Utah Prisons

I’ve seen them walk in with the bleach
Goose stepping out with the rifles
Bloody fragments and bone in blonde hair
Brand new Casio watch, new shoes, clean underwear
The traces of the dead man’s Prozac
Ulcer medications and ibuprophins
Mingle loosely with the trigger mens viagra
with their cocaine and caffeine grins
Where you off to now Mr. Executioners?
After you’ve lynched in the most disgusting way
you are off to your grandchild’s christening
to her prom night or school play
my sweat drips on to the cold concrete and I chant, i say, “you can’t stop us,
it’s inevitable. Soon all you know will fall.”
Tattered socks scrape and squeak as I motion
I raise my arms and tap my chest, “ten”
counting out the sets and counting down the days
here’s a promise that I believe the people support
we won’t blindfold you, we’ll allow you to watch
you’ll need to see the ones now holding the rifles
are the very same you’ve oppressed, starved and stifled
and we will pull the trigger out of social conscience
not out of your racism, greed or chauvinistic pride
and it will not be a secret, the world can watch
nothing will need to be hidden or secret
because we’ll explain why, to our children we’ll teach it
that the reason we kill you pig isn’t out of hate
it’s that food you stockpiled that the starving masses never ate

In just days our comrade Ronnie Garner will be shot to death by trigger happy pigs at the Utah state plantation. Line upon line of trigger happy swine congregate. Just itching to be one of the five to open fire on an unarmed, seated, shackled and waist chain and cuffed human being. Tickets are sold out with standing room only for one of imperialist Amerikkka’s favorite shows. A lynching. High def, surround stereo sounds reports of five rifles, four loaded, just what the ignorant chauvinistic piles of racist shit needed to return the old bounce to the abusive, greedy step.

Settler nation. Thieving cowardly nation. As those rifles hollow-pointed slugs tear through an unpremeditated killers beating heart. As five premeditated murderers slay a man who was threatened with such a demise for centuries. As the state treated all his ills for this long, from ulcers to dandruff, and now sees fit to just blow his chest out his back for sport. All you across this doomed Americur$e know this. I scream anti-imperialism with two fingers in the air. Fuck you too Amerika!

As the Mexican border walls get higher and higher to keep starving people off Amerikan streets, Amerikur$e ships/flies ton upon ton of military might and fattened U$ soldiers to Iraqi/Afgani streets. “Hypocritic swine,” I scream. You rich fucks in the oval office who smoke “illegal” smuggled Cuban cigars and have sex with children, prostitutes, each other. I scream socialist proletarian justice and have your spots chalked out in my mind for your firing squad$.

As all eyes turn to this Utah lynching of a tied, seated man. Dandruff and cavity free. Let us not forget the masses toothless with lice who sharpen blades in leaky lean-to. Let us never forget the millions who starve to death yearly because the U$ snakes see fit to not feed them as there is no profit in it.

As I approach release from USP after two plus years down in this UINTA One control unit. And bid ‘fare-in-martyrdom-well’ to a fellow political prisoner of war I scream again. What do I yell you ask? Is it revenge at the cost of my life or a light show on the ten-o-clock news? A blaze of glory?

Fuck no comrades. It’s to the library I go and to your piggy drug abuse classes. It’s to the parole office I go smiling. Because there isn’t a dope pipe or ‘pigs-brains-on-concrete’ that can get me as high as this anti-imperialist struggle does. I’ll play your games and beat you at them you cowardly pigs and then some. No more will I be your puppet to dance and justify these wars on crime/drugs. To justify these killer fascist koncentration Kamps.

You’ll lose Amerika. You will. And on that day we’ll truly see who gets the firing squad. Might even give your overweight, liposucked fat racist asses a running start too.

Power to the people!

MIM(Prisons) adds: Ronnie Garner is scheduled to be executed by firing squad on June 18, 2010, but his lawyers are working to appeal. We do not know Mr. Garner or the details of his case.

I started reading [The Straight Scoop from Charlie Daniels (see excerpt below)] with the thought, “Oh, he has some good music” and ended up with the, “never again will I listen to country music.” All country music is patriotic, racist pig rhetoric. Take old Toby Keith’s bullshit soldier songs.

