A CALL FOR PRISON RACIAL PEACE FROM PELICAN BAY

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It is friday and that means Scission returns to prison and reminds us all to keep in mind the plight of the thousands locked up behind the bars and the walls of this "institutions."

When I was in prison back in the seventies there were, of course, racial divisions amongst prisoners, but not nearly to the extent that they exist today.  Don't forget I entered prison only a few years after prisoners at Attica united together in that historic uprising.

Today anything like that would be practically impossible.  Prisons have turned into gang fiefdoms and are rife with racial hatred.  Race based violence is commonplace.  Prison administrators feign concern, but the reality is these divisions make control much more simple.  A divided prison population is a prison populations whose anger is most often turned within.  The unity needed for a true prison movement within is thus extremely difficult.  That is why the post and statement below is so very important.

The call for unity, for a stepping back from the violence may sound utopian to some.  It may even seem utopian to me.  Still, it also represents some sort of hope, some sort of a re-emergence of sanity.  I hope with all my heart that the call you will read here is heard by the thousands of prisoners who can only gain anything at all by working together in struggle.  There simply is no other way.

The task toward prisoner unity strikes me as an incredibly tough one, but all power to those taking the first step.

The following is from the San Francisco Bay View.

California prisoners make historic call for peace between racial groups in California prisons and jails

by Isaac Ontiveros, Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity



Oakland – Prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) have announced a push to end all hostilities between racial groups within California’s prisons and jails. The handwritten announcement was sent to prison advocacy organizations. It is signed by several prisoners, identifying themselves as the PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Collective. [Their statement follows this one.]
The Attica rebellion in upstate New York Sept. 9-13, 1971, saw thousands of prisoners take over the prison, protesting intolerable conditions and infuriated by the assassination of George Jackson at San Quentin on Aug. 21, 1971. The secret of their unprecedented strength was their multi-racial solidarity. Here, Black and white prisoners sit on a wall during a meeting called by the organizers.The Short Corridor refers to a section of Pelican Bay Prison’s notorious Security Housing Unit (SHU). Pelican Bay’s SHU was the point of origin for last year’s hunger strikes which rocked California’s prison system, at one point including the participation of nearly 12,000 prisoners in over 11 prisons throughout the state.

The statement calls for the cessation of all hostilities between groups to commence Oct. 10, 2012, in all California prisons and county jails. “This means that from this date on, all racial group hostilities need to be at an end,” the statement says.
It also calls on prisoners throughout the state to set aside their differences and use diplomatic means to settle their disputes. The Short Corridor Collective states, “If personal issues arise between individuals, people need to do all they can to exhaust all diplomatic means to settle such disputes; do not allow personal, individual issues to escalate into racial group issues.”

The statement calls for the cessation of all hostilities between groups to commence Oct. 10, 2012, in all California prisons and county jails. “This means that from this date on, all racial group hostilities need to be at an end,” the statement says.

In the past, California prisoners have attempted to collaborate with the Department of Corrections to bring an end to the hostilities, but CDCR has been largely unresponsive to prisoners’ requests. The statement warns prisoners that they expect prison officials to attempt to undermine this agreement.

Occupy San Quentin on Feb. 20, 2012, a major demonstration in support of prisoners, united people across race, class, age and gender dividing lines. – Photo: Alex Darocy, Indybay“My long-time experience in urban peace issues, gang truces, prevention and intervention is that when gang leaders and prisoners take full stock of the violence and how they can contribute to the peace, such peace will be strong, lasting and deep. I honor this effort as expressed in this statement,” says Luis J. Rodriguez, renowned violence intervention worker and award-winning author of “Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.”

Rodriguez has helped broker gang truces throughout the U.S. as well as in other parts of the world. This spring, Rodriguez was involved in a historic truce between gangs in El Salvador leading to a 70 percent drop in violence in that country.
According to Rodriguez, “What is needed now – and where most peace efforts fail – is the meaningful and long-lasting support of society and government, in the form of prison reform, training, education, drug and mental health treatment and proper health care. We need an end to repressive measures that only feed into the violence and traumas.”
George Jackson, a strong advocate of solidarity across race lines, recognized “that in every situation where race has arisen to become a sharp dividing social factor, the hands of the capitalists can be seen pulling the strings, and it is only they who benefit from the conflicts,” writes Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, a present-day prisoner often compared to Jackson. This banner graced the Occupy San Quentin demonstration on Feb. 20, 2012. – Photo: Alex Darocy, Indybay

Azadeh Zohrabi of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition sees the agreement as a positive development that stems from last year’s hunger strikes. “While living through some of the worst conditions imaginable, the authors of this statement continue to work for change,” states Zohrabi. “While the prison administration drags its feet on even the most basic reforms, these guys are trying to build peace throughout the system. That says a lot about their humanity and hope.”

Advocates and the Short Corridor Collective are eager to spread the word as far and wide as possible and implement peace plans throughout California’s prisons and jails. “We must all hold strong to our mutual agreement from this point on and focus our time, attention and energy on mutual causes beneficial to all of us [i.e., prisoners] and our best interests,” says the Collective.
“The reality is that, collectively, we are an empowered, mighty force that can positively change this entire corrupt system into a system that actually benefits prisoners and thereby the public as a whole.”

“While living through some of the worst conditions imaginable, the authors of this statement continue to work for change,” states Zohrabi. “While the prison administration drags its feet on even the most basic reforms, these guys are trying to build peace throughout the system. That says a lot about their humanity and hope.”

The PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Collective has strongly requested that its statement be read and referred to in whole. It follows here:

Agreement to end hostilities

Dated Aug. 12, 2012
To whom it may concern and all California Prisoners:
Greetings from the entire PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Hunger Strike Representatives. We are hereby presenting this mutual agreement on behalf of all racial groups here in the PBSP-SHU Corridor. Wherein, we have arrived at a mutual agreement concerning the following points:
1. If we really want to bring about substantive meaningful changes to the CDCR system in a manner beneficial to all solid individuals who have never been broken by CDCR’s torture tactics intended to coerce one to become a state informant via debriefing, that now is the time for us to collectively seize this moment in time and put an end to more than 20-30 years of hostilities between our racial groups.
2. Therefore, beginning on Oct. 10, 2012, all hostilities between our racial groups in SHU, ad-seg, general population and county jails will officially cease. This means that from this date on, all racial group hostilities need to be at an end. And if personal issues arise between individuals, people need to do all they can to exhaust all diplomatic means to settle such disputes; do not allow personal, individual issues to escalate into racial group issues!

