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The topic of prison has been on the
mouths and in the minds of the public more than ever in the past
year—controversy has erupted around the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, major
corruption has been exposed in state prison administrations in Florida, Georgia,
and California, and the battle over lethal injection is still raging
strong. However, this heightened awareness doesn’t do much for the
conditions of the 2,186,230 Americans who are currently incarcerated. The
prison population has quadrupled since 1980—U.S. jails now boast a higher
rate of incarceration than any other country in the world except Russia.
And a recent BBC expose shows that many American prisoners are subjected to
intimidation and abuse by attack dogs, cattle prods, stun guns, and other
torture tactics. It’s no wonder that prison reform activism has been taking
a new and provocative turn. The most innovative activism surrounding prison
issues as of late has come from an unlikely source: inmates themselves.
Despite all literal, figurative, and ideological barriers, many of today’s
prisoners are coming together, working to change not only their own unfair
conditions, but also the big-picture injustices of America’s prison system.
BODIES AS PROTEST: DIRECT ACTION BEHIND BARS
Steven Woods is a Punk Planet reader,
a former bassist, and a death row inmate in Texas’s Polunsky Unit, a
segregated housing institution where inmates are locked in their cells for
22 hours each day. They’re also denied group recreation, religious
services, art programs, work programs, TVs, and contact visits—even though
state policy technically allows prisoners most of these amenities. After
failed attempts to ameliorate conditions through legal challenges and
complaints to the administration, Woods decided that he and his fellow
inmates would need to take matters to a different level: nonviolent
resistance, in the form of a hunger strike. The protest, Woods and his
co-inmates believed, just might be drastic enough to catch the attention of
both the prison administration and the public. Plus, he says, these days,
the mood is ripe.
“I think a rising number of people in
prison are becoming radical in the light of prison reform,” Woods says. “This
was sort of inevitable. You keep locking us up and we agitate and educate and
help our fellows rise above their chains. You place us in a situation where
all the fuel is already there, and all it needs is a spark.” As prison
populations continue to skyrocket, the numbers of potential agitators
increase, as well. Lately, prisoners can also cite the well-publicized
abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay as fuel for their actions
against the American prison complex.
The Polunsky hunger strike kicked off
at the beginning of October. The last three strikers ended their fast on
November 4. Woods finally consented to be fed after overhearing a nurse
saying that his kidneys would soon stop functioning—an ironic example of
Polunsky’s neglect of prisoners’ medical needs. Though he was willing to
starve to death, Woods was not keen on living out the rest of his days in
Polunsky with serious internal organ damage—especially since only three
strikers were still fasting, and it was unlikely that the prison
administration would begin changing policies in response to such a small
group. However, Woods says, October’s strike was just the beginning. He’s
currently working to build a strong coalition in the prison reform
community that will stand behind prisoners when they strike again. A second
fast is scheduled to begin May 6.
“The biggest part of being an
activist is reaching out and instilling the spirit of revolution and
resistance in our fellows, to break the herd mentality,” Woods says.
Direct, physical actions like hunger strikes are a shock to the system: not
only to the administrative system, which must come face-to-face with the
effects of its policies, but to the systems of protesters themselves, who
by voluntarily taking on trying circumstances, prove that they retain some
agency over their lives.
Steph Turner, a writer, zine publisher,
activist, and student who was released from prison in 2005 after a 12-year
incarceration, points out that some inmates are carrying out direct-action
protests simply by living their lives in defiance of stereotypes and rigid
categorization. Responding to harsh treatment with an attitude of grace and
personal morality, she says, is a protest in and of itself. While in
prison, Turner focused on deepening her spirituality and developing love
for herself and others, maintaining the view, “Where I exist, there are not
disposable souls, for we are all connected no matter what we think or do.”
As a transgender prisoner, Turner faced particularly harsh conditions:
prison administrators generally force trans inmates to conform to gender
norms, living a life that feels constantly false and painful. Yet, notes
Turner, each trans inmate’s physical presence, just by existing, poses a
political challenge to the prison system.
