Validated: Targeted for Repression
Who denies that New Afrikans (Blacks colonized in Amerika) have been viewed and treated as a “Security Threat Group”, and consequently subjected to varied forms of repression by a myriad of state and non-state reactionary pigs since our enslavement here? Who denies that this country’s “laws” or judicial system (e.g., police, prosecutors, judges, prison guards, etc.) has been and continues to be used as a weapon of oppressive domination of our people? I assert that the actual function of “law enforcement” - as particularly applied to our neo-colonial context - is to beat, harass, humiliate and kill, i.e., to contain and control. On an ultimate level, this is the actual purpose of those who operate in law enforcement.
We can see this evidenced in the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of New Afrikans in the Greenwood district, the 1920 Ocoee, Florida, the 1923 Rosewood, Florida massacres, and the list goes on. The historical pattern is that those who embody the Amerikan judicial system/law enforcement functioned with the primary aim of our domination in exploitation as remains the case in 2014, even under Eric Holder as the Attorney General.
What’s most important to grasp and take to heart is that as a group/nationality New Afrikans are in fact a “validated” population as a result of being calculated to represent a serious political threat against the white male power structure. Naturally, as we constitute a diversity in terms of political tendencies and hence threat assessments, the validation process is pursued and applied in varying forms. Even as all forms of the validation process (e.g. disciplinary techniques in the military, corporations, universities, law enforcement, industries, NBA, NFL, Wall Street, etc.) are ever geared towards our containment and domination.
“Classifications which are frequently encountered in social science literature of the European American variety frequently reduce people to categories like the ‘aged,’ ‘the schizophrenic subjects,’ ‘the culturally deprived,’ etc. Such categories, which are initially nominal are invariably treated in some qualitative fashion resulting in an ordinal classification based on superordinate-subordinate arrangement. The necessity to refer to people involved in psychological studies as ‘subjects’ is clearly instructive about the goal of such studies which is to subject. This is the value of the ‘valueless’ European American experimental methodology.” - Dr. Naim Akbar
Here in California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCr), prisoners are designated via terms such as “contaminate,” “subject,” “disruptive groups,” “security threat groups,” “E.O.P.,” “CCCMS,” etc. In the larger society, New Afrikan gang members and even political organizations are designated as “domestic terrorists,” “security threat groups,” etc. In each instance what those individuals/groups whom are designated by one-or-the-other terms have in common is the status of being classified, i.e. a procedural identification for purposes of categorization and monitoring techniques for state repression.
This is the essence and actual political function and primary objective of what is referred to and defined as “validated.” In penological terms to be “validated” means that a prisoner has been found or confirmed via investigation to be an affiliate of either a prison gang or disruptive group. The “stamp of approval” (rubber stamp) is exacted without sincere consideration and nor recognition of a prisoner’s supposedly accorded “due process rights.” In the final analysis, the validation process is fraught with legal indifference and profound official bias since it is CDCr’s penological interests which are ever paramount.
Although a prisoner has a right to appeal, the end result of such futile pursuit is most predictable since this amounts to “appealing” to another part of the monster which is dead-set on punitive measures immersed in authoritarian arrogance. I stress political function, since from the beginning, in the case of New Afrikans, ours is a relationship based upon institutional domination in terms of the racist prison system. As is often said “war is an expression of politics by other means,” so too, “prison is an expression of politics by other means.” The prison system is an element of protracted war against our people ever with the aim of subjection.
Indeed just as the U.S. government employs covers (e.g. “humanitarian aid,” “fighting terrorism,” “spreading democracy”) to legitimize its politics and practices in Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Congo, Mali, Sudan, Ukraine, etc., the same is true on a domestic level as regards the covers employed to legitimize the state’s repressive policies and measures (i.e. stop and frisk, ten-twenty-life, three strikes, mandatory minimum sentencing, anti-terrorism act, war on drugs, war on gangs) directed against the New Afrikan and Latino(a) communities and oppressed nation people in general. In the case of the New Afrikan and Latino(a) communities the pretext used is “working to make the streets safe” via targeting our youth/warrior-oriented groups with “Gang injunctions,” “Prison Gang Validation,” “Behavioral Modification Units,” etc.