Like the Attica rebellion, the Lucasville prisoners who took over their prison in April 1993 deliberately united across the racial lines that prison authorities use to divide and conquer prisoners. The multi-racial leadership has remained united to this day throughout their isolation on death row. This photo of a sign made during the rebellion was used as an exhibit during their trial in 1996. – Photo: Courtesy Staughton Lynd3. We also want to warn those in the general population that IGI [Institutional Gang Investigators] will continue to plant undercover Sensitive Needs Yard (SNY) debriefer “inmates” amongst the solid GP prisoners with orders from IGI to be informers, snitches, rats and obstructionists, in order to attempt to disrupt and undermine our collective groups’ mutual understanding on issues intended for our mutual causes (i.e., forcing CDCR to open up all GP main lines and return to a rehabilitative-type system of meaningful programs and privileges, including lifer conjugal visits etc. via peaceful protest activity and noncooperation e.g., hunger strike, no labor etc.). People need to be aware and vigilant to such tactics and refuse to allow such IGI inmate snitches to create chaos and reignite hostilities amongst our racial groups. We can no longer play into IGI, ISU (Investigative Service Unit), OCS (Office of Correctional Safety) and SSU’s (Service Security Unit’s) old manipulative divide and conquer tactics!

In conclusion, we must all hold strong to our mutual agreement from this point on and focus our time, attention and energy on mutual causes beneficial to all of us [i.e., prisoners] and our best interests. We can no longer allow CDCR to use us against each other for their benefit!
Because the reality is that collectively, we are an empowered, mighty force that can positively change this entire corrupt system into a system that actually benefits prisoners and thereby the public as a whole, and we simply cannot allow CDCR and CCPOA, the prison guards’ union, IGI, ISU, OCS and SSU to continue to get away with their constant form of progressive oppression and warehousing of tens of thousands of prisoners, including the 14,000-plus prisoners held in solitary confinement torture chambers – SHU and ad-seg units – for decades!
We send our love and respect to all those of like mind and heart. Onward in struggle and solidarity!
Presented by the PBSP-SHU Short Corridor Collective:

• Todd Ashker, C-58191, D1-119
• Arturo Castellanos, C-17275, D1-121
• Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa (Dewberry), C-35671, D1-117
• Antonio Guillen, P-81948, D2-106

And the Representatives Body:

• Danny Troxell, B-76578, D1-120
• George Franco, D-46556, D4-217
• Ronnie Yandell, V-27927, D4-215
• Paul Redd, B-72683, D2-117
• James Baridi Williamson, D-34288. D4-107
• Alfred Sandoval, D-61000, D4-214
• Louis Powell, B-59864, D1-104
• Alex Yrigollen, H-32421, D2-204
• Gabriel Huerta, C80766, D3-222
• Frank Clement, D-07919, D3-116
• Raymond Chavo Perez, K-12922, D1-219
• James Mario Perez, B-48186, D3-124

Note: All names and the foregoing statement must be shown verbatim when used and posted on any website or other publication.Send our brothers some love and light and solidarity. Write to them using the listed names, numbers and housing and add the address: P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City CA 95532. The Bay View sends them all our highest re

WORK, PRODUCTION AND THE COMMON: A PROVOCATION

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Theoretical weekends has arrived right on schedule and I have another piece that I have not yet read yet, but looks somewhat interesting to me.  Have fun, enjoy,  and as Abbie used to say revolution for the hell of it....and forget about that decent job already....

The following is from A Tribe of Moles.

