Under Lock and Key RAIL Radio Program for December 18, 1998

New bill adds hard time for crimes with guns
Reserve the death penalty for lying cops and
prosecutors!
Public universities suffer under prison craze
MIM announces new anti-imperialist prisoner mass organization

Welcome to Under Lock and Key, news and commentary about prisons
from the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League. The U.$.
incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than any other
country. The rate for imprisonment of Blacks is 4 times that of
apartheid South Africa, and the U.$. sends more Black men to
prison than college. The purpose of this program is to educate
about, and inspire activism against, the Amerikan lockdown.

New bill adds hard time for crimes with guns

In November, Clinton made headlines by signing a new bill to
"strengthen penalties for violent criminals and drug traffickers
who possess, brandish, or discharge a gun when committing a
crime."(1) He presented the bill, S. 191, at the same time as
another one which provides college scholarships for the families
of cops killed on the job. The combination serves only to
underscore the ideological motive behind the new legislation -- to
equate the problem of crime with guns, and to equate guns with the
killing of police officers.

At the signing, Clinton made the equation outright: QUOTE "We know
from painful experience that the most serious threat to the safety
of police officers is a criminal armed with a weapon. Most police
officers who lose their lives die from gunshot wounds ... To
protect our families and police officers the bill I sign today
will add five years of hard time to sentences of criminals who
even possess firearms when they commit drug-related or violent
crimes. Brandishing the firearm will draw an extra seven years;
firing it, another 10. A second conviction means a quarter century
in jail."

According to the Associated Press, the legislation resolves a key
point which has been argued in the courts, namely, that QUOTE "the
additional and mandatory federal five-year penalty for criminals
who 'use or carry' firearms applies even if the criminal simply
was in possession of a gun -- locked in a car trunk or glove
compartment, for example -- during the commission of a violent
crime or drug felony." (2)

But according to "Justice" Department statistics, drawing both
from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the National Crime
Victimization Survey (NCVS), most crime does not involve guns.(3)
The touting of sentence-enhancing legislation for crimes involving
guns as a way to reduce the crime rate is worse than hypocritical
-- it is a way to fan the public flames of reaction against the
majority of non-violent, non-gun-carrying persons accused of
committing crimes.

The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League has long worked to
expose the national oppression in all stages of the criminal
injustice system -- from the police to courts to conditions in
prisons and jails. We know that under imperialism, strengthening
any aspect of that system, as this new bill does, serves only to
enhance that oppression.

Notes:
1. Remarks By The President At Crime Bill Signings Event  12:17
P.M. EST - Old Executive Office Building
2. The Associated Press, Nov. 13, 1998.
3. "Guns Used in Crime: Firearms, Crime, and Criminal Justice"
Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995.


Reserve the death penalty for lying cops and
prosecutors!

The USA Today ran an excellent article on the death penalty
November 13 about 30 wrongfully convicted people from death row
now going to attend an academic conference on the subject. QUOTE
"Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty 22 years
ago, 486 people have been executed. Williams is one of 75 men in
19 states who have been spared execution and freed from death row
after evidence emerged showing that they had been wrongfully
convicted."(1)

The U.$. Supreme Court has already admitted that the death penalty
is applied in a racially discriminatory way. It decided that the
good still outweighed the bad in having a death penalty, thereby
not prioritizing the fight against national oppression or
racism.(2)

Now there is a campaign afoot to focus on the innocent. The
average length of time that the innocent sat in prison was seven
years before clearing their name,(1) but the fascists in this
country want to speed up a process known by statisticians to be
racially flawed and therefore likely flawed in other ways as well.

Although most Amerikans are conscious of their own viciousness and
support police and prosecutors in a knee-jerk way, a minority has
naive views about police, prosecutors and judges. When we say that
the government is set up to protect property and that conscious
and unconscious mechanisms ensure that the judicial system is used
to oppress, the naive minority does not understand. However, an
increasing portion of the public will understand that prosecutors
and elected judges seek public office based on their success in
locking people up. As long as the headlines show a prosecutor to
be successful, it does not matter to the prosecutor if s/he locked
up the wrong persyn.

In the United $tates, there are 50 states each with two U.S.
Senators and one governor. That is 150 people.  The revolutionary
communist newspaper, MIM Notes, conducted its own investigation to
tally up how many of these 150 are former prosecutors. As of 1997,
there were 30.(3) There was also one former head of the Department
of Corrections, Governor Miller in Georgia.

Bill Clinton is a former prosecutor. Before being elected mayor of
the largest city -- New York -- Giuliani was a prosectuor.
Giuliani in particular had to bump aside his police chief when the
police chief tried to take credit for reducing crime. Hence, cops
too are trying to use crime to get elected. It is typical to use
the prosecutor job as a stepping stone to being mayor or governor.
Bill Clinton then went from govern or to White House.

