Education Expropriation Now!

"Justice is on our side, but victory won’t be handed to us."

-Herukhuti


    I think all liberationists, seekers of justice, and anti-imperialists would agree that we can’t execute a robust campaign against the state’s penal, educational, criminal justice, or economic institutions with personnel who: still believe in the promises of capitalism, are still convinced of this Government’s legitimacy, and/or silently accept the shameful “Privileges” of “Whiteness”, labor aristocracy, “Black Elitism”, or Neo-Colonizer status. Even when we consciously say “We’re against capitalism, racism,” etc. our habits and subconscious are still infected with the individualist and materialist ideologies. That’s why WOMMB Institute is committed to the decolonization and re-development of the hearts and minds of oppressed captives as the cornerstones and prerequisites for prison abolition, state resistance, and community building.


    What we’re trying to tackle has a seldom, if ever, discussed obstacle that has been in freedoms way for a long time. i call it “The Sequestration of Humanity’s Accumulative Knowledge and Experience” like air, water, land,and technology; education (not mere selective training) belongs to us all, equally. It’s not the property of Yale, Oxford, or N.Y.U. This society, rules by corporations and tyrannical government, has been, and is depriving the people of our ability and duty to contribute our utmost to humanity and fully realize our talents and potential. High School diplomas, community college and undergraduate “training” only condition us to gain employment (more slavery). We’re not taught how to think, but what to think. We’re not taught skills to be independent and free thinkers, to create for ourselves and communities, to serve our own interest that are counter to the “Established Order”


    We’re not taught in ways that we can add value to a revolutionary culture. The elite few raise their children in isolated/secure environments where their basic nutrition, shelter, safety, and psychological needs are met; allowing them to be able to focus on “elevated” concerns. They go to prep schools where they’re trained to be leaders, thinkers, and problem-solvers. The exact opposite of what we “slaves” learn in public, charter and low income private schools. They’re guaranteed slots at Ivy League schools and fraternities and sororities. Advanced degrees cost hundreds and thousands of dollars.  They don’t own the knowledge! We have to be “debriefed”. Where’s our training? How can we “occupy” the education and teach ourselves what’s necessary for getting free and building our independent democracy? We have to think outside of the box and find ways to re-capture the knowledge. Steal it back! Expropriate it?


The majority of our oppressed youth in prison and i the communities, who would naturally and logically take the mantle of freedom fighting are preoccupied with consumerism, entertainment, “feeling good” and status. Ignorance is something to take pride in. Moral and civic cowardice are rewarded. The criminalization process is funnelling them into prison by the thousands. If oppressed community members (youth especially) remain undeveloped and psychologically colonized they will continue to populate prisons- if already incarcerated oppressed community members remain undeveloped, imperialist institutions, like prisons, will remain, presenting unnecessary resistance to our abolition movement; defeating our purpose. Again, this is why W.O.M.B.B. Institute is relevant and necessary- a key component- to prison abolition and our struggles. If our communities can expropriate the knowledge and get it to us; we’ll teach and learn. We’ll train and blossom.


Tomorrow, one of the W.O.M.M.B. Institute’s apprentices is being released to a halfway house. I only had 4 months to mentor him. He’s come a long way from not caring about life and being irresponsible. And his “mind” is set on change. But, I’m only cautiously optimistic because it takes a lot longer than 4 months to completely recondition thought and behavior patterns. It takes more leadership skills and knowledge than I currently possess to fully initiate someone into adulthood and sovereignty; more than one individual's coaching, without community support. It will take an additional higher quality of mentoring, teaching, incentivized economic security and course materials, connected to rich community support networks and consultancy- a whole training apparatus behind W.O.M.M.B institute - meeting our discarded, damaged, and imprisoned community members needs, so they can be fine tuned to add value to our special movements. These will be men and women in prison fighting their oppressors instead of each other. Instead of terrorizing our communities again; when they get out, they’ll physically join the collectives and co-ops they were in part of in prison. This is also one of our strategies for prison abolition. It’s called “de-population”.  W.O.M.M.B Institute Participants and graduates/initiates won’t be drug users and since they’ll have the advanced educations to be able to create income streams and economics they won’t have a need to sell drugs- Thus a reduction in drug related crimes, sending them to prison.


We sincerely need our communities’ support in getting the materials needed for our re-development and advanced training - the beginning of a genuine prison education movement. We need course books not currently in use by colleges and universities- maybe they’ve been thrown away, given away, or “in storage” somewhere. We can receive internet downloads and printouts through regular mail. Maybe there are online college courses that can be “tapped into” and printed out. We can receive newspapers and journals. All publications (books, magazines, tapes/cds) that are new have to come from publisher, bookstore, or distributor directly. Amazon.com is fine, but not e-bay or Amazon Marketplace, etc. No used books. But, again, we encourage internet printouts and even xeroxed books because they come to us straight through the mail and we can have unlimited amounts. Books from AK Press, PM Press, and other anarchist, leftist, and liberal/progressive publishers have half price discounts for prisoners. Any other ideas you all may have for “Education Expropriation” are needed and welcomed. Maybe we can get educational materials from other countries like China. It’s all about creating options and thinking outside the limitations given to us to stifle growth.  


We need educational materials, curricula, and mentoring in the following: 1) Rites of passage, ethics, philosophy, character development, 2) Political Science, Military Science, Psychology, Behavioral Sciences 3) Cooperative economics, Urban Farming/gardening, Co-operative business and collectives, urban planning, community organizing, personnel management 4) World history, anthropology, sociology, metaphysics 5) Foreign affairs, revolutions/rebellions, law (international, Civil Rights), Diplomacy, negotiation, conflict resolution, treaty negotiation 6) Foreign Languages, teaching, journalism, writing communications, public speaking, speech writing, any others our communities recommend.


Thanks for your support.


In struggle and solidarity.

Program to Unite Arizona Prison Population with Free World Arizona Communities

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.