At the end of 2012, Tecumseh State Correctional Institution (Tecumseh
SCI) made a drastic change. The administration decided to use a very
poor excuse of violence to lock the entire yard down. I believe five
fights happened in 24 hours, nobody got stabbed, cut or really messed
up. They used this as a reason to lock the entire yard down. Everyone
was only allowed to come out of their cells to eat meals, shower, and
make one phone call per day. After months of this and many grievances,
day room time became available, but any outside facilities like gym,
ball courts, or ball field were slowly added on a rotating schedule. One
hour you could go to the gym with your unit, then come right back; a
couple days later maybe an hour at the ball fields then back. We no
longer were confined only to our cells but could pretty much be in the
day rooms all day except of course during count. Eventually it shifted
to let us use the recreational facilities once per day, like ball field
Monday morning, gym Tuesday afternoon, ball courts Wednesday morning,
ball field Thursday afternoon and so on.
Recently they started a “wellness league” in which people who stay out
of the hole for one year, and refrain from misconduct reports for 6
months to a year could be allowed to “walk the yard” for a few hours
each day. This sounds good but there are administration loopholes. Like
if their snitches got in a fight and went to the hole, as soon as the
snitch got out of the hole they would be back out walking while the
other person would be in the hole another half year and then have to
wait another year just to be qualified to be on “wellness league.” Of
course any petty write-up would keep you off wellness league, and it was
a cold day in hell if any homies could make it onto wellness league. And
everyone else not on wellness league was stuck on dayroom and could
access a “mini yard” attached to their building which was basically a
fenced in half basketball court. That was life for a while.
Well Mother’s Day this year the shit hit the fan. A last minute
non-violent protest was set in motion. I say last minute because if a
protest has any planning here the yard gets locked down cause snitches
tell administration. So the protest started, simple walking around the
yard refusing to lock down until our petitions and major complains were
heard. However near the start of this a few prisoners got into it with a
couple pigs. Of course we all complied when they said “get down.” We
cooperated when asked to show our IDs and when we were told we could get
up we got up and continued marching to our protest.
Some protesters got locked in the gym so a plan to break them out to
join the protest was set in motion. A short while later staff fired a
live round with no warning into our group, going through one captive and
hitting my good friend, and they both fell onto me. Our group was
totally shocked. No chemical agents were used first, no “less than
lethal,” no pepperballs, and the guy who had the shot go through him was
bleeding bad. We put a tourniquet on his wound to slow the bleeding,
then as one huge group we carried him to medical, left him in front of
medical and moved halfway across the yard so they would come out and get
him.
Once he was safe the tension broke, the call went out, and the prison
literally started to burn. Every single faction was on the same team, us
versus the pigs. Staff got chased to the tower, everything that could be
burned was burned, bulletproof glass burned, fences came undone, people
got shot with less-than-lethal and lethal ammunition alike; only one
more live round was fired that I know of. The entire prison banded
together, offices burned, treatment files burned, office desks burned.
If the glass couldn’t be broken it was melted to allow access for other
captives. We had total control of a whole housing unit, the gym, and
half of another housing unit. We had the facility until the next morning
when finally we surrendered.
Now, for the press, the administration is trying to say this was planned
for months, because it was so exact in its execution, and that we burned
down walls only to get “targeted individuals”. Yeah right, they are
saying we did all this so we could get two people? How ridiculous!
Our new director is from the Washington state prison system. He is the
only one with a clear head. He says (in a memo sent to the whole prison)
that he couldn’t believe we didn’t do this sooner with the lockdown and
all, and never in his life has he seen such unity to get something like
this done. The warden and even the governor now believe that the
facility should permanently stay on lockdown, forever, allowing at most
minimal day room time and mini yard time if you qualify for wellness
league. Everyone else is to remain locked 2 per cell (was 3 per cell for
a while until housing unit 2 became livable again) for 24 hours a day
getting 20 minutes, twice a week for showers and telephone calls. I mean
20 minutes total, to shower and use the phone, once every 3 days. It’s
so fucked up out there.
Down here in the hole we live better than the people on the yard. We get
at minimum 3 showers a week and at minimum mini yard 5 days a week. I
assume I will be down here for a few years, hell a simple fist fight (my
first in the prison) back in 2012 landed me 13 months in isolation. This
one’s gonna be years. And I’m not the only one. Some 240 people are
getting charged. I don’t even know how many of us are now stuck in the
hole but we won’t be going anywhere any time soon.
MIM(Prisons) responds: Prisons in the United $tates are populated
with an inherent contradiction. As tools of social control targeting
oppressed nation lumpen, the people locked up are easily shown the need
for resistance and organizing against the criminal injustice system. The
powder keg of oppression and abuse in many lockdown units is easily set
off when people get together to turn their anger and pain into
resistance. This contradiction between the imperialists’ desire to
control oppressed nations, and the actual conditions of confinement
breeding resistance is just one example of how oppression creates
conditions for social change.
Protests like this one in Nebraska are steps forward in unity and
resistance. But as this comrade describes, no real change resulted, and
the active folks are now in long-term isolation. As revolutionaries we
need to figure out how to turn the righteous anger of the masses into
organized protests that can help achieve meaningful change. Sometimes in
prison we won’t get anything more than a bit of publicity and a
temporary outlet for anger, but we can do some things to increase the
chances for success. This starts with building unity and educating
people well before actions are initiated. We can run study groups behind
bars, discussing the basics of political theory and then applying what
is learned to conditions in the prison. And we need to build independent
media to report on actions in prison from the perspective of the
prisoners, so that we don’t leave it to the pigs to interpret our
actions to the public as “riots.” This preliminary work will also help
with follow-up after a protest. Even if something like what this writer
describes is set off spontaneously, it will be important to have
discipline and unity both during and after the action if we’re going to
effect any change within the system.
And for revolutionaries it is important that we help people see that we
won’t ever win this battle until we dismantle the criminal injustice
system entirely. We need to draw the connection between the prison
system and imperialism. While our current work focuses on prisons, we
can’t lose sight of the system that is behind the criminal injustice.
Our education work needs to include these connections as we help raise
the awareness of all potential future protesters and revolutionaries.