“It is my view that the transgender
experience of transcending gender binarism implicitly challenges other
relative divisions, including the relatively arbitrary distinction between ‘guilt’
and ‘innocence,’“ Turner says. “At some visceral level, we are a threat to
the status quo of Western culture with its heavy reliance upon discrete
categories. This must be an annoyance to the prison industrial complex.”
Indeed, showing up the complexities
of all people—including those that happen to be in prison—forms a critical
part of prison-based activism. And reworking the public’s image of “inmate”
requires a deep questioning of one automatic assumption: that people in
prison are always guilty.
PRISON ROOTS: WORKING FROM THE FLOOR UP
Death row inmate Hasan Shakur was
executed on August 31 for a crime for which he claimed innocence until the
end: the case against him, he explained, was based on a false, coerced
confession he had made when first arrested. However, beyond protesting his
own sentence, Shakur founded two organizations and a web page—all still in
operation—while he was behind bars, in order to work toward the liberation
of falsely accused prisoners and the recognition of the human rights of all
inmates.
When he entered jail nine years ago,
Shakur was confused, sad, and angry. The years of his life stretched before
him, seemingly purposeless. Yet once in prison, surrounded by depression
and impending doom, Shakur was hit with the urge to take action.
“He turned from a boy into a man in
prison,” says his wife, Debbie Frazier. “His motivation was all the
wrongdoing around him. He felt he needed to speak out and let the world
know what was going on.”
Shakur began to express himself via
the written word, breaking through the psychological barriers that boxed in
his potential, since he couldn’t break through the physical ones. “With my
thoughts bleeding through/ this pen attacking the lock that/ has imprisoned
my brain!” he wrote in one poem. Being in prison—having most of his rights
to speak out removed—alerted Shakur to how important it was to use the few
rights he did have, and he spoke out in any way he could. He began to file
grievances and urged others to call and write to the prison administration
about the unfair treatment and lack of legal aid given to himself and
fellow inmates. He zeroed in on the small, practical points that needed to
be covered in order to help other prisoners with their cases. The constant,
physical reality of his incarceration kept him driven toward the priorities
of the moment. Inmate activists often speak of how each small decision they
make and each minute they spend immersed in service can mean life or death
for someone else; this reality is much more heavily present for them than
for prison reformers on the outside. Thus, Shakur took on the role of
assigning outsiders tasks to further his causes.
“In practically every letter he wrote
me, he would include a list of things that I needed to look up for
somebody,” says Shakur’s best friend and co-organizer, Knut Erik Paulli. “They
ranged from looking up a person or an organization, to doing a background
check on an attorney, to looking up cases and laws, and even contacting
family and friends of a fellow inmate to give them a push to help and
assist their loved one behind bars.”
Determined to plant a seed of prison
reform that would continue growing after his death, Shakur founded
Operation Love Inspiration Freedom and Equality (O.L.I.F.E.), a newsletter
that—unlike most publications about prison issues—features the words of
inmates themselves. O.L.I.F.E. focuses on the corruption and injustice that
is built into the legal system and the structure of prisons. The newsletter
includes firsthand stories of prison life, interviews with prisoners,
poetry, artwork, and legal advice. Shakur planned for the development of
O.L.I.F.E. into a full-fledged organization aimed at granting prisoners
help and educating the public. (According to Paulli, it’s on its way.) In
2005, Shakur founded a second publication, the Human Rights Coalition Texas
Branch Newsletter, with the goal of organizing the families of prisoners
into a powerful lobby for prison reform.
“He knew that he would probably not
live to see these changes that he worked so hard for,” Paulli says. “But he
stayed true to his visions and goals, and he had a hope and belief that one
day—one day the change would come.” This type of faith influences much
prison activism: inmates know that, given the constraints of their
circumstances, they can’t lead a one-person revolution. They don’t expect
to watch the world fall in line with their dreams—but, by continuing to
dream and to act, they are contributing crucial pieces to a slow-building
force of resistance.
