MIM's prison organizing encompasses a lot of areas:

1. Web work
2. Work with prisoners - discussion of theory, sending agitation materials and assignments, etc.
3. Mailing literature to prisoners - MIM notes (funding and mailing), books and MIM Theory
4. Legal work - fighting censorship, organizing legal battles
5. Agitation - publishing prisoner's writings in MIM Notes, organizing campaigns against repression in prison, writing stories about repression in prison, making flyers, petitions, etc.
6. Prisoner re-lease on life program - working with released prisoners to stay on the streets and stay politically active

We do some good work with prisoners but we need to think bigger for our prison work to break out of the current stage of development and expand to the next level. We should be looking to expand in two ways:
1) gaining a larger base of active prisoners
2) greater involvement in our prison work by people on the outside.

Number 2 is going to feed into number 1 if we involve people the right way. We have learned from experience that it is a mistake to plug new people in to writing to prisoners if they are not working directly with a local MIM branch. We end up with people sending in reactionary literature, or neglecting prisoner's letters for months without us knowing about it, not to mention the security risk we put our comrades behind bars in by sending their addresses out to these people. So it is still going to fall on our main forces of MIM prison activists to do the work directly with prisoners and recruit others locally to help. But there are a lot of other ways people can contribute without ever meeting with us. Below are some areas that we need to expand and that are relatively easy to plug in to.

1. Web updates - convert prisoner's writings into HTML in real time as they are typed in rather than several months later when someone gets to it. Also do some work to clarify prison organizing campaigns going on in various states and publicizing them on the web on other sites like indymedia (i.e. post MIM articles there with a link to the MIM prisons page). Or take an example from www.abolishcontrolunits.org and build new web sites publicizing MIM's prison work.

2. Books for prisoners - set up deals for classic texts to be bought in bulk cheaply or find places for prisoners to order directly (some do have money and want to know where to go to buy things). Raise funds for this work from people who might not support our other work. Publicize it more widely. Get free ads or listings in publications geared towards prisoners.

3. Legal work - we need someone to lead this area. There are a lot of jailhouse lawyers willing to do whatever research is delegated to them but we need to prioritize battles and pull together research and have someone who knows the law review it before we circulate it. We don't want to duplicate what Prison Legal News does, but we have our own battles to fight (including censorship) and some people are willing to help our political prisoners also fight more direct localized battles (repression).

4. Typing pool - people willing to type in prisoner's writings are always needed. However, you have to give us your snail mail address and we recommend using PGP to transmit that to us because otherwise you're giving your address out to the pigs over email. We'll mail you letters and you email them back to us typed in.

5. News - There is a lot of news out there about what's going on with prisons. We need people to stay on top of it and write up articles where appropriate. We want to know when there is a hunger strike or a shooting at a prison and then we can go to our comrades behind bars and ask for more info. Similarly we want to know about government plans with the prisons.

I would welcome other ideas from people interested in getting involved in the important work of organizing political prisoners* in Amerika.

Contact the MIM prison minister at pm@mim.org to get involved in these or other tasks.

* MIM argues that all prisoners are political prisoners because all imprisonment under imperialism is political.