Motherfucker, Charlie Daniels, those Taliban have been victims, their land was invaded, their wives and children murdered… Let’s see your pussy ass go through that and not have a heart attack!!!

It’s his conviction that he’s so right that’s frightening. And he is amerika. The epitomy of the average amerikan right there. Ignorant, proud, uppity, evil, wrong!

The Straight Scoop from Charlie Daniels… I’ve just returned from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba Naval Air Station base where we did three shows for the troops and toured several locations around the post visiting with some of the finest military personnel on planet earth. The kids seemed to really enjoy the shows and especially liked “This Ain’t No Rag, It’s A Flag” and “In America.” … The truth is that these scum bags [Taliban detainees] are not only being treated humanely, but they are probably better off health wise and medically than they’ve ever been in their lives.

MIM(Prisons) responds: Charlie Daniels is taking up the Michael Moore (maker of the film Sicko) amerikan populist line on health care. MIM(Prisons) calls for the u.$. to provide universal health care to all people in countries under u.$. occupation, while white nationalists get indignant because a thousand prisoners of war get medical attention while they are tortured in long-term isolation. Daniels thinks long-term isolation is humane, and is pissed off that they are getting such good health care. This is amerikan chauvinism at its finest as our comrade points out.

Any humynist would be pissed off that the only way Third World people have been able to get decent health care under imperialism is by being captured and tortured by the imperialists. At home, with their family, such care is not available. Racists like Daniels and Moore think Afghans and other Third World people get what they deserve, while amerikans need more when they have access to Viagra, boob jobs and an endless list of medical technology that is purely recreational and not related to survival.

Everything you are
is everything I hate
Everything you love
is everything I ain’t
I want to live
you are already dead
I struggle to achieve revolution
Divesting knowledge like you do bread
The day your obese heart stops
and all you know ceases to exist
I’ll still be sweating truth
Your daughter my wife, you not missed
Keep me here for years
but know the longer I stay
my mind’s building the future
how it’ll be one day
Understand I’m a man now
not that weak confused child
What pain you caused me growing up
will return, boomerang, anything but mild
For now I sit
starved, rattling my chains
but I’m stronger for this
You weaken by the day!

While reading MIM Theory 11: Amerikkkan Prisons on Trial about how all United $nakes prisoners are political prisoners, and most all of these are oppressed nations, it made me question if maybe these statistics differ much in the state of Utah?

The Utah population is mostly white, so much so that over half of us convicts in these chambers are white. This statistic must really be an anomaly in the overall U.$. percentage rate of those incarcerated. Of course it’s poor whites who can’t afford lawyers who are caged here. But what saddens me to my very soul is seeing these whites running around with swastikas saying they love Amerikkka. Saying it’s not the unjust in-justice system that targeted them for slavery but it was because they chose this path, they chose not to work and slang drugs. Did they choose too to have their fathers and uncles institutionalized, I ask? Where was your father growing up, where was your dad when you were starting to buck the system that you supposedly love so well? Not in prison? So your son is now destined for the very same fate as you and your father…and you love this system?!

We were served hot dogs for the fourth of July and these people, my peers, were happy. Yelling out on the tier, “Happy fourth of July.” I screamed back, “Fuck Amerika!” If we wasn’t all in solitary, the looks on their faces would of made the Mona Lisa frown. The audacity of this Communist to say “fuck Amerika.” We got hot dogs and fireworks, they say, we have it much better than prisoners elsewhere.

Is this what we’ve come to now? Even though our families are ripped apart, severed from each other like so many heads from chickens. Now it’s our fate to run around headless, knowledge-less, happy that our captors (with swastikas too under sleeves and on hearts) feed us a damn hot dog!

As a child I remember visiting my father here at the Draper prison and even then I felt anger at him and a sort of disgust. Isn’t that how they feel on T.V. about criminals? Isn’t that how I should feel, too? Well I did. I hated him. His very own son. And why? Because that’s what I was “taught” to do. I was mind-fucked into hating my very own father the same way these lumpen racists are mind-fucked into loving a country that takes everything from you but a damn hot dog.

