This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

Join RAIL's Contingent at the Jericho '98
Rally to Free Political Prisoners

  1. See MIM's Photos of the Jericho march.

  2. Free our comrades in Amerikan gulags
    Organize to end the Amerikan Lockdown

  3. All prisoners are political prisoners
    Is this a dividing line question in 1998?

  4. Frank Big Black Smith to speak at University of Michigan Campus

Free our comrades in Amerikan gulags
Organize to end the Amerikan Lockdown

Jericho '98 is a march on Washington, D.C. on March 27, 1998. The march, primarily organized by various nationalist and progressive groups, is aimed at exposing the incarceration of leaders and activists who are imprisoned because of their political beliefs and actions. Jericho '98 calls attention to the demand for amnesty for these prisoners and is part of broader campaigns to build support for these prisoners.

MIM urges all supporters of prisoners and opponents of oppression to join RAIL's contingent to the Jericho '98 rally and build other RAIL events which expose the crimes of the Amerikan bourgeoisie against the people. Amerika has imprisoned political leaders and continues to steadily build the Amerikan police forces and prison system as tools of social control and national oppression.

Through education and mass practice, the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL) builds support for all struggles against oppression. This includes supporting the release of those incarcerated because of their political beliefs and actions. RAIL is organizing contingents from various locations to attend the Jericho '98 march on Washington, D.C. and is also hosting a teach-in the following day in D.C. The teach-in will include information on specific prisoners' cases and on the Amerikan INjustice system in general. We will also discuss tactics for activism. There is still room for organizations and individuals to participate in the teach-in. So write to:

MIM Distributors
P.O. Box 3576
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-3576

to donate time or money or to talk with us about facilitating a discussion on a particular topic.

Why the call for amnesty?

Organizers of Jericho '98 wrote: "There are over 150 political prisoners in US jails. They are in jail because they are committed to taking action for social justice. They are Black, Puerto Rican, Native American and progressive white people who have dedicated their lives to fighting against racism, colonialism and exploitation. Some of them have been in jail for over 26 years. This makes them some of the longest held political prisoners in the world.

"Through history, whenever the dispossessed have risen up, they have come under attack. They are assassinated, imprisoned, and harassed. The last few decades in this country have been no exception.

"Many of the political prisoners are locked up as a result of the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). During the 1960s and 1970s the FBI developed COINTELPRO to attack, frame, assassinate, and imprison participants and leaders of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement and other powerful social movements. Others have received excessively long sentences because of the political nature of their actions."

Communists, pacifists, anarchists and nationalists should support the call for amnesty and release of political leaders and activists. We can wage winnable reformist battles to free some of the people's leaders and activists. Even if you disagree with the political or ideological stance of these prisoners, you can see that they are imprisoned because of these beliefs and that this is undemocratic. Amerika's so-called democracy is a hypocrisy. It frames and imprisons people for working to reform or eliminate capitalistic exploitation. Anyone who says these prisoners should remain locked up for their political beliefs and actions is saying that it should be illegal to struggle against oppression.

Struggles against oppression are crimes in Amerika

Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa have been imprisoned for over 26 years because of their political involvement in the National Committee to Combat Fascism (an off-shoot of the BPP.) These comrades were framed to serve the settler nation's interest in breaking up and slowing down the struggle for oppressed nation self-determination. In 1971, they were convicted of killing an Omaha cop despite the great deal of evidence which proves otherwise. The cop was killed after he accidentally triggered a suitcase and it exploded.

The primary evidence against the comrades came from Duane Peak who was himself a suspect in the case. Peak allegedly confessed (after being threatened with the possibility of facing the electric chair) that he, Poindexter and Langa were responsible for leaving the suitcase for the pigs to discover. When Peak took the stand, he denied planting the bomb with Langa and Poindexter. The prosecutor immediately called for a recess and when that was over, Peak returned with clear signs of physical abuse. Despite the obvious coercion and lack of credible evidence in the case, Langa and Poindexter received life sentences. Their kangaroo court trials and imprisonment demonstrate what happens when even the legacies reminiscent of the BPP are perceived as a threat to white Amerika.

