August 7 -- MIM and RAIL held our regular San Francisco monthly protest to shut down the prison Security Housing Units (SHU), a part of the state-wide protests of the United Front to Shut Down the SHU. At our regular location, in downtown San Francisco, we once again found support among the tourists and former prisoners who pass through the area. We were joined by two former prisoners who came to the protest to help fight torture in prisons. The group of protesters had a literature table with a few people asking passers by to sign the petition, people walking around with posters encouraging people to come over to the table, and roving petitioners approaching people on the sidewalk. In the two hour protest we gathered more than 60 signatures and distributed a many copies of MIM Notes and the MIM pamphlet on the SHU.
Relatives of prisoners, and former prisoners, were quick to stop and sign the petition, thanking us for protesting prison torture. Several people commented on the similarity between what happened in the Amerikan prisons in other countries and Amerikan prisons at home, eagerly taking a copy of the August MIM Notes which had a cover story exposing Amerikan prison abuses in Afghanistan.
One of our new allies, who has seven years of experience with the California Department of Corrections, agreed to an interview after the protest. He said that he's never spoken out about the abuses he's endured, but he was compelled to do so when he saw that MIM was fighting prison torture and focusing on the same kinds of issues he is fighting: "Your Maoist Internationalist Movement is dealing with the CDC now on a level that is consistent with what I'm going through, torture."
Our new ally, who we will call John, has been in and out of prisons for years, never on the streets for more than a month in a year. His revolving door experience with the prisons is typical of the injustice system that is not set up to rehabilitate people or offer them alternatives but instead encourages recidivism. The problem started when he was young, in the juvenile system. Instead of trying to help John, they released him at age 16 and told him to move out of the state and not come back until he was old enough to be charged as an adult (because they assumed he would be back in the system).
John has a problem with drugs and alcohol, a problem that continued behind bars. He has been clean and sober since his last release, but in the past his drug addiction led to minor offenses like petty theft, or drug possession, which got him locked back up again. A system focused on rehabilitation would offer John services to help him get off drugs, but instead he was rejected for a program because of his parole status. As John states "it's not about rehabilitation, it's about warehousing."
John speaks of harassment by the San Francisco Police, the prison guards, and the entire DOC which are all part of a system that is set up to target people like himself. He says the prisons "politically speaking, are a mess...the [guards union] are very powerful, too powerful for anyone to mess with." He spoke of fights set up in the prison by the guards, attacks on himself and others. Many people talk about prisoner gangs, but John speaks about the prison guard gang, "The Green Wall Mafia, a gang of guards which is about a code of silence." They won't let anyone speak out about the abuses within the prison. "The [prison guards union] is politically impossible to touch....San Francisco won't fuck with them, the court system won't fuck with them."
John is concerned that the police or the DOC will try to kill him because he won't conform and he wouldn't play their games in the prison. He talks about "the California DOC, Prison Industries Authorities, CCPOE [prison guards union], the private prison firms are all interconnected, it's all a game, it's all about money."
He is homeless now, the typical condition of released prisoners, who have no resources when they get out, and no support or opportunities for employment. John is living in a homeless shelter which has a curfew of 7pm every night. He is clean and sober because when he was paroled just over a month ago, his sister (who we will call Sophia) told him they were both going to go clean and sober together starting that day.
John and Sophia are part of the Cheyenne indigenous nation. This is one of the First Nations that wiped out General Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. As they say, they've had a bad deal of it from the beginning. Sophia says "that's why we're on their shit list from the start." This nation, which has supposedly autonomous land surrounded by Montana (aka a reservation), is fighting the government about fiberoptic cables run through their land without their permission. John says the government claimed "eminent domain" which means it can do whatever it thinks is necessary on what it considers federal land, even though "we're supposed to be autonomous." But this is like Amerika running fiber optic wires through Canada without asking the permission of the Canadian government. First Nations deserve the same independence granted to any other sovereign nations, not to mention restitution for the history of genocide.
On the streets and clean now for over a month, John and his sister are committed to staying clean and out of prison. They support each other every day spending their spare time before curfew together, and speak of getting an apartment together some day. But they laugh mentioning Gavin Newsom's "Care Not Cash" program which made it harder for Sophia to get a bed in a shelter, limiting her stay to seven days and not telling her when her time had run out. The odds are all stacked against John and Sophia, who both have prison records. But they are determined to fight back and are excited to have hooked up with MIM so that they can get involved with the campaign against torture in prisons. John noted that staying busy doing work like this is what will help him stay clean and sober.