Work, Production and The Common: A Provocation

Questions of decent work and employment have been central to the social antagonisms and political convulsions of postapartheid South Africa. In the wake of the 2007 Polokwane conference, leadership changes and policy shifts in the ANC have focused on the failures of Thabo Mbeki’s agenda of economic liberalisation in making employment a foundation of rights, stability, and inclusion. Labor struggles have constantly reminded the country’s rulers of how democratisation is supposed to be not just a procedural and constitutional matter, but also the fulfillment of popular demands of redemption of work, which past racial domination turned into a largely oppressive reality but unions tried to rescue as a condition of solidarity and empowerment. Social movements have, finally, made the “dignity of work”, and even the “right to work” a central ethical-political component in their demands for redistribution and recognition. In the age of Jacob Zuma and the New Growth Path, “decent work” is for many on the left shorthand for worker-friendly, socially sensitive state developmentalism, as an alternative both to neoliberalism and to repressive government-driven capitalist accumulation.
Underpinning desires for “decent work” is “job creation” as an alleged, unquestionably progressive outcome and yardstick against which the quality of postapartheid democracy is supposedly to be measured. The centrality of “decent work” and “job creation” in South African discourses of emancipation raises, however, also decisive problems, which are all the more urgent as such concepts tend to largely escape critical scrutiny. At an immediate level, definition is an issue: under which conditions does work become “decent”? How does the creation of jobs not imply the reproduction of poverty and inequality? For sure, these are not problems for employers, liberal reformers, and assorted free marketers. Once “job creation” becomes the pinnacle of emancipative imagination, it becomes easy for them to argue that a bad job is better than no job at. In this way, the labor market is naturalised as an objective law of social advancement, redistributive claims become pathological symptoms of “dependency”, and social conflicts are threats to prosperity and the expansion of employment. As the definition of “decency” ceases thus to be a matter of political contestation, the subsequent, consequential step is to assert that it is up to market conditions and the characteristics of the job itself to determine how “decent” it is allowed to be. To see where this road can lead, one needs look no further than Newcastle (KwaZulu-Natal) and the recent clothing industry disputes, where globalised employers presented their workers with the stark alternative: either work or decency.
It is more difficult to understand why “job creation” and “decent work” hold such a powerful grip on the imagination of actors – activists, unions, social movements – that call themselves radical and reclaim their descent from Marxian legacies. Left traditions variously infused with Marxism have, in their social democratic as well as Stalinist variants, glorified production, waged employment, and the workplace as the objective repositories and necessary conduits of proletarian consciousness and modern forms of revolutionary or progressive organising. The process has effaced the many ways in which Marx theorised the emancipation of human activity as liberation from work, expressed his horror at wage labor, and insisted that under capitalism there is no such thing as “decent” work. Far from seeing it as the foundation of anticapitalist politics, Marx regarded wage labor as capital’s condition to exist and saw the refusal of work as the basis of anticapitalist subjectivity. As Mario Tronti commented, “Workers have no time for the dignity of labor … Today, the working class need only look at itself to understand capital. It need only combat itself in order to destroy capital.” In this path, often interrupted by the manifold institutionalisations – unions, parties, governments – of Marxian critique, liberation lies in the subversion, not the glorification, of employment and wage labor.
The critique of employment as a vehicle of emancipative imagination is more urgent than ever in these days of global crisis of neoliberalism, when all sorts of horrors are perpetrated in the name of “job creation”: for the purpose of investment and competitiveness corporate taxes and public programs are slashed, all in the name of job creation; the systematic degradation of employment conditions and the roll-back of workers’ power and guarantees are justified, in the name of job creation; extreme social inequalities are normalised and naturalised, in the name of job creation; the most reactionary right-wing governments (think France’s Sarkozy with his call to “rediscover the worth of work”) have sought and found popular legitimacy, in the name of job creation; the most viciously xenophobic, racist, chauvinist, proto-Fascist political identities pursue, and are often given, respectability, in the name of job creation (and claims of national jobs for national people).
Confronted with this impressive discursive slide, where the dignity of work is upheld to reinforce the centrality of the labor market in determining the measure and reward of life, indeed the very meaning of being human, the left’s concerns with “decent work” have fallen quite short of a convincing alternative narrative or a radically oppositional recasting of desire. Having failed to contest the multitudes’ meanings and values on the terrain of work and production, traditional left forces have rather fallen back on the state as the ultimate guarantor of fairness, development, and decency. And from the state the left has received further injunctions to rely on employment, and employment only, for any meaningful social inclusion and security, with no other considerations attached as to the conditions and remunerations of work, or the measures that can at least limit a complete domination of employment over life. Thus, developmentalist regimes usually praised by progressive forces (such as Brazil’s Bolsa Familia or India’s “Employment Guarantees” programme) have lured the poor with minimal social provisions into exploitative, underpaid, when not semi-servile occupations. In South Africa governmental parlance does not even refer to “jobs” (a concept too ridden with implications in terms of rights, stability, expectations, and contestation) anymore, preferring “employment opportunities” instead. At the same time, the centrality of “job creation” has here been decisive in undermining struggles for decommodification and redistribution, as witnessed by the past rise and rapid decline of proposals for universal basic income.
We cannot think of the global decline of the twentieth century socialist and nationalist left(s), themselves a major factor in the neoliberal hegemony of the past forty years, without questioning the ways in which they have idealised employment and unquestioningly associated it with progress. Within this broader devastation in the terrain of political power relations and public discourse, the left’s attachment to “decent jobs” only reveals a comprehensive failure of imagination, of which the acceptance by progressive forces of a subordinate role in a game of which capital is writing the rules is consequential. It is indeed revealing how the official left has responded, throughout the past century, to movements that radically criticised wage labor, capital, and the nation-state (from anticolonial opposition to proletarianisation to the refusal of work in industrialised capitalist countries) with policies aimed at using the nation-state to manage capital for the purpose of creating wage labor!
These issues, and the depth of the collapse of the left they indicate, are for us serious enough not to be answerable by just tinkering with definitional diatribes, or trying to define the mix of ingredients that makes capitalist employment “decent”. It is time to ask, is “decent work” still a valid tool to criticise capitalism and oppose the disciplining of multitudes by market forces? Or is it time to finally realise that today employment-based claims and identity lead not to emancipation, but to renewed subjugation, repression, and reaction? Should we start placing liberation from, and not through capitalist work at the core of new languages and grammars of politics, which uncompromisingly break with the legacy of the twentieth century left(s)?
There is a politically compelling factor in these questions. If the myth of employment as the flag-bearer of emancipative narratives is over, that is not only due to right-wing hegemony and left-wing decline as abstract ideological discourse. It is also because social antagonisms in this turn of the century are demanding everywhere decent life regardless of the conditions and status of employment. The most powerful struggles we have been witnessing over the past decade have placed on the agenda matters of decommodification of water, housing, land, education, and basic services independently from the market. From Greece to Egypt, precarious workers have not merely seen their subjectivity thwarted and mutilated by the lack of a stable job but, by being central to vast movements against austerity policies, they have indeed placed their own precariousness at the core of a radical politics of claims and political possibilities. These conflicts may well be, and often are, recuperated by an imagination that subordinates the legitimacy of such claims to how productive of commodities individuals and communities are. They also, nonetheless, reveal a profound gap between how livelihoods and reproduction are imagined, respectively, from the standpoint of capital and ordinary people. It is a gap, harbinger of political potentials, between how the multitude lives and how capital imagines it should live, or between the sensuous, multifarious manifestation of desire and its continuous subordination to the labor market. In practice, such struggles put on the agenda the question of the societal distribution of power and resources as a matter not, in Michel Foucault’s terms, of self-entrepreneurship or of abstract constitutional rights, but as forms of life conflictually reclaiming autonomy from capital, the nation-state, and wage labor. Current modalities of social antagonism can no longer be understood under worn-out slogans opposing public/state to private/business control of resources as such dichotomies obscure the significance of forms of life centered on a common substance (which includes social cooperation, cognition, and affect/desire) which exists independently of business and the state, and becomes the potential for a radical critique of both.
We say, it “becomes” so. It is in fact also important to clarify that forms of life and their common are especially central to social antagonism and the subversion of market discipline as capital, in the convulsions of its current structural crisis, seeks in the living – meaning the basic conditions of reproduction, from water to the genetic code, but also living social cooperation and the Marxian “general intellect” – new opportunities for enclosures and profit. But, contrary to wage labor, which exists as a source of value only because capital creates it through processes of abstraction and measurement, the living is a source of production and value that exceeds capital, and is capable of signifying its own existence in such terms. Capital’s attempt to colonise and incorporate the living is therefore open to the continuous possibility of contestation that emanates from such a significational gap, a point well captured by postcolonial theorists discussing the “incommensurability” and “untranslatability” of capital’s values and norms for the lives of its subjects.
We believe that decisive to reinventing a politics of social antagonism is to give words and political sense to such gaps and untranslatability as conditions of autonomy. With this task in mind, we address another question: does the irrelevance of employment to a politics of liberation mean that production-related struggles are no longer worth fighting for? Our response is an emphatic “no”, but on condition of profoundly redefining what we mean by “production”. In other words, “production-related” can no longer simply mean “workplace-based”. Workplace struggles are, for sure, still important in affirming the autonomy of life and the common from the dictates of the market, for example through demands for wages and benefits that are impossible to meet in terms of productivity, therefore subverting wage labor from within. But struggles for production especially imply for us the production of social relations and political possibilities that emanate from the power of the common as it manifests itself across the social and the everyday. They hint, in other words, at the production of subjectivity and the refusal of the modalities of subjection along which capital and government want to align conducts and values. We are referring here not only to subjectivities premised on waged employment and the consumption of commodities but also to their correlates in the institutional sphere: liberal democracy and the idea of the individual rooted in property and market relations as the only legitimate carrier of socio-political agency.A radical critique of liberal democracy is central to our recasting of production struggles as it underlines the connections between capital’s domination of life and the ways in which domination operates in the guise of individual freedom within market exchange and competition. To this idea of freedom as a mere technology of government and subjection, to which the discourse of citizenship and the constitutional rights of liberal democracy give a normative expression, we oppose the power of singularities (individuals, movements, communities) as a capacity to multiply social and political possibilities expressing the autonomy of the common. A democracy of the common is thus crucial to reclaiming from capital the productive forces of forms of life.
In sum: a critique of employment-based views of emancipation and of “decent work” as a terrain of social contestation; a radical redefinition of production-based struggles from the standpoint of forms of life and the common; an uncompromising reassessment of liberal democracy as a mode of expression of political subjectivity: these are the core elements we bring to this debate. It is a small bet in a broad and hugely important gamble. Is an anticapitalist project still possible as the radical reinvention of political possibilities? Or are we stuck with a left imagination that, in the name of development and “decent work”, abets renewed subjugation and continuous corporate signification of desire, of which the public discourse of Zumaism and the ravenous chattering of the tenderpreneurial bourgeoisie are, respectively, clearly discernible echoes in today’s South Africa? As capitalism flounders in the tides of its global crisis, the time to raise these questions has never been more appropriate. Now we must seize it.
a tribe of moles

