Under Lock and Key RAIL Radio Program for March 26, 1999

Mumia Abu Jamal writes about the Amerikan Gulag;
Lynch mob explains the death penalty in Amerika;
California and Texas prisoners send statements to the Jericho 
March.

Welcome to Under Lock and Key, news and commentary about prisons 
from the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League. The U.$. 
incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than any other 
country. The rate for imprisonment of Blacks is 4 times that of 
apartheid South Africa, and the U.$. sends more Black men to 
prison than college. The purpose of this program is to educate 
about, and inspire activism against, the Amerikan lockdown. 

This is an article by Mumia Abu Jamal entitled
GULAG AMERICA

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, ]
barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? --asked Michel 
Foucault in Discipline & Punish,

Over a million and a half human beings arise daily in American 
cages.

These people constitute "invisible populations" living in 
"invisible worlds" whose lives have become cheap fodder for what 
scholar/activist Angela Y. Davis has termed, the "punishment 
industry" 

Although the formal penitentiary can be traced to the ill-fated 
"Philadelphia System" and the infamous Walnut Street Jail of the 
late 18th century that spawned it, the earliest uses of 
imprisonment on American shores had a nakedly political objective. 
After the slaughter and betrayal that was King Philips War 
thousands of 'Indians' (actually Wampanoags), including those 
'loyal' 'Christian' Wampanoags who helped the whites, were 
imprisoned on barren island of the New England coast where they 
died of cold and hunger.

Those who survived were shipped to a savage and short life as 
slaves (merely another form of imprisonment) in the West Indies. 
One of the early sites of imprisonment became Deer Island Jail 
(recently vacated because of its dilapidated condition) in 
Winthrop, Massachusetts.

These nameless men and women were truly prisoners of war, encaged 
in early American concentration camps, not for what they did, but 
because of what they were--so-called Indians. Those who survived 
that harrowing hell became prisoners of the political order 
(political prisoners) for life--slaves.

This early nefarious usage of imprisonment by the English settlers 
of Massachusetts, would influence and mark the subtextual usages 
of imprisonment down through American history, and each newly 
entering ethnic group found itself thrown into American gulags for 
what are economic, social and political reasons, as noted by 
Richard Quinney, thusly:

     Prisons in this country are used mainly for those who commit 
     a select group of crimes, primarily burglary, robbery, 
     larceny, and assault. Excluded are the criminals of the 
     capitalist class, who cause more of an economic and social 
     loss to the country and the society, but who are not often 
     given prison sentences. This means that prisons are 
     institutions of control for the working class, especially the 
     surplus population of the working class. 

While Quinney is undoubtedly correct, he doesn't go far enough, 
for at the time he was writing those words, the Black Liberation 
Movement was on the wane, after years of state and societal 
attacks. The American prison system, back in the 1920s, showed a 
Black population that did not outrageously outpace it's population 
percentage. The numbers of Black imprisonment show a marked, 
dramatic, and increasingly precipitous rise in the 1970s, far 
outstripping the African-American population percentage.

As a Black Judge in Memphis notes, Black youth are caught up in a 
"containment system" that serves white economic interests. Judge 
Joseph B. Bowen, Jr., of Shelby County, Tennessee notes:

    The criminal justice system makes a lot of money for 
    everybody, from the judge to the bailiff, from the bail 
    bondsmen to the police, the sheriffs deputies, everybody. The 
    neoslave, the young Black male, becomes the fodder, the raw 
    material, for this industry-like profit-making system.

    The fodder is Black, and the beneficiaries--those who profit 
    from the system--are white. 

As Black youth were becoming increasingly radical in their 
struggle against the white power structure, the "containment 
system" was moved into place, to bottle up, and encage the rage of 
an oppressed, damned people beginning to come to grips with living 
in the midst of a white supremacist domain.

Studies have consistently borne out the view that one's race, and 
secondarily, one's class, is a powerful aggravating circumstance 
when it comes to judgments and sentencings. Even on the 
unconscious level, these powerful predictors are present, and 
active:

Where unconscious racism works in the law, it perpetrates racist 
harms. More than this, however, it serves to reinforce unexamined 
racial beliefs, working as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that 
maintains races by confirming the validity of racial biases. 
Consider the sentencing of convicted criminals. A number of 
studies document large disparities in sentencing that correlate 
only to the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. 
Having committed the same crime in the same jurisdiction, with the 
same record of prior convictions, one is likely to receive a 
higher sentence if one is non-White or if one's victim is White. 
These disparities are particularly evident in capital cases. One 
study [by Professor Haney and published by the NYU Press in 1996] 
shows that in otherwise similar situations prosecutors seek the 
death penalty against Latinos four times more often than against 
Whites, and are fourteen times more likely to seek the death 
penalty against those who murder Whites than against those who 
murder Latinos. 

