US Prisoners Strike

international | rights, freedoms and repression | other press Wednesday December 15, 2010 13:53 by john throne - Factsforworkingpeople loughfinn at aol dot com

Support needed.

In the largest prisoners strike in US history the prisoners in Georgia have united across racial lines. This is a major victory. Please send your support.

Some excerpts from an interview with Elaine Brown, Former chair of Black Panther Party and presently part of the Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners' Rights which represents the Georgia Prisoners who are on the largest strike of prisoners in US history. Please send messages of support to the prisoners and messages of protest to the US authorities. Scroll back to get the email and other addresses and phone numbers.

ELAINE BROWN:

These men (the prisoners)created what is effectively a spontaneous decision by networking with each other and saying, you know, “We’re tired of all of the abuse we’ve been suffering here, "We’re going to do something, but the something we’re going to do is not to try to initiate a violent response or initiate violence, but to simply say we will not work until we’re paid. We're in day six, and they are still holding out and saying they will not come out and work unless they can sit down at the table and begin to get their demands met and their issues dealt with.

The conditions?
Well, I’m sure they’re not very much different from other prisons, I mean, or as the men would say, the chain gang or the camp they’re in. You know, you have overcrowded conditions. There is no activity other than the work tasks that they’re assigned to do. In other words, there’s no real educational opportunities. There’s no exercise. There’s nothing else. The food is bad. They have poor nutrition. They have crowded—overcrowded cells. A lot of the day-to-day thing, I think the most important part is that, as it was outlined many years ago in a Stanford study conducted by Dr. Phil Zimbardo, one of the most important things is that the constant violence being perpetrated against them by guards, who with their own idle time look to try and instigate an incident here or there, so there’s a lot of screaming, hollering, you know, aggressive behaviors that go on. And so, there’s always some incident jumping off, as it were, and so forth and so on. It’s just a life of idle—idleness and violence and a lack of any basic human condition. I mean, among the conditions, the demands of the prisoners are a living wage for work, talking about being a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution that prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude. In Georgia, they’re not even paid. They’re not paid one dime in the state of Georgia. I mean, the State Department of Corrections would like to say they have some workers that are paid. There are probably some people doing life without parole who work at the Governor’s mansion, maybe 15 of them who might be getting some money. But the prisoners in the state of Georgia are paid nothing at all. Now, that’s not to say that the prisoners in other states are being paid. They’re mostly being paid a dollar a day to 50 cents an hour. That would probably be the maximum. So they’re not exactly being paid enough money to accumulate anything over the years of their incarceration and maybe come out of the prison with more than the $25 check they give them upon release in the state of Georgia. So, they are not paid one single dime, and they are required to clean the floors, clean the showers, do the yard work, do the dishes, cook the food—in other words, to maintain the prison itself.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how this largest prison strike in U.S. history was organized, sort of redefining the term "cell phone," Elaine Brown.

ELAINE BROWN: Well, you know, a lot of people have been fascinated by this, and I’m glad that you made note immediately that—you know, so many people say, “Well, these guys have contraband." Well, the greatest avenue for their obtaining these cell phones is by sales from guards, and these guards are selling these phones at exorbitant prices. I learned the other day that one guy said he paid $800 to a guard for a cell phone that was probably worth about 50 bucks. So, that’s the first point that has to be made, because people imagine that there’s all this smuggling going on—and there is, but it’s on the part of—in the main, on the part of guards that are inside these facilities.
The cell phone played a part, but the other part was that there are leaders of different factions in the prison, and they were able to sort of discuss what could they do. Instead of fighting among themselves, is there anything that they could do to try to change the conditions of being just constantly bombarded with violent attacks, with, you know, idle time, and so forth and so on? And they—at some point, a number of them just decided, "Well, we just shouldn't’t work." And it just became a prairie fire. It was truly the spark that lit the prairie fire. And everybody was saying, “Well, I’m down with that. We’re not going to get up.” And each group—you know, you have blacks in various subsets, and you have Muslims, you have Mexicans and other Latinos, Hispanics, you have Whites, you have Rastafarians, you have Christians—all of them, for reasons that I cannot explain how they suddenly understood how to be unified, decided, “Yeah, we’re not working, and we’re down with this, and we’re not going to get up, and we’re going to stay united.” And across the prisons, in the various sets, they called each other, sent text messages, and they all agreed to do it. And they agreed on the date, and that was December 9.
AMY GOODMAN: Elaine, I interviewed you a long time ago when your memoir came out, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. You’re the former chair of the Black Panther Party. Can you tell us a little bit about your life and how you came to be a prison activist today?
ELAINE BROWN: Well, it’s pretty—you know, it’s sort of organic, very much like this prisoner strike. You know, we used to say in the Black Panther Party, “Repression breeds resistance.” We recognized that our plight was not much different as black people than other oppressed people, and we joined arms and forces with a variety of other groups like the Brown Berets, the Red Guard, the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, and so forth. And then we linked ourselves to the international struggle of people around the world for national liberation in Vietnam, throughout the continent of Africa, and in Latin America, South America. So, we became internationalists. And I remain that person. So it isn’t complicated to draw the line from that struggle to the struggle of the most oppressed group in America: the prisoner class. The prisoners in this country, as you know, make up the largest prisoner group in the world. America confines more people than any single country at a higher rate and a higher—and the largest number. Fifty percent of those prisoners, or nearly 50 percent of them, are black men. And so, we have to ask the question, how did that come to be? Either the black men are the only people—when we consider that we black people make up approximately 12 to 13 percent of the overall population and yet almost 50 percent of the prison population, we have to ask the question, is this the result of some genetic flaw in black people? Are we obviously some sort of criminally minded? Or is there something wrong in the scheme of things? Obviously, the latter is what I would say. And so, I’ve committed myself to bringing people out of prison.
I have a very close friend who was a member of the Black Panther Party here in California, who has been in prison since 1969, over 41 years, Chip Fitzgerald. So I helped to organize the Committee to Free Chip Fitzgerald. These people have been buried in prison for their political beliefs, and they’ve been buried in prison for their poverty. There are no rich people languishing in the prisons of America. So, there’s a class question. There’s a race question. And this is just a continuation of expressing my efforts or of continuing my efforts toward the goal of the liberation of all oppressed people.
AMY GOODMAN: Elaine Brown, I want to thank you very much for being with us and just ask you a final question about what you expect the outcome of—it was planned as a one-day strike, December 9th, biggest strike in U.S. history in prisons. But with the lock down continuing in a number of the state prisons in Georgia, what’s going to happen?
ELAINE BROWN: Well, we—this coalition that you have mentioned, the Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoner Rights, which includes everything from the NAACP national office and the state office to the Nation of Islam and a number of other organizations, All of Us or None, so forth, across the country, we’ve been talking in conference calls over the last two days. We are having a meeting at this point with either the commissioner or deputy commissioner of the Department of Corrections. We plan on imploring them to first stop instigating the situation and trying to escalate it to a violent confrontation, which is what they are doing by prodding men with everything, turning off the heat, beating people, forcing them out of their cells, turning off the hot water, destroying and trashing people’s property, not feeding them, and so forth and so on, all kinds of tactics to instigate a violent response. So our first goal is to make sure this does not become Attica, although it is not like Attica because the prisoners have not taken hostages or anything of this sort. They are simply not leaving their cells.

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