California Prisons

It has come time for all of us who have become politically active to stand together as one united front, proselytizing unity amongst the Black street tribes. It is time for the warriors of our people to lock flags and step into history. It has become increasingly clear that our continued genocidal tendencies are at our own destruction, peril and demise.

We are constantly under attack by the paramilitary style police units in every city that brutally occupies our communities, the very unrighteous injustice and revenge procedures masquerading as a fair and balanced judicial system, and of course the modern day slave plantation known as prison with its oppressive family-destroying, man-breaking psychological warfare. We have endured much pain inflicted by these forces, but it pales in comparison to the pain, sorrow and death we have inflicted upon each other.

Just imagine the beautiful power that is in our uniting against the elements that thrive successfully because of our difficulties and divided strata. It is time for all the warriors of the street tribes to realize that together we are unstoppable. It is time for those of us with influence, stripes, rank and respect to start believing in and advocating the uniting of the lumpen organizations.

Brotha Frantz Fanon said “Every generation has a mission, it is up to that generation to fulfill or betray that mission.” I believe our generation’s mission is uniting. It is in the best interest of not only our individual tribes, but most important it is in the best interest of our people as a whole. It is up to our generation, this generation, to evolve from so-called criminals, gangstas and thugs, into men, human beings who believe in our ability to be warriors and souljahs in one united front fighting on the front line to ensure the life of our people.

Revolutionize yourself, become new men, liberate yourself mentally. The honorable brotha Malcolm X once said “I do not pretend to be a divine man…I am not educated nor am I an expert in any particular field but I am sincere and my sincerity is my credentials.”

Being confined in this new millennium has caused me to wonder about the intelligence of prisoners who receive benefits from the theft, conversion and criminal actions of those charged with enforcing laws, rules and regulations. Here you have prisoners who accept from correctional officers magazines, books, and other items of value that belong to other prisoners and smile and grin saying they came up. Basically at the expense of another prisoner. It’s the same old practice used by law enforcement time after time on unsuspecting prisoners they see as potential sources of intelligence and are used until they have no further use and are tossed back to the lions with the customary amusement.

I can not, for the life of me, understand why a prisoner will go out of his way to provide correctional staff and officials intelligence that establishes that a prisoner has membership or association with a prison gang, street gang, or other disruptive group which automatically requires special attention and placement considerations which could include being indefinitely confined in a security housing unit until that individual rats out his comrades, dies or paroles, yet there seems to be new acceptance.

It’s amusing to me when I see some of these characters bragging and boasting being validated by the prisoncrats as a gang member while making it a point to ask others, typically around the picklesuits, “are you active”. It’s as if the new concept of the penal system is to not only tell on yourself but trick others to tell on themselves! It’s as if prison agent provacateurism has gained tacit acceptance, and some new status symbolism.

When asked if I am active, I have to ask “active in what?” Since as with so many other English language concepts the word has been coopted into supposedly meaning one thing for the dumb down prisoner but in reality meaning something significantly more onerous to the prisoncrats. And it’s no secret but many in the prison population have yet to understand or realize the significance and these concepts and ideas are becoming interwoven into the fabric of prison social structure, forcing many real men to adopt anti-social positions in order to stay out of the cross.

Being a general population prisoner of consciousness, I do not miss much. However I have noted that there are so many idiots who are sycophants to an old concept that has morphed and changed into something that is truly malevolent. One has to go back to the number one concept of “trust no one” with anything of any import. Those who are real you will be able to tell, and those who are not will eventually expose themselves. Educate yourselves and pay attention is all I can advise you in this CDCR trap in which many do not seriously consider the reality of the struggle, but instead practice acceptance.

