Terminology: Prisoners, inmates or captives

Please, comrades at MIM, I have one small favor to ask. Please do not address us as "inmate" or "prisoner" or a number. We are "captives". Please address us as "captives."

An inmate is one who is brainwashed to believe he or she is still part of the U.S. An establishment that bows down and conforms and obeys the pigs and snakes and dogs, who hopes and dreams of being part of the USA system again. An inmate has a parole date within 5 to 10 years, with half time, and is totally controlled by his or her parole date.

A prisoner/number is one who believes and is brainwashed by some kind of prison gang and believes this gang is looking out for his or her best interest. One who does nothing to better themselves or educate themselves. One who sports an Amerikan flag on his or her coffee cup, roots for some u.s. corporate football/baseball/basketball team, who speaks and thinks the typical cretin prisoner mentality.

A captive informs him or herself, educates him or herself, understands the power of strong unconditional unity, always resist and fights to defeat their nazi-plutocratic pig captors, one being exploited by his or her captor to extort profit.

MIM responds: The Prison Ministry has long had a policy of using the term "prisoner" and not the term "inmate," so we have agreement there. Many have made the same distinction between the terms that this comrade makes.

We have always used the term prisoner because it makes clear the captive relationship between the imprisoned and those doing the imprisoning. In fact, we consider all prisoners political prisoners, precisely because of the political nature of the criminal injustice system that makes political distinctions between arrests, trials, juries, laws and sentences to disproportionately lock up oppressed nations.

We can generally agree with the break down of prisoners into three groups, those allied with imperialism, those opposed to it and those who are stuck in a lumpen mentality and potential allies to either of the first two groups. However, as an extremely oppressed group of people there is much potential for the revolutionary awakening of the imprisoned lumpen. And as one of the few groups in the united $tates that are potential allies to liberation struggles as a group, we can refer to them as "prisoners" and mean it to designate prisoners as being of the "masses." The degree that we need to divide the group we call "prisoners" will change as the struggle advances and it will be useful in certain contexts, but generally they are "prisoners" and therefore potential allies, if not explicit allies. We are not convinced that the term "captive" does a better job clarifying this than the term prisoner. We welcome feedback on this question from our readers as we are always working to refine our language to serve our political purposes.