Now I’m the one that’s hated when mail call or visiting comes around, (“Whats wrong with you?” looks hidden behind what could have been smiles). I see my nephew’s face and the hostility there masked, just barely, and I want to grab the little guy and tell him, whisper, don’t listen to them man! Little buddy wake up! Wake up! But visiting is over and mother and grandmother won’t allow any of that “revolution” talk in front of the child, let alone any truth in letters. Return to sender. Return to ignorance. Is this how you felt, pops, at our visits? Was that why you looked at me that way? Was it pleading? As you sit in “population” or “Lone Peak work release” and I struggle here in solitary supermax, my brother in county jail, uncles and aunts in CUCF, I understand now. But it took me twenty seven years to do so, twenty seven years of self-hate, suicidal thoughts, homicidal anger, clouds of drug smoke and alcohol fog.

All I ask you sick, demented, money hungry, cold, imperialist nation is one hour. You and me alone in a dark alley. Put down that fascist oppressive stick and take off that bullshit white power mask. We’ll see who is the better man. Even with my malnourished body and soul, you’d be the one on the cold concrete, Uncle Sam. You’d be the one eating garbage, unable to get up. Every fiber of my being is now tied up with the Maoist Internationalist Movement. I, or my son, or my son’s son will take up the gun beside the people when revolution calls. It’s not going to stop until we stop it.

Most of the time we don’t even realize anything’s going on. Hell, how could we when we have hot dogs?! We must find a way to wake everybody up to what’s happening. It’s up to us, the youth of today’s generation, to figure out how best to halt the ignorance, to wake them up! The old to teach the new and the new to redo or reinvent strategy, reinvent new agitations, new minds who maintain the same line and disciplines but with a spin on dissemination, essays, and politics.

Of course the world knows what time it is but in order for our part of the revolution to have enough strength, enough firepower and muscle to take down the bourgeoisie, we need all hands on deck. We can’t be having our own family and peers wearing the wrong colors and waving the wrong flag. In my eyes those who won’t listen to the truth, who won’t take their eyes off the Seinfeld reruns, family included, those are the ones who will first trip up the movement. They’ll give the pigs the momentum to take us down. Personally I’m in prison because a family member called the kops. The more I’m learning, the more I understand the underground status, and believe it applies universally. And that’s what makes it difficult to lead by example or spread the word. This contradiction is an important one and I think the answer or solution is right here in us, in the youth. We just have to realize this.

I send strength to all comrades worldwide. As one!

{Saved by the bell

we are made this way,
then punished for being this way!
be afraid motherfuckers
its back to school today.}

MIM(Prisons) adds: Yes, Utah is an anomaly. The Black nation makes up half of the U.$. prison population, while representing about 12% of the overall population. And that is one legacy of the material basis for building socialism among Blacks and not whites. We should try to ally with all who can be allied with, but as we see Amerikans “waking up” they are too often turning to fascism.

Actually, this is a good test case for the “re-proletarianization” of the United $tates. Some argue that we must organize Amerikans now in a mass movement for socialism because as imperialist crisis advances they will become proletarian again. First of all, Amerikans have never been a proletarian nation. They began as an oppressor nation over the indigenous people of the Americas, followed soon after by African slaves and countless other peoples throughout history.

Utah prisons are an interesting example because we actually have a majority white population losing their economic privilege as well as facing extreme repression. And technically, a portion of them are even being economically exploited. An economic collapse in the u$ will not suddenly cause a boom in industry, so a lumpenization is a more accurate description of what will occur than a proletarianization. In this sense, the Utah case study parallels the hypothetical future Amerika pretty well.

So, what is the result? A minority of whites, like our comrade here, will become radicalized towards finding solutions to the inherent contradictions in the system. The majority of whites will cling to their heritage and wave Amerikan flags and scream white power.

All U.$. citizens are criminals–accomplices and accessories to the crimes of U.$. oppression globally until the day u$ imperialism is overcome. All U.$. citizens should start from the point of view that they are reforming criminals. Comrades like the writer are already well on their way to becoming contributors to a brighter future for humynity.

