This is a challenge to every anarchist, abolitionist, rebel and determined fighter against prison society and white supremacy in Amerikkka: Between Monday, July 16 and Saturday, July 21, we’re calling on you to help unleash a concerted and spectacular array of solidarity actions before the upcoming prison strikes!

Prepare now, bring mayhem everywhere!

As you likely know, prisoners will strike from August 21st to September 9th. They anticipate guards and administrators to respond with violent reprisals, media distortions, and extended lockdowns. Defending the strikes from the outside is an essential component of its success. Don’t wait; retaliation has already started and as August 21st approaches we expect to see transfers, preemptive lockdowns, and more.

Outside support efforts, in collaboration with imprisoned rebels, have already begun. Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, IWOC, and other organizations are building phone trees, publishing call-outs, and mounting pressure campaigns. Another thing outside supporters can do is promote and set a stage for the strike. From July 16-21, we want to make an opening act that warms up the public consciousness and media landscape. If we’re successful, it will also be a loudspeaker for the prisoners’ call, blaring it past the censors, the mailroom pigs, and the dense walls of isolation and silence that prevent prisoners from knowing what’s cooking in other states or facilities until it’s already served up cold.

The challenge before us is to do things so spectacular, creative, and unexpected that the mainstream media cannot neglect them. Hashtag: #prisonstrike2018. Use any means necessary to break that media blockade: take the streets, paint the town, disrupt the status quo, hack a site, get things lit, or go ahead and chuck your anarchist purity, resort to wooing celebrity endorsements, buying clever ads, or schmoozing your way into the news.

Remember, the radical and independent outlets most likely to cover our activities exist mainly online. We need to leverage that coverage to force the big old media (the kind that gets into prisons: TV, radio, print editions of newspapers) to report this news due to fear-of-missing-out.

The goal: get the phrase “Nationwide Prison Strike: 8/21-9/9” printed or spoken on the largest platform so prisoners can see it and no one outside can ignore it.

So get out there and surprise us! Overwhelm amerikkka’s hostile media environment and get the word into prisons large and small across the nation.

For downloadable Sticker and Poster Graphics:

https://supportprisonerresistance.noblogs.org/nationalprisonstrike2018/

Groups endorsing the 2018 Nationwide Prison Strike:

Jailhouse Lawyers Speak

Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee

The Fire Inside Collective

Millions for Prisoners

The People’s Consortium

The post Week of International Support in Lead Up to Nationwide Prison Strike appeared first on Void Network.

Coordinated, nonviolent prison protests as well as spontaneous uprisings amid deteriorating conditions have escalated in recent years both nationwide and in Florida, which has the third largest prison system in the country. Prisoners in the state were among the most active during a nationwide strike in September 2016, which was quickly dubbed the “largest prison strike in U.S. history.” At least 10 Florida prisons participated in that action, which was planned to coincide with the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising but started a day early when tensions flared at Holmes Correctional Institution in the Florida Panhandle. Then, in August, in response to prison activists’ calls for another show of dissent, Department of Corrections officials placed the entire state system — 143 facilities and 97,000 people — on lockdown, an unprecedented move.

Incarcerated organizers of this week’s strike have chosen to remain anonymous to prevent retaliation, but they shared a statement outlining their demands with outside supporters. In an audio message from prison shared with The Intercept, one of the organizers described the action as a “nonviolent protest to get what we deserve from our government.”

“They use word play and deceive the public about what really goes on inside the system, and we want to expose those things,” he said.

Prison officials regularly retaliate against organizers by restricting their visitation rights and contact with other inmates, and sometimes even moving them to different facilities, which makes it harder for reports of protests to reach the public. But despite the challenges, “prisoners are pretty well organized and coordinated inside the prisons and throughout the prison system,” said Panagioti Tsolkas, an organizer with the prisoners’ rights and environmentalist group Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons. Tsolkas, who communicates regularly with activists inside, said that some of the upcoming strike’s organizers have already been placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for their efforts.

In response to questions about the planned strike, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Corrections wrote in a statement to The Intercept that “the department will continue to ensure the safe operation of our correctional institutions.”