Another case of a Black male leader is Kojo Bomani Sababu who has been imprisoned since 1975 after the state attacked and destroyed his Black Liberation Army unit. His sentence of multiple life terms was handed down because he fought for self-determination of the Black nation. His unit engaged in bank expropriation and liquidated dealers bringing drugs into the Black community. These are political activities intended to strengthen the Black nation (though MIM argues that engaging in such political activities at this time is incorrect inside Amerika.) This is the real reason that he is imprisoned though the state would deny it. If you disagree that these are political actions, ask yourself why Amerika considers his actions a crime and why it allows MNCs to extract super-profits from workers in oppressed nations and why it allows pig units to receive kickbacks from drug dealers throughout the United Snakes.

Another leader of the Black nation, Albert 'Nuh' Washington has spent over 16 years in prison, seven of them in solitary confinement to deny him the ability to conduct political education among the prison masses. He stated, "As a former member of the Black Panther Party and a member of the Black Liberation Army, it is my position to struggle for the right of self-determination for Black people in the United States. Historically, our political rights have been determined not by our own national will, but by the needs of the political system that enslaved us. Therefore, as any other colonized people, Black people must be free to decide their own national, political, economic and social destiny." It is because of his work to build self-determination that he was sent to prison for the trumped up charge of killing two New York City pigs. "The district attorney, by his own admission, stated he couldn't say or prove what part Nuh allegedly played in the killings, but asked a jury to convict him based on his beliefs, which they did."

Hanif Shabazz Bey has been subjected to continued confinement in the Behavior Modification Program at Marion federal penitentiary. He was told by an in-house shrink that his chances of leaving Marion would be better if he toned down his political views. He said, "what I see as the main factor as to why I am persistently being held at Marion is the fact that I was convicted in a Virgin Islands court in 1973 for the armed attack on the Nelson Rockefeller-owned golf course on the island of St. Croix in 1972, and the Bureau of Prisons now finds it convenient to keep me here so they can point to my case in their media interviews to show what type [of prisoners] is being housed at Marion. This way they can justify spending the tax payers' dollar on this high security operation whose sole purpose is to impose terror tactics on the rest of the BOP as well as the state prisoner population."

First Nation leader of the American Indian Movement, Leonard Peltier has been in prison since 1975 after false evidence justified his extradition from Kanada. There still has been no evidence which shows that Peltier killed the two FBI agents who Oglala land. In fact, the so-called evidence was obtained through force and coercion and later denied when the witness was allowed to tell the truth. And the rest of the so-called evidence only reveals what a contrived frame-up the case against Peltier is because it is contradictory to basic facts.

The above are only a few of the people's leaders locked up because of political action to end oppression. Several Puerto Rican leaders have been sentenced to outrageously disproportionate sentences, tortured while in prison and denied very basic needs. The reason? Amerika says that they committed seditious conspiracy. What this means is that they were sentenced because they organized the people to expose and stop the domination of the Puerto Rican nation by Amerika. MIM continues the struggles to stop Amerika's control over the Black, Latino and First nations. But the battle to eventually have the power in the hands of the people will be more quickly achieved if we are able to press the Amerikan bourgeois to stick to its own terms of war which appear on paper.

Proliferation of prisons equals mass repression

MIM and RAIL see that it is the entire prison system in Amerika that is a tool of oppression. It is not only the tactics of COINTELPRO and the imprisonment of political leaders and revolutionaries which have been tools to perpetuate oppression. We are committed to building support for prisoners incarcerated specifically for political beliefs and actions, but the majority of our work more broadly builds support for all struggles against oppression. And in this, we see that the disproportionate imprisonment rate of oppressed nationals alone necessitates a broad struggle against the current Amerikan prison system in its totality.

The rate of imprisonment in the united $tates increased more than fourfold from 1972 to 1990, from 100 per 100,000 to 455 per 100,000. Currently the u.$. imprisons people at a higher rate than any other country. Black men are imprisoned at a rate seven times that of white men, and one in three Black men is either in prison, on parole, or on probation. Private prisons are a growth industry. And politicians try to out-do each other with their proposals for more cops, more arrests, tougher sentencing, and more prisons allegedly to combat crime.