To protect and serve or belittle and torture?
It’s the same to me, to them I’m not sure
Kind of feels like these pigs they feel that
They enjoy our deaths, our “suicides” and body bags
Abu Ghraib wasn’t a fluke or freak of nature
Those atrocities pale in comparison to what I see here
Except this stuff’s o.k. if we’re Amerikans?
Faces filled with expressions of understanding
Loving benevolence as if they’re doing me favors
And I’m deserving of my cage, not a slave here
Questioning my motives, like “Why’s he fighting back?”
Your corrections made me this way, that’s real as a heart attack.

Greetings comrades! I am writing to you today to first and foremost thank your organization for all the work being done to educate the sleepers.

I received your notice and letter about the pigs refusing the literature you sent to me. I was not even issued a copy of the rejection slip by the prison mail room. They are by policy required to notify prisoners of any and all mail refused by the facility, but following policy is not of concern to the oppressors! I am glad to have received ULK #7. There was plenty of good info in there and I have passed the newsletter around to others.

In regards to money being made by the prison, I am a witness to the way prisoners are performing cheap labor in this hell hole as the prison gets contracts with outside corporations. For example, UCI (Utah Correctional Industries) employs prisoners to make products for any corporation including the united states military. The prisoners are paid anywhere from 90 cents to $5.45 to work for UCI an hour. They must give back 60% of their total pay to the prison. So each prisoner is roughly making $1,144.50 a month, but they only bring home roughly $400 bucks after the prison gets their cut off top.

Then the prisoner must turn around and buy food off of commissary, which is extremely overpriced. So the prison is again making money. The UCI job is the best one as far as pay, that a prisoner can get.

The section jobs (in house stuff like food handler, section cleaner) only pay $62 a month. These jobs are what keep the prison functioning and the pay is a joke to say the least. There are not enough pigs to fill the positions prisoners hold and if the convicts would stand in solidarity to demand higher pay it would make some changes have to be made or the institution would not function.

Yet problem number one is the lack of solid convicts who will stand as one against the oppressors. Number two is that only a handful of prisoners have any income from family or friends, so they must work and accept the low pay, just to purchase general needs such as soap, deodorant and other hygiene.

The system is well designed to stay with a full belly at the expense of the poor, oppressed prisoners it houses. Prisons are huge money makers for somebody, and its time for the people to come to power and take control of our environments to live righteous lives!

Keep up the good work MIM!

P.S. Here’s a list of some more jobs that prisoners perform to keep this place running: laundry services, food prep, grounds keeping, plumbing, and the UCI makes all clothes issued to prisoners and for purchase of commissary.

Here at Utah’s plantation they’ve cut jobs that used to pay $60 a month to just $7 a month and thrown out a lot of positions. So one guy does the work of what used to take several. The prison does manufacture houses in their carpentry program, and UCI commisary has convicts making sweats and shorts down in Gunnison, then selling these products back to the U.$ and community. I’ve been out of population for a year now but the above is what I was seeing at that time.

Since I last wrote to you I’ve been studying with MIM(Prisons) cell study course and had the privilege of seeing one of these punk pigs here at the Utah Supermax solitary unit fired. Not only was Feikert fired for sexual misconduct, but it seems he’s pursuing a lawsuit himself against the DOC. Let them bite each others swine throats I say. He’s back at work though on some form of legal matter but hopefully not for long.

The interview with Mfalme Sikivu in ULK 7 was right on and I respect what he and the UFD are doing. Though the comrade from Texas’s words were the most heartfelt I believe. I think we should all try harder to see things for what they really are instead of putting our own personal slant on issues. Being a realist for sure isn’t the easiest way to be but it’s the truest.

Take for example my comrades here in UINTA One solitary. Day in and day out these pigs taunt and seek reactions so they can keep us here longer or take all our stuff and place us on strip cell. Most comrades are wise to that approach but it’s when these pigs turn us against ourselves that most convicts become tricked into acting out.

I don’t see how some people can become friends and sit there talking to these pigs. You see my friend just hanged himself and the next day I hear ”I don’t care about you pieces of shit, I never lost a single moment of sleep over you scumbags” or “Spider went home, 4a, Hoopers on early release” as they laugh like it’s funny.