“Slave Labor” and Price Gouging

Florida prisoners work both inside the prisons — doing laundry, cooking, maintaining the facilities, and growing food — and on outside “community work squads.” According to the corrections department, in 2017 the latter group alone performed 3.15 million hours of work valued at more than $38 million statewide, including cleanup work after Hurricane Irma.

“Our goal is to make the governor realize that it will cost the state of Florida millions of dollars daily to contract outside companies to come and cook, clean, and handle the maintenance,” the prisoners wrote in their statement. “This will cause a total BREAK DOWN.”

Prisoners are demanding compensation for their work as opposed to “the current slave arrangement,” they wrote, in which they are paid in time deducted from their sentences. “A lot of times people will work in order to get time deducted, and then the prison guards and officials will find ways to punish someone for what the prisoners are saying are made up reasons that then extend the person’s time,” Jacqueline Aziz, an attorney with the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Intercept.

“We want to be paid for the work we do, so that somebody doesn’t end up spending 10, 15, 20 years not being paid, and sent home with a bus ticket and a $50 check,” the prisoner speaking in the recording said. “We want to create an environment where someone can do their time, be rehabilitated, and enter into society with some type of hope.”

“That would be helpful for society instead of creating a revolving door where you lock people up and just set them up for failure so that they keep coming back.”

Prisoners are also calling for fairer pricing of goods they can purchase in prison — claiming, for example, that a case of soup that costs $4 on the outside is sold for $17 by prison commissaries (the DOC disputed that claim and provided the following list of canteen prices).

“This is highway robbery without a gun,” the prisoners wrote. “It’s not just us that they’re taking from. It’s our families who struggle to make ends meet and send us money — they are the real victims that the state of Florida is taking advantage of.”

Strike organizers are also calling on Florida to restore parole — which the state eliminated for non-capital felonies in 1984. “When someone is sentenced to life in prison, it means life in prison in Florida,” said Aziz. “There is no chance that good behavior in prison will get someone out earlier.”

The lack of parole has compounded the system’s colossal overcrowding, which in turn has contributed to some of the harshest and most violent prison conditions in the country. “There are so many unexplained deaths,” Lisa Graybill, deputy legal director for criminal justice reform at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told The Intercept. “They’re just appalling.”

Unexplained Deaths in Custody

Deaths in Florida state prisons — including homicides and a spate of suicides — have skyrocketed in recent years, soaring from 191 in 2000 to 356 in 2016.

Among those killed in custody was Darren Rainey, a mentally ill prisoner who was scalded to death at Dade Correctional Institution in 2012 when guards locked him in a hot shower for two hours. The water reached temperatures as high as 180 degrees, according to witnesses, including a nurse on duty that night who said that the heat controls were in a neighboring room controlled by guards.

Following Rainey’s death, a devastating investigation by the Miami Herald detailed more unexplained and brutal deaths, as well as system-wide neglect and abuse and efforts to cover up prison officials’ wrongdoing. Randall Jordan-Aparo, a disabled inmate at Franklin Correctional Institution, was killed in 2010 when guards beat him and gassed him with a chemical agent after he begged for medical help for days (prison guards later took to Facebook to mock his death). Another prisoner allegedly hanged herself while her hands were tied.

The corrections department has also been sued over its treatment of disabled prisoners and its failure to treat prisoners with Hepatitis C, and rights groups have called on the Department of Justice — twice — to open a federal civil rights investigation into the state’s prisons. “These problems are chronic,” Graybill said. “They haven’t been addressed and they’re not going away.”

Like most other states, Florida went on an “incarceration binge” in the 1990s, Graybill said. But unlike most other states — some 36 of which have undertaken some kind of criminal justice reform — the state has consistently refused to reconsider its policies.

“The solution for Florida is clear,” she said. “It needs to improve the conditions of confinement in its facilities, and one way it can afford to do that is by ensuring that it is only incarcerating the people who truly need to be incarcerated.”

“The question becomes, Why has the legislature been so unwilling or unable to do that?”

“This Is Florida … We’ll Beat Your Ass!”

In addition to denouncing brutal conditions of confinement, the prisoners are demanding broader criminal justice reform in Florida — including restored voting rights and a moratorium on executions.

