represented by the loosely used term “the sixties” and the violent repression against it, contains essential lessons for every young person seeking a more just society. More generally, people should not be misled by the myth of democracy, the idea that the system can be made to work for “us” or that those in power will somehow reach a moral epiphany and give up anything of consequence without a fight.

We see this myth exposed today in many ways – mass imprisonment, the tearing up of families and communities – driven by racism – the criminalization of dissent so any act of resistance becomes by their definition an act of “terrorism.”

This is a continuum that is unleashed upon the world’s peoples as well as internally. Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are targeted. Muslims and South Asians are targeted. Women and queer folks are targeted. Prisoners are subjected to the worst inhumanities, and if they are ever released, what do they have they to look forward to?

The U.S. has by far the largest incarceration rate in the world—as they build more prisons, the schools deteriorate and the public education system lies in racist tatters.

A3N: How do you think the US government’s repression of the Left today differs from the COINTELPRO era?

CM: In the 1970s, the public and some officials, faced with the exposure of the illegal acts of government and police agencies against dissent, feigned concerns about the loss of civil liberties, held hearings, and alleged that reforms would take place. But today, the acts of the FBI, police, and other agencies, once illegal, are now legitimate, legal – via the Patriot Act and other unconstitutional measures, all in the name of homeland security and defending the nation against “terrorism.”

The playing field has changed. The government now openly conducts assassinations anywhere in the world, can declare people to be “enemy combatants” and imprison them indefinitely without charges; drone warfare permits mass civilian murders by so-called military experts thousands of miles away without risking US military casualties – it’s a “game” except to the thousands of victims.

Today the government claims the right to breach international human rights laws and conventions with no accountability. And the corporate media is so integrated into this strategy, that there is little room for “legitimate” opposition to get a hearing. So it becomes incumbent upon us to organize and message independently and with few resources.

COINTELPRO 101 is made with mainly love and fumes, but we hope that it will be a useful tool to engage in dialogue and to help organize movements that challenge the mythology that dissent is a guaranteed right, that seek the release of political prisoners, that counter the miseducation of our youth with an understanding of the past so they can better shape the future.

A3N: Knowing what we do about this repression in the past and present, how can activists today best defend ourselves? How should our organizing strategies be modified?

CM: We must organize to show our outrage with more consistency and despite risks. There is an urgency to demand more of one another as well. Challenging the state is serious and will not succeed as a result of stroking egos or the pronouncements of self-declared leaders. It is hard work and requires a deep commitment and a passion for serving the people and rebuilding our communities. Our capacity must grow in realistic ways as there are no shortcuts, and the path includes defeats and sacrifice. This is one of the things that our political prisoners and the many martyrs can teach us.

A3N: For our readers not close enough to San Francisco for the October 10 premiere, how will folks be able to watch the new film?

CM: The film will begin to show in communities and on campuses this fall and winter. People can reach us to make arrangements. At some point we will also manufacture DVDs. We hope to have it available with subtitles in other languages as well. Also check the website as we have resources about COINTELPRO posted and will also add a teaching curriculum to accompany the film.

A3N: How can folks best support your efforts?

CM: We are very much a grassroots organization. We have no corporate or government funding. We are one voice among many, but we encourage people to support the work of independent media, including ourselves. We welcome your questions and comments and greatly appreciate your support.

Also please use the audio and video documentaries that we’ve produced as educational materials and organizing tools. The actual Freedom Archives is searchable on line and is intended to preserve radical history and culture. So check us out!

A3N: Any closing thoughts?

CM: Years ago, as the movements grew and we worked in various political and media organizations, we were fond of quoting part of an 1857 speech by Frederick Douglass, often using Ossie Davis’s dramatic rendition of his famous words. They sum up a lesson that is central to what I am saying, and is at the heart of COINTELPRO 101. Many of your readers are probably familiar with it, but its essence bears repeating:

“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle… If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."