Federal Prisons

Mail the petition to your loved ones and comrades inside who are experiencing issues with the grievance procedure. Send them extra copies to share! For more info on this campaign, click here.

Prisoners should send a copy of the signed petition to each of the addresses below. Supporters should send letters on behalf of prisoners.

John Baldwin, Acting Director, 1301 Concordia Court, PO Box 19277, Springfield, IL 62794-9277

US Dept of Justice, Civil Rights Div, 950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, PHB, Washington, DC 20530

And send MIM(Prisons) copies of any responses you receive!

MIM(Prisons), USW
PO Box 40799
San Francisco, CA 94140

Recently I was front driver on a battle for education for another inmate. The prison industrial complex had him in a kitchen job at 17 cents an hour. He has been begging for GED for some time now, only to be told no and continue to work for private corporation Aramark in the Tennessee Department of Corrections (TDOC).

I recently wrote the commissioner for the Department of Education in Tennessee, which has zero to do with TDOC. I told her how many are being denied programming and education. How is one supposed to better him/herself without an education? I said “what social interest is served by prisoners who remain illiterate? What social benefit is there in ignorance? How are people corrected while imprisoned if their education is outlawed? Who profits other than the prison industrial complex itself from stupid prisoners?” The recidivism rate for Tennessee is 55% for/in 3 years. 55% will return to prison. That’s fact. And at $64.21 per day, you tell me who profits! Not the innocent women and children who the burden falls on when you get arrested and locked up again.

MIM(Prisons) responds: These are the right questions to raise: who really is benefiting from locking up so many people and then offering no services to help these people gain education and work skills, or address problems that make it hard for them to live outside of prison?

Ultimately we don’t see any profit coming out of the actual locking up of people: it’s a net money-losing enterprise paid for by the government (i.e. by U.$. taxpayers). But certainly there are lots of businesses and individuals working in the criminal injustice system who are making lots of money off this system and who have a material interest in perpetuating it. However, these people aren’t the main ones driving the creation, expansion or continuation of prisons, which we’ve analyzed in depth in past articles. The government, who is allotting so much money to prisons, is using them for the goal of social control, particularly targeting oppressed nations within U.$. borders.

Clearly the whole criminal injustice system needs to be dismantled. But in the short term it is folks like this writer, helping out fellow prisoners, who are doing the ground work to build a united movement strong enough to win the smaller battles today and the bigger battle tomorrow.

I am writing to let you all know that at Eastham unit there are episodes of the K-2 epidemic. One person falls out we get locked down for 24 hours. Just one line. Its not in the rule book or disciplinary books, they lock you up for nothing, especially if you can’t snitch on someone.

A Lt beat me up last year, I wrote it up and my step 1 disappeared so I could not write a step 2. Also I sent my copies of everything to Huntsville, TX they sent my stuff back saying they don’t want any problems or complaints sent to them, when I got the paperwork back I was missing my medical report.

They wrote me an attempted assault on officer. When I got my time sheet they changed it to an assault on officer said it was the same thing, I still have the original case. I’m writing to ask for a Texas Pack. They took mine when they shook me down. My legal work was scattered all around and only my legal folder was gone through. I had my other papers in another folder. I get tired of retaliation and can’t do nothing about it.

Eastham is out of control, cussing us out all day long. We report it or write it up. Comes back with no proof and that we lie. The guards and rank work together.

We are not correcting bad or criminal behavior, we are not reforming lives or serving justice. We are struggling to get public attention drawn to this torture. I’ve witnessed a guard provoke a prisoner verbally, and taunt him until he had a reaction, which was then used as an excuse to assault the prisoner, claiming the prisoner acted aggressively. Implicit in nearly every interaction with the guards is the potential, the threat, of violence; every breath is a potential disciplinary infraction, or write-up. Many rules are either unknown or go unenforced, making for a milieu where a guard could enter, quite literally, any cell and find a reason to write up its inhabitant. If you have more than three books at any given time, it could be a write-up, or you put a picture of your family on or in your locker, or hang wet clothes up to dry. Almost anything can be considered non-dangerous contraband. Any guard has the power to keep a prisoners from seeing or talking to his family, a power frequently abused.

This kind of control is maddening. For the individuals who live under its influence; any refusal to comply with these instruments of violence – any lack of submission – can be met with a can of mace followed by beatings, while in restraints, and time in segregation. Meeting violent offenders with more violence, along with mental and physical torture is not an effective method of reform. It will only make the prisoners more fluent in the language of violence. And they are frequently angry, bitter and full of resentment.