To my comrades in neighboring cells no matter if they’re white or black, I will be beside all you comrades when revolution is necessary. I see the economic recession as just another sign the U.$. is weakening and I can feel the anger turned to knowledge in each of your ULK submissions. I’m glad to be a part of MIM.

Imperialism is the enemy first, all this other shit second but it’s not time to just wait for a movement. We are the movement, every time one of us wins a lawsuit or cracks a law or history book we win. Slowly we’re winning, growing, learning.

Just keep your heads up out there, especially those sitting in these solitary dungeons. It’s not east-side west-side, it’s the oppressed-side. We are all family in this and we are going to take the power back because we speak truth, we bleed justice.

I am alive today because of MIM and the ideals I’ve learned there. The anger’s not focused inward anymore, but outward towards learning how to better myself instead of destroy myself. Because they want us to go off, they want us to die. It’s what they don’t want that scares them, that gets through to them. They fear real equality, justice and peace. I mean their minds can’t grasp the possibility of liberty for all. It’s our jobs to blaze a trail, to show the way.

Budget cuts here at the USP have knocked indigent envelopes down from 5 a week to just one a week which is hateful. The fact that paper got cut too from 25 pieces a week to just 5 is a matter I’m grieving (freedom of expression) because we here in the hole aren’t allowed to buy any writing materials other than 15 envelopes a week. So we (some of us) have 15 envelopes but only 5 pieces of paper.

I’ve spent my whole life being angry and confused with law enforcement, the U.$., and just people in general. In my confusion I’ve taken my anger out on the pigs these past fourteen years, with many assaults on officers, attempting to disarm an officer, anything to rebel against this system of lies everybody has fully embraced and accepted.

I’ll admit for a while there I was beginning to believe I was the problem: not having pride in the Amerikan troops in Iraq like the rest. Hating these pigs for giving my father the raw deal over and over. My whole life witnessing my family deteriorate by losing touch with each other because most all of us are felons. Never being able to fight back because there’s not enough money to fight these charges, paying fines eternally.

I want to thank all the comrades who put the word out about your beliefs and platform because my blinders are off because of all your hard work. You see I’m currently in Utah’s UNITA One facility. It is Supermax solitary, or intensive management unit (the hole), for just plain anger related incidents. I came to prison this time for attempting to disarm a pig. I figured I’d take one of them fuckers out at least, and my life would seem worthwhile or my family would feel the utter hate I have for these people who have destroyed everything I hold dear through their constant harassments.

I’m 26 years old, just eight months ago I wrote to the Maoist Prison cell, seeking reading materials to pass the time. These past eight months I’ve become almost drunk on all these misconceptions. I’ve been exposed to the truth. I feel anger still, but it’s not at those small town pigs, it’s at the imperialist pigs who run the U.$.

Now there’s a whole bigger picture and I want to contribute to the struggle. I see now it’s like they wanted me to go off so they could just brush me aside and either kill me or place me in a cell. I feel the rightness when I read Mao’s words and see the total wrongness in this system, in these CO’s eyes as they torture us, force medicate us. I was very close to just succumbing to these offers of medications. Like I said I thought it was me who was wrong, seeing Amerika as evil. My struggle brought me here though, and I’m happy for that because my mind’s just been seeking the rhyme and reason and my back’s been strengthened enough to put my weight behind just such a cause.

I smile now at these COs when they toss my cell or write me up. I laugh at these psychiatrists when they tell me I need medication. I feel pity the same way a person feels pity on a weaker boxer in a title bout. For these pigs, they’ll lose.

So for now I’ll continue my study and contribute all I’m able to the fight with hopes of gaining enough wisdom to spread the message to a lost soul like I was someday. I’m literally the only prisoner in my section (the hole) who is not all zoned out on medications. I was very close to being unable to even struggle with anything but my own medicated thoughts - out of despair I came close to just getting on medication. Yet my drugs is in my exercise knowing there’s many years ahead to fight a just cause. My drug’s in the look on these guards faces when a grievance causes loss of jobs, positions and face. I live now in a torture chamber, the lowest possible position (except death row three sections down) a man can be in. But I see myself rising to the most high position possible: comrade in a struggle to bring true justice to the world’s population.