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News and Letters Essay Article March 1998
From the streets to the prisons-Black mind in revolt
by Gene Ford
"The emphasis must be on the transformation of mentality. We are revolutionaries because we believe in revolution as our protein, vitamin of life. We believe in the human element to revolt against oppressing forces. We believe in this new mentality as the ultimate and only guide to freedom."
-Hugo ' Pinell, imprisoned since 1964
The character of America is dominated by racism. Its heart is a chamber in which people of color are locked. In this prison society some are locked up while others are locked out-unemployed, welfare cut, and unrecognized. Still others, especially whites, have the key and are free to roam about and control.
POST-LA REBELLION BACKLASH
The streets of South Central Los Angeles are a reflection of prison existence. The violent-by-nature LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) dominates those streets with rifle butt, billy club, gun fire and fear. The recently reported drop in the murder rate in Los Angeles is viewed by the politicians as a success story of this "war on crime."
Stiffer sentencing and the "three strikes and you're out" law are credited with the drop in crime. What is not reported is that these laws have increased the murder and attempted murder rate of the police themselves. What is also not reported is that the 1992 Gang Truce in Watts, not the LAPD, is responsible for the decrease in "gang related deaths."
Yet, the Gang Truce, which dates from the time of the 1992 LA rebellion, has been attacked by the politicians and the LAPD. With the Truce, the community, especially the youth, claimed their own reality of housing projects like Jordan Downs, Imperial Courts and Nickerson Gardens that contain so much of the intense poverty and gang activity of Watts and South Central LA.
The police have never stopped being against the coming together of factions of Crips and Bloods, and have set out to destroy any unity. This unity is itself a conscious uprising that has proven to be more powerful than the original founders of the Truce may have realized. The state sees its power and seeks to destroy the peace. The police systematically distribute leaflets that promote the assassination of police officers as an excuse to crush the peace.
Following the appearance of these leaflets the police riot against peaceful gatherings of mothers, children, and grandmothers who feel a need to come together after 20 years of being divided by railroad tracks, a street, or gang affiliations. Ever since the '92 LA rebellion the LAPD has been mopping up anything they see as a threat to their control of the community. The police have been out for revenge for that rebellion, which saw the whole community put down the LAPD, while Black elected officials continue to say and do nothing to ease the pain inflicted by the LAPD on the Black community.
The laws that have been passed in the state of California in the six years since the LA rebellion such as three strikes (Proposition 186), the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, and all the cutbacks in welfare and education, have made California the proving ground for this country's reactionary backlash. White America, from liberal to conservative, experienced a new kind of "white flight"-fear that they had nowhere else to run and that what they had in common was property to protect.
The cowardice and revenge of this backlash was seen recently with the LAPD's harassment of Damian Williams on trumped-up charges of parole violation. Damian is one of the LA 4+ defendants who was convicted five years ago for the alleged assault on Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, at the corner of Florence and Normandie during the rebellion. The other defendants were also violated as soon as they were released.
This kind of police repression has been ongoing since the LA rebellion. Only weeks after the revolt a unity party held at Jordan Downs, 500-deep with gang and family members from the Watts projects, came under attack by the LAPD. There had been no violence until the police showed up to disperse the peaceful crowd who had come to express the strength of their unity (Watts love). Before the police showed up if people came into the gathering and attempted to provoke a fight they were removed by a security force chosen beforehand by the different sets participating in the unity rally.
It wasn't until the Metro police and the CRASH unit of the LAPD showed up at the park that violence occurred. The police formed a line of about 80 cops in riot gear and forced people to go through their gauntlet, using batons to beat people exiting the park. One nine-year-old had his nose broken, others were choked out and stomped, some were arrested for assault on the police when the police were the ones doing the assaulting. Despite this, the LAPD has not been able to kill the Truce in six years.
WAR ON PRISONERS' RIGHTS
That however has not stopped the steady incarceration of the ghetto poor. Nor has it stopped the state's attack on prisoners' rights inside the prison walls. Recent legislation attempts to turn the massive California prison population of 156,000 inmates (which grows by 10,000 each year) into statistical non-existence with bigger and taller walls to contain the real human element inside.