It is a sincere pleasure to receive the open letter detailing the progressive actions you all have been taking. As we see with Obama, it is not enough for us to continue down the line of just using titles such as capitalism, racism, imperialism, fascism, colonialism, classism, and oppression. We must call them out one by one. For example: when capitalist/fascist Dianne Feinstein presents legislation that further targets the lumpen/proletarian class, we must send out operatives in the area to challenge her by contradicting the very policies she’s introducing. We have enough public record information to use against these politicians who continue to draw up policies that line their pockets with corporate profits at the expense of humanity.

We have New African politicians such as the Congressional Black Caucus who are affected by the fraud and control. They must be sought out and called out on the very oppressive policies that they support like when Rep. Maxine Waters was in support of legislation that authorized a one million dollar bounty on Assata Shakur, who is in exile in Cuba after escaping from the imperialist state that sought to murder her. When she was called on it she said that she didn’t know her by that name!

We are dealing with spineless individuals who not only support all these draconian laws but don’t inform their constituents of what these racist policies will do to them, like when Bill Clinton was made to be seen as the first Black President. He is responsible for passing the Prison Litigation Reform Act which is an extremely anti-prisoner policy. Lawyers’ incentives were taken away which had encouraged lawyers to take prisoners cases. He was also responsible for the Death Penalty/Terrorist Act in 1996 sealing the fate of thousands of poor disenfranchised New Afrikans, Latinos and poor whites to life in prison. This made it next to impossible to challenge criminal cases in the courts after one year.

We must challenge each and every one of these sell-out politicians when they support policies that are anti-human in nature. We must hold them accountable by voting them out of office.

Most of my life I’ve been incarcerated. I had a reputation as one of the “leading Bloods” in the prison system. My fate was sealed until my mother was killed in a car accident in 1996 and it was a letter she wrote to me that I received about 3 days after finding out she was killed. This letter was ironically a brief biography of her life that revealed to me all these things I didn’t know about her, like she was a Sgt. of arms in the Black Panther Party, and that she was responsible for introducing the Women, Infant and Children (WIC) program. She assisted in the escape of Angela Davis. It was an honorable surprise because it explained why our childhood was so radical for my brothers and I, where the FBI kicked in our doors routinely and we moved constantly. Therefore my disdain for authority that abuses its position is strong.

I was already questioning my past actions because even as a misguided youth I tried to be rooted in a moral sense where I would justify my actions by saying that those individuals who I wronged were wrong. Yet looking back, I never liked what I saw and it’s really crazy because I found out my mother was a revolutionary when I always thought she was a gangster of some sort because of what I saw with the FBI and others constantly harassing her and my step-father when I was a child.

I learned that law enforcement does’t just go after bad guys, but also good ones. This led me to redirect my energy toward the interests of my people. If you could see my past history in the penal system, where I was extremely destructive from 1976 to 1996, it wasn’t until I became productive/constructive from 1996 until now that I became a threat. All the stabbings, assaults on prisoners, and a couple of staff, didn’t seal my fate in these gulags. It wasn’t until I became a progressive in organizing prisoners towards their own interests that I was validated as a prison gang member and placed in SHU indefinitely in 2000.

MIM(Prisons) responds: This letter is yet another excellent illustration of why we say that revolutionaries are the real advocates of peace while the criminal injustice system punishes those who oppose violence. We also agree with this prisoner that it’s important to point out the bad policies enacted by politicians, but we disagree with his suggestion that we vote these politicians out of office. Voting won’t change anything, because the only people who can get elected are those who serve the interests of the system. Changing the face of the oppressor will not put an end to oppression. Only the overthrow of the oppressive imperialist system will truly bring peace to the majority of the world’s people.

When last I wrote I shared my struggle to get typewriters in our prison law library. Makes sense to have typewriters in a law library, doesn’t it?

Well, for my efforts I was thrown in the hole when I was attempting to use the law library facilities in order to finish some work for a case that was scheduled for a telephone hearing the following day.

