False gang validations to repress Latinos
I am writing to you to seek advice, assistance or referral on how to get word out about biased racial profiling, mass validation, and their failure to follow their own policies and laws. Now let me just give a quick run down on what is going on here at High Desert State Prison (HDSP). In August 2009, the California Department of Corrections’ goon squad, Institutional Gang Investigators, took all personal property from all “northern Hispanic” inmates on C-facility and at this time removed between 40 to 50 “northern Hispanics” from the mainline and validated us as prison gang members. Several inmates were placed on potty watch. (This is where inmates are placed in a diaper taped up and handcuffed 24 hours a day and forced to use a plastic bag to relieve themselves.) The inmates were eventually validated as gang members and are retained in ASU and we are not being transferred to appropriate prisons. Most of the points used against us were either made up or do not meet guidelines of the law to validate us. There are a lot of violations of federal and state laws going on here but I’m going to keep this brief.
MIM(Prisons) adds: The U.$. imperialists have divided the Chicano Nation (and Latinos in general) in California by drawing a line across the middle of the state and labeling those who grew up north of that line “northern Hispanics.” They call the “northerners” and “southerners” gangs worthy of repression, yet countless comrades have been forced into these groups by the CDCR themselves. Early in the process, they assigned certain prisons and units to “northerners” and others to “southerners.” Then when they want to lock up all the Latinos they can do so and say they are dealing with a “gang.”
It is an absolute joke that this thinly veiled form of national oppression passes as legal in a bourgeois democracy. Of course, there are neo-colonial agents that have played into these divisions from the beginning. Just as the Amerikans divided Korea and Vietnam between north and south by setting up puppet leaderships, they have done the same in U.$.-occupied Aztlán. This is why the demand for the unification of oppressed nations and their territories is an inherently anti-imperialist demand.
