Federal Prisons

2017 DECEMBER — My beloved comrades at ULK, please take whatever steps necessary to convey this information to your readers, particularly those on the Texas plantations. It is my hope this will move a few to join in this all-out attack against mass incarceration, which those brothers on the Eastham Plantation are being persecuted for.

First, we have launched an attack on the totality of the living conditions on this plantation: double-celling, sleep deprivation, extreme heat, contaminated water, no toilets in the day rooms and rec yard, overcrowded showers. At present we have 5 lawsuits filed and hoping to have 5 more by the first of the year. They are listed at the end of this missive for those who might want to obtain copies and/or file for intervention. I would urge each plantation to file because each plantation has different violations, which in their totality are cruel and unusual.

Next, we have launched an at attack on the symbiotic-parasitic-relationship between Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) and the American Correctional Association (ACA). Last year we sent numerous letters to the ACA headquarters in Virginia with various complaints including the delayed posting of scheduled audits. Apparently someone was moved to do the right thing. Then notices for the January 2018 audit were posted here in October. As a result, we of the Community Improvement Committee (CIC) here on the unit have sent petitions with hundreds of names with numerous complaints of ACA violations and requests for a Q&A in the gym or chapel. This is being done with individual letters as well. Plus, we have sent the actual notice to various reform organizations requesting them to visit the unit during the audit and act as overseers pointing out particular areas of violations such as the giant cockroach infestation beneath the kitchen.

Next we have and intend to continue to urge the public to stay on top of their legislators to change the law, making it mandatory that prisoners be compensated for their labor.

Finally, we have filed an application for Writ of Habeas Corpus requesting to be released immediately due to the fact that the time sheet shows one has completed 100% of his sentence – that even without the good time, the flat time and the work time equals the sentence imposed by the court. In addition we are drafting something similar for those sentenced under the one-third law. We are submitting to the court that these prisoners have a short-way discharge date. The application for Writ of Habeas Corpus was first filed in the state court in Travis County and denied without a written order in the Texas court of criminal Appeals (#WR-87,529-01 Tr.Ct. No. D-1-DC-02-301765A). We are now in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District Tyler Division (McGee v Director, #6:17cv643). This info is supplied so that those with the means may download the info and/or keep track of the case. The following are the case numbers for the totality of living conditions complaint, which is also in the U.S. District in Tyler:

Walker v. Davis, et al., #6:17cv166
Henderson v. Davis, #6:17cv320
Douglas v. Davis, #6:17cv347
Burley v. Davis, #6:17cv490

The Devil whispers: "You can't withstand the storm"
The Warrior replied: "I am the storm." - The Mateuszm

MIM(Prisons) responds: These comrades are pushing the struggles to improve conditions inside Texas prisons along its natural course. Countless prisoners have sent grievances, grievance petitions, letters to the Ombudsman, letters to elected officials, and letters to various TDCJ administrators on these same issues. We have seen some victories, but mostly we've had barriers put in our way.

The next step laid out for us is to file lawsuits, which is another kind of barrier. Lawsuits take years and sometimes decades to complete, and innumerable hours of work. When we do win, we then have to go through additional lawsuits to ensure enforcement. And on and on it goes...

If we expect the lawsuits to bring final remedy, we must be living in a fantasy. A quintessential example of how the U.$. government behaves regarding lawsuits can be seen in how it totally disrespects treaties with First Nations. When the U.$. government, or its agencies, doesn't like something, they don't really give a shit what the law says. This has been true since the beginning of this government. We don't see any evidence that this will ever change.

Yet, lawsuits aren't all bad. They can sometimes create a little more breathing room within which revolutionaries can operate. Lawsuits can also be used to publicize our struggles, and to show just how callous the state is, if we lose.

Yet, most importantly, lawsuits keep comrades busy. Before any lawsuit, there needs to be a solid analysis of winability, and the likelihood of other options. While we are relatively weak as a movement, lawsuits are a fine option, and building a movement around these lawsuits will give them strength. But if your legal strategy doesn't also include building up collective power to eventually protect people without petitioning the state to do it, then your legal strategy is as useless as a feather in a tornado.

