Goal:
To create an alliance for us to
commitedly and actively work together to solve our crime, education,
social, economic and political problems, without the interference or
manipulation of law enforcement, state agencies, welfare, parole
officers, public schools, etc.; to start building our own
institutions.
A)
Open consistent lines of 2-way communication and dialogue between
prisoners and communities to build mutual understanding, respect,
accountability, trust and effort; so that prisoners will know what’s
expected of us when we return, how we need to serve and participate
in community life and know that we are needed and wanted as
contributors.
We
should be kept abreast of current events going on in our home
communities and plan years ahead of our release dates as to how we’re
going to make a smooth transition into society. This would be done
through coordinated planning, involving prisoners getting education
in fields / jobs our communities advise us on, based on availability,
demand and necessities.
We
will also use our personal interaction to mend all emotional wounds,
seek forgiveness and facilitate for a genuine redemption process with
our communities, rather than the state; establishing ‘responsibility
contracts’ and real commitments to serve.
B)
Form functioning mentoring partnerships, sponsorships, and reciprocal
participation groups to initiate wealth building enterprises: pairing
off to work on various projects in the communities’ socio-political
and economic interests. Prisoners can do research and development
activities, think tanks, etc. Co-ops can be established, working
towards economic independence and collective sufficiency. Prisoners
can become a valuable resource and an asset to our communities,
sharing the labor and struggle along with the benefits and fruits.
The simultaneous awakening of the socio-political and economic
consciousness of the 2 halves of our communities.
C)
Start an information campaign to give facts, data and stats about the
true nature of prison life, the injustice system and law enforcement.
To show the genocide and corruption. To hold Arizona prison
officials, legislators, and public servants accountable for their
‘misdeeds’, that negatively effect us in terms of how they vote
on laws and policy and enforce laws.
To
let the public know the fallacies of:
a)
ADOC being a rehabilitation and corrections institution;
b)
Our human, civil and prisoner rights being honored and upheld;
c)
Warehousing us being the best option available;
d)
The recidivism rate being improved and crime dropping;
e)
Law enforcement and government working in the best interests of the
poor and working-class peoples.
We
are potentially a unified civilization made up of multiple oppressed
colonies, nations and classes. We have a common adversary and our
watchwords are: anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-oppression;
anti-modern civilization! Being against this modern civilization also
means being against racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, materialism,
and individualism. Modern civilization is genocide! They have many
different institutions for carrying out genocide: media, school /
education, ‘health care’ systems, agriculture, pollution,
prisons, police, welfare, economic systems, laws, courts, ghettos.
These realities kill us emotionally, intellectually, morally,
socially, genetically and culturally. Our independence has been
destroyed. We may come from different cultural backgrounds and may
have experienced different forms and extremes of oppression, but we
are ONE, and our oppressor doesn’t make those distinctions when
it’s time to exploit us. Our communities are viewed as external
undeveloped nations, only useful for tax dollars and labor values to
enrich our ‘mother country’. They don’t invest in our
communities; tax dollars aren’t used to enhance our children’s
education; we are a surplus population.
The
majority of the men and women in prison are from low income,
non-privileged, non-white, marginalized communities; not necessarily
poor or jobless. We’re not ‘lumpen’. Forget all the
Eurocentric, rigid labels and classifications. The same pool of
individuals in prison are a microcosm of where you life: our
disadvantaged communities. In our communities there are high school
and college educated, high school drop outs, drug addicts,
alcoholics, hustlers, sex addicts, highly intelligent, employed,
unemployed, sometimes employed, homeless, homeowners, ex-prisoners,
business owners, Christians, Muslims, and atheists. You know what?