I have filed grievances challenging this violation of the First Amendment and also the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments due to these prisoncrats stripping me and others of all personal property, denying access to the law library or outside recreation, and deliberately abusing grievance procedure by refusing to process any grievance that is submitted. So we ask that eyes and ears be placed upon this place because there are those offenders ready to force these prisoncrats to remove us from these cruel and inhuman conditions.

These deplorable conditions create an environment that often feels helpless and insurmountable to the prisoners who live through it. We are being oppressed and controlled, mistreated and abused on a daily basis. Some offenders have no means of addressing these abuses – even the grievance procedure is hopelessly flawed, not permitting the offenders to grieve the conduct of the guards, or any procedure whatsoever. They recognize that they are being subjected to conditions that surpass more punishment for their crimes. The parole board isn’t actually there to help us obtain our freedom, it’s there to give the illusion that it is possible, so that we may be controlled. The few that are successful will emerge as scarred, changed men, living with the knowledge and pain of what they were forced to endure, and the daily suffering that continues by the people they left behind.

On May 28 of this year a fellow inmate as well as myself were brutally beaten in handcuffs and sprayed multiple times with chemical agents off of the camera by officers, sergeants, and a Lt on this Gib Lewis Unit in Woodville, TX. Here on this unit these beatings by officers are the norm for us inmates. Most of us have little to no family support to help us voice these cruel acts of injustice to the public. We are here for rehabilitation and transformation not to be beaten to the point of traumatization. We need the public to know that the real criminals are working amongst criminal and breaking laws, rules, etc on the daily and hiding behind their uniform and rank. Assist us in this struggle for justice.

I would like for you to print my story, so that the rest of my brothers and sisters who are a part of the movement will know how I have been treated this past year.

It all started in June and July of 2016 when prisoners started passing out from smoking spice. Well because we have prisoners here who are cool with the police my name was said to them, then they came and snatched me off mainline (messing up my programming that the parole board told me to complete, so I would be able to go home). I was ad-segged in DSU. This is not an ad-seg building like I was supposed to be, where I would be able to make phone calls, have the same clothes prisoners have on mainline canteen.

So, not only was I ad-segged in the hole, but my wife was removed from my visiting list, the STM officer asked that I be ad-segged for 180 days, but the superintendent signed the paper and clearly said I was to be in ad-seg for 60 days. Well the hearing officer who used to be an officer here gave me the 180 days, even though his boss said 60 days. The STM released all the other inmates back to mainline that was under the same investigation I was under, so I filled out a discrimination form against the STM, because he was showing a complete indifference with letting them back to mainline, and keeping me ad-segged. Well the STM tried to force me to talk to the state police by telling me that they had me on tape bringing in contraband, which I knew was a lie, because I told them from the jump I know nothing about what their talking about. The STM continued to try to force me to talk, but I told the state police, and the STM that I have nothing to say, and I plead the 5th amendment. Then he threatened me with going to my wife’s house. Well, of course he never went to my wife house, because he knew that she had nothing to say to him, because she didn’t know anything.

Around November I went on a hunger strike, because the Lt Kleier wouldn’t let me use the phone, or move me to an ad-seg building. I have bi-polar, anxiety and I had to fight with mental health about putting on the right meds, so I started tripping out seeing things, thinking that people was out to harm me. I ended up writing a note to someone that I considered a friend, but remember I was hallucinating, because of my hunger strike. Well this person held on to the note where I was talking about me paying someone to hurt another person who I had no problem with, it was all of the craziness I had going on in my head. Somehow the STM ended up with the note, and because they couldn’t get me on the spice they decided to write me up for the crazy note, and have me sent to the SHU Program.

So, it’s almost been a 2 year, and after all my grievances, my tort, and my civil suit against them they come and tell me that they’re sorry for placing me on ad-seg because of hearsay, and they’re sorry for taking my wife off my visiting list, and they’re going to put my wife back on my visiting list, and that they have no evidence against me, so I’m not going to receive a write up.

Well they still sent me to the SHU program which is going to mess up my parole board hearing, so just like I told my wife I’m going to make them pay for all of this mistreatment of me and my family by getting paid on my tort claim, and my civil suit that I have against them, because during the time I was ad-segged I lost a daughter to suicide, a brother who was killed, and found out my mom is dying from throat cancer, and the only time I was allowed near a phone was when they let my wife call in and tell me the bad news, then I had to get off the phone. I wasn’t allowed to call none of my family to speak with them about how I was doing, so of course I mentally checked out, because that was too much for me to handle.