Now similar to my brother’s situation in North Carolina (ULK #7, March 2009) I was placed in a “security cage” (California prisoners are familiar with these) and left there from 6 am until 2 pm and I had an abscessed tooth at the time (documented and since crowned) and medical refused me my antibiotics and pain medication. By 2 pm I was so delirious with pain that they felt the need to cover the security cage I was in with a wool blanket and dump two fire extinguishers full of chemicals; one of them is known as 505 (lethal).

The next thing I recall was waking up in a cold bare cell with no means of comfort (mattress, blanket, nothing).

Since that attempt on my life I attempted to file a board of claims to the state, but it disappeared after my CCI got it from me. I had to give it to him because I had to get a registered trust statement from him to file with the state. California keeps her “ducks” in a row.

So, as a result of my injury, the state of California’s prison at Mule Crrek accommodates their medically assigned bottom bunk prisoners to bare naked cells in the hole. No property, no bunk, just a mattress on the floor. This is common practice, my neighbor is a seventy plus year old man, forced to sleep on the floor!

If a nation is judged by the way she treats her prisoners, this country is damned.

I am currently incarcerated in California serving a 220 year life sentence that I’ll never finish.

I know every state is a little different as to how it taxes its prisoners and uses the sweat of our slave labor to promote the prison industrial complex. Following is an outline of a few of the ways they do it here in California.

Some of our taxation comes in the form of “restitution,” for which we are taxed 55 percent of all money that lands in our prisoner trust accounts. Ten percent of that goes to the prison for administrative costs and the remainder goes to the state’s general fund.

The next money-grabber comes in the form of a $5 co-payment for all medical and dental visits, which is outrageous considering that we are provided substandard and unconstitutional medical, dental, and mental health services under the control of a court-ordered receivership.

Another tax comes in the form of our prisoner welfare fund, which gets collected in various ways, the most common of which is a 10 percent tax on the purchase of an appliance, quarterly package, special purchase or hobby supplies.

A lot of guys - and girls - are unaware of the money that gets clipped from our friends and family. For example, every time we make one of those collect calls, our friends and family get clobbered with outrageous phone bill charges, which the phone companies kickback to the prison for allowing them to provide us with phone service. To give you an idea how badly our families are being taxed by these calls, last year the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) received over $25 million in kickbacks from phone companies.

A similar tax can be found in our visiting rooms by way of the “super high” prices of vending machine items. The vendors, like the phone companies, pay kickbacks to the prisons for the privilege of putting their machines in our visiting areas! I don’t know what this amount is annually, but I assure you, it’s a lot.

Also in the visiting area are the sales of pictures for which all the profits go to the inmate welfare fund, which gets quietly shuffled into the general fund. The same applies to the profits from our canteen purchases.

Next we visit the prison labor issue. Here in California we’ve been operating with a pay scale system that was developed in the 1970s and there hasn’t been a cost of living adjustment since it was implemented. In fact, the only change that has come has been the elimination of paid positions, because there is always some desperate prisoner who is willing to work for nothing just to get out of his or her cell. This practice must stop if we are ever to see a pay increase.

We pretty much make everything for the state prison system and government offices: Clothing, food, bedding, cleaning products, tables, chairs, and even modular offices. We make license plates and the tags that go on them; our labor saves the state $billions annually. Yet we continue to jump at the opportunity to work for 10 cents an hour or for nothing at all!

I could go on for hours about all the ways the state is extorting our money and the sweat of our labor. It’s endless, and all we are doing is making it possible for them to hold us longer and, quite possibly imprison our friends, neighbors and loved ones to expand their prison industrial complex. This has got to stop.

Now, here’s my solution. This should work, considering the current economic crisis affecting every state, but it won’t come easily or without sacrifice.

I call upon everyone to use up or send out all the money in your prison trust account. This will deprive the state of millions of dollars that they acquire from interest on our money, as well as funds they won’t get from restitution, fines, inmate welfare and other bogus charges, because we’ll have no money to spend. Second, everyone must stop using the phone and start writing instead. Third, stop working for nothing. I guarantee you this will quickly get the attention of your administrators - but don’t collapse under pressure. Last, demand prisoners’ rights, including the right to vote. Once that is established you will have the power to do just about anything.