But a closer look shows that more cops, more arrests, and more people in prison does not deter crime. Using u.$. government definitions and statistics, the violent crime rate in the u.$. has remained about the same since the 70s, despite a 600% increase in the budget for cops, courts, and prisons. Furthermore, the very definition of crime and the application of anti-crime laws are used selectively. Why is it a crime to possess a small amount of crack cocaine, while it is business as usual for the CIA to import cocaine by the ton? Why are sentences for powder cocaine -- mostly affecting whites -- lighter than the sentences for crack cocaine possession which almost entirely affect Blacks? The answer is that the prison system in the u.$. is designed to maintain the systems of capitalist and national oppression. That is why oppressed nationals and poor people are disproportionately represented in prison.

The Amerikan settler nation does not consider it a crime for the bourgeoisie to exploit the labor of the masses. Nor is it a crime in Amerika to be a white paper or button pushing labor aristocrat who produces no value but lives on the land and off the sweat of the masses. But it is considered the crime of a poor womyn to steal piddly amounts to supplement her inadequate income she uses to support her family. It is considered a crime for oppressed nationals to sell drugs to make money when they live in areas which offer no productive job opportunities, but it is not a crime for rich white college students to use drugs or rape wimmin when they are drunk and at parties.

Many prisoners write to MIM explaining that their actions were taken out of desperation or self-defense -- of themselves or their peoples. Many more explain that their sentences are particularly long under abusive conditions because they become politically active while in prison. Other prison comrades have been murdered outright by pigs while serving sentences for white nation defined crimes. The Amerikan prison system is a targeted attack against the oppressed and serves absolutely no goal of eradicating crime against the people.

The trend towards harsher and broader imprisonment and repression continues. MIM's recent projections based on u.$. government statistics show that if current trends in imprisonment continue, there will be almost 10 million prisoners in the u.s. by 2020. Blacks would be imprisoned at a rate of 9,517 per 100,000 if current trends continue that means almost 1 Black person out of every 10 would be in prison, not to mention on parole or on probation. This bleak future in not inevitable, but it will take the consistent efforts of activists in and out of prisons to prevent it.

Physical repression in prisons

Amerika's prisoners report to MIM that gulag conditions are dangerous and inhumane. Unsanitary conditions, inadequate medical care, exposure to toxins and inadequate heating are among the many forms of physical torture and repression that Amerika's prisoners face daily.

Late in 1996, the Michigan state legislature passed a law requiring prisoners to pay a $3.00 charge for all non-emergency medical care. Now, Michigan prisoners are forced to pay $3.00 (more money than the state pays most of its prisoner employees for a week of work) every time they see a doctor. The $3.00 does not include getting prescriptions filled or any care beyond the visit.

Forcing prisoners to pay for health care is a form of economic repression and is a fundamental part of the Amerikan bourgeoisie's war against the oppressed nations. The state of Michigan already follows U.$. policy in imprisoning Black men eight times as much as it does whites. With this new prisoner co-payment for health care policy the state is further legitimizing the attitude that oppressed nationals are a drain on state resources and not a productive part of society.

Making prisoners pay for sub-standard health care is equivalent to saying that prisoners who did not pay for this service were mooching off the rest of the state. This is a cover for the fact that prisoners are denied the opportunity to earn any money while in prison, and that they are being discriminated against by being scapegoated for the problems of capitalism.

The reactionaries who make prison policy and run the prisons promote the idea that prisoners deserve to be treated as less than citizens. In one example, prisoners who are of an age to collect their social security benefits are denied these benefits for the time that they are imprisoned. The logic to this law is that while people are in prison their basic needs are paid for by one arm of the state so they do not need to receive payment from its other arm. The reality to this law in combination with the payment for non-emergency medical care regulations is that prisoners who would receive social security payments if they were not in prison are being made to pay money to the state for care, and this care is at the same time being used as the rationale for denying them money which they would have gotten were they not in prison.

Another form of physical and mental control over prisoners is the recent rash in massive transfers of prisoners between states. The transfers allow the state to perpetuate the lie that the state needs more money to build prisons because of alleged overcrowding. The facilities hosting the transferred prisoners are then allowed to make a profit off of the labor of those prisoners or simply off of the contract from the state sending the prisoners half way across the United Snakes.

In September, MIM reported on the one incident in which transferred prisoners from Missouri had been beaten repeatedly. Capital Correctional Resources Inc. had a $6 million dollar contract with Missouri -- 415 prisoners had been transferred to Texas under this contract. Transferred prisoners were beaten by pigs and attacked by the pigs' dogs.