BUILDING COMMUNICATION, FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Since prisoner-initiated activism is
necessarily cooperative, inmates must work tirelessly for the right to
communicate. And since phone and in-person communication is severely
limited, newsletters (like Hasan Shakur’s two) have become a favorite mode
of spreading the word. For Ohio death row inmate, Siddique Abdullah Hasan,
a newsletter has served as a vital pathway of communication between two
groups of people who might never otherwise speak: death row inmates and
murder victims’ families. Hasan, who describes his prison cell as “just
another office,” dreamed up Compassion in 1991, and served as its editor
until last March. Compassion’s pages focus on the positive contributions
death row inmates are making to society, based on the idea that the
inmates, as people, are not only composed of the worst deed they’ve done in
their lives. It also includes a “Victim’s Voice” section, which allows family
members of victims to express their grief. Additionally, Compassion’s
staffers have established a college scholarship fund for victims’ family
members. The fund has so far awarded more than $21,000 in scholarships. In
the first issue of Compassion, Hasan noted that scholarships are not meant
to attempt to erase family members’ losses; they are instead a “compassionate
gesture,” expressing remorse for victims’ deaths and showing how sympathy
and kindness can arise in all people—even those who have committed murder.
Publishing the words of
inmates—especially when those words display true emotion—is one of the most
important steps that can be taken toward the reform of prison conditions
and the abolition of the death penalty, says Woods, who is in the process
of producing a zine, tentatively titled The Continuing Struggle of a Nail
in My Coffin.
“Our writing shows we’re not what ‘normal
people’ perceive us to be, puts us on a level with them, connects us to
them,” he says. “How can we achieve any kind of change if we’re perceived
as dumb beasts, fuck-ups?” In other words, it’s easy to be
pro-death-penalty when you don’t perceive those being put to death as
people.. Additionally, writing and seeing their work distributed reaffirms
inmate-activists’ commitment to their causes, Woods says. And in
circumstances as dire as those at Polunsky, reaffirming a commitment to one’s
cause also serves as an affirmation of one’s own existence. “It lifts our
hearts above the walls,” Woods says.
Stephen Hartnett, a University of
Illinois communications professor who also teaches creative writing in
prisons, holds that writing a good poem can be the first step toward being
a political activist. He encourages his students to share their creative
work with their lawyers, to convey their identity and history.
“You have to be able to get behind
those poems, support those poems,” Hartnett says. “My position is that any
act of expression by a person that marginalized is a political gesture; it’s
expanding the realm of who gets to talk in our public space.”
Hartnett points out that the macho
culture of male prisons often works against inmates, preventing some
potential communication with the outside. The culture discourages emotional
displays, yet this very type of expression—the admission of vulnerability
and compassion and the dissolution of the “hardened criminal” image—is one
of the most important political tools available to prisoners, Hartnett
says.
The mixing of personal and political
is key to promoting prison reform from the inside. When the public begins
to tune in to the emotions of prisoners, those prisoners become people
instead of statistics—and inmates themselves, who have tuned out their own
emotions over years of conforming to the standards of machismo, begin to
view themselves as people, as well.
Brandon Gatson, a recently released
Michigan prisoner and political poet, echoes Hartnett’s sentiment, noting
that writing can become a form of inner activism. Channeling strong
feelings into words instead of into violence is a choice that defies the
rigid stereotypes and assumptions of the prison system, he says. It also
provides a calm mode for thinking through ideas for larger-scale social
change.
“Whenever something’s in my mind now
that bothers me, I can just write about it,” he says of discovering poetry.
“People don’t tend to deal with things—I do, by writing about them. I get
that stuff off my shoulders.” Getting that stuff is off one’s shoulders,
Gatson says, is a humbling experience; but it also helps prisoners gain a new
respect for self. And recouping a sense of self-worth while in prison is
itself a brave act of protest.