For everyone’s information, I want you to know I have already undertaken this plan of action. I have remained indigent since my incarceration in 2005 and, as a direct result, the state pays me 20 metered indigent envelopes a month, all my necessary hygiene equipment, soap, razors, toothpaste, toothbrush, comb and so forth. They also pay for all my legal copying services, paper, envelopes and postage of which I have used many. I have deprived the state of the interest from my money and the $850,000 it claims I owe in restitution. I have refused to work from day one and will continue to do so until I see radical changes in prisoners’ rights. I don’t pay for my medical visits or my medications, which are numerous and extremely expensive.

Again, I could ramble on for days, but I want you all to start thinking about how you are contributing to the prison industrial complex and start taking actions to change this environment in which we live. If done nationwide, we can and will stop the heart of the Prison Industrial Complex by removing the profit motive.

MIM(Prisons) adds: This comrade points out a lot of ways that prisoners can take legal and non-violent actions against the so-called prison industrial complex. This sort of organizing is important. However, this will not remove the motivation for imprisonment in the United $tates. While people are making extra money off of prisoners through all the methods listed above, the fundamental source of money for prisons is still the government. Prisons are not profitable in the sense that they do not generate enough value to pay for themselves. They are a subsidized industry that pays a lot of people a lot of money to build, fill and operate. And so the portion of this that prisoners can impact by the direct actions described in this article is limited to a minority of the money. That doesn’t mean these actions will be useless, but we can’t fool ourselves into thinking these actions alone will stop the heart of the Prison Industrial Complex.

As I write this letter I am once again incarcerated in the administrative segregation dungeon (ad-seg) of Mule Creek State Prison for refusing to conform to the CDCR-CCPOA Mafia underground corruption rules of forced double celling.

This time they have incarcerated me in what is called the disciplinary detention bubble for no reason.

1. I have no RVR115 rule violation guilty ruling.
   2. I have no RVR115 disciplinary detention sentence.
   3. I have no psych evaluation 114 order.

They put me in the bubble to shut me up, to silence me, to stop me from teaching truth to the blind ignorant inmates.

In this letter I have drawn an image of the CDCR-CCPOA Mafia machine multi-billion dollar monster that holds you captive. Every time you feed the beast your money you empower the beast and the beast grows another arm.

• All prisoner telephone calls feed the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia beast.
  - All prisoner canteen purchases feed the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia beast.
  - All prisoner special purchase (Walkenhurst-access packages) purchases feed and empower the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia beast.
  - All special food sale purchases feed and empower the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia beast.
  - All prisoners who work and program in their pseudo (no pay) work/vocational/education schemes, feed and empower the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia beast.
  - When prisoners conform and comply with the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia’s underground corruption rule of forced double celling they empower the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia beast.

Stop empowering your enemy the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia. A plan + a goal + an action = freedom.

My comrades, I challenge you to ask yourselves this question: why, at a CDCR RVR 115 disciplinary hearing, does the disciplinary officer not restrict a prisoner from making purchases in the CDCR-CCPOA-Prison canteen as part of the RVR115 punishment? Because it’s part of the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia’s life blood!

Ask yourself, why does the CDCR not stop prisoners from making prison canteen purchases in the CDCR-Adseg or the CDCR-SHU? Because it’s part of the CDCR’s life blood.

They have us like blind sheep and cows ignorantly empowering them. Stop empowering the enemy. Stop helping them. 65% of all purchase money in the canteen goes to the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia beast.

The next time you give your money to the prison canteen CDCR-CCPOA-Prison mafia beast think of this image drawn for your education, think about how you’re empowering the CDCR-CCPOA-Mafia to grow another arm to incarcerate you, your son, your father, your brother, your sister, your mother, your wife, your grandchildren, your friends and comrades.