Conditions in prisons across the country are literally a threat to the lives of the prisoners. But since Texas started to sell space to detain prisoners from other states, many prisoners have written to MIM explaining that the conditions in Texas are worse than in their own states. Texas has about tripled the size of its prison system since 1991, spending $3 billion on nearly 100,000 new beds which is uses to profit from the imprisonment of more and more people.

Massachusetts RAIL has been fighting the deportation of prisoners from that state since 1995 when over 300 prisoners were transferred in the middle of the night to Texas far from their families. Massachusetts continues to send prisoners to Texas to support the political argument of the oppressor that there needs to be more money spent on prison construction. Many other states engage in this disgusting slave trade. And now, RAIL and MIM are taking up the struggle to stop the transfer of prisoners from Michigan to West Virginia which started during this last week.

Prisoner labor exploited to fill oppressor's pockets

As if the state couldn't generate enough false propaganda against prisoners just by exaggerating the dangers "criminals" pose to society, RAIL and MIM have recently discovered the first hints that that the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) is baldly lying about how much money it pays its prisoner laborers. In May of 1997, RAIL put out a factsheet, based on DOC statistical reports, about how little prisoner laborers get paid in Michigan. RAIL knew when it did this that most prisoners are not even lucky enough to have jobs and most do not even have the low level of income the state says it provides. What RAIL and MIM did not know is that the state lies about the wages it publishes.

As so many comrades in prison have pointed out to MIM over the years, slavery remains legal in Amerikan prisons under the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.$. Konstitution. The amendment states in part that slavery and involuntary servitude are both acceptable as a form of punishment for crime "whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

So if a jury agrees to convict someone for committing a crime, that person can be enslaved to the state. But where is the blind justice in this law? How is it that the oppressed manage to fall disproportionately prey to the fate of "slavery and involuntary servitude" even into 1998? It is nothing short of political repression and imprisonment when forced labor is extracted from poor people who have passed a bad check, or been convicted of doing this; while the heads of state who invade other countries and kill their people go free.

According to the MDOC Statistical Report for 1992, prisoner factory workers were paid $.24/hour for unskilled labor and $.70/hour for skilled labor. For unskilled and skilled farm labor respectively, prisoners were supposed to have earned $1.62 and $4.94 per hour. Yet one prisoner wrote us recently saying that the going rate at his low-security prison is $.71 per eight-hour day for unskilled labor -- this is less than half what the state claims to be paying prisoners. The same prisoner reports that prisoners working the MDOC farms make no more than $5 per eight-to-ten-hour day -- again less than half of the minimum the DOC claims to be paying.

Another Michigan prisoner writes that the average prisoner with a job earns between $20 and $30 per month. If we take the lowest rate the DOC claims to pay prisoners and assume 8 hour work days and five-day weeks (most prisoners with jobs work more), prisoners would be earning a minimum of $38.40. This particular prisoner works much more than 40 hours per week and is still earning less than $40 per month.

In 1995, government agency prison industries had sales of $1.2 billion and private prison industries had sales of $83 million. The actual amount that prisoners are forced to produce and paid little or nothing for is hard to determine because the government sales are undervalued.

In 1994, 44% of state and federal prisoners were in prison work programs and another 6% were in work release programs. Prisoners are paid nothing in some states and in the rest are paid very little. Then in places like Kentucky, prisoners do the work which otherwise the state would have to pay someone else to do. Because of the ability of companies and the state to make incarceration more affordable through growing prison industries, there is no impetus for the Amerikan settler nation to decrease the number of oppressed nationals it imprisons.

MIM believes it is desperately important for pro-prisoner activists to bring attention to these types of repression suffered by prisoners. As we work to bring attention to the plights of those imprisoned explicitly for their political activity, we also heed the words of Geronimo Pratt on his release from prison: "you have political prisoners on top of political prisoners" in Amerika's so-called correctional facilities. We must continue to point to the political repression of ordinary Blacks, Latinos and First Nationals who are bound up in U.$. custody for the crimes of being minority nationalities and/or being poor. We see that the primary struggle is to fight for self-determination of oppressed nations.

The struggle against the political use of prisons as a tool in war against oppressed nations continues. Join the RAIL contingent to Jericho '98 and the RAIL injustice system teach-in.


All prisoners are political prisoners
Is this a dividing line question in 1998?