Professor Haney argues that this is so, not only at trial, but at 
plea bargains, at probation and parole, and at every stop in 
between.

To these arguments there will no doubt be many who suggest it be 
dismissed, for those in prison surely deserve to be there. But 
prisons are political constructions, built to meet political ends 
and objectives, such as the containment of the oppressed. They are 
thus agents of a legalized form of violence, and warped 
beneficiaries of violence. This is seen clearest in the context of 
what is laughable called the 'War on Drugs', which as former 
Massachusetts Prison Psychiatrist, Dr. James Gilligan, M.D. 
explained, is anything but;


    In short--and this is by far the most important finding of all 
    that is known on the subject: "For illegal psychoactive drugs, 
    the illegal market itself accounts for far more violence than 
    pharmacological effects." Thus, the "war on drugs" appears to be 
    a self-generating war. Outlawing drugs, with the consequent 
    decrease in their supply, followed by the increase in their 
    cost, generates the illegal market--and all the violence that 
    follows from that.

    Since the war on drugs victimizes mostly those who are young, 
    poor and/or black, and benefits mostly organized crime, it 
    might be said to be a war on the young, the poor, and on 
    blacks, a method of stimulating violence, and a very expensive 
    means of subsidizing organized crime, boosting the employment 
    of police and correction officers and border guards, and 
    subsidizing the construction industry by promoting the 
    building of more prisons. One could also wonder whether it is 
    not, wittingly or unwittingly, a means of distracting the 
    white middle class voting public from recognizing and 
    ameliorating the real poverty and misery that are epidemic in 
    the central-city ghettos. 

Across a nation that claims to be the 'Land of the Free', over a 
million souls sleep tonight in cages, consigned there by an 
improper process, kept there by political expediency, and destined 
to do so tomorrow because of the willing blindness of a sated and 
jaded citizenry.

And the gulags continue to swell. 

That was Mumia Abu Jamal, written on September 6, 1998. Mumai is 
on death row in Pennsylvania, framed for the murder of a police 
officer.

[Play track one of "Lynch Mob". This
is 1:54 long and there is no gap between this and the 2nd track. 
Some white dude says "The mob was totally unruly--mob was totally 
unruly--mob was totally unruly" and it's over and we cut.  There 
is an explosision right during the 3rd time he says it.]

The Jericho March is an annual event designed to draw attention to 
the cases of the hundreds of people incarcerated by the United 
Snakes for their political beliefs and actions. The Maoist 
Internationalist Movement and the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist 
League solicited statements from politically concious prisoners to 
read at Jericho events. We present two of these statements here.

Greetings comrades, freedom fighters and all others participating
in the struggle against imperialist Amerikka,

I'm currently a prisoner in California.  I'm a young black who has
seen personally the unjust of the criminal justice system. And I want to
first thank MIM Distributors and RAIL for all of the hard work and making
it possible for me and others like me to see what's really going on in the
U$.  I also want to encourage everyone that's able to participate in the
struggle to free all political prisoners around the U$ who have seen no
justice.  We want to see Mumia Abu Jamal free, we want Geronimo Pratt to
remain free, we want the brothers in Angola who started the BPP down there
free. These people did nothing
but stood as an opposing threat against the U$ imperialist structure.

        By me being in prison I can speak personally about the
mistreatment of the prisoners.  The slave work that we're forced to
participate in or face disciplinary action.  They are over sentencing the
people, then employing them for free with no means of acquiring articles
of personal hygiene.  Then they have the nerve to call these places
Correctional facilities.  But, there's no measure of correction being
provided.  There's not any way to prepare for a return to society except
through you the anti-imperialist [movement].

        All of you are our hope!  We need support, education and a
physical presence or a voice to be heard on our behalf.  Education needs
to be addressed, they are keeping our people in prisons illiterate
teaching junior high school material.  And that's not acceptable if we are
to be counted as comrades in this people's struggle.  So I'm calling on
the people in position and with opportunity to aid educational development
of prisoners.
 

        Thank you and peace out!

- A prisoner in Texas


This has been Under Lock and Key, a weekly Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist
League program about prisons. For more information, contact: RAIL PO Box
712 Amherst MA 01004, or email RAILRadio@mim.org.