So instead of easing off me they tried to apply more pressure, but they had to admit that I had nothing to do with their bogus investigation, so now I’m fighting against them with the court system, so to all my brother and sisters that’s going thru mistreatment behind bars I want you to grab your pen, and run the ink out of it by filing grievances, tort claims, and civil suits, because that’s all that they understand and they hate for you to go over their heads, so just like they had me under investigation, now I have their bosses doing an investigation on how I was mistreated at the Oregon state prison.

I completed the drug survey from ULK 56. As the days passed I could not stop reflecting on the article “Drugs a Barrier to Organizing in Many Prisons.” Here in West Virginia dope is God and those who supply them are Messiahs. I decided to put pen to paper and add my thoughts to the discourse.

I am currently incarcerated at Mount Olive, which is West Virginia’s highest security prison. Recently the administration severely restricted our yard time. This was done to punish us for the rash of recent murders. Some of the more militant brothers started organizing a peaceful sitdown to protest. The shot-callers immediately vetoed the sitdown.

I was shocked. Then I decided to follow the money, or in this case dope. The gang leaders did not want to antagonize the prison administration out of fear that they would restrict the flow of dope. Drugs were more important than our outdoor recreation privileges.

This is not the only power that drugs have given the administration over us. To curtail the flow of K-2 into the prison we no longer receive our actual mail. We get poor quality photocopies of our mail. There is still K-2 on the compound, but the price has doubled. If prisoners cannot get K-2 through the mail how does it get in? Simple, our captors bring it in. Not only are we enriching our captors, we are increasing their control over us.

Drugs drain all the money off the compound. When prisoners are broke and dope sick they not only rob and extort weaker prisoners, they are grimey with their brothers. This increases the violence on the yard. Instead of working together to improve our situation we make it worse. No unity.

As an old head I lead by example. I abstain from all drugs and alcohol. I do my best to educate the young bloods. No, I do not have much success. As soon as I turn my back they chase the dopeman. I hate to paint such a dark picture, but the truth is not always bright. I look forward to reading the other discourses on this subject.

I am a pretrial detainee for over a year now, since May 2016. I can barely see because they took my glasses. Many laws are broken continuously here, and I am bringing a claim to challenge in the 11th Circuit. Below is a list of some conditions in this facility.

Locked down:
18-24 hours a day. No exercise equipment. Some outdoor yard time with no set schedule. Yard is the same size as a pod (minus 4 tables), about 40-50 paces in circumference. Church, hygiene, razors, free time, law library, are all incumbent of each other in time.

The loss and mishandling of my property:
Prescribed eye glasses, jewelry (very sentimental), my wallet (ID, financial cards, personal info), clothing and boots. I have not signed a receipt.

Defamation of my character:
The proliferation of pictures of me in a “turtle suit” (suicidal) with false information, damaging and harming, marring and scarring my character permanently professionally to career prospects, loved ones, community, publicly, socially on all media.

Attacks on freedom of speech:
Use of courts, protection of the laws, use of media, legal representation, support, networking, resources, by damaging and destroying outgoing mail and material.

Malevolent “medical care”:
Mishandling records, medication, evil intent, calloused deliberate indifference causing permanent damage to my psyche, eyes, organs, nervous system, joint and back.

Denied meaningful use of courts:
Would not take a police report. Inadequate representation. The law library at this jail is insufficient.

Denied protection by the laws:
Law library. Tampers with evidence and statements. Denied redress or response to viable grievances.

Subjection to adverse conditions:
No maintenance or cleaning delegation schedule. Air system ducts, vents and filters are filthy, ever dropping debris and water on inmates and in our food and drink. Extremely hot in summer and cold in winter. Busted fixtures. Showers are slick with standing water, mold, mildew, never power washed or properly scrubbed.

Medical fees:
Charged at the will of staff, often for services NOT requested, NOT rendered. Taking my funds I need to medical, hygiene, cosmetic, coffee, legal postal.

Carelessness:
With pointing tazers at my face for amusement, randomly dropping them.

Failure to supply:
Indigent legal envelopes and postage. Proper law library. Legal defense.

Retaliation:
I have ad hygiene, medical, sanitary (toilet paper), religious books, legal books, writings, taken spitefully for grievances, complaints or asking for law library, copies, phone, legal.