The comrades fighting these battles inside Texas have done a great job of spreading the word to outside organizations to garner support and attention for their lawsuits. We support their efforts to make Texas prisons more bearable for the imprisoned lumpen population, and we support their efforts to link these lawsuits to the greater anti-imperialist movement. And when they decide that lawsuits aren't enough to bring a real change in conditions, we'll support that too.

The U.$. legal system's role is to keep the United $tates government as a dominant world power, no matter what. The extreme heat in Texas prisons isn't just an oversight by administrators. And it's not even just about racism of guards. It is directly connected to the United $tate's role in the oppression and repression of oppressed nations across the world. If the legal system fails, don't give up. Try something else to bring it down. Lawsuits are not the only option.

05/05/2017 — I don't know what prisons people are talking about when they say that they don't make a profit, because here the furniture factory is almost all profit. The wood is donated from the free world on a tax write off, they buy glue, paint, nails, etc. And the state pays the guards. The electricity is paid on a scale. They pay a set price no matter how much they use because they couldn't afford to pay for all that they use.

The bus shop where they rebuild buses in the free world is almost all profit because the freeworld people pay $5 to bring it in to get fixed. They pay only for materials and the prison furnishes free labor.

We have thousands of acres of land where we grow our own food plus prisons ship stuff back and forth to other prisons. We have hogs, chickens, cows and slaughter houses so our prisons in Texas are pretty self-sufficient in food. So cost is the guards, the rest is profit here in Texas. The little things like fuel, tractors and such is cost which they are all paid for.

Here's some more examples from Prison Legal News:

"Rep Alan Powell of Georgia says the state gets better results out of a prisoner in 12 months hard labor than sitting in a cell. If the tax payers pay to build roads or pick up trash, they let the prisoners do it. In keeping with that philosophy, Georgia's Department of Transportation is using parole violators to clean up trash on highways statewide. It costs the department millions of dollars every year to pick up litter along Georgia's 20,000 miles of state and federal roads. ...

"In October 2011, Camden County, Georgia considered a proposal to place two prisoners in each of the county’s three firehouses. The prisoners would respond to calls alongside firefighters, who would be responsible for supervising them. It was hoped that using prisoners convicted of non-violent offenses rather than hiring more firemen would save the county $500,000 annually. The prisoners would not receive any pay but would be eligible to be hired as firefighters five years after their release...."

"In Washington, with a $1.5 billion apple crop at risk, state officials ordered prisoners into the orchards in November 2011."

I've been to prison 7 times in 4 states and I have 20 years done. I'm on this side where you can actually see this kind of stuff happening from day to day. They do illegal stuff all the time to cover up stuff, and freeworld people never hear this because they try to keep it all on this side of the fence.

"Colorado has used prison labor on private farms since 2005, when the state enacted stricter immigration laws. Around 100 female prisoners from La Vista Correctional Facility are employed weeding, picking and packing onions and pumpkins under the supervision of prison guards. The prisoners receive $9.60 an hour, of which about $5.60 goes to the state. At least 10 Colorado farmers use prison labor....

"In Arizona, Wilcox-based Eurofresh Farms employs around 400 prisoners through an Arizona Corrections Industries program. The prisoners are paid close to minimum wage. ...

"Florida is another state that has put its prisoners to work on farms, including a program that began in 2009 which uses work crews from the Berrydale Forestry Camp on a 650-acre publicly-funded farm at the University of Florida’s West Florida Research and Education Center. The prisoners grow collards, cabbage and turnips in the winter, while the spring crop yields snap peas, corn and tomatoes.

"The arrangement provides the University with agricultural research and supplies vegetables for prisoners’ meals. In 2010 the farm program resulted in $192,000 in food cost savings at the prison and saved the University $75,000 money that otherwise would have been spent on paid staff."

MIM(Prisons) responds: This letter is interesting in that it provides an array of examples of what prisoners are doing in their jobs. Just looking at agriculture, the examples from Texas and Florida involve prisoners producing of the food they eat. This is not economic exploitation. But what are the conditions that they have to work under? We would support prisoners fighting for proper sun protection and water breaks at such a job, but do not see a good economic reason to oppose working to produce food for one's own population.

