I was studying Comrade George L. Jackson’s “Blood in my Eyes” when I
first came to know of your organization and movement. After inquiring I
was given a little more information and agreed completely with
everything that you expressed and stood for.
I’m currently serving a life sentence, though I strive each day to
relieve myself of this oppressive prison system, having gone through
this experience has been fundamental in the development of my
revolutionary consciousness. When I was running the streets the same
conditions that exist in prison where I’m at existed out there as well.
It took the compounding of these conditions that prisons create to lead
me to open my eyes. More than that, being housed and living with, and in
many cases fighting along side with, BGF, Crips, Bloods, former Black
Panthers, and others, gave me the strength and realization that there is
still much work to be done.
George Jackson has become a role model of sorts for me. His strength,
intelligence and desire for positive and meaningful change are aspects I
see within myself. Through this process of self and environmental
reflection I’ve come into my own ideas of how to affect change, and have
begun working with a couple of other comrades towards this end. But one
many can only do so much by himself, or even with a few determined
comrades.
I read about the USW (United Struggle from Within) and I want to become
a part of this. Because this prison is quick to suppress any efforts to
organize prisoners around anything that isn’t conformatory, I haven’t
heard of any others involved with the USW. But that’s not to say there
are not any. I will work from my end to affect the goals and objectives
of the USW.
The conditions of my prison are as follows: the overcrowding here is out
of control and has lead to the placing of prisoners on bunks in the
middle of the day room floors and gym, two places that were never
intended to house prisoners.
The conditions I find to be most objectionable however are those you
can’t see. Not having the access to exact numbers I can only describe
the following situation from a first hand perspective. Though I’m a
convicted murderer, at the moment I’m a level 3 prisoner, and many of my
comrades here will be heading back to the streets within the next 5
years. The education system here is worthless. A man who is given the
chance to work toward his GED isn’t given any help in the way of
actually understanding the information he’s asked to memorize off the
packet of work he’s given. The man is asked to sit in a classroom for 6
hours where he receives no instruction, and the teacher, like most of
the so-called students, is goofing off, doing everything except the work
intended. These men are fed through a worthless system where their only
requirement is that they show up.
From what I have read, education is the biggest factor in the reasons
people come to prison in the first place, and return in the second. And
yet, when money “needs” to be cut, it’s education that is the first
place they turn to. The system in my eyes hides this fact by
compensating the lack of education with an abundance of yard time. My
prison does offer a college correspondence course, one must first have
his GED and with a majority of the prisoners being unable to read
through an entire newspaper their ambitions remain as such, alone and to
themselves. So with the illusion of GED and college classes, the fact
that many of the prisoners will never participate or complete them is
hidden from those too distracted walking laps around the prison yard.
Thankfully I came in with a GED, and I am taking college classes. But
the basis of this educational system is to be laughed at.
The conditions of today’s prison system are not, in my eyes, as physical
as they once were in the 50s, 60, 70s, and 80s. Though I’m only 25 years
old, I tend to view the developing prison system as I do the development
of the New African Nation here in America. Some think that because the
physical restraints have come off and we have been given fists full of
“rights” that we’ve come along in the way of freedom. I take nothing
away from those who lived and died to achieve these rights, but the
United States is a flexible entity that has existed as long as it has
because it is able to mold itself with developing and commanding
situations. I ask myself, did slavery end because they finally work up
and realized their abuses, or did it become just too difficult to
maintain any longer? I like to believe it’s the former. The abuses of
this country or of its prison system have only receded from the front
lines where it’s most easily attacked, to the rear, where those of less
than open eyes cannot see its source.