SOLITARY: "I AM A VOICE CRYING OUT IN A PLACE WHERE NO ONE CAN HEAR ME"

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It's Friday so we look at prisons and prisoners today.  The post that will follow will give you a gruesome taste of what it is like to be in solitary where life and torture become the same.  This is a barometer of what this country really thinks of humans and human rights.  You don't like  some  prisoners, you say they are criminals, you say some deserve to be punished severely.  Well, that is your business, I reckon, but no one has the right to treat living creatures, including humans this way...or at least they should not have that right. Read and get angry.

I took this from Dart Society Reports

The Gray Box: An investigative look at solitary confinement

A few weeks ago, on the fifteenth anniversary of his first day in prison, Osiel Rodriguez set about cleaning the 87 square feet he inhabits at ADX, a federal mass isolation facility in Colorado.“I got it in my head to destroy all my photographs,” he writes in a letter to me. “I spent some five hours ripping each one to pieces. No one was safe. I did not save one of my mother, father, sisters. Who are those people anyway?”Such is the logic of the gray box, of sitting year after year in solitude.Whether Rodriguez had psychological problems when he robbed a bank, burglarized a pawn shop and stole some guns at age 22, or whether mental illness set in during the eight years he has spent in seclusion since trying to walk out of a federal penitentiary in Florida – it’s academic. What’s true now is that he’s sick, literally, of being alone, as are scores of other prisoners in extreme isolation.Among the misperceptions about solitary confinement is that it’s used only on the most violent inmates, and only for a few weeks or months. In fact, an estimated 80,000 Americans — many with no record of violence either inside or outside prison — are living in seclusion. They stay there for years, even decades. What this means, generally, is 23 hours a day in a cell the size of two queen-sized mattresses, with a single hour in an exercise cage, also alone. Some prisoners aren’t allowed visits or phone calls. Some have no TV or radio. Some never lay eyes on each other. And some go years without fresh air or sunlight.

“One time I kept a single green leaf alive for a few weeks. I had grasshopper for a pet. I made a guitar out of milk cartons, and it played quite well. I have done a thousand and one things to replicate ordinary life, but these too are now gone.”

Solitary is a place where the slightest details can mean the world. Things like whether you can see a patch of grass or only sky outside your window – if you’re lucky enough to have a window. Or whether the guy who occupies cells before you in rotation has a habit of smearing feces on the wall. Are the lights on 24/7? Is there a clock or calendar to mark time? If you scream, could anyone hear you?In the warp of time and space where Rodriguez lives, the system not only has stripped him of any real human contact, but also made it unbearable to be reminded of a reality that has become all too unreal. It’s ripping him apart.“Looking at photos of the free world caused me so much pain that I just couldn’t do it any more,” writes Rodriguez, 36. “Time and these conditions are breaking me down.”This is what our prisons are doing to people in the name of safety. This is how deeply we’re burying them.* * *I got my first letter from solitary in 2008 while working as a newspaper columnist in Colorado. Mark Jordan — then at ADX on convictions for bank robbery and a prison murder – wrote asking me to cover a trial in which he’d be arguing for access to reading materials that seemed a reasonable way to cope inside a concrete box. The Federal Bureau of Prisons had banned, for instance, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Anaïs Nin’s books, which Jordan had already ordered. Officers in the mailroom wouldn’t pass along his issues of The New Yorker, either, because some of the cartoons depict nude figures.Intrigued, I went to hear Jordan represent himself in federal court by a live video feed from prison. Though he was shackled as he made his case, his arguments were as skilled as those of the most seasoned trial attorneys I had seen. He lost.Solitary confinement slipped from my mind after I covered Jordan’s case and moved on to my next deadline. But the subject became a preoccupation months later while I was hospitalized for septic pneumonia, with an “ISOLATION” sign outside my door. Partly it was the stale air in my hospital room and the view of a brick wall out my window. Partly it was the anxiety of losing my autonomy and voice. I’d lie there pressing a buzzer to get a glass of water or to have my tubes unhooked so I could get out of bed, and nobody would answer. I’d buzz and buzz again, complaining bitterly once nurses finally showed up. I’d see them roll their eyes and hear them dissing me in the hallway. Being sick wasn’t as bad as being stuck. I remember thinking about Jordan and wondering how people who were imprisoned in solitary were able to survive it. It occurred to me then that isolation – the non-medical, punitive, indefinite kind – could crack you in about a week. Powerlessness is its own centrifugal force.* * *Plenty of corrections officers might tell you that offenders doing time in solitary don’t deserve the roofs over their heads or the meals shoved through their food slots. To be sure, many of these prisoners have done heinous, unforgivable things for which we lock them up tightly. Just how tightly is no small question. Yet, as a matter of public policy, the question hardly comes up. Compared to how much we as a nation have debated capital punishment, a sentence served by a small fraction of the incarcerated, we barely discuss how severely we’re willing to punish nearly everyone else.“When the door is locked against the prisoner, we do not think about what is behind it,” Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy once said.Solitary confinement started in the U.S. as a morally progressive social experiment in the 1820s by Quakers, who wanted lawmakers to replace mutilations, amputations and the death penalty with rehabilitation. The hope was that long periods of introspection would help criminals repent.After touring a Pennsylvania prison in the 1840s, Charles Dickens described prolonged isolation as a “slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” He also wrote, “There is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom.”Some of his contemporaries shared that view.  “It devours the victims incessantly and unmercifully,” Alexis de Tocqueville reported from a prison in New York in the 1820s. “It does not reform, it kills.”Most prisons suspended the practice in the mid- to late-1800s once it became clear the theory didn’t work. The U.S. Supreme Court punctuated that point in 1890 when it freed a Colorado man who had been sentenced to death for killing his wife, recognizing the psychological harm isolation had caused him.“This matter of solitary confinement is not … a mere unimportant regulation as to the safe-keeping of the prisoner,” the court ruled in the case of James Medley. “A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.”

