Call to Coordinate Legal Battle in Texas

My fellow prisoners I am sending out this call for a massive assault upon our living conditions here in TDCJ; a massive RUIZ TYPE Lawsuit that should not only bring a change to our living conditions, but should bring about the release of thousands of us.

ORDER TO REDUCE PRISON POPULATION

On 4 August 2009, this three-judge court issued an Opinion and Order finding, by clear and convincing evidence, that crowding is the primacy cause of the constitutional inadequacies in the delivery of medical and mental health care to California prisoners and that no relief other than a “prison release order”, as that term is broadly defined by the PLRA, 18 USC 3626(g)(4), is capable of remedying these constitutional deficiencies – see COLEMAN v SCHWARZENEGGER, 2010. US.Dist.LEXIS 2711, BROWN v PLATA, 563 U.S. 493 and GRADDICK NEWMAN, 453 U.S. 923.

Each of these cases were started by prisoners in California and Alabama. We can, and must, do the same! We must do so because the conditions today are back to Pre-RUIZ. Thus, we need a massive lawsuit to bring change. Unfortunately, we must come up with a way to communicate. Since communication is often difficult to impossible I offer the following strategy: During the American slave trade, the top priority of each plantation was to ensure there wasn’t any communication between the slaves from one plantation to another. Shuttering the communication lines was, is and has always been the most effective way to control slaves/prisoners. Doing so is the dominant means of ensuring captives are not planning insurrections, escapes, revolutionary actions, and/or working together to get the very best class action suits filed in federal courts!

Ruiz was the lead plaintiff in the fantastically expensive and bitterly contested lawsuit that laid waste to the original and brutal Texas Department of Corrections (TDC, now known as TDCJ-Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice) control model. Had it not been for the benefit of the mail system the lawsuit probably would not have ever seen the light of day. During the time the lawsuit was being researched, rough drafted and crafted, the incarcerated were permitted to write each other and share notes, ideas and research of what the lawsuit should bring to the court’s attention. Needless to say, we cannot do that today. As a result, besides the recent “excessive heat” lawsuit filings by TDCJ prisoners and then taken over by the ACLU and other civil & human rights groups, there has been no sign of an effective federal suit against TDCJ since the original RUIZ in the 1970s and 1960s. The originality of the lawsuit had started with Ruiz, Fred Cruz and others of “eight hoe-squad.” It eventually fanned out to other writ-writers at several more of the 14 units/plantations in Texas. Every writ-writer in the State was either researching or actually writing up some filings to either send to Ruiz’s eight hoe-squad crew consideration.

From the disciplinary block of the Wynne Plantation, Ruiz’s document traveled first to Judge William Wayne Justice’s court house in Tyler. He sent eight illustrative complaints to the New York offices of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund to solicit representation for the indigent Plaintiffs. The rest is history. Unfortunately, we cannot write to one another, nor can we expect the fair treatment of a William Wayne Justice. We must come with overwhelming clear and convincing evidence for these ultra conservative judges. To make this point clear, I offer the following example, which is a case I personally litigated from here on the Coffield Unit. They put Armour on the Medical Chain, kept him away for about six months and played the chase-mail game with his mail. They handled us real ruff:

“Armour attached in his response a newspaper article, purportedly from a publication called the Texas Tribune, saying that TDCJ Director Bryan Collier testified in a court hearing that TDCJ failed to monitor temperatures on units where the agency houses inmates who are supposed to be protected by a settlement agreement covering the Pack Unit. Armour also attached four pages, 11, 12, 47 and 48, which are purportedly from a document called the Human Rights Report from the University of Texas. These documents recite from interviews with inmates about the heat, claim that TDCJ is aware of”inhumane conditions”, and sets out the conclusions and recommendations of the unnamed authors of the “report.” The Defendants have filed a motion asking that the article from the Texas Tribune and the excerpted pages from the Human Rights Report be stricken as hearsay. The Fifth Circuit has stated that newspaper articles are classic, inadmissible hearsay and cannot be used to defeat summary judgment.”

Please read ARMOUR v DAVIS, 2020 U.S.DIST-LEXIS 94986, and see that in addition to this the Judge claimed that 406-Affidavits of prisoners were not part of the record.

Thus, it is my hope that us jailhouse lawyers across the State of Texas will file lawsuits about our living conditions, and in the future we will attempt to get them consolidated and/or attempt to get the Justice Department to intervene. Also, I urge each of you to contact the National Lawyers Guild. They have four lawsuits that they are attempting to get Affidavits from all the units in TDCJ about the complaints they have filed: BAKER v COLLIER, 1:22-cv-01249, PANUS v O’DANIEL, 1:23-cv-00086, SIRUS v RELIGIOUS PRACTICE COMMITTEE, 1:22-cv-00191 and COX v COLLIER, TBA.

So, as the story unfolds, “mail-call” has lost the most important part of its strength when it comes to incarcerated individuals uniting as one band or group of people to fight the injustices of a system that holds them in perpetual bondage, whether that’s physically in prison or by means of supervised release to parole/probation. Let us not allow the lack of the ability to communicate to prevent us from carrying out the next multi-level federal case!

DARE TO STRUGGLE! DARE TO WIN!

MIM(Prisons) responds: We print this article for the information it contains, not necessarily to echo the call of this comrade. This comrade has a proven track record of legal campaigns. Those who operate strictly in the legal realm, whether jailhouse lawyers or organizations like the ACLU, can be comrades in united front with demands of the anti-imperialist movement.

What the comrade doesn’t address here is why we are back to conditions as bad as before the Ruiz case. The short answer is, there are no rights, only power struggles. We live in a system where the minority oppresses the majority. As long as that is true, the majority can never sit idly and have their needs met. They must struggle for them.

As this comrade is calling for a coordinated struggle, we agree. But it cannot be relegated to the courtrooms. That is why we did promote and support the Juneteenth Freedom Initiative in Texas prisons, which had a multi-pronged approach that was based in organizing the prison masses. The state seems to have won that round, but that is the type of strategy we need. Just as the International Criminal Court is not going to stop the genocide in Palestine, nor are peaceful protests in the United $tates, but they provide agitational support for the ongoing liberation struggle being fought on the ground by the masses. All of these forces are part of a united front effort, with different political approaches, supporting a common cause of ending genocide.