Call for prisoner writings

Below is a call for prisoner writings from a comrade in Ohio. If you wish to participate, please send your submission together with an envelope and sufficient postage to MIM, P.O. Box 29670, Los Angeles, CA 90029-0670. Include your contact info with your submission so you can be in direct contact with the editor.

"Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation that people are already dying you could have saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half lives if you fail to act " --George Jackson

I write this form letter to all of you, challenging you to imagine the possibility, if there was a way to reach out to every class war and political prisoner(1) in this country, all the men and women silenced by the government, and we could take the most dangerous thoughts and collect them from their views on a wide variety of topics, from capitalism to war to the environment, from race to U.S. drug policy to police and prisons. And all these thoughts were edited down, combined together into a single space to carry on this conversation.

I am inviting you to take part. I am offering no money, I do not yet have a publisher agreeing to publish, and I am paying for postage and copies out of pocket from my own prison cell. But I believe firmly that this may be one of the most important undertakings I could accomplish in life, and I believe the end result of this could be an important gift to the world.

If and when a publisher does agree to publish, and if any money is offered, it seems to me that the money should be put into a trust and provided to a cause all of us participating in this project can support. Maybe even begin a Political Prisoner Defense Fund.

In the meantime, I propose the following process for those who are interested. I will provide a topic and invite everyone to submit written responses. I propose the first topic to be "Targets of Repression." I purposely leave it ambiguous so you may choose, for example, to discuss why you are a target of repression; you may give a history of a specific people targeted for repression; you may point out the process by which the government chooses its targets of repression. In fact, I hope for diversity of insights that will create a rich fabric of dialogue.

I don't want to set artificial deadlines or page limits, but it would be good to have submissions for "Targets of Repression" by the end of September. Once I put the topic together, I will send the final product to each of you, along with another proposed topic. I will not in any way submit the final product for any kind of publication or consideration until everyone who submitted to it approves of it.

For those who are artists, feel free to submit artwork and illustration relevant to the topics.

Also, please suggest topics you feel are relevant so I can disseminate them and incorporate those ideas into the work.

If there are mail regulations that inhibit this process, please let me know what we must do to accommodate those regulations.

If you know anyone who should be included, please feel free to pass on this letter to them.

Once I begin putting submissions together for "Targets of Repression," I will propose a second topic.

I hope to hear from all of you. Stay dangerous.

--an Ohio prisoner, 20 July, 2005

1. If MIM Notes is inclined to publish my invitation [for submissions to] "U.S. Political Prisoners: In Their Own Words" I would only clarify my definition of "political prisoner" to say that the political reality in the U.S. renders the system of laws, the system of injustice, and the system of punishment illegitimate. [These systems] become tools of a class war that serve a particularly reactionary system of global capital in a number of latent ways. As such, anyone subjected to captivity as a result of such a political process is, de facto, a political prisoner, apart from the question of whether the "offense" committed against the State was an overt or intentional political act.

Each offender's arrest, arraignment, trial, plea bargain, sentence, appeal, and captivity are political acts on the part of the State and its lackeys.