“To be,” writes sociologist Joan Martel, “one has to be somewhere.”

Solitary confinement was largely unused for about a century until October 1983 when, in separate incidents, inmates killed two guards in one day at the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Ill., which had replaced Alcatraz as home to the most dangerous federal convicts. The prison went into lockdown for the next 23 years, setting the model for dozens of state and federal supermaxes – prisons designed specifically for mass isolation — that since have been built in the name of officer safety. “Never again,” promised Reagan-era shock doctrinarians who set out at great cost to crack down on prison violence.“Whole prisons have been built, people have gotten funding for supermax facilities based on the act of a single (inmate),” says Michael Randle, former director of the Illinois Department of Corrections.Administered by corrections officials, not judges, solitary confinement is a punishment beyond incarceration, removing prisoners not only from the rest of society, but also from each other and staff. It’s now practiced routinely in federal penitentiaries, state prisons and local jails under a number of bureaucratic labels: “lockdown,” “protective custody,” “strip cells,” “control units,” “security housing units,” “special management units” and “administrative segregation.” Federal justice officials say the different classifications prevent them from keeping track of how many people are being isolated. What is acknowledged even in official records is that the vast majority are men and that rates of pre-existing mental illness exceed the higher-than-average levels in general prison populations.Prisoners who have assaulted staff often get sent straight to solitary. Those who have killed other inmates or escaped from prison — or attempted to — also take priority. Corrections officials eager to please officers’ unions and weary of public criticism tend to place difficult prisoners in solitary as an easy default.“These become career decisions that administrators have to struggle with, knowing if a person does kill again, that you basically will get massacred in the media, massacred by the opposition, massacred by your governor’s party,” Randle says. “These are determinations that can make or break your career.”Meantime, an analysis of prison budgets by the Urban Institute shows that taxpayers are shelling out about $75,000 a year to house a single prisoner in solitary confinement – more than twice as much as spent housing prisoners in general population. Staffing is more expensive because two or more officers usually are required to escort prisoners any time they leave their cells, and because the cooking and cleaning work, which in other prisons would be performed by inmates, must be done by paid staff. As a rule, prisoners in isolation aren’t allowed to work.For reasons of prison safety, short periods of confinement may make sense for the most violent inmates. Yet the so-called “worst of the worst” are, by definition, the exception rather than the rule. States vastly overestimated the need for supermax space to contain high-risk offenders, and have filled it with relatively low-risk prisoners, many of whom pose no apparent risk or have no record of violence. Anyone even loosely labeled to have ties with terrorists gets put into isolation as a matter of course. Juveniles are secluded for what is officially deemed to be their own protection. Mentally ill prisoners who are prone to rage or agitation are isolated for convenience. And, all too often, having a gang affiliation, writing grievances or cussing out a guard can land you in solitary for the long haul. Bad behavior – or merely a corrections officer’s allegation of it – can add years to your time in isolation. Some prisoners have spent a decade or two asking why they’re still there, without getting an official answer.“These are extraordinary, I believe often needless and indefensible, risks to take with the human psyche and spirit,” writes Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.Anthony Gay had a low-level assault charge in Illinois for punching another kid, stealing a dollar from him and swiping his hat. A parole violation on his seven-year suspended sentence ultimately landed him in a state supermax where he has cut himself hundreds of times with shards of glass and metal, and eats his own flesh. He has racked up a 97-year sentence for throwing urine and feces out his food slot – behavior that’s fairly typical for severely mentally ill prisoners in solitary.Gay passes his time at the Tamms Correctional Center writing anyone who will receive his letters.“I’ve been trapped for approximately nine years. The trap, like a fly on sticky paper, aggravates and agitates me,” he writes. “America, can you hear me? I love you America, but if you love me, please speak out and stand up against solitary confinement.”* * *In months of trading letters with prisoners, and in a few dozen interviews with men who’ve gotten out, I hear the same descriptions of solitary: that it’s starkly sterile, unremittingly monotonous and numbingly idle.

“I’ve been waiting like 20-something years to say all this.”