In very recent years, another motivation has appeared for cops to
lie about crime -- which is to get on television and make a good
impression or be famous. Legal barriers preventing television from
live broadcasts of police and suspects have fallen. Now cops have
the incentive of fame to stir something up, conspire a bit and get
on television, just as the many sick people who conspire to get on
the Jerry Springer show. While not all cops will have such
motivations just as not all people will do something nuts to get
on television, there is a minority that can cause plenty of
trouble. We recommend the movie "Running Man" to open the eyes of
the naive.

Almost no scholars find any point to having a death penalty in the
U$A. In fact, there have been numerous studies of the flaws of the
system, studies which never seem to be digested by the public or
politicians of the oppressor nation.

About 7 in 10 Amerikans do not believe in "innocent till proven
guilty" and instead majorities believe someone is guilty if cops
seek charges. As a result of concerns about juries, a number of
studies have been done.

One study of 1000 wrongful convictions of all types shows that
about half are attributable to eyewitness error. Different studies
based on mock crime scenes have shown that from 21 to 33 percent
of all people will point to someone in a police lineup as the
culprit when the culprit was not present.(4)

This would be a case of unconscious fascism. In academic
experiments there is no persynal reason these eyewitnesses could
have for lying, but they are just inaccurate in about a third of
cases. The willingness to finger someone is just a case of
unconscious fascism, the fact that injustice is so routine in U.$.
society that people carry out injustice as a matter of course.

The meeting of 30 freed death row inmates at Northwestern
University focussed on reforming or abolishing the death penalty.
Illinois has had 9 people freed already since 1994 and it is
considering formation of a panel to review all death row cases
given its poor record. That's one kind of reform.

The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League argues for another
reform -- a death penalty for attempted judicial murder. 10 people
have been freed with the result of DNA evidence. Most of the time,
nothing happens to the cops, prosecutors and judges who lied. In
one case, three assistant prosecutors in Illinois's DuPage county
were charged with perjury, obstruction of justice and
conspiracy.(1) In our opinion, that is not enough. They should
have been charged for attempted murder since they knew their
accusations could lead to the death penalty. In other words, as
some of the former death row innocents have said, in many cases
the prosecutors know they are prosecuting someone innocent.
Attempted murder and murder by prosecutors, cops and judges who
condemn innocent men -- such should receive the strictest
penalties of all, the death penalty.

So if someone wants to become governor by falsely winning cases as
a prosecutor, he or she should also weigh the possibility he or
she will face the death penalty if caught. The existing law should
be interpreting these cases as murder and attempted murder and the
penalty for attempted murder in such cases should be death.

Alternatively, should some liberals feel bad for fascist cops,
prosecutors and judges being executed for their unjust treatment
of the innocent, they can support a different reform. They could
make it impossible for prosecutors or judges to ever run for
public office.

Even then, there will still be a death penalty applied in a
discriminatory way against oppressed nationalities. Only anti-
imperialist revolution can resolve that injustice.

Notes:
1. USA Today 13Nov1998, p. 14a.
2. "In the 1987 case of McClesky v. Kemp, the U.S. Supreme Court
upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty despite evidence
that killers of whites are given the death penalty more often than
killers of blacks."John E. Conklin, Criminology, 3rd ed., (NY:
MacMillan, 1989), p. 406. MIM would add that the court admitted
that the anti-death penalty lawyers proved their point.
3. Almanac of American Politics (Washington, DC: National Journal,
1998). 4. New York Times 17Jan1995, c1, c6.


Public universities suffer under prison craze

The current University of Michigan president has attempted to
follow in the footsteps of his predecessor in talking about the
trade-off between building prisons and supporting public
universities. President Lee C. Bollinger has called the prison
policy of Michigan "a very unfortunate set of laws and public
policy."(1) We call on all public university presidents, students,
faculty and researchers to turn up the heat against the prison
craze.

Michigan expects to imprison 70,000 in the year 2005, up almost 75
percent from already fascist levels.(1)

The facts about imprisonment in the United $tates are that the
United $tates has been the world's leading prison-state per capita
for the last generation, with a brief exception during Boris
Yeltsin's declaration of a state of emergency.(2)

That means that while Reagan was talking about a Soviet "evil
empire" he was the head of a state that imprisoned more people per
capita.  In supposedly "hard-line" Bulgaria of the Soviet bloc of
the 1980s, the imprisonment rate was less than half that of the
United $tates.(3,4) Since that time, the United $tates has only
increased its rate of imprisonment.