MAINTAINING CONNECTIONS: ACTIVISM FROM THE
OUTSIDE IN
For prisoners who developed activist
roots while inside, the spark usually doesn’t die easy. In fact, some of
the most important allies for inmates working to improve their conditions
and reform the prison system are fellow inmates who’ve been released.
Former political prisoner Ed Mead is a prime example. Incarcerated for 18
years, he spent his time in the Washington State Penitentiary organizing a
Men Against Sexism group, writing, and contemplating the prison-industrial
complex. Once out, he immediately began sending money to political
prisoners who were still locked up. After awhile, Mead’s pocketbook was
hurting, and he was itching for a way to help prisoners help themselves. So
he created the site Prison Art ( prisonart.org): both a moneymaker and a
political tool.
“I figured that if I put up a website
where prisoners could sell their arts and crafts, they could make
themselves some money and create consciousness-raising art at the same
time,” Mead says. He expected political prisoners to be the main
participants in his program, but this wasn’t the case—in fact, most of the
artists who’ve contributed to Mead’s site aren’t in prison for political
reasons, but have developed an activist streak while inside. Prison Art
provides them with a canvass for that streak, and Mead himself provides
them with an example of continued activism upon release. In addition to
Prison Art, he’s founded the Mark Cook Freedom Committee (which lobbied for
and achieved the release of a co-defendant), organized the Seattle Mumia
Defense Committee, and served as vice president of the Seattle chapter of
the National Lawyers’ Guild.
Like Mead, Brandon Gatson developed
an activist drive on the inside that has fueled his efforts and dreams
since his recent release. Though he experienced a major bout of depression
when first incarcerated, Gatson eventually became involved with the Prison
Creative Arts Project (PCAP), an Ann Arbor-based organization that provides
prisoners with opportunities to explore art, creative writing, music,
theater, and dance. Gatson discovered both a love of poetry and a
revolutionary spirit. He decided that his mission, while in prison, would
be to improve conditions for less fortunate inmates.
“I didn’t expect to change the whole
prison system; but I did change individuals’ lives,” Gatson says. “I wanted
to make life more comfortable for the people who have to be in there for
the rest of their lives.”
Since a passion for language
transformed Gatson’s own life, he aimed—and continues to aim—to introduce
that love to other prisoners. Gatson created a series of vocabulary classes
for his fellow inmates: he found a dictionary and selected a list of
complex words each week, then copied and passed out the lists to others in
preparation for periodic quizzes.
Now that he’s out, Gatson lends his
firsthand experience to help others become better prison activists: he
occasionally visits classes at the University of Michigan, sharing his
knowledge and views on what students can do for inmates. He emphasizes the
importance of voting—since inmates are disenfranchised, everyone on the
outside has the opportunity to advocate for inmates simply by going to the
polls and voting in their interest. Gatson also continues to write poetry
that challenges the prison system. He writes in “I’m Too Much”: “No form of
imprisonment can hold me captive/I’m too much/Liberation is a cycle of
fate/Regardless of how long I’ve been captured/I’m too much/Your forces are
not enough to keep me remanded/Your chains of bondage shall I escape/I’m
too much.”
For those of us on the outside who
want to assist incarcerated activists, perhaps the best place to turn is to
people like Gatson, Mead, and Steph Turner (who continues to run a
prison-based zine, communicating regularly with her co-writers inside).
These folks know the prison experience: its hardships and its loopholes;
the cracks in its exterior that allow for the possibility of change. To
connect would-be reformers with the prisoners they aim to aid, Daniel Sturm
and his wife Angela Jancius, prison reform activists in Ohio, recently set
up Prisonersolidarity.org, a website that publishes news and views by
prisoners and their allies. Its goal: to bolster the inside/outside
connection, helping the “concerned public” lend a hand to activists behind
bars.
“We wanted to give prisoners a
microphone to tell their story,” Sturm says. “It’s a powerful strategy, to
seek an analogy with journalism, to ‘let the people’s voices speak for
themselves.’”
Interested in helping to amp up the
people’s voices? Check out the following sites for volunteer opportunities:
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