CHAIN-GANGS COMING TO MASSACHUSETTS

by a MIM comrade

In June, Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson 
will institute chain-gangs in Massachusetts. 
Massachusetts will join "nine other states -- 
most of them in the South or West."

Hodgson ran for Sheriff on a pro-death penalty 
platform. The Sheriff has no legal control over 
the death penalty, but he can and has instituted 
a long series of changes increasing repression 
of prisoners. A currently pending lawsuit argues 
that conditions are so bad as to encourage 
prisoners to plead guilty just to get out of 
Hodgson's jail.

A throwback to the slave era, chain gangs fell 
out of favor in the 1940s. But in 1995, the 
middle-class was ready to see prisoners used to 
do the manual work it doesn't want to do. In the 
past, organized labor opposed prison labor 
because it undercut union wages. Now the white 
labor aristocracy overwhelmingly supports the 
anti-crime fervor. It legitimizes the 
incarceration of the oppressed who otherwise 
would be available for organizing against the 
settler nation parasitic existence. Moreover, 
profits from slave labor in prisons make 
increased costs of imprisonment easier to 
swallow for the settler nation.

Particularly in the South, the so-called justice 
system has a history of throwing people in 
prison just to get free labor out of them on the 
chain gangs. Now prison construction companies 
and prison guard unions have an interest in 
throwing people in prison for arbitrary reasons, 
including national oppression. These lobbies are 
joined by politicians eager to please the 
increasingly parasitic workers who can't 
remember the days when they were manual laborers 
threatened by prison labor.

Making a spectacle out of punishment is not 
rehabilitative. It's yet another sign that 
Amerika -- and the majority of its voting masses 
-- are interested only in the violent economic 
and political repression of the Black, Latino 
and First Nations.

Note: Boston Globe 22 May 1999, p. B5; 5 January 
199, p. B4, 3 January 3, 1999, p. A1, A20-21.