In the other scenarios, the prisoners are producing food for private companies, who are profiting off the sale of their product. In the Colorado example prisoners are being "paid" $9.60, which is well over the U.$. minimum wage, and well over the global average value of labor.(2) So if the prisoner actually received all that money, ey would be participating in the exploitation of the Third World proletariat, receiving superwages. This becomes more true when you consider that the prisoner has food and housing provided.

In reality, the Colorado prisoners receive less than half of the wage, which is less than minimum wage. Arizona prisoners also receive minimum wage. This puts them near the average value of labor. If they were paid, say, $2 per hour, then we could say they are clearly making less than the average value of their labor and being economically exploited.

By virtue of being in the heart of empire, we are all benefiting from the economic system of imperialism. Even to some extent most U.$. prisoners are better off, compared to life in the Third World. It is this reality that makes battles over wages and labor organizing in general rarely a progressive battle in this country. It is only when talking about populations who do not enjoy full citizenship rights, such as prisoners and migrants, that we can even consider progressive wage battles.

I am still here in TDCJ doing time. I'm still locked in administrative segregation and the living conditions here are still not good. It's better now in this unit than it was 2 years ago, and I believe this is because we have a new dept. warden here in high security and because of all the inmates filing lawsuits.

The main issue that makes it so hard is the excessiveness of force. The officers are slamming inmates to the floor and beating them senseless for something as small as cussing them out.

Getting medical care is a hard thing to do, because the nurses and doctors won't treat us. Receiving medical care here in TDCJ is not easy to do, it's a system-wide problem for everybody involved.

Everybody that works for TDCJ is corrupt in one way or another, and I believe this corruption goes all the way to the governor of Texas.

I am writing to inform you that this unit no longer allows us to mail out SASE so that people like you can mail information back in that we request. I don't know if this is being done system wide or just this unit. But I do believe that this move is being made to hinder prisoners being able to get outside help because they know that most people will only send us information to help us legally fight back if we send a SASE. No SASE, no information...because most people can't pay to send every prisoner what they request. They don't want us to be educated to resist by using that mighty ink pen and paper. I just wanted to let you all know what was going on in case you start getting more requests but no stamped envelopes to help with postage.

I'm just reading your info pack for the first time in 9 flat years. This is the first time I've seen it. I'd like to get involved in your program and get on your mailing list.

What's started all this is this unit we're on, C.T. Terrell only returns 20% of the grievances we send in. This grievance system on this ifs totally broke down.

Another thing that got me started on this is that I got issued a case for contraband, i.e. a sewing needle. This guy in the craft shop sold some needles and they told him if he got them back nobody would get a case.

So this guy started going all over this trusty camp gathering up the needles. This craft shop officer was standing at the front desk trying to write down the cubicles he was going to. So she wrote all these cases that half of them were frivolous, so they tore them up and wrote some more and my name came up on the second batch of cases.

They come to my work and read me the case and took my statement. The first thing I noticed was the wording of the case on the second thing & noticed our sgt.'s name stamped on the bottom. I asked this sgt. about this case she wrote and she told me "I did not write any of these cases!" She told me the craft shop officer wrote all these cases and stamped her name on them.

They got all the needles back and the guy that sold all the needles only got a level 3 case when everybody else got a level 2 contraband case. So I'm 99% sure I'll get the contraband case stuck on me. But I am going all out on the craft shop officer for PD-22-10, pg 6 for falsification of records.

This is really the straw that broke my back with this system. The grievance system on this unit anyway is completely broke down. If we write our grievances to the ombdudsman's office they just send them straight back to this warden. I just saw in your Texas Pack A RRM Division Administrator. Who that is I have no idea, but I want to find out all I can because I am going all out. I want to educate myself as much as I can before I start writing letters on stuff I have no idea what I'm talking about. I think with y'all's help, I can educate myself in standing up to these people.