Florida is one of four states in the country — with Kentucky, Iowa, and Virginia — that imposes lifetime disenfranchisement for people convicted of felonies. That means 1.5 million state residents can’t vote because of their criminal history. “People who have already paid their debt to society are essentially prevented from being active citizens,” said Aziz, the ACLU lawyer.

A proposed constitutional amendment could change that — if it can garner enough support to get on the ballot — but until that passes, the only potential path to the vote is for each disenfranchised individual to personally appeal to the governor, Rick Scott. Scott grants only 8 percent of those appeals, with little transparency on the decision-making process and a backlog of 10,000 applications awaiting review, the New York Times recently reported. The process leaves restoration of the right to vote dependent on the governor’s personal convictions. In a hearing on the voting rights of a man who had been convicted of manslaughter in a drunken driving incident, for instance, Scott said he would need to think about it — then noted, with his mic accidentally still on, “That’s how my uncle died.”

Scott also wields disproportionate power when it comes to the state’s death penalty. After newly elected prosecutor Aramis Ayala — Florida’s first black state attorney – said she would not seek the death penalty in her district, which includes Orlando, Scott moved 29 potential capital cases to a different jurisdiction. Ayala appealed, but the state’s Supreme Court ruled in the governor’s favor, forcing her to walk back her ban. Last year, Florida moved to tighten its death penalty laws by requiring a unanimous jury verdict after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the previous sentencing protocol was unconstitutional. The move made dozens of people eligible for re-sentencing, but the state limited retroactive application to those sentenced after 2002 — leaving approximately 200 on death row with sentences ineligible for review.

Finally, prisoners planning the strike are joining the local community’s protest against a phosphate mine set to surround the Reception and Medical Center near Lake Butler, where new arrivals and inmates with medical conditions are housed. Residents and prisoners fear the health consequences of water contamination and exposure to potential carcinogens linked to phosphate mining.

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson arrived at the Reception and Medical Center last spring.

Johnson, a well-known prison activist, jailhouse lawyer, and prolific writer and critic of prison abuse, had already been moved from Virginia to Texas under an interstate agreement that allows for the transfer of prisoners — ostensibly for public safety reasons, but often as a punitive measure.

That Johnson would be transferred to Florida “is a piece of evidence of how the Florida prison system is viewed even by the prison industry itself,” said Tsolkas, who has been communicating with him ahead of the upcoming strike. “Appalachia wasn’t bad enough. Texas wasn’t bad enough. Well, you’re going to the swamps.”

At the RMC, Johnson wrote in July, a guard told him that he was “not in Virginia, or wherever else” he might have been previously. “You will answer us only as ‘no sir’ and ‘yessir,’ ‘no ma’am’ and ‘yes ma’am.’ You forget this and we’ll kick your fucking teeth out,” the guard said, according to Johnson. “This is Florida, and we’ll beat your ass! We’ll kill you!”

That didn’t stop Johnson from continuing to expose prison abuse in Florida, or from joining the state prisoners’ organizing efforts, including ahead of Monday’s strike.

“What the prisoners are asking for is not only completely reasonable, but should be the bare minimum of how we treat an individual that the state is in charge of caring for,” said Aziz. “I would hope that whatever the DOC’s response is, it is an ethical and responsible way of addressing these real concerns.”

___________________________________

Alice Speri

Photo: Lynne Sladky/AP– A prisoner works on the lawn at Dade Correctional Institution, where mentally ill prisoner Darren Rainey died in 2012, in Florida City, Florida, July 10, 2014

Source: https://theintercept.com

The post FLORIDA PRISONERS PREPARE TO STRIKE, DEMANDING AN END TO UNPAID LABOR AND BRUTAL CONDITIONS appeared first on Void Network.