Prejudice:
I have been passed over the whole time for work detail, I believe because I am considered a “yankee.” I begged for better shoes for a year while everyone else got them. Everyone else gets to see their property and sign off for it. It takes weeks or months to get items.

Greetings comrades! I’m writing to report the events that have transpired through the middle of June. On June 17, 2017 at approximately 3:50pm eight correctional officers were witnessed jumping on a prisoner in handcuffs in the middle of the compound. Medical staff had to wheel that prisoner out on a stretcher. Turns out that prisoner was affiliated to the Bloods and on June 21 at first work call multiple members of the Bloods began attacking officers for their involvement in the beating.

As of now we are on a level 3 lockdown while administration tries to sort this mess out. Warden Blackwood knows his officers are responsible yet he continues to allow them to put hands on prisoners while administration covers up their dirty work. Grievances are a joke; no matter what level we file them to they will still be denied and beatings will continue.

Last year I wrote in about the brutal response on Gulf Annex to peaceful protesters. It was because of these same beatings that took place last year why prisoners at Gulf Annex had a sit down. Nothing has changed here but a calendar, until Warden Blackwood and his entire administration team are fired and replaced we will continue to suffer abuse from the hands of these pigs. We need help from the outside world by publishing these events to shed some light on what’s really going on at Gulf Annex. Responding to violence with violence is not the answer. All the loved ones we have in the free world aren’t making much a difference with they phone calls and their concerns for our well being. Maybe if the Feds looked into all these brutal attacks being swept under and start arresting these officers they’d think twice about jumping on prisoners.

“On June 19, 1963, nearly a hundred chairmen of corporations, foundations answered the call of the president of the Taconic Foundation to aid the civil-rights movement financially. Meeting at the Hotel Carlyle in Manhattan, they pledged over a million dollars to five major civil-rights groups. These leaders of finance and industry perhaps assumed that by assisting the established black organizations to secure their goals they could preclude the emergence of radicalism that would fill the vacuum if the movement failed. Whatever their intentions, these funds, and the sizable contributions from other whites and blacks, enabled the black struggle to expand, to reach more potential supporters, and to plan larger, more ambitious campaigns.” (Wedding, Vega, and Mark, 2003, pp. 186-187)

“James Baldwin’s ‘The Fire Next Time’ which forced into the consciousness of whites a new sense of the rancor of blacks and the destruction awaiting America if it did not quickly and completely change its racial ways” (Wedding, Vega, and Mark, 2003, p. 185).

He described the Afro-American’s past of

“Rope, fire, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible.” (James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” as reported by Wedding, Vega & Mark, 2003, p. 185).

This added to

“The popularity of the Black Muslims incitement of violent enmity, described by Baldwin, had first been impressed on white America by CBS’s inflammatory documentary in 1959, ‘The Hate That Hate Produced.’ The Nation of Islam was depicted as an army of black fanatics planning for the inevitable race war. Little or nothing most whites read and heard informed them of Muslim success in rehabilitating blacks that others considered beyond reclamation, or of the Muslim gospel that blacks had to conquer their own shame and poverty by adhering to traditional American virtues as hard work, honesty, self-discipline, mutual help, and self-respect.”

Things like this had a huge influence over wealthy white psyches. They began to fear these black Muslims. What I cite next took them over the edge, but Dr. King was ready to be the peaceful Negro leader solution.

“Malcolm X appeared on television more than any other black spokesman in 1963, and few whites remained unaware of his expressions of contempt for all things white, his appeal to blacks to fight racism ‘by any means necessary,’ and his insistence that the ‘day of nonviolent resistance is over.’ What often frightened whites instilled a fighting pride in blacks. An apostle of defiance, Malcolm particularly gave voice to the anger and pain of young blacks in the ghetto. His hostility and resentment toward whites epitomized their feelings, and they cheered when he preached ‘an eye for an eye,’ or when he brought ‘whitey down front.’ Such utterances expressed the rarely publicized longings of the dissident black masses. Malcolm’s insistence on black unity and the right of self-defense, and especially his affirmation of blackness and his contention that blacks must lead and control their own freedom struggle, struck still deeper chords among the many in Afro-America who demanded faster and more fundamental changes in racial conditions and called for more forceful means to achieve these ends. To them, of all black leaders, only Malcolm seemed to understand the depth of the racial conflict; and only Malcolm appeared to view the black struggle for equality as a power struggle, not a moral one. To virtually all blacks, moreover, Malcolm X stood as an implacable symbol of resistance and a champion of liberation.” (Wedding, Vega and Mark, 2003, pp. 185-186).

