"End the Amerikan Lockdown" campaign comes to UC Santa Barbara

SANTA BARBARA, CA -- The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League and 
Maoist Internationalist Movement at the University of California, 
Santa Barbara (UCSB), held two successful End the Amerikan 
Lockdown events at the beginning of June -- a panel discussion on 
"Prisons in the Injustice System," and a showing of the 
documentary "Attica!" These events were well-attended by concerned 
students and activists, representing the continuing upward 
progress of the anti-imperialist struggle at UCSB. The panel began 
with an overview of trends in prison-based national oppression, 
the rates of imprisonment, the gross hypocrisy of the "war on 
drugs," and the effects of the prison system on oppressed 
communities. Three speakers followed.

The first speaker summarized MIM's position on the role of the 
prison system in the political economic sphere. First, the number 
of people directly employed by the prison system has skyrocketed 
along with the number of prisons and prisoners. This includes 
prison guards and construction workers, most of them white workers 
in the small towns and rural areas. This is one aspect of the 
labor aristocracy's support for the prison system. There are well 
over 300,000 prison guards employed in the U.$. today.

The second aspect discussed was the (slave) labor of prisoners 
themselves. Although the prison system is not primarily a labor 
system at this time, there are tens of thousands of prisoners 
working for outside government or private industries. These 
workers come to industry dirt cheap (by U.$. standards), and also 
offer the benefit of punitive state control -- as in the case of 
two California prisoners who got lockdown for complaining about 
working conditions -- like in Third World countries. The labor 
aristocracy's unions oppose this prisoner labor, for the same 
reasons that they opposed the spread of slavery in the nineteenth 
century: they don't want their wages to go down.

The third aspect also speaks to the labor aristocracy wages 
question. With the "unemployment" rate so low, wages for the labor 
aristocracy have been stable or climbing in recent years. The 
speaker presented some evidence to show that the low official 
unemployment rate is partly the result of having more than 2 
million people in prison. If all those were out of prison, most of 
them would be unemployed -- and that would drive down wages much 
more than cheap prison labor supposedly does. So again, the labor 
aristocracy has a concrete material reason to rally behind the 
explosive growth of the prison system.

The second speaker represented the campus Mumia coalition and the 
All-African People's Revolutionary Party. This speaker described 
the hundreds of years of history behind Black nation resistance to 
the prison system, starting with resistance to slavery, through 
Attica and George Jackson, and up to the present with today's 
political prisoners and activists locked down in "administrative 
segregation" or Supermax secure housing units (SHUs) to prevent 
their political agitation from spreading. The final speaker, 
representing RAIL, gave the history of SHUs and their role in 
repressing political activism in the prison system. This 
presentation included a detailed description of the conditions in 
SHUs, using prisoners' letters and testimonials.

The discussion that followed among the audience and the speakers 
indicated that the presentations effectively showed the systematic 
oppressive nature of the Amerikan prison injustice system, and the 
importance of anti-prisons organizing and activism.

Two nights later, about 50 people attended the screening of ITAL 
Attica! END. The movie documents the rebellion of prisoners at New 
York's Attica State Prison in 1971, which started a new era of 
prisoner activism and anti-prisons work on the outside. About 20 
people stayed for a discussion after the 80-minute video. 

The comrade who lead the discussion emphasized that the "practical 
proposals" the Attica prisoners raised are still timely [see 
sidebar]. In fact, according to former Attica prisoner Akil 
Aljundi, "in a lot of ways it's gotten worse. What has happened is 
that the state has had an opportunity to learn off of Attica, so 
they've adopted measures that are more repressive and in a lot of 
cases they've given prisoners things that look like panaceas, you 
know, quick-solution stuff which basically is to keep people from 
stating what the problems really are. So nothing has really gotten 
better. There are more prisoners in prison, more younger prisoners 
than ever before, people are growing up with more time, less 
people are getting released from prisons, and they have to fend 
for themselves when they get out -- the prison counselors are 
certainly not finding jobs for anybody... At any time, prior to 
Attica and since Attica, any prison can go up."

These two events together helped build support for the anti-
prisons activism that MIM and RAIL are leading at UCSB and across 
the state of California. The participants came away both better 
educated and better motivated to get involved in different ways to 
support this political project.

ITAL If you want to help put on similar events, contact 
larail@mim.org for copies of the materials used in these 
presentations and to arrange for MIM and RAIL speakers. END