“Ninety percent of the time you hear nothing but the sound of air from the ventilation. The silence can drive you crazy. Makes you feel as if the world has ended but you somehow survived and are tripped,” Jeremy Pinson writes from ADX, the crown jewel of the federal system once described by its warden as a “clean version of hell.”“The world outside is like another planet,” writes Jack Powers, also from ADX. “I feel like I am trapped within a disease.”Prisoners pace their cells like caged felines at a zoo.“I walked and walked and walked some more,” says Darrell Cannon, who did nine years in solitary in Illinois. “I’d walk in circles – always to the left, for some reason – for six, maybe seven hours a day.”Almost everyone in isolation spends at least some time counting. They count the steps they take, the cinder blocks on the walls, the tiles on the ceiling, their sneezes and coughs, and how many times the furnace kicks in or the plumbing sloshes.“If I remember correctly, there are 412 holes in (the cell door). I would count them daily,” Joe Sorrentino, now serving time in a general population prison, recalls of his cell at Tamms. “At the back of the cell, close to the ceiling there’s a window approx. 30 inches long and 10 inches high with a square bar going through the middle … My window faced the tunnel, so my view for my first seven years there were of a blue wall. For years, I wondered what other guys could see out their windows.”Some prisoners pass their time praying, meditating or talking to themselves. Some read voraciously, though often they’re limited to only a few books a month.  Some take whatever enrichment classes are broadcast over their TVs. The Bureau of Prisons has offered courses on Hitler, Sparta, Animals of the World, Legends of the Silver Screen and Robert E. Lee and his High Command.Out of limited supplies, prisoners create art. They lodge bits of sponges into ballpoint cartridges to make paintbrushes. For paint, they mix water with Nescafe grinds or dye from candy they can buy from the commissary. M&Ms – plain, not peanut – work best. For deep reds, they fold red dye in with ground powder from vitamins. Navy blue takes a three-step process mixing royal blue candy coating with blue and black ink from pens. The color purple is best achieved from Skittles.Prisoners strike up relationships with the critters that crawl in through their air vents. One man used his own hairs to try to repair a moth’s injured wing in hopes of facilitating its escape. Mohammed Saleh — convicted of having co-conspired in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — lost his daily hour of outdoor recreation for three months at ADX because he saved bread crumbs to feed blackbirds in his exercise pen.Defiance can kill time in solitary. Some prisoners kick the walls or bang their cups against their doors. Some flood their cells by clogging their toilets with toilet paper, or break light bulbs and set their mattresses on fire. Some write up their grievances; some sue over them; and some sue some more on behalf of guys on their units. Those feeling especially resistant stop eating or drinking. Brian Nelson starved himself regularly at Tamms, where he spent 12 years in seclusion. He once refused food and water for 40 days, he says, to try to prod the prison to treat a guy on his unit for cancer.“(Fasts) become addicting … You feel clean, but it’s also your body eating your body,” says Nelson. “My last hunger strike, I was on a gurney and there was no vital signs, and I went into shock.”A hunger strike by 5,000 prisoners last fall shed light on solitary confinement conditions at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. The strike ended when the state agreed to consider letting prisoners make phone calls and buy calendars. Months later, no substantive changes have been made on those modest demands. There have been reports that strike leaders have faced disciplinary action and that three strikers have committed suicide.* * *Many of us flirt with isolation. We tune out in all sorts of ways – cranking up our headphones or holing up in little rooms to write. From “Walden” to “Into the Wild,” generations have idealized solitude, wondering how long we could last on our own. Fox Reality Channel’s show “Solitary” kept contestants in voluntary round-the-clock confinement competing for $50,000 in prize money. The goal was to be the last player to quit by hitting the panic button. Boredom.com, a video game maker, has virtualized lockdown with “Escape 3D: The Jail.” You can feign confinement in the comfort of your home or office, or, thanks to a handy smart phone app, idle in solitary on the subway or in line at the DMV.Still, we know from all manner of solo expeditions, behavioral tests, biological experiments and psychological studies that we’re not wired to be alone. Early in the space age, cosmonauts training to fly Soviet rockets were put into isolation chambers without any way of knowing how much time was ticking by. Some gave up within hours. One, Andrian Nikolayev, earned hero status and the nickname “Iron Man” after setting a four-day record before pressing a buzzer to be released.The human brain needs social contact like our lungs need air. Social needs are so basic that they drive family structures, religions, urban design, governments, economies and legal systems worldwide. We honor these needs even with pets and zoo animals, generally acknowledging the inhumanity of caging them for long periods of time alone or in tight spaces. New federal guidelines on the use of laboratory animals require relatively more space, sensory stimulation and environmental enrichment than we afford people in confinement. The revised rules put forth by the National Academy of Sciences call for significantly more square footage to house a head of cattle, for example, than prisons provide in solitary.Convicts in the U.S. are not afforded such concern. We push some of them into seclusion with little to no programmatic support, basically giving up on them.“Anyone who spends more than three years in a place like this is ruined for life,” Powers writes. “Two or three hundred years from now people will look back on this lockdown mania like we look back on the burning of witches.”In 2006, a bipartisan national task force convened by the Vera Institute for Justice called for ending solitary confinement beyond periods of about ten days. The report by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in American Prisons found practically no benefits from supermax conditions either for prisoners or the public. It cited studies showing that solitary confinement impairs brain function and can cause psychosis and serious depression. It also cited a number of reports showing that long-term isolation doesn’t curb prison violence and makes it highly likely that prisoners will commit more crimes when released.The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, is calling to end the use of isolation on juveniles and the mentally ill. For everyone else, he is pushing a worldwide limit of 15 days. Mendez personally endured three days in solitary under the rule of a junta in Argentina – an experience he describes as “the darkest days of my life.” So far, he has been unable to gain access to investigate state and federal prisons in the U.S.“Let’s just say it has been a challenge,” he says.U.S. courts have rejected most 8th Amendment claims against isolation, ruling that some psychological harm to certain prisoners doesn’t make the entire practice cruel or unusual. In many cases, corrections officials have persuaded judges that isolation is a misnomer because prisoners glean brief interactions with guards – exchanges that are at best perfunctory and at worst hostile, degrading and cruel. They’ll also argue that prisoners shouting to each other between cellblocks, across exercise cages or down drainpipes constitute meaningful forms of social interaction.

In solitary, concentration wanes, revenge fantasies fester and voices echo in people’s heads. Idiosyncrasies grow into obsessions. Prisoner after prisoner writes of becoming enraged by slight noises or tweaks in their routines.