An I60 is a form used throughout Texas Prisons as a means of paper communication. On the Wynne Unit, and perhaps other units, an "Escape I60" is supposedly an I60 written by another inmate claiming that an inmate is planning to escape. The I60 is unsigned.

An "Escape I60" is used to "lock up" inmates in a segregation cell, a.k.a., PHD. An "investigation" is supposed to occur usually, a few inmates are called out in the middle of the night to sign statements that they have not heard of anyone looking to escape.

There are sometimes other reasons that are used to "lock up" an inmate.

On 5/9/18 I was called out and told an "Escape I60" was written on me. It stated that I was planning to escape and had stolen an officer's ID.

1. Wouldn't you immediately check to see if an officer's ID was missing?
2. If not, wouldn't that indicate that the I60 was BOGUS?

The officers who took my statement as to how false this was, also asked if I possibly knew who wrote it. I said that I have a new cell mate but have no proof that he or any other inmate wrote it. Later I remembered that the officers also said the I60 stated I intended to harm Nurse Jackie Fisher.

On 4/3/18 when I incured a urinary tract obstruction and was taken to medical, I was refused medical care. It took almost 26 hours for the obstruction to clear at which time my urination was painful and had blood. The nurse who refused me was Jackie Fisher. The officer who took me to medical and told me that Jackie Fisher had refused medical care, was the same officer interviewing me.

I also realized that I had told NO inmate this. I had only conveyed this in letters and grievances. Something only officers/staff have access to. I recently filed 6 grievances.

Inmates say that only a few "Escape I60s" are written by other inmates. Most believe that a majority of "Escape I60s" are written by officers looking to lock inmates up—retaliation?

One inmate was locked up for almost 30 days because an I60 claimed he intended to assassinate Warden Strong. Warden Strong actually came to see this inmate.

If officers on the Wynne unit "truly" beleived that someone was planning to assassinate Warden Strong, why didn't they alert local law enforcement or the FBI?

For a while now I’ve wondered why all the conflict between anarchists and socialists/Marxists/Maoists. I mean, we are two revolutionary forces who are committed to the abolishment of capitalism, imperialism and all forms of oppression. We have that in common and that is what’s important. I understand that our strategies and ideologies are a bit different, but what’s preventing us from getting together in solidarity, agreeing to disagree and focus our energies on the revolution combining our strengths and common ground? Why can’t we cease to tear each other down? I don’t know about anyone else, but this bothers me! The energy used to tear one another down, discrediting one another, could be used to gain some real headway by picking up arms together to combat oppression. Of course there are more experienced and more politicized people than me that may wish to give me some feedback and critique. I welcome critique, feedback and criticism.

MIM(Prisons) responds: This is a good question, especially for building a united movement against imperialism. There are many reasons to build unity with all who can be united. Maoists advocate a united front against imperialism because this format of organizing allows all organizations to freely build their own movements and push their own ideologies, but come together against a common enemy.

At the same time, we do believe there are some very good reasons to refuse to unite with some organizations. Just because a group calls itself “socialist” or “anarchist” doesn’t mean it is automatically on the right side of the struggle. In the extreme, we have the national socialists who are really fascists, as an obvious example. But even among those claiming to be progressive revolutionaries there are some organizations that have taken up such wrongheaded and dangerous political lines that we consider them to be more use to the fascists than to the revolutionaries.

In the case of anarchists in general, we do not see them as enemies. In fact we believe that anarchists have the same end goal as communists: a society where no people have power over other people. But anarchists don’t have a strong history of success in progress towards that goal. We see their approach of jumping right from imperialism to anarchism as idealist, because it hasn’t played out in real life at even a comparable scale to the socialist experiment.

It’s just not realistic to overthrow the imperialists and keep them overthrown, without a period of proletarian state power. We have too long of a history of class, nation and gender oppression for that to happen. The bourgeois classes will need to be forcibly repressed, and culture will need to be radically altered on a mass scale. It might take generations before humyns evolve to live peacefully with no oppression. As MIM write in MIM Theory 8: “Communists know that it takes power to destroy power, whereas anarchists see power itself, independent of conditions, as the enemy of the people.”

