MIM and RAIL continued our work with the United Front to Shut Down the SHU with a series of protests, educational events and outreach work in October. Our regular first Saturday of the month Security Housing Unit protests in San Francisco and Oakland were a success. This month we were again out on the streets downtown in both cities, handing out literature, collecting petition signatures, and talking to people about these long term solitary confinement cells and why we want to shut them down.
In San Francisco, we set up at our usual location downtown but moved the table to a new spot which turned out to be much better for talking to people. Many former prisoners and family members of former prisoners stopped by to express support, sign the petition, and take literature. A few people familiar with the campaign also stopped by the table to say hi and thank us for our work and pledge their continued support. We collected close to 50 signatures in the two hours of outreach.
In Oakland, RAIL was on the street in various locations and doing outreach at friendly events before, during and after our first Saturday of the month rally to build for our teach-in around the SHU the following week. All of our work around downtown brought us in contact with former SHU victims, family members and supporters. We gathered dozens of signatures during this time and handed out hundreds of fliers for our teach-in.
The day after the first Saturday rally we attended the Hip Hop Summit at Laney college (in Oakland) and set up a table featuring information on the SHU and some "Don't Vote, Organize!" propaganda. The latter was in stark contrast to the overall theme of the event. The upside was that there was a strong focus by the Summit on local ballot initiatives dealing with issues such as putting more cops on the street and reforming the Three Strikes Law. This is a significant difference from the pro-Kerry voting campaigns that most organizations are taking up. Reception at the Summit was very positive. We gathered several sheets of signatures and gained a lot of good attention and new allies. Many people there were familiar with the criminal injustice system and there were activists there supporting Proposition 66 (the Three Strikes amendment) and copwatch, among others. We met a number of activists with organizations in the state that were interested in learning more about the United Front and possibly getting involved.
The most encouraging voices at the Summit were members of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee (POCC), most notably Mutulu from dead prez and Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. Dead prez performed that evening alongside five other acts to close the summit. The POCC were the only other people besides MIM and RAIL putting out a "Don't Vote" message at the Summit. As usual, dead prez put on an excellent performance, while stressing the POCC Code of Culture; stressing that this isn't a "hip hop concert", but rather a people coming together to express their common experience and organize to change that experience. (for more on dead prez's music and politics check out MIM's music reviews in our online bookstore). While it was discouraging that the crowd surged in size after the organizing programs were over, dead prez brought a better message to the evening crowd than a lot of people were putting out during the day and RAIL took the opportunity to hand out fliers to hundreds of young people.
Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. spoke at a separate forum the following night in Berkeley to promote the POCC and raise funds to attend the International Social Forum in Brazil, where they hope to present their African Anti-Terorrism Bill (AAT). The AAT is one of the POCC's major tools in pressuring politicians and media personas to make concessions to the cause of liberating African people. The theme of this event was "The Math of the Masses: No position on political prisoners + No position on reparations + no position on the AAT Bill = NO VOTE!". Throughout the night, Hampton stressed that when people are so desperate that they'll vote for anyone, they open themselves to all kinds of attacks. The POCC is taking a principled stand on not voting, just as MIM has done for decades. Neither of us has ruled out voting as a possible strategy, but until it becomes a strategy that we can push revolutionary struggle forward with we will build allies by coming out in principled opposition.
Fred Hampton Jr. is working in the footsteps of his father who was killed in his bed by the government at age 21 for being a successful organizer for the Black Panther Party. Chairman Fred Jr. spoke about his father's successes such as working with the Devil's Disciples to become the Black Disciples who took on work with the BPP's breakfast for school children program. Fred spoke about how these organizations weren't joining the BPP, but they were working with them where they could find unity. This is the same strategy the POCC is taking up today, apparently successfully, in working with unpoliticized street tribes. While Hampton spoke about the many "coalitions" they are forming with groups in Chicago, this is an example of what MIM defines as a "United Front." The difference being that the POCC, as the BPP before it, is finding unity with these organizations in action while each group is keeping its independence in terms of ideology and what it stands for in general. A coalition implies a melding of organizations into one monolithic whole, the tragedy of this being that the politics of the most advanced sectors are watered down by the politics of the rest.
The POCC also does a lot of prisoner support work similar to MIM. Instead of MIM's Serve the People Prisoner Re-Lease on Life program, the POCC has "Welcome Black to the Community," which at this stage provides a care package to recent releasees to help them get on their feet. The POCC also has a "One Prisoner, One Contact" program that gets people on the outside writing to prisoners on the inside. And as the Chairman stressed its not just writing about, "hi, how are you, can't wait for you to get out." They're working to build real contact between prisoners and communities to build organization, just as MIM does with its prison correspondence work and Serve the People Free Books for Prisoners. The POCC does a good job of putting politics in command of its work and we look forward to their future successes and potential alliances in our respective work.
The following night we had our own public education event in Oakland on the SHU. Only a small group attended but it was a good event with a lively discussion. The speakers focused on the contradictions within the prison system and how the SHU and the criminal injustice system as a whole fit into the bigger picture of imperialism.
Opening the event, a RAIL activist explained the dialectical nature of prisons as tools of oppression and breeders of resistance. S/he stressed the strategic importance of the SHU campaign in relation to all the other humyn rights issues we could be taking on. On one side we have the SHU as an extreme form of repression that is isolating some of our best leaders from the masses they are trying to organize. This is bad and this is why it is so important that we win this struggle. It would not just be a victory for one small humyn rights struggle, but the relative liberation of our comrades from these SHUs (relative because they will still be imprisoned) will push forward the long term goal of guaranteeing all humyns survival rights by overthrowing imperialism as a whole.
The other side of the SHU is that it is so brutally repressive that as long as they do exist our movement will only grow as more family members and ex-prisoners have had experience with the system. These units have already been condemned by the United Nations. Even those who promote prisons can't deny that about 90% of those in the SHU will be released some day and that it is better for society if they had spent that time taking classes, working, exercising and interacting with other humyns.
A presentation by the Barrio Defense Committee(BDC) exposed the use of the SHU for social control, particularly targeting Mexican prisoners. The BDC comrade also discussed how Mexican community members are being targeted by the police through programs called "Weed and Seed" that are artificially increasing the charges being brought against people because they are being picked up in neighborhoods the government has decided to target. Afterward, MIM gave context to the repression in the SHU discussing why the United $tates has the highest imprisonment rate in the world and how prisons and the SHU fit into the system of national oppression within u.s. borders.
United Struggle from Within comrades in the SHU participated in the event through written statements read by RAIL activists. The opening speaker stressed the connection and similarities between the SHU and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. The flier for the event used Abu Ghraib photos in an effort to make a point that this was a systematic problem. Torture and terror are not new to the u$, their use has only increased over time. Black people have seen this terror since the beginnings of slavery, and today there are few parts of the world you can go that have not been touched by u$ terror. It is only within the context of ending all u$ terror that we can make the struggle to abolish the SHU an effective one.