California's new prison laws limiting prisoner rights are aimed at dissolving those rights that the prison movement fought long and hard to get enacted 30 years ago. California's current governor Pete Wilson is reversing prisoner rights laws that former governor Ronald Reagan was forced to enact under pressure of the mass movement of the 1960s and '70s.
New restrictions include removal of law books from prison libraries, random drug testing, ban on overnight visiting privileges for prisoners serving life sentences, ban on packages sent from the outside, and removal of all weight-lifting equipment. These new restrictions are nothing less than an act of war on prisoners.
Matthew Jay, 30, serving 15 years to life at Solano State Prison for a second-degree murder conviction in Los Angeles is one of thousands of prisoners whose home is a bunk in a prison gym. The strain of overcrowding is an overwhelming fact of prison life. Lifting weights is one of the few things that relieves the strain and frustration, Jay said. Without it tensions rise. However, he's more worried about the loss of law books: "If that access is taken away, we are no longer in a prison. We are in a war camp, like prisoners of war. When rights are violated, we're left with no alternative but to react."
"The system excludes and debases the human rights of the people, the system has no concern for the people's welfare or their lives. All around us and above us force is the weapon used against the people's will. Here inside the concentration camp these attitudes are more to the extreme. We are like the people outside of the prison walls, forced into resisting."
-John Clutchette, Soledad POW Brother
The Black masses today live in urban and prison ghettos equal in alienation. But the criminalization and imprisonment of Black life demands a confrontation with ourselves beyond the identity the state is attempting to destroy. We must push beyond the horror of this reality to reach a new beginning in social existence and in thought.
A new movement is growing behind the high-tech security, the maximum isolation measures, the shatter-proof glass, steel bars and concrete walls of such gulags as California's infamous Pelican Bay S.H.U. (Security Housing Unit). The state's attempt to isolate and destroy reason with facilities like Pelican Bay has instead created a confrontation with self that has opened the door to the mind. Out have stepped "guerrillas in the mist" of a system that creates its own gravediggers.
Soledad Brother George Jackson characterized this relationship of force to what it creates this way: "When the prison gates blow open the real dragons will fly out." Jackson didn't live to open those gates. Instead his written words sustained him: "I want something to remain to haunt him [Ronald Reagan], to make him know in no uncertain terms that he did incur this n--- 's sore disfavor."
In 1998, this spirit of George Jackson continues to haunt the state in the form of the "new Afrikan political prisoner movement."
"Ninety-five percent of the new Afrikan political prisoners, POWs and politically active prisoners are isolated in solitary confinement, control unit prisons and segregation units. I myself have been in isolation for the past 14 1/2 years-but many of us have been able to use what was meant to destroy us as a means to help build our liberation movement. This isolation affords us the opportunity to seriously focus our intellectual capacity on those issues which are of great concern to our people/community. I have for the last nine years devoted at least 80% of my time towards analyzing the science of crime, criminology, the new Afrikan criminal mentality and the role this KKKovernment has played in all this. Thus, we have criminology 101."
-"New African Institute for Criminology 101"
The "New Afrikan Institute for Criminology 101" is a writing by Abdul O. Shakur and Mutawally J. Kanbon, two new Afrikan prison activist-theoreticians incarcerated at Pelican Bay. Their manual is an attempt to confront the mentality of state institutional racism, that is, how crime and the identification of images of crime with Black and Brown faces gets reflected in the American mind. On the college level this "Bell Curve" mentality is being ingrained in the consciousness of students. Criminology 101 confronts head-on the criminalization of populations of color.
GEORGE JACKSON: FIGHTING IMPRISONMENT OF THE MIND
This "new Afrikan prison movement" within the California prison system has its roots in the philosophy and writings of George Jackson: Soledad Brother and Blood In My Eye. Jackson showed that it wasn't only physical strength but mental seriousness that threatened the prison system at San Quentin. He characterized young people like himself who were denied a decent education or job and who therefore had to teach themselves to read and write as "lumpen-proletarian intellectuals." Their greatest weapon against their oppressors was the liberation of their minds.
George Jackson showed in his writings that survival is not alone a question of economics. Behind the prison walls extortion, drugs, prostitution, and gambling exist just as they do on the streets. The battle not to allow the inhuman conditions of being in prison to imprison the mind also goes on.
