by a SLALA comrade and MIM

Six months after the criminal convictions of former Department of Criminal Justice Director James "Andy" Collins and his partner-in-crime Yank Barry, Texas prisoners are still waiting for news of the thieves' sentencing.(1) Barry, the president of VitaPro Foods, Inc., together with Collins, concocted a scheme to serve VitaPro -- a soy-based food supplement -- to Texas prisoners as their daily diet staple. In August, Barry and Collins were convicted of bribery, fraud, money laundering and conspiracy. Sentencing has been delayed twice as of December.(2) To anti- imperialists, Collins was a corrupter of justice even before he got involved with VitaPro, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice remains corrupt now that Collins is gone. But the Collins- VitaPro scandal is noteworthy as a clear example of the emerging fascism in Amerika's prisons.

Fascism exists wherever the interests of private capital and the state combine for the greater exploitation of the oppressed. This case confirms the absurdity in the common tendency to view private enterprises as separate and antagonistic from government plans and programs.(3) Barry was convicted of paying Collins $20,000 in bribes to secure a $33 million contract for VitaPro in the Texas prisons -- the second largest prison system in the Unites $tates.(4) Using VitaPro was to have saved the Texas prisons millions on buying and storing fresh foods for the prisoners.(5) The key profiteering element came not just in using VitaPro to replace meat and poultry for Texas prisoners -- but in repacking it and selling it to other states for their prisoners. With projections for the state of $4 million in the first year, prisoners "would scoop the granules into 30-pound pails and 50- pound sacks for distribution nationwide."(5) It was this redistribution money grab that led to the excess abuse of VitaPro, far beyond its use as a food additive. According to a report in the Dallas Morning news, "sales were lethargic, bringing in about $85,000, and VitaPro soon started stockpiling in prison warehouses. For [prisoners], it meant that the supplement, envisioned as an additive in 10 meals a month, was in used every breakfast, lunch and dinner."(6)

Collins and his gang's greedy overuse of VitaPro led to numerous complaints about poor taste, offensive smell and health problems. Prisoners refused to eat it, complaining that it caused diarrhea, skin rashes and other ailments. MIM received several letters from Texas prisoners describing the disgusting and inedible nature of VitaPro. According to one prisoner's article published in MIM Notes in 1996, "when we wouldn't eat it, they gradually cut down all food, trying to starve us into eating it."(7) MIM does not have independent information on the nutritional value of VitaPro as a food additive. But as a daily staple, used as such because of capitalist "overproduction," it deprived prisoners of the variety needed to labor and to live a healthy life. VitaPro's Barry still boasts that the product is found in upscale Moroccan hotels if one wants to order a "vegetarian chicken salad." The comparison between the accommodations of a hotel (even in the Third World) and Amerika's prisoners is a vulgar one. If nothing else, the VitaPro scandal clearly illustrates the United $tates's disregard for humyn life behind bars. Under socialism, MIM would not hesitate to mandate plant-based diets for all people, if such were necessary to feed the population.(8) But the Texas-VitaPro scheme was not a rational economic measure to address basic humyn needs or an effort to improve nutrition. MIM sees a connection between the way the imperialist prison administration was willing to take a factory approach to the prison diet -- serving the same thing every single day -- to its approach to prisoners' health care, where all prisoners get the same treatment regardless of their condition.

MIM is currently leading a campaign to get Texas prison officials to follow their own bourgeois policies and provide health care for prisoner workers. Just as we consider preventive health care a right for all people under socialism, we also struggle to provide all oppressed people with a healthy diet. We urge all who have a concern for the lives of those who are chained to injustice to gather support by collecting petition signatures and by exposing self- interested capitalists that endanger people's lives. MIM and its affiliated mass organizations struggle for a system in which the different sectors of the economy will not be able to impose their products on a particular society, and want to put an end to contradictions that give prisoners insufficient but profitable mono-diets, while the parasitic amerikan society is bombarded with ads promoting "beef for dinner."

Food production and distribution under the dictatorship of proletariat will be socialized, as will the correct rehabilitation of real criminals. Power and access to basic goods and opportunities will not be monopolized by any one group of people. Gary Collins has been prosecuted and convicted for the narrowly-defined crime of taking bribes. Under socialism, Collins, his cronies and counterparts in the Amerikan prison bureaucracy would all be tried in the people's courts where all his actions running a repressive prison system would be the grounds for his punishment. As we struggle to eventually end the entire system that creates prisons and prisoncrats that carry out brutal repression to generate profit and to control the poor masses, we make certain demands immediately to end the system of punishing prisoners who can't work for medical reasons. Help collect signatures for the petition (printed with this article), and send them to MIM.

Notes: 1. Texas prisoner letter, November 2001. 2. www.canadianbusinsss.com 10 December, 2001 3. MIM Theory 11: Amerikan Prisons on Trial, p. 19. 4. Houston Chronicle, 21 August 2001. 5. Houston Chronicle, 7 August 2001. 6. Dallas Morning News, 21 August 2001. 7. See also MIM Notes 118, "The Well Deserved Death of VitaPro" reprinted from Prison News Service $ 54, Spring 1996. 8. See "Veganism and 'animal rights.'" MIM Party Congress 1999, Session II. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/cong/vegan. html