Same as in prison. Because we come from you. We are you. We are your
sons and daughters, husbands and wives, aunts and uncles, brothers
and sisters, cousins, friends, students and neighbors. Some of you
have been in here. Some of you will be coming here. Whether you broke
the law or not; or whether or not you ‘deserved’ the severity of
the sentence. We’re just experiencing the different forms an
extremes of genocide and oppression right now. You guys might be
getting evicted from your apartments, laid off from work, or racially
profiled by the cops. Your form of genocide might be not getting land
rights on a portion of your ‘reservation’. We’re experiencing
the forms calls: prison, inadequate nutrition and health care, and
‘warehousing’. Our genocide is the stripping of our rights to
participate in democracy (voting) or right to assemble. We have to
unite!!
We
have to recognize that we are one class of people. We’ve let law
enforcement, politicians, and the media trick and misinform us into
being at odds with one another. You get tricked into voting for
‘tough on crime’ laws and convinced that the modern prison system
deters crime, and rehabilitates ‘offenders’. What most of us
don’t realize is that the whole system is a sham, and that they
create crime and criminals through their violent examples. This
civilization socializes our children for prison, slavery, and
meaningless lives of chasing money and status. We give them full
license to come into our communities to kill us; we take our children
to their schools to have their minds and self confidence destroyed.
We blame ourselves when we don’t ‘succeed’ in life according to
modern standards of success. It’s been set up for us to miss the
mark, even if a few of us ‘slip through’ and strike it rich. They
teach us that if we stay in our place and accept the ‘mild forms’
of genocide, we won’t go to prison or get murdered by them. Your
only way out is to accept their values and become an exploiter
yourself: don’t develop your community, and depend on your
oppressors for ideas and social welfare. In other words, assimilate
and integrate. Even then, on subconscious levels over the long term,
your psychological orientation becomes bound to the economy, merely
existing to eat and sleep to be able to go to work again and again.
Looking
at ‘life’ from a reasonable position, people respond differently
to oppressive, genocidal conditions. Some self-medicate or rob
stores; some drop out of school or become ‘over achievers’; some
commit murder or repeatedly enter into abusive relationships; some
become sex workers or exercise junkies, workaholics, etc. Some react
to our controlled environments of harshness and bleakness by quitting
their jobs or abandoning their families or just having a glass of
wine at the end of the day; some beat their spouses and children;
some suppress the metaphysical and emotional anguish and ‘just deal
with it’. It’s obvious that some of us will go to prison for
these responses and reactions to oppressive conditions and some
won’t. Some of us commit these acts and ‘don’t get caught’.
I’m not excusing or condoning poor choices or anti-social /
criminal behavior. I’m only pointing out that we suffer from the
same forms of genocide and are the same people. And instead of
supporting a government and its value systems that create the
genocidal conditions in the first place; as enlightened people we
need to come up with our own solutions to our socio-economic and
political problems. Instead of cruelly punishing and further
destroying those of us who have violated our communities (burglaries,
robbing, drug dealing, etc.), we might want to start occupying our
social institutions and recreating, re-engineering them to serve our
interests, in our image, so that our civilization will begin to take
shape. Our institutions will no longer create criminals, individuals
stripped of self-respect and asocial ‘civic vampires’.
But,
let me digress here and open your understand to the depths of
genocide in the forms of the judicial process and penal system, so
you can witness how truly depraved and wicked the privileged few are.
They depress our communities economically (no jobs or resources or
avenues to grow our food), so that mere survival is our focus. Our
tax dollars aren’t spent on quality education or industrial capital
so that we have the human and material resources to provide our own
jobs and be self-sufficient and not need welfare. When youth turn to
crime because of the above and because of poor leadership, parenting
and teaching, they are targeted by law enforcement. They are
selectively prosecuted and charged (yes, prosecutors and judges come
to legal decisions based on race and income categories). They (we)
are selectively sentenced as well. Big corporations spend big money
through media, news highlighting violence and crime to pump fear in
communities, then present tough on crime bills and politicians for
you to vote for. They convince us that more prisons are the answer
and that ‘revenge justice’ is what we deserve. They encourage you
to turn a blind eye to their corruption and to relinquish all
oversight and monitoring of their closed door decision-making in
state legislation and prison policy making. This neglect is coming
back to ‘bite us in the rear’. You are unknowingly complicit in
further destroying our communities.