“The more Malcolm loomed as the alternative that whites would have to confront if CORE, SNCC and the SCLC failed, the more white officials acceded to the stipulations posed by the established leadership of the campaign for racial equality.” (Harvard Sitkoff, 1981, “The Struggl for Black Equality:1954-1992, n.p.)

Using this, Dr. King and his cronies manipulated the power holding rich whites into sponsoring the nonviolent approach to civil rights, which they gained total control of, even picking who they wanted to be recognized as black leaders. This went so far up the political ladder that the POTUS of the era was effected and partially responsible for its growth as stated in the following:

“Kennedy began to act decisively on civil rights in the summer of 1963. He did so in part because of his personal sense of morality and in part because of his calculations as party leader and chief executive on how to respond to new pressure. He needed to satisfy the millions of Americans, white and black, liberal and moderate, protesting federal inaction and wanting an end to disorder. The president also had to dampen the explosive potential of widespread racial violence and to maintain the confidence of the mass of blacks in government. Additionally, Kennedy considered it necessary to assist Farmer and King and Wilkins in securing their objectives lest the movement be taken over by extremists.” (Wedding, Vega & Mark, 2003, p. 187)

Once we see and know the truth about the fear and jealousy that King and his cronies had for the Nation of Islam in the persons of Honorable Elijah Mohammad and Malcolm X whose membership was growing exponentially in 1963-1964, which the nonviolent wing of the civil rights look at as a rival or even worse a direct enemy. What motivated King and his cronies was not the people’s needs. It was power, influence and money. What is not discussed is that by many blacks Dr. King was a sellout in his own time. Later on Dr. King smartened up and became aware of the true enemy of the people, i.e. capitalism and wage inequality, which lead to housing and consumer inequality. He was assassinated before he could make this address on the Washington lawn. Killed by the capitalistic system as an example to show who controlled the movement and what was and wasn’t allowed to be talked about. The slave master’s name is not “whitey.” Its name is “capitalism”, which is the creator of poverty. Just ponder what happened to Johnnie Cochran when he decided to take on the United States on the issue of reparations for the slaves’ descendants. Mysteriously Johnnie checked out on some cancer shit.

We should all wake up and see our enemy!

In response to Sex Offenders Reconsidered in ULK 55, I am both in agreement as well as opposition. Let me explain. I am a sex offender who hates and believes that pedophiles and rapists should stay pariahs. But yet I am stuck in that category even though what I did, in 1990, should not have been a sex crime. I dated a girl who was 15 years old when I was 17.5 years old. We were in high school together. A 2.5 year difference. I turned 18 and she was 15.5 years old, 6 months shy of Florida’s 16-year-old consent law. Anyway, I was convicted and am now considered a CHO-MO (child molester) who has to register for the rest of his life and can never go into the general population, where I feel I should be so that I can join the struggle for better prison conditions.

MIM(Prisons) responds: We get a lot of letters like this one, from people who were convicted on sex offenses but do not fit the stereotypical image of a violent rapist or child molester. This is good evidence for why we never trust the criminal injustice system to tell us who are the real criminals. There is a long Amerikkkan history of convicting people from oppressed nations in particular of false sex crimes just to put them “in their place.” We refuse to allow the Amerikan government this power.

With that said, there are definitely people who have committed terrible crimes against the people, both sex offenses and other offenses, both inside and outside of prison. This is something that a revolutionary government will need to address. We do not think that there is some essence of a person that makes them incorrigible and a criminal for life. Instead we think the capitalist patriarchy molds people to do terrible things, and it will be up to a revolutionary society to re-mold these folks into productive members of society. That will start with self-criticism and a solid understanding of one’s errors and then agreement on how and why ey needs to change.

We’re not in a good position to enforce this right now because we just don’t have the resources or the power. And we know that it will take serious work for people who have committed anti-people crimes like rape and murder to reform and become productive members of a revolutionary society. But anyone who has committed crimes against the people and wants to take up revolutionary work today can still be judged by their work and their political line. We encourage these folks to engage in serious self-criticism. We are here to help with that. But we know that thorough reform and change will be very difficult under the patriarchy/capitalism. In the mean time we are only able to judge people by their practice. Even people who used to be cops, or fought for the Amerikan military, or committed serious sex crimes can take up revolutionary work and we will welcome that work.