Prison is only apparently the exception to the rule: crime given vent to or innocence punished is in fact the totality of society where everyone punishes each other for the offense of being there and where anyone who thinks is pierced by this question at least once a day: “Why have they put me here? What have I done?” and the terribly obsessive desire for escape is just like that of prisoners. Maybe even more intense.
The evolution of the penitentiary system with the construction of so many new spaces for punishment has a significance beyond that of “more humanity and reeducation” rather than retributive suffering. The distance, the separation between the city and its prison—which has always been very great—decreases, because the inhabitants of the city increasingly resemble (through work, family, universities, hospitals, discotheques, theaters, stadiums) prisoners of a model prison who are granted occasional leaves (weekends, holidays, “white” weeks) with the obligation of returning on specific days with no room for error.
Even the “promenade” is a mirror of the city within the prison and of the prison within the city. The people guarded on their pedestrian islands, enclosed by flowering bushes as walls, going sadly and monotonously in and out of shopping centers, loaded with useless but obligatory purchases. The people watched by video cameras in the shops and outside, forced to pass through metal detectors to enter a bank, constrained to stamp a railway ticket, whispering at every instant that ignoble secretion of personal identity that is the fiscal code, invention of the gulag. Do you believe this is very different from a prison?
I can see the courtyard of Newgate—where the prisoners in pajamas march around in rows in a circle in the famous Doré incision—once again every time I walk through any pedestrian island, special project of mayors preoccupied with having an aromatic aroma, an edenic glade, within the immense urban prison they administer. Have we really emerged from the courtyard of Newgate? Have we completely given it up, or only taken that marked pajama to the laundry?
The edenic model inspired the providential inclusion of parks—which in name still carry the memory of Paradise (park is a contraction of paradise, Persian pardesh =garden)—in the emerging urban hell. These parks would later be degraded with the name of “green zone”. But what did these deceptive patches of paradise really change anyway? The urban glade (avenue or public garden) is not forest, freedom, refuge, free play of the spirit among lives different from the human; it is nothing but human images and, in an increasingly brutal manner, human images signify that which we most abhor: walls that enclose and constrain, jail.
The new prison construction (less somber, sometimes more breathable) was begun by the fascist regime (experimentally, in small cities) in order to reduce the distance between city and prison, destined to form a single, compact, totalitarian poison. We see the prison of Orvieto, built in 1936, the year of the greatest fascist triumph, no different from the Italian Bar, the University of Rome or any youth hostel…But the model totalitarian city, with urban envoys lined up in exchange for liberation from malarial anopheles, was Littoria (Latina) where the prison, built in 1939, is an anonymous service building, a true and proper outpost of the future outskirts. And a modern condominium on the outskirts endures widespread prison conditions. From the ground floor to the penthouse, the cooking is the same everywhere: spaghetti—steak—salad—dessert, just like in a regular prison.
The difference is that the family in the condominium doesn’t throw away much food, preserves the leftovers, cooks with more intelligence. The prison, like the barracks or the hospice, wastes a great deal and cooks the same things in a vile manner. No one would ever lick those plates, so often returned full.
Among the traits of liberal democracies at the beginning of this century, this marvel still exists: though specific prison conditions may change in any possible way, in the unstoppable degradation of life in common and of sociality in general on the outside, in the abandonment of the city to degenerative cities, nothing can be done to impede this inevitable transformation of the totality of the urban environment into a prison that has been immersed in the electronic for sometime, filled with typical prison slavery like rape, sexual extortion, the exchange of favors that ends up being more important than monetary exchange.
At any place in the city, at any hour of the day, millions of urban prisoners watch the same things on television as those prisoners who have been sentenced in a trial and those who are held in custody awaiting trial. The judges themselves do the same, cheering in the same way for a goal by their soccer team.
Today all urban space is watched, controlled, patrolled, feared, distrusted, perpetually threatened. In the name of security, it has gradually reached the point of the creation of an absolute technological-military prison. One can say that this long war will only cease in order to abandon its place to a kind of monstrous prison as an extreme form of “necessary” protection. And this is happening under a democracy that tries to appear powerless, under the egalitarian rhetoric with which it cloaks itself, to prevent—since this is what it wants and needs in order to conserve itself—every city of its dreams from becoming a maximum-security prison space (thus without respite) where the circulation of individuals increasingly resembles the circling of the prisoners round and round that courtyard with the high windowless walls where the poor exhausted footsteps resound in cadence.


source: http://devibody.blogspot.gr/2010/02/walls-of-city.html

The post “The Walls of the City” by C.G. from Diavolo in Corpo, a magazine of anarchist social critique from Italy appeared first on Void Network.