* * *For every hunger striker, jailhouse lawyer and cellblock arsonist, there are many more people in solitary who’ve folded up quietly into themselves.“I became increasingly withdrawn at ADX to the point where the only people I interacted with were the television characters on ‘Seinfeld.’ I watched ‘Seinfeld’ four times a day. Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer became my best friends. I felt like part of their family. They were the only friends I had,” Anthony McBayne wrote in a legal declaration.Some prisoners say they forget what day, month or year it is, partly because keeping track can be too painful.“Time is the enemy, a constant reminder that your life is being wasted and there is no redemptive solution. Paying close attention to time will in short order drive you to misery and despair at what you’ve lost,” Jeremy Pinson writes.Concentration wanes, revenge fantasies fester and voices echo in people’s heads. Idiosyncrasies grow into obsessions about the tiniest details of physical space. Prisoner after prisoner writes of becoming enraged by slight noises or tweaks in their routines.Some describe losing their senses of self, physically and emotionally. Mirrors, if available, are stainless steel plates that reflect only blurs. You can go years without an accurate picture of your own aging. Basic biographical facts – your age, your birthday – can get lost in a fog.“This is difficult to explain, but my memories were no longer mine,” Mark Jordan writes of his years at ADX. “I questioned whether or not I really had a past or history at all, whether the memories were real or false. … It was as though none of it was real. I was born into this life of isolation and the memories not memories at all. Confabulations.”We in the free world know who we are by interacting with each other. We make sense of ourselves largely through our relationships. Legal sociologist Joan Martel described the loss of identity in isolation. “To be,” she writes, “one has to be somewhere.” Without normal grounding in space or time, isolated prisoners lose their understanding of themselves and their own histories.“After 14 years, those people are strangers to me; as I must be to them,” Osiel Rodriguez wrote about the family members whose portraits he destroyed. “My parents will be dust if/when I ever get out of prison. My three sisters will be in their mid-70’s to late 60’s. So what was I doing holding on to photos of moments I was not a part of, or know nothing about?”In his mind, Stephen Slevin spent two months in solitary confinement after being arrested on a drunk driving charge and booked into New Mexico’s Doña Ana County Detention Center. In real time, it was 20 months before the charge was dropped and, ungroomed and delusional, he was released. Those 18 months are still missing somewhere inside him, he now says. Yesterday, a jury awarded him $22 million in damages associated with his time in solitary.* * *Covering solitary is an exercise in inaccessibility.Reporters’ visits and phone calls are out of the question.State and county prisoners usually can be glimpsed only by their mug shots. The federal system makes no photos available of the people it locks up or the spaces they inhabit.Family members can pass along information – if a prisoner chooses not to shield them from what isolation is really like.“My philosophy is, I don’t care if you have a knife stuck in your back, you tell your mom that you’re okay,” Sorrentino writes. “Seeing how they looked at me on visits, handcuffed, shackled, chained to the floor and behind glass, killed me inside.”Prison officials don’t help much with transparency or public accountability. They cite pending lawsuits and security risks for refusing to be interviewed. They have scoffed when I’ve asked if they’d consider passing a disposable camera or hand-held recorder to a man who hasn’t been seen or heard from in years. (“What do you think we are — bellhops at the Hyatt Regency?”) Officers are dispatched to berate journalists, even off grounds, for aiming lenses toward their prisons.“The inmates housed at the ADX pose the greatest threat within the Federal Bureau of Prisons to staff, other inmates, visitors, and the public, and may be extreme escape risks,” Warden Blake R. Davis wrote to me. “Accordingly, permitting a film crew to take video footage of the exterior of the institution would negatively affect the security and orderly operation of the facility.”Years ago, while assigned to cover Area 51 in Nevada, I had better access to a federal airbase that didn’t officially exist.* * *Letters from isolation are always handwritten (supermaxes don’t provide access to computers, which some long-timers have never even used). They arrive on government-issue loose-leaf paper in government-issue white envelopes, often quilted with 1-cent and 5-cent postage stamps bartered somehow between cells.Some – especially those from prisons allowing showers only once a week — come smelling like confinement.Certain prisoners struggle with their writing.“Miz Greene. Weyre traped. Police help us,” reads one letter, start to finish, from a man named Paz at Pelican Bay.Others write so well that it hurts.“I miss being around people. I miss being able to run on the track or walk on grass or feel the sun on my face,” reads one of Jack Powers’ letters. “One time I kept a single green leaf alive for a few weeks. And one time I had grasshopper for a pet. And one time I made a dwarf tree out of yarn from a green winter hat, paper and dried tea bags. I made a guitar out of milk cartons, and it played quite well. I invented a perfect family – mom, dad and sister – so that we could interact and love one another. One time I wanted to take a bath, so I got into a garbage bag and put water in it and sat there. For a while I made vases out of toilet paper and soap and ink from a pen. I have done a thousand and one things to replicate ordinary life, but these too are now gone.”From solitary, I’ve received marriage proposals, tomes of legal documents and a Christmas card crafted out of a Wortz Cheese Crackers box. One man mailed three weeks’ worth of daily manifestos about Yahweh. People in confinement have criticized me for my grammar and syntax, cursed me for not writing more often and advised me to go lock myself in my bathroom to deepen my understanding of their plight.Some letters are angry rants. Others are full of longing.A prisoner in Virginia wrote 16 pages on behalf of the guy howling night and day in a cell down the hall, never once using the word “I.” Another in Illinois wrote a regretful 22-page essay about the man he had killed half a lifetime ago, imagining what might have happened to them each if he hadn’t pulled the trigger.From the cutters, I’ve been given step-by-step accounts of their attempts to feel something, anything, in the tedium. Anthony Gay seems to want me and all of America to understand exactly how he’s hurting himself.“When my anxiety becomes overwhelming … I’ll pull out my cutting instrument, pull off my boxer shorts, sit on my toilet and cut a gash in my thigh,” Gay writes. “If I happen to become extremely anxious, I’ll slice my penis like a hot dog or my testicle like a tomato.”A man who tried to hang himself in his cell asked for my help reimbursing the state of Illinois $56 for a torn bed sheet. Attempted suicide in solitary often is treated as a disciplinary problem.“When I’m put on a suicide watch, I’m all alone and stripped naked and may see a mental health staff for 3-4 minutes a day. So I wonder dam how is this pose to help me. It don’t,” Bobby Boyd writes from Tamms.Some prisoners recognize their mental health problems. Others write around them.More often than I’ll ever know, my letters haven’t reached the men I’ve mailed them to. Some have come back to me marked that they were rejected by prisoners I’m sure didn’t reject them. Even more often, their letters to me don’t make it past the mailroom.Between the lines of the ones that do, most letters from solitary say the same thing: That we’re all higher than the lowest things we’ve ever done. For most of the so-called “worst of the worst” who bother writing, there seems to be at least some capacity for redemption.* * *It’s no small thing to ask someone who has spent years without social contact to sit and tell his story. I learned this waiting at a Kmart café in Denver, a donut shop in Chicago and Union Station in Washington, D.C., for men who had recently been released but didn’t show up for interviews as they agreed. Saying no — or that they were scared to leave home or just not up to talking — apparently didn’t seem like an option.Some who did show up had trouble shaking my hand or looking me in the eye or crying in front of me.“I’m gonna push through my nerves, see, because I’ve been waiting like 20-something years to say all this,” Vincente Rodriguez told me when we met in his living room in Chicago.Rodriguez’s seven months in the free world haven’t been easy. Like lots of guys, he curls up in a corner of his apartment, blinds drawn, alone. He says he likes it that way, and it worries him.Robert Felton retreats to his bedroom in Danville, Ill. His wife and young kids wonder why he won’t hang out or cuddle in front of the TV. He can’t bring himself to tell them that he now finds such closeness intolerable.These are the guys next door, the men refereeing your kids’ basketball games, the hothead in line at the Conoco who freaks when someone brushes against him.In the 18 months Brian Nelson has been out of solitary, he has found a job, a girlfriend and a car. He drives when he’s anxious, and is anxious often. Nelson curses himself when he loses his way on the streets of Chicago, the city he knew well until age 17 when a murder conviction landed him a 28-year sentence.“I’m here, but I’m not here, if that makes any sense,” he says from behind the wheel of his Jeep Compass, disoriented on the South Side. “People ask me what hurts. I say the box, the gray box. I can feel those walls and I can taste them every day of my life. I’m still there, really. And I’m not sure when I’m ever gonna get out.”Nelson — whose lawsuits from isolation improved conditions for prisoners in Illinois — works in a law office as an advocate for prisoners he left behind in confinement. Compared to other guys who’ve been released, he is doing well. Yet he’s flailing. He’s facing a DUI charge while on parole. He recently gave himself a black eye. The experience of being interviewed on camera sent him back into a box emotionally for weeks.Anthony McBayne, the “Seinfeld” fan, realized after his release from prison that he’d never recover from his years in solitary. Once faced with social situations, he says he would speak so fast that he’d stutter. He came to avoid people and wouldn’t look at them.“Later on, when I did look, it was only to read their lips, as it’s how I remember to ‘hear’ from when prisoners would talk through the thick glass at ADX when one prisoner was in a rec cage and I was in my cell,” reads his legal declaration. “I found myself doing this all the time after my release and it became so annoying that I had to lie and tell people that I was deaf and needed to read lips to hear.”McBayne robbed a bank after his release. He’s now doing time at U.S. Penitentiary Big Sandy in Kentucky.Joe Sorrentino, who is serving life on a murder conviction, remembers passing time in Tamms by drawing blueprints of a house he’ll never be able to build. All his designs included secret passages and hidden rooms where he could go to be alone. He has since been transferred out of solitary into a general population prison in Stateville.“I have a huge sense of guilt for not being at Tamms,” he writes. “I feel completely empty and purposeless now. Plus, I hate being around people, period. I have a good cellmate, but I can’t stand being this close to another human being. I get frustrated very easily and the littlest things irk me. When I first arrived here, I attempted to make contact with mental health to try to get a one-man cell. She basically told me to ‘get over it,’ then asked if I wanted medication – which I don’t want. What I really want, deep inside, is to go back.”* * *Some words are uncomfortable to write.“Trauma” is one of them, especially when used about people who have traumatized others. “Torture” is another. In the moral balance of crime and punishment, the word risks discounting the suffering convicts have brought their own victims.Nothing is black and white in a gray box. Lines can blur between the good guys and the bad ones. It’s far easier to label the secret police in some foreign dictatorship as torturers than to lob the word at prison guards in the next county.It isn’t news that solitary confinement hurts people. Dickens, de Tocqueville and the Supreme Court — they all knew it generations ago. But our memory is disturbingly short. What’s considered cruel and unusual under the 8th Amendment pivots on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Our continuing reliance on solitary confinement as a default for difficult prisoners raises the question of how much, if at all, we as a society have progressed.Jack Powers, now in his 11th year at ADX, mentions in almost all his letters that every day is a struggle not to lose what’s left of his free will.“I could lie back, watch TV, eat chips and jack off all day and say to hell with it. But I cannot because there is some force of principle in my mind that will not allow me to do so,” he writes. “I am a voice crying out in a place where no one can hear me. I am saying, ‘Wait! We have it all wrong! We can do better than this!’ But maybe we cannot. Maybe we are just stuck with what it is. Maybe I am afraid of the world and of being human and of lacking love. Maybe we all are. Maybe this is all we are capable of.“I hope not. But maybe it is.”