At this prison, a prisoner who is on full program who works one of their job or education or vocation schemes is classified as A1A. For an A1A prisoner the CDCR gets $45,000 a year. A prisoner who is programming and is eligible for a work or education position but none are available are classified as A2B. For an A2B prisoner the CDCR gets $35,000 a year. A prisoner who refuses to program or is in ad-seg or the SHU is classified as C-Status or D1D status. For a prisoner of C-status or D1D status the CDCR only gets $22,000 a year.

There are 37+ CDCR prisons. Each prison has 4 prison yards. Each yard has 5 buildings plus a gym full of captives. Each building has 100 cells (doubled up - two prisoners per cell). That’s 200 prisoners in the cells per building. Each building also has 40 dayroom bunks and each gym has 220 bunks. All total per prison yard that is 1,420 prisoners. And multiplied by 4 yards that is 5,680 prisoners per prison. With 37 prisons that would be 210,160 prisoner captives.

Now here’s where everything gets very ambiguous. The CDCR won’t give a clear number of prisons. They always say 37 (plus) prisons. It’s the “(plus)” that is so ambiguous. It’s what ex-pres Bush called fuzzy math that only a politician could understand.

I have been accused of this gang allegation but actually it is the prison guards at the prison, especially ISU and IGI, who are a gang, always oppressing and beating people up at their desire. I’m not sure if you have heard about how ISU operates at this place. In an attempt to catch prisoners off guard when they’re about to search for contraband, they rush into buildings and go straight to specific cells with huge pepper spray canisters on hand. When they reach their target they first start emptying out their canisters at the occupants inside, then ask questions later.

Now, when they do these raids they’re not supposed to enter the cells, but wait until the prisoners themselves put their hands out through the food port to be handcuffed or get down prone on the floor. Then they can open the door and pull them out. (They are not supposed to even use their pepper spray cans unless somebody’s safety is at risk or in immediate danger but they do it anyway.) This is a CDC policy throughout California’s prison system but it’s not what they do at this prison.

Right here they just barge in and after beating down the prisoners and cuffing them up, they literally drag them out of the cell. Also, while they’re restraining them, they always yell out loud for everybody to hear “stay down, quit resisting!” when they’re not resisting, in an effort to excuse their excessive use of force.

Later on you can hear them bragging about their abusive actions or making fun of how the prisoners were screaming. Needless to say, at the time they file their reports they always omit the part where they barge into the cells and beat down the prisoners. This is exactly what happened to me and my cell mate at the time back in December 2007, but when I filed a formal complaint against ISU they shot me down saying I took too long, that I only had 15 days to file.

The fact is, I did take longer than 15 days. It was several months actually. However, the appeals coordinator has the discretion to accept a late filing on a showing of good cause. When I explained my reasons (fear of retaliation, among other things) they simply responded that my appeal had been reviewed by the chief deputy warden in accord with AB05/03, and further suggested that I “research this in the law library” knowing full well that prisoners in ASU do not have law library access unless they have a court ordered deadline. Just another form of oppression by higher ups…who is actually the gang in this picture?

But they want to cover up their wrongful acts by locking us away indefinitely, in spirit breaking lockup units until we parole, die or become snitches. The worst part of all is that the so-called gang allegation doesn’t even have to be proven at all. All they need is “some evidence,” under their own standards, which they often fabricate. Or like in my case, use someone else’s on somebody they want to get rid of for any reason. It’s a convenient tactic they have been using for many years and since it has given them results, it doesn’t seem like they will be changing their ways any time soon.