As in the case of their recently conceived repressive tactic referred to as the “Step Down Program,” merely one element of an ever-adaptive strategic program rooted in our control, the paramount aim of the state’s obvious subterfuge is our subjection to forms of reorientation/indoctrination which operates in total conformity with their dictates, i.e. socio-economic, cultural, security and political imperatives.
“(I)t is the government which gets to define what a ‘security threat group’ is. According to a national survey conducted by the Department of Justice in 1997, the Department of Corrections of Minnesota and Oregon named all Asians as gangs, which Minnesota further compounds by adding all Native Americans. The State of New Jersey DOC lists the Black Cat Collective as a gang. The Black Cat Collective is my free foster son along with two friends who put on Afro-Centric cultural programs in libraries.”(Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Vol.39)
The above komrad goes on to point out that “the government considered the Black Panther Party a ‘street gang’ under their loose meaning they employed.” As we’re aware, it is the convenient policy of oppressive and exploitive governments to define and designate especially oppositional radical political forces/individuals (e.g. Mau Mau, RNA, Hamas, IRA, BLA, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Marcus Garvey, Yaa Asantewaa, Winnie Mandela, Steve Biko, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Martin L. King, Malcolm X, etc.) by an array of self-serving propagandistic pejorative terms including thugs, hoodlums, savages, terrorists, and mass murders, so as to demonize them and discredit their socio-political causes. This common tactic of attack via de-legitimization measures is currently being employed against our Black Riders Liberation Party based in Los Angeles.
In California prisons, on the classification Chrono we’re referred to or identified as “subject.” As a validated prisoner/captive I am treated as and considered to be what they call a “contaminate.” I’ve already listed other official terms in which the state employs to conveniently designate those from the ghettoes. Thus, we discern that the necessity to refer to people as mere “subjects” is also a penological methodology in society and prison. Why not the “oppressed,” “colonized,” or “exploited”? Because the appropriate and applicable designations would not only operate to accurately identify and classify First Nation peoples, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, New Afrikans, etc., but they’d also work to indict the white male supremacist capitalist-imperialist system. Yes, to a large degree the saying: “He whom defines reality…has the power,” is accurate and this is the reason the labeling process is so important to our political adversaries. Classification procedures function as a method of identification with the intended aim of targeting/profiling individuals/groups who are perceived to constitute a “threat to the security” of institutional operations as they’re not in conformity with the dictated program.
Once labeled via the classification process the individual/group is made subject to all sorts of political repressive tactics. This even applies to those individuals/groups defined as “gangs” and engaged in criminal activities whether confined to prisons or that of society since it is the “power relation” which is the ultimate crux of the matter.
As is well known, Pelican Bay State Prison as a “model” of repressive control was built along the lines of Marion, Florence, and other maximum security prisons and its authoritarian methods are being implemented across the country in other tombs of gloom. As the “subjects” of these punitively-geared penological settings we are experimented upon (e.g. sterilization, SHUs, suppressive measures such as tear gas, pepper spray, tasers, block guns, E.O.P., CCCMS) As a method of instruction I often explain to brothers that our relationship to the prison system (classification committees, disciplinary hearings, SSU, ISU, IGI, parole supervision) is rooted in and motivated by politics in the sense of alien authority being exercised over us and against our interests.
The fact that one can penalize via some prison official ought to inform us of our subordinate status since it is obviously others who are making the final decisions which negatively impact our lives since they are in a superior position of power. So, for those who have a naive tendency to think in terms that somehow politics is limited to the political process (e.g. voting, referendums, policies, etc.) it must be grasped that the very nature of our relationship with CDCr is actually one based upon politics. Logically, this especially applies to the larger macrocosm or society in terms of our peculiar neo-colonial relationship with the U.S. Empire.
In CDCr, the terms used to define and classify the nexus between prison gangs and disruptive groups (now redefined and reclassified as “Security Threat Groups”), are “subservient” and “subordinate” since the disruptive groups/street gangs are said to be “inferior” to, and thus under the dictation of, a prison gang whom prison officials perceive as the “worst of the worst.” The “dictation” goes to program expectations - i.e., rules to abide by on pain of punishment - and general agendas as well as ideological patterns. This attitude and perception, of the nexus between prison gangs and disruptive groups, presumes that those of the latter groups cannot or are not given the latitude to think for themselves nor to govern their lives in their own interests.