Jackson was a forerunner of Mumia Abu-Jamal though their prison sentences are different. Mumia is on death row today in Pennsylvania, and Jackson at 19 was given an indeterminate one year to life sentence in 1961 for a $70 gas station robbery. He had been in for 10 years when he was murdered on the plaza outside the Adjustment Center at San Quentin by shots from a gun tower. Prison authorities characterized it as an escape attempt that left three guards and two tier tenders dead with their throats cut.
Even though Mumia faces a death sentence, his struggle and writings have made people conscious anew of prison conditions today. Jackson was also given a death sentence because of his political thought and struggle. He spent most of his life in the prison system fighting against repressive laws as an "outlaw," from the youth authority to the adult system. Jackson was no angel; many people who are caught up in the system are not "innocent." But what was key for Jackson and today is how the transformation of the prisoner's mentality can take place behind the prison walls. In George Jackson's case:
"I was angry. I was in prison and I looked around for something that would really bother these cats. Well, I couldn't find anything that bothered them more than philosophy. I gave everyone a chance. I gave Adam Smith as much attention as I gave Karl Marx. But Smith's whole point was to justify the bourgeoisie and because that was his aim, his conclusions were strained. The things I read in Marx made more sense."
Jackson went on to say that he and other comrades attempted to transform the Black criminal mentality into a Black revolutionary mentality. This attitude to the mind of the imprisoned as the key to the struggle can be found throughout Mumia's writings. It is also reflected in the preface written by Julia Wright, the daughter of Richard Wright, for Mumia's new book Death Blossums:
"Resolutely on'a move... Mumia makes us understand that 'free' men and women can imprison and arrest their own revolution just as 'inmates' can set free a boundless revolution of the mind. As Frantz Fanon, the late psychiatrist and freedom fighter, wrote in Wretched of the Earth, 'Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land and from our minds as well.'"
In theory and in practice, the new Afrikan consciousness among the youth, street soldiers hardened and educated by prison time, has been reinforced by the 1992 LA rebellion and the Gang Truce. The Watts Gang Truce has influenced Latino gangs to call a truce among themselves as well. This peace movement has spread from the streets to California's jails and prisons:
"In Men's Central Jail, while being processed out of state prison, Darren 'CW' Williams, 36, said being a shooter on the streets is no longer something to be proud of inside prison walls. 'Don't think you can shoot a brother and come up in here and think you gonna get any love,' said Williams, who served 13 years for murder. 'That ain't gonna fly anymore. You ain't getting any stripes for killing a brother.'"
WOMEN, PRISON, AND REVOLUTION
Along with this new prisoner consciousness has also come a new prison subject-women prisoners. The conditions of women prisoners are worse than those of men. While many are imprisoned for the same crimes, there is a double standard in the law, especially when it comes to women defending themselves against the violence of their spouses. Many put up with years of abuse to themselves and their children until they are killed. Many women also strike back in self-defense. However, the state will not hear their self-defense pleas. Instead, women are usually convicted and sent to prison for life.
"It is impossible to think that a man who lived through what a woman lived through would have been seen as a criminal. A man held at knife point, beaten with fists, kicked, pistol whipped, tied up and left for hours to listen to his children in the next room being beaten and then released to be brutally sodomized would not have ever been arrested on murder charges if he finally got free long enough to shoot the perpetrator. He would more likely be given praise and viewed as a hero defending his life and the lives of his children. But she is still serving time on second degree murder charges. As if what she has already been through is not enough, the prison time she is doing is filled with all the degrading and dehumanizing efforts that the California Department of Corrections has at hand."
-The Fire Inside
Women's struggles in prison have a special character, which is not separated from the overall movement behind prison walls. Although the bourgeois media make their struggles invisible, we cannot afford to. Thus, while it is true that society must be judged by the treatment of its imprisoned, the lowest is the treatment of women.
Not only should American society be put on trial and condemned for its war crimes against its own population. The poor shall, out of their deep alienation, judge this system that perpetuates a self-destructive mentality among its own people. Only then will we be able to carry out a social revolution in thought and in act that will allow us to live unbutchered lives.
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