MIM has long worked around the principle that under imperialism all prisoners are political prisoners. This is an important aspect of our line and of the work we do in support of all prisoners. Yet we urge organizations doing genuine work around prisons issues not to make this a dividing line question between organizations working together to support prisoners' struggles.

MIM founded the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL) to mobilize anti-imperialist activists who do not agree with MIM on all things. Many RAIL members will not agree that all prisoners are political prisoners. These activists will be quite welcome to work in RAIL to expose the imprisonment of specific political prisoners. RAIL's contingent at the Jericho '98 march will fully support the release of those prisoners who are broadly recognized as being political prisoners. RAIL is also a revolutionary mass organization and as such its efforts will be focused both on the release of individual prisoners and on general education about imprisonment in the United Snakes.

MIM recognizes that some organizers of the Jericho'98 march focus specifically on the freedom of prisoners incarcerated for their political actions or beliefs. Others emphasize the link between these prisoners' battles and the overall struggle against oppression. MIM urges both camps not to let this question block unity between separate organizations in our preparations for Jericho'98 or in other pro-prisoner work.

MIM argues that all prisoners are political prisoners because not one of the over 1.6 million people incarcerated in Amerika's gulags was arrested, tried and convicted by representatives of the people. Even the laws under which prisoners have been convicted support the material interests of the oppressor. The intensely disproportionate imprisonment rate of oppressed nationals further shows that the prison system perpetuates the white nation's domination of its internal colonies.

Inadequate education and job opportunities are social and economic conditions imposed upon the oppressed. The state, which runs its prisons with one hand, uses the other hand to commit murder in the form of militarist aggression and theft in the form of imperialist expansion. This state is responsible for the poor living conditions of the oppressed and so cannot fairly judge the oppressed for any so-called crimes.

MIM struggles to build a new revolutionary society under which the state and the people will answer to the same law under the same standard of proletarian justice. Current prisoners will be retried and imperialist criminals will be brought for judgment before the same people's courts. The masses are responsible only for building such a revolutionary society, not for subservience to the laws of the oppressors.

Mao wrote: "The contradictions between ourselves and the enemy are antagonistic contradictions. In ordinary circumstances, contradictions among the people are not antagonistic. But if they are not handled properly, or if we relax our vigilance and lower our guard, antagonism may arise." MIM has deep respect for the contradictions which may arise among the progressive forces. Disagreements among the people should be expected, and it is our responsibility to ensure that these disagreements do not turn into deeper divisions among the friends of the oppressed. For this reason, we seek unity in all our work against oppression with all those who will work with us for justice.

While MIM seeks unity with all who can be united around specific progressive political struggles, we are a communist party and as such we have a consistent line. We assert our independence in developing a revolutionary Party -- this independence is the basis for our straightforward leadership of the masses. A part of this leadership is to build opposition to national oppression and the political imprisonment of the oppressed. For this reason we include the theory that all prisoners are political prisoners in our literature and it is a position that we will adhere to even as we do work with other groups. Clarity in our own line keeps the Party from swinging right and left with the wind. But one party's line questions should not be used to divide it from other organizations which genuinely share some goals in common. This is why you see MIM working with organizations which may criticize our general use of the term political prisoners.

MIM's stance is clear. We will continue our work and join together with others to expose the imprisonment of comrades locked up for their political beliefs and actions. We will not work with organizations which insist that we water down our political line or mass work, and we will not work with organizations which are infiltrated or led by cops or revisionists. We will struggle with individuals and organizations to build support for all prisoners' struggles against oppression. We will even struggle with individuals and organizations to study Marx, Lenin and Mao and to support armed liberation struggles internationally. But we know that support at such a high level is not inherent at birth. So we will continue to pursue political struggle and mass work to develop deeper support for all struggles against oppression.

The Jericho march, its preparation and follow-up are great opportunities for genuine progressives to educate one another, the masses and community members about the various tactics of oppression. Some attending or even organizing sections of the teach-in may be focusing on specific prisoners' cases. The principal contradiction in the world and in Amerika today is the fact that oppressed nations are controlled by the imperialists. We need the people to fight against various aspects of this control as we build deeper unity necessary for genuine liberation. We look forward to working with all activists who are steadfastly pursuing any aspect of the struggle against oppression.

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