This a speech written to introduce 
representatives of various national liberation 
movements at a RAIL-organized Criminal Injustice 
system teach-in.

Today we talked a lot about the role of the 
criminal justice system in repressing the Black, 
Latino and First Nations. You'll see in MIM 
Notes that MIM calls all prisoners political 
prisoners because itŐs a political system that 
determines who goes to prison and who does not.

But this next panel is about the cases of a 
special type of prisoner: those incarcerated for 
their political beliefs and actions. These are 
our revolutionary leaders. 

Amerika is at war. They are at war with the 
Black, Latino and First Nations. In any war, 
leaders are targeted.

There are tens of thousands of people who 
weren't political when they went to prison. 
Inside the walls, the naked brutality of this 
system teaches these prisoners to become 
political. So these tens of thousands become 
political and are punished for it.

But the point of this next panel is to talk 
about those incarcerated solely for their 
beliefs and actions. There are hundreds of this 
prisoners. Their incarceration represents a 
counter-revolutionary attack on national 
liberation movements.

The government started keeping track of the 
incarceration rate in the 1930s. It stayed 
constant until the early 1970s. Then it started 
going up exponentially. As some people have 
said, this is a sign of Amerika trying to 
control Blacks, Latinos and the First Nations to 
prevent a repeat of the revolutionary upsurges 
of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

So why did incarceration start to increase in 
the early 1970s? That time marks some big 
setbacks for national liberation movements. For 
example, many members of the Black Panther Party 
were murdered by the FBI at that time. Many more 
were incarcerated at that time and remain behind 
bars today.

Their arrest and continued imprisonment is a 
blow to the revolutionary movement. The U.$. 
government has stolen the experience of 
revolutionary movements and diverted its energy 
from offensive struggle into defensive struggle.

To remove these important leaders from 
circulation, many were framed. And some others 
actually did what they were accused of. But 
these acts were not crimes in the eyes of the 
people. In the final analysis, itŐs the views of 
the people that matter, not those of the 
government. The government calls fight 
oppression to be a criminal act. That' a lie. 

To RAIL, and hopefully to you, these leaders of 
the people are in fact heroes.