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News and Letters Editorial April 1998
Racism, oppression in prison system
Two recent events in Pennsylvania's prisons have focused attention on the racist and oppressive history and essence of the U.S. criminal "justice" system: the hunger strike by death row prisoners including Mumia Abu-Jamal at SCI Greene, in Waynesburg, and the death of Merle Africa of the MOVE Nine at SCI Cambridge Springs. Behind both of these events lies a common history of racism and legal repression.
PRISONERS' HUNGER STRIKE
At first, the hunger strikers appeared to have won a small victory over the prisoncrats. The strike began in response to a March 5 directive from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) which slashed the few rights prisoners have left. Amnesty International issued a statement describing these new measures as "draconian." For example, family visits were to be cut down to one hour per week (from a mere two hours) with no more weekend or holiday visits allowed. For family members who already have to make a six-hour trip from Philadelphia, this would be a huge blow. And prisoners' phone calls would have been limited to one fifteen-minute call per week. The DOC appears for now to have backed down on these points.
Further, the DOC had ordered prisoners' personal belongings to be confiscated. This happened without warning the day the directive was issued. Mumia Abu-Jamal described what he witnessed this way: "While [the authorities] did not attack the men themselves, they did attack personal, mental, educational and legal property. Books, underwear, sweat suits, footwear, ink pens, cosmetics, letters-everything was stripped from all. Men were given two choices. Ship or destroy. If any property could not fit into a standard record box, it could not be kept. Visits were halted, commissary food items excluded, recreational equipment forbidden." At this time this issue has yet to be settled.
The "blitzkrieg" at SCI Greene may have been a vindictive response to the recent legal victory by prisoners which allowed them the right to private conversations with their attorneys. But it is also a part of the ever-growing national trend toward depriving all prisoners of their legal rights and so-called "privileges," meaning the exercise of their basic humanity. This includes everything from the use of exercise equipment for physical health to the right to keep books. This isn't confined to Pennsylvania by any means. Prisoners also tell of reprisals visited upon them for circulating literature.
DEATH OF MERLE AFRICA
It should be noted as well that the prisoncrats are not so much worried about the prisoners having private property as they are worried about the ideas that are to be found in books, papers and personal writings becoming common property. From the grossest physical brutality to the most refined high-tech torture, the prison system is aiming to impose a total dehumanization upon its victims. And this dehumanization is part of a long history of racism that has fed the system's growth. The death of Merle Austin Africa on March 13 is the starkest possible reminder of this history.
Merle Africa, along with the rest of the MOVE Nine, had spent 20 years in prison, ever since the Aug. 8, 1978 assault by police upon the MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia in which one police officer was killed. Although it was never shown in court that any MOVE member had fired at the police, and although the judge in the case admitted that he had no idea who killed the officer, nine innocent people were given sentences of 30-100 years.
Then-Mayor Frank Rizzo was a former police commissioner who became a spokesman in the '70s for "white backlash" through a series of brutal assaults upon the Black community framed in the reactionary Nixonian rhetoric of "law-and-order." Rizzo's demonizing of MOVE was a part of this racist program. As he said after the 1978 assault which saw heavy police gunfire and water cannons directed at adults and small children alike, "The only way we're going to end them is get that death penalty back in, put them in the electric chair and I'll pull the switch." Then and later, the journalism of Mumia Abu-Jamal was the major force in attempting to break through this demonization with an honest presentation of MOVE's views and actions.
Merle Africa's sentence became a death sentence. Prisoncrats claimed that she died of cancer without being aware she had it. Friends and family questioned this, saying that she seemed to be in good health. Health care for women in prison is notoriously poor, and there are many questions surrounding her death, but one thing is beyond dispute. The last 20 years in the life of an innocent woman were taken away. This injustice is a touchstone for the entire system, which should be held to account at long last.
The refusal of prisoners like the hunger strikers at SCI Greene to accept dehumanization needs to be met by a movement outside prison walls that aims at breaking down those barriers of the mind that helped build those walls. Mumia struck this note in writing of the situation that moved his comrades to strike: "I wrote about the attack on the life of the mind. This is that attack realized."
What frightens racist politicians and prisoncrats now is that they are faced with a mind that is beginning to move, to ask some profound new questions about the system itself and to redefine a reality that has been imposed upon it. This mind is embodied in the struggle for a new consciousness within the prisons, as well as in thousands of grassroots organizations that are being formed to combat the racism and oppressiveness of this society. The question for revolutionaries is, how will we be responsible to this movement of consciousness?
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