To find a comparison with U.$. imprisonment of Black people, there
is no statistic in any country that compares including apartheid
South Africa of the era before Mandela was president. The last
situation remotely comparable to the situation today was under
Stalin during war time. Stalin was fighting Nazis, but the U.$.
fascist movement is simply repressing oppressed nationalities.

The rednecks tell RAIL that we live in a "free country." They live
in an Orwellian 1984 situation where freedom is imprisonment.
Unfortunately, they won't notice until the very last persyn
criticizing the government is in prison.

The media and politicians, including the prosecutors and cops
running for mayor, governor and president talk about crime as if
we became the world's prison-state leader for locking up only
murderers. However, the majority of prisoners in the United $tates
are there for non-violent offenses.(5)

Public university students and even moreso public university
researchers who receive the bulk of government funds are the ones
to pay the price for the prison-state buildup. They should be
allies of the anti-imperialist movement. --

Notes:
1. Michigan Today Fall, 1998, p. 6. Michigan Today is an
official publication of the University of Michigan.
2. Marc Mauer, "Americans Behind Bars: The International Use
of Incarceration 1993," The Prison Sentencing Project, 918 F.
St. NW, Suite 501, Washington, DC 20004 (202) 628-0871
Reference: SRI: R8965-2, 1994
3. Ibid., 1992 report.
4. United Nations Development Programme, "Human Development
Report 1994,:" Oxford University Press, p. 186.
5. Figure of 51.2 percent for state prisoners there for non-
violent offenses. Abstract of the United States 1993, p. 211.


MIM announces new anti-imperialist prisoner mass organization

In a recent issue of MIM Notes, the Maoist Internationalist
Movement announced several big developments of a new revolutionary
organization: United Struggle from Within.  United Struggle from
Within is an anti-imperialist mass organization of prisoners led
by the Maoist Internationalist Movement.

The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League, RAIL, focuses on
building anti-imperialist public opinion outside the walls. We
also work to raise the consciousness of our incarcerated comrades
through literature and correspondence. The formation of this new
organization will better serve prisoners and allow them to more
effectively lead other prisoners to a revolutionary consciousness
and practice.

For the past several months, prisoners and those of us on the
outside have been working out the details of this new
organization. Here we present some of the recent announcement from
MIM Notes:

--

MIM has received a tremendous response from comrades under lock
and key who have shown dedication, commitment and leadership in
developing the anti-imperialist prisoner mass organization.
Comrades have sent artwork, name suggestions, articles, plans for
development of the organization and submissions for MIM Notes....
MIM salutes with a clenched fist the inspirational revolutionary
work of our brothers and sisters under lock and key. We will
continue our efforts to make prisoner voices heard and to build
the foundations of revolution and a future society where prisons
are not tools of social control and oppression.

Several prisoners submitted suggestions for names of the
organization. The MIM Prison Ministry has decided to use the
suggestion "United Struggle from Within" by a prisoner in South
Carolina. We have a couple comments about the theory behind
picking the name.

We reiterate that the intention of the organization is to unite
all anti-imperialist prisoners, further education and build
struggle. This is not intended to be an organization solely made
up of Maoists, as some have suggested. Just as RAIL does not
exclude non-communists or those who have less worked out political
lines, members of other progressive organizations or those who
have religious beliefs, the United Struggle From Within should
include a broad base of prisoners working together against
national oppression.

Stemming from other name suggestions, we reiterate the importance
that this organization be within bourgeois legal confines. Prison
comrades face enough repression without ourselves drawing legal
justification for more. The name, slogans and general work of the
organization should be to build anti-imperialism, but it should
not give the oppressor fodder in a legal argument to punish
comrades further.

Specifically, MIM does not engage in armed struggle in the
imperialist countries at this time. We have made clear that
revolution is the only solution to ending oppression. But arms at
this time are not our weapons. We must build education,
independent institutions of the people, public opinion and a
strong United Front against imperialism led by the proletariat.
There is much work in these areas, there is no need to perpetuate
the pigs' claim that we support armed struggle now in Amerikkka.

--

United Struggle from Within now has several leaders working quite
hard to build revolutionary study groups. These study groups are
essential to keeping the organization and more generally, anti-
imperialist agitation, on the correct path. Comrades are also
monitoring censorship of political materials and developing
political and legal strategies in response.

Stay tuned to future Under Lock and Key programs for more on the
development of United Struggle from Within.

--

This has been Under Lock and Key, a weekly Revolutionary Anti-
Imperialist League program about prisons. For more information,
contact: RAIL PO Box 712 Amherst MA 01004, or email
RAILRadio@mim.org.