Arizona
Department of Corrections, Bureau of Prisons, County Jails, Law
Enforcement in general, all violate the Geneva Convention, United
Nations Human Rights Laws, and the treatment of prisoners protocol.
They torture us psychologically and physically. We don’t even
investigate it. We don’t ask questions. It’s accepted as
‘American culture’. We don’t realize that prison policies, the
examples set by law enforcement through violence and dehumanization
creates a violent and depraved prison culture that destroys our
minds, moral decency, and decision-making ability that will allow us
to be anything close to civilized, proactive, capable human beings
once we return to YOU, our communities. The very place that says they
‘rehabilitate’ and ‘correct’ criminal behavior actually
exacerbates it. In the same sense that when children grow up with an
abusive parent, they tend to reproduce that behavior; or when a
parents beats their children to make them behave, they usually become
more misbehaved and dysfunctional. How can we captives be prepared to
be good parents, responsible citizens, economically productive and
engaged in community life, if we’re warehoused like cattle, with no
real educational opportunities, jobs with real wages so we can
support family and save money, no access to the ever-changing
technology that’s being used, no real, healthy opportunities for
interaction with our families, no right to vote for changes that
directly affect our futures and interests?
Our
governors, legislators, directors of prison, wardens are directly
culpable and need to be brought up on charges, at state level,
nationally and even internationally, for the war crimes, human, civil
and prison rights’ violations, and hate crimes committed against
prisons and our communities. They knowingly dehumanize prisoners and
reduce us to fodder for their exploitative agenda; they brutalize us
until we hate authority; they allow drugs into the system to control
prison gangs into policing the prisoner population for the
administration. So the ‘leaders’ tell the yards not to rebel or
fight for our rights. Also, a drugged out population of ‘zombies’
aren’t concerned about adequate food, health care, or conditions of
confinement and they will return to prison, giving employees ‘job
security’. They make us want revenge and make sure we can’t
function properly, then they send us home to our own poor communities
(not the rich neighborhoods they live in) to rob, kill, kidnap. That
is irresponsible and criminally negligent, especially when research
has been done to prove there are much more effective methods for
rehabilitation and re-educating that cost tax payers less money.
Collectively, we need to get serious and bring attention to these
issues and get involved on the political level.
Since
we can’t (and shouldn’t) rely on government and the privileged
‘know it alls’ (corporations / intellectuals / elite) to create
viable solutions to our problems regarding crime, poverty and
ignorance, we have to think outside the box and get unconventional;
get innovative and nuanced, and come up with our own remedies; using
mutual aid and assistance, cooperative effort, and collective work
and responsibility as our motivating values. I feel that we captives
and ex-captives have to unite with you, our community leaders,
activists, and members to repair the breaches of fear and alienation
that were created as a result of our poor choices and exacerbated by
our enemies. We must develop a synergistic collaboration for our
survival and maintain it. We need to expose the uselessness of our
current prison industries and penal systems and implement healthy
programs to address violence and crime. Current prisons only create
jobs for small town America and make profits for the ‘fat cats’,
keeping oppressed nations and poor whites controlled and contained
for our productive years. A few jobs for the small town folk aren’t
worth our futures and community cohesiveness and prosperity.
Again,
we can only repair our society if we unite, strategize, and make the
biggest perpetrators of crime (directors, governors, police, etc.)
accountable if we begin transforming our laws and the functioning of
our societies. We captives are redeemable and lovable. A lot of us
are natural leaders. A lot of us just needed to get off drugs and
alcohol. A lot of us are changing our lives for the better, on our
own, in spite of the state’s cruel obstacles. So, just imagine how
many of us could be rehabilitated and remobilized, ready to
participate in civic life, with the sponsorship and help our
communities. This is a community issue, not just a prisoner problem.
I sincerely hope that this will be the beginning of a courageous
mobilization of solidarity in community building.
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