In the First World, in particular, there are some anarchist (in addition to socialist) groups which are doing work that actively supports imperialism. It’s important that organizations clearly work out what are the most important questions of political line that we face today. For instance, we have, in this country, a bought-off class of people who are clearly economically and ideologically in support of imperialism. Yet some so-called socialist and anarchist organizations see these people as their mass base, and call on them to rally for even higher wages and a bigger piece of the imperialist pie. That’s not progressive, that’s a call to fascism! And so we can’t unite with such political stances. In fact if that group calls itself “socialist” or “anarchist” or even “Maoist,” we think that’s more dangerous than if they openly organized for fascism, because it is misleading people about what is the communist struggle.

I would like to ask your staff a question. I recently received ULK 60 and it made a statement that solitary confinement was abolished in Texas in 2017. When I seen that, it floored me. I say that because i'm writing this letter FROM SOLITARY CONFINEMENT. So did I miss something? And if so, how can I fight from here to rectify the situation?

I let others read that and we all was stunned. I mean stunned. Are we reading this statement in your newsletter wrong?

Also we would like to know what is the Texas Pack and how can I obtain one? Your newsletter has shed light on a lot of things that are helpful for us in this place, and I just would like to say thank you and keep up the good work.

MIM(Prisons) responds: In September 2017, TDCJ announced it would no longer use solitary confinement for punishment, or as a method to encourage good behavior. It would "only" use "Administrative Segregation" (totally different from solitary confinement, right?) for "gang members, those at risk of escape, and those who are likely to attack other inmates."(1) That month, 4,000 people were still held in isolation on these grounds. Consider that only 75 prisoners were actually released from solitary confinement after this policy change.

We appreciate that this writer spoke up, because this is a very common practice. The Department says "we're not using it for punishment," while holding many, many people in isolation. The claim of gangs and security threats is often cited as the justification for the "exception" to their superficially-humanitarian publicity stunt.

Some examples include the Tier 2 program in Georgia, and the indefinite solitary confinement in California prisons that led to the hunger strikes in 2011-2013 and the Ashker settlement.

No matter what you call it, or what "justifications" are given for why it's used, solitary confinement is always torture, and never necessary. We have no doubts that solitary confinement can and should be ended, for everyone, today.

As for the Texas Pack, we are still updating and mailing this out. It's one of our more expensive projects, so we're asking for subscribers to send a donation of $2.50, or work-trade, to get the Texas Pack. This packet contains all our campaign info relevant to TDCJ, including on the grievance process, medical copay, and indigent mail restrictions. Send your donation to the address on p. 1, and tell us first if you want to send a check or M.O. so we can send instructions.

I am writing with concerns pertaining to the (SRG) gang issue that's been hindering so many individuals in the North Carolina prison institutions. Guilty by association has been at the forefront of bestowing gang affiliation. I feel a person should only be labeled if caught in the act of any malicious behavior with a gang member.

One thing that stands out from this whole ordeal the most is how the gang intelligence officers use confidential information to gain a guilty verdict against you with the hearing examiner.

How are you supposed to face your accuser when you don't know anything about the source from which it came? It's a violation of your constitutional rights no matter what type of label is placed upon you. I feel the situation should be taken seriously due to the fact that, as a human being, it puts restrictions on one's life, as well as scrutiny in the public eye.

I am currently going through these circumstances and it is very frustrating knowing that you have to be accountable for someone else's actions even when the evidence speaks for itself. I fully overstand that being black in amerikkka is an everyday struggle, especially when it comes to judging an entire race. My mindset is to overcome these obstacles and maintain a sense of focus on being successful.

I will tell you about this prison conditions in this state jail because the prison system in Texas has created a state jail (to squeeze more money from the honest taxpayers). The state jail runs this place in all kinds of ways except the right way.

For example: one of the federal stipulations in the cases of Wolf vs McDonald (in California) and Ruiz vs Estelle (in TX). The federal courts passed a new rule that states when the prison system conducts a disciplinary court, they must have a tape recorder. This state jail does not have one tape recorder. Never has.