Susan Greene

Susan Greene is a journalist in Denver who specializes in investigating social justice issues. She worked in newspapers for twenty years, most recently as a metro columnist for The Denver Post

THE TEN POINT PROGRAM OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY

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PETE O'NEAL
AFRICAN AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY
KANSAS CITY BLACK PANTHER
MAN OF THE PEOPLEAT WORK IN AFRICA TODAY

Theoretical Weekends at Scission today presents the Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party...short and sweet.  Written in October of 1966, it is still relevant today. All I can say is we could sure as hell use the original Black Panther Party today...

The Ten Point Plan

1. WE WANT FREEDOM. WE WANT POWER TO DETERMINE THE DESTINY OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES. We believe that Black and oppressed people will not be free until we are able to determine our destinies in our own communities ourselves, by fully controlling all the institutions which exist in our communities.
2. WE WANT FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR OUR PEOPLE. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every person employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the American businessmen will not give full employment, then the technology and means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE CAPITALISTS OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES. We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of our fifty million Black people. Therefore, we feel this is a modest demand that we make.
4. WE WANT DECENT HOUSING, FIT FOR THE SHELTER OF HUMAN BEINGS. We believe that if the landlords will not give decent housing to our Black and oppressed communities, then housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people in our communities, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for the people.
5. WE WANT DECENT EDUCATION FOR OUR PEOPLE THAT EXPOSES THE TRUE NATURE OF THIS DECADENT AMERICAN SOCIETY. WE WANT EDUCATION THAT TEACHES US OUR TRUE HISTORY AND OUR ROLE IN THE PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of the self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society and in the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else.
6. WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR All BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE. We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventive medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give all Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide our selves with proper medical attention and care.
7. WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE, OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR, All OPPRESSED PEOPLE INSIDE THE UNITED STATES. We believe that the racist and fascist government of the United States uses its domestic enforcement agencies to carry out its program of oppression against black people, other people of color and poor people inside the united States. We believe it is our right, therefore, to defend ourselves against such armed forces and that all Black and oppressed people should be armed for self defense of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces.
8. WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO ALL WARS OF AGGRESSION. We believe that the various conflicts which exist around the world stem directly from the aggressive desire of the United States ruling circle and government to force its domination upon the oppressed people of the world. We believe that if the United States government or its lackeys do not cease these aggressive wars it is the right of the people to defend themselves by any means necessary against their aggressors.
9. WE WANT FREEDOM FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE NOW HELD IN U. S. FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, CITY AND MILITARY PRISONS AND JAILS. WE WANT TRIALS BY A JURY OF PEERS FOR All PERSONS CHARGED WITH SO-CALLED CRIMES UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS COUNTRY. We believe that the many Black and poor oppressed people now held in United States prisons and jails have not received fair and impartial trials under a racist and fascist judicial system and should be free from incarceration. We believe in the ultimate elimination of all wretched, inhuman penal institutions, because the masses of men and women imprisoned inside the United States or by the United States military are the victims of oppressive conditions which are the real cause of their imprisonment. We believe that when persons are brought to trial they must be guaranteed, by the United States, juries of their peers, attorneys of their choice and freedom from imprisonment while awaiting trial.
10. WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE'S COMMUNITY CONTROL OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
    
    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are most disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Football Night in Tennessee

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Last Friday night was the home opener for The King's Academy High School football team.


My boy? #51. Edison plays center and defensive line.


A bit of holding, perhaps?


They lost to Cosby, 41-14.  Tonight they play Tri-Cities.  Local sports guys are split on who will win.  Edison thinks that TKA will.  I'll go with my boy.



He's one of the captains of the team this year.  He says, "Dad, I'm one of four seniors.  We're all captains and I'll be a captain all year long."  I'm still proud of him.  His play is tough and his encouragement, both on and off the field, is one of kindness and help.  He's at every practice when he's in town and would be in on every play if the coaches would let him.  He's out there most of the time, except when he needs a breather.

This is what I'll be doing on Friday nights this semester.  And I wouldn't want it any other way.

images courtesy of my sister-in-law, Lori Higgins

1993 Leland's Auction Catalog

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I was at Central Street Books (facebook link) in KnoxVegas and found this gem for a dollar. The proprietor, wanting to clear cruft out of his shop, sold it for fifty cents. A winner is me.


There are quite a few uniforms, signed balls, even Pete Rose's Rolls Royce.  Say that three times fast.

I like the Ruth poster and the mechanical bank.

One of the things that I like about this catalog is the way that the group photos were taken. Sure, I only give you one example.

How did it turn out?  Here are some newspaper articles describing the auction results.

Beaver County Times - February 21, 1993

The Sunday Gazette - February 21, 1993

Ah, to have lived in the early 1990s with a boatload of cash.  I could be driving a Silver Wraith now.