There’s a little over 4,200 prisoners at this institution. About 200 or more of these prisoners are level one. They are housed outside the gun towered perimeter, in what they call the minimum support facility. All of these prisoners have jobs consisting of laborer positions, from warehouse workers to clean up crews and landscaping, their wages are at a maximum of 13 cents an hour. Other jobs include dump/garbage truck drivers and car/truck maintenance. These other prisoners cannot earn more than 32 cents an hour. The rest of the population is level IV prisoners housed in A, B, C and D facilities, and two ASUs (D facility is SNY). With the exception of facility D, which has a joint venture program where about 100 prisoners earn the minimum wage. There are no other type of jobs in any of the other facilities, with the exception of support services positions such as yard clean up crews, kitchen, chow hall and a few clerical positions in education, program office, canteen, and law library. There would probably be somewhere around 150 job positions per facility with only about half of these positions being pay numbers earning anywhere from 8 cents to 32 cents an hour.

Yes, pay numbers are a joke throughout California prisons, and yes, we are being exploited to a certain degree, but not in the way that you may think. Profits are being made not so much from prisoner labor but from filling up the bed space in all of these prisons. Each prison creates more than 1,000 job positions with prison guards and medical staff being the highest number and receiving payment at about close to $50 an hour plus overtime. And it is my belief that besides the heads of the CDC, it is the prison guard’s union that is profiting the most from our incarceration.

It is no wonder they always spend millions of dollars to kill every proposition or assembly bill that goes on the ballot concerning reduction of prisoner sentences or amendments to modify their biggest accomplishment, the three strikes law. Many people benefit from crime (police officers, public defenders, district attorneys, judges, etc.), and from incarceration in state prison, the matter at issue here. All these people in turn spend money and contribute to the imperialist economy. Then, there come the contracts each warden has with many different food suppliers where a lot of money is being handed down under the table. Also, the contracts with the phone company and package vendors where a lot of kick backs go to wardens or other head officials within the CDC. So as you can see, everybody’s a winner in this game except us of course. With the biggest winner being the imperialist government, followed by CDC head officials and the prison guard’s union being the ones getting the biggest piece of the pie.

Oppresion en el SMU de Pennsylvania esta a lo más alto que nunca. Aquí es donde los peores de los peores son mandados, pero no es ninguna forma de rehabilitación, en vez es para que sean abusados. Muchos de nuestros hermanos fuertes están haciendo abusados fisica y mentalmente en un atento de quebrar y de acabar con su espirito guerillero. Nota: los oppresores temen a lo que no pueden controlar.

Es dicho que todos de nosotros que tenemos la abilidad mental para organizar la mayoría y estructrar cualquier tipo de movimiento para el mejoramiento de nuestra gente “necesitamos” ser encerrados.

El abuso en SCI Camp Hill corre muy adentro, hasta el punto en donde los debiles serán quebrados. El otro día un hermano (recien llegado) se abrió su propia cabeza en un atento para que lo cambien se lo llevaron al medico por 3 dias y lo regresaron para tras al SMU. Yo personalmente he visto mucho abuso. Yo soy considerado por la oficina central y bajo el Security Threat Group como un Blood de Nueva York de alto riesgo, y con eso me quitan mi literatura, correo, fotos y material legal (todo lo consideran “gang related”).

No podemos comprar jabón, desodorante, pasta ni loción de la cantina aunque tengamos feria en nuestra cuenta. Cada vez que pidemos copias de estas reglas nos dicen que no podemos tener eso en el SMU. Todo es considerado un riesgo a la seguridad de este campamento de concentración.

Cualquier otro lugar me ha dejado tener Notas de MIM menos aquí los oficiales no obedecen sus propias reglas y lo toman en sus manos para determinar que podemos o no tener. Yo he escrito un grievance sobre esto y un numero de violaciones aquí incluyendo riesgo de salud y estoy planiando meter un Class Action lawsuit con otros camaradas. Nuestra meta es para que cierren este lugar.

Estamos ahorita trabajando con un numero de organizationes que nos han ayudado mucho, yo escribo para que todos sepan lo serio de esta situación. Los oficiales nos golpean aunque tengamos esposas y estemos amarrados. Esto no es rehabilitación en ninguna manera pero es oppresión a lo peor! Pero de todas maneras nos mantendrémos fuerte y concentrados en cerrando este pinche lugar!!