MIM(Prisons) is a cell of revolutionaries serving the oppressed masses inside U.$. prisons, guided by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Under Lock & Key is a news service written by and for prisoners with a focus on what is going on behind bars throughout the United States. Under Lock & Key is available to U.S. prisoners for free through MIM(Prisons)'s Free Political Literature to Prisoners Program, by writing:
MIM(Prisons) PO Box 40799 San Francisco, CA 94140.
A comrade attending rallies supporting Palestinian resistance to the
I$raeli war distributed ULKs this winter and talked to
attendees. Here are a couple of the interviews ey sent to
ULK.
1.What brought you to this event?
Well, seeing as I am Black and a Christian, I find it important to
come out and demonstrate solidarity with the people of Palestine as I
believe our struggles are connected. Many people tend to see what is
going on in Palestine as a sort of religious conflict, portraying it
simplistically as a conflict between Jews and Muslims. Many Christians
in this country support Israel because the Church tells them to, when in
reality Christians are just as persecuted as Muslims in Palestine. I
mean, they just bombed the Church of Saint Porphyrius – one of the
oldest churches in the world – last night.
2. Do you see any parallels, either current or historical,
between i$rael and the united $tates? if so, can you elaborate?
Yes, I see many parallels actually. The biggest one being that they
are both settler-colonial projects. It is important to remember that in
both cases, the land was not empty when the settlers arrived. Israel has
been waging a war against the Palestinian people in order to clear and
settle the land. When the Europeans came to America, the first thing
they did was wage war against the Indigenous population to do the same
thing. They are both guilty of ethnic cleansing. Think about the Nakba.
Think about The Trail of Tears. In Ohio, they said the land was “too
good for Indians” – similar justifications were made for the initial
Nakba.
I would also say that Israel is almost as racist as the United
States. They have different laws for different people. That’s apartheid.
Zionists call us anti-semetic, yet they treat non-White Jews like
second-class citizens. Look at how they treat Ethiopian and South-East
Asian Jews within their borders. You know they sterilized them in the
1970s and 1980s. Zionism isn’t about Judaism, it’s about white
supremacy. So I think there are very real parallels to draw between
Israel and the United States as they both are rooted in war, ethnic
cleansing, and white supremacy.
3. We promote the right to self-determination of all oppressed
nations from oppressor nations and imperialism more generally. What do
you think about the idea of the oppressed nations (i.e. Chican@/Latin@,
First Nations, New Afrikans, and other Third World Peoples) within the
so-called United $tates breaking from the United $tates in order to
realize self-determination?
I’m not entirely sure if I think it is possible, but I support it.
That said, I am very skeptical. The only feasible way I think that could
happen is if the American Government allows it to happen by carrying it
out themselves, but I really don’t see that happening anytime soon.
4. Finally, what do you think is the best way we could
demonstrate our support and solidarity to the Palestinian people?
I think we could demonstrate our support and solidarity by boycotting
Israeli products and participating in the BDS movement as a whole. By
continuing to protest. By not allowing Israel to participate in soccer.
And by not allowing Israeli academics to sanitize what has happened in
the past 70 years. It is important that we utilize our legal means and
push politicians to support an end to the genocide.
Second Interview
1.What brought you to this event?
I’m here to show support against the repression of Arabs in
Palestine, to demonstrate mass support, and to lift the spirits of
others who find these war crimes unacceptable.
2. Do you see any parallels, either current or historical,
between i$rael and the united $tates? if so, can you elaborate?
Yeah, I see parallels in that they’re settlers, racists, and repress
native populations. But I also see parallels between First Nations and
the Palestinian people – especially in their emancipatory spirit.
**3. We promote the right to self-determination of all oppressed
nations from oppressor nations and imperialism more generally. What do
you think about the idea of the oppressed nations (i.e. Chican@/Latin@,
First Nations, New Afrikans, and other Third World Peoples) within the
so-called United $tates breaking from the United $tates in order to
realize self-determination?
Yeah, of course! The first priority is emancipation of those groups,
even if that means through violence.
4. Finally, what do you think is the best way we could
demonstrate our support and solidarity to the Palestinian people?
I think we can demonstrate our support by continuing to go to these
demonstrations and by showing our support for fringe groups such as
Hamas, PFLP, etc…the militant fighters.
NOTE: PFLP is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,
an organization that arose during the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution in China, and was one of the Palestinian organizations
greatly influenced by the Maoism of the time. In those early years they
gained notoriety for hijacking airplanes and remain on the U.$.
terrorist list to this day. They took a pan-Arab approach to the
revolution, and co-ordinated with many organizations outside the Arab
world, including providing training to communists from Azania (aka South
Africa). This connection is relevant to why South Africa today has
brought charges of genocide against I$rael to the International Criminal
Court, as well as the fact that Palestinians today are facing the same
apartheid conditions that Africans in South Africa once faced. PFLP took
part in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th along with Hamas, Islamic
Jihad, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The
latter is also a Maoist-inspired group that came out of PFLP.
Tip of the Spear Black Radicalism, Prison
Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt
Orisanmi Burton (Author)
University of California Press
October 2023
“without understanding carceral spaces as zones of undeclared
domestic war, zones that are inextricably linked to imperial and
officially acknowledged wars abroad, we cannot fully understand how and
why the U.S. became the global leader of incarceration that it is
today.” (1)
Tip of the Spear is the story of the organization and flourishing of
resistance to American imperialism as it developed in the New York state
prison system in the 1960s and 1970s, including the time well before the
four days of Attica in 1971. Professor of anthropology Orisanmi Burton
does many things in this book, a lot of which we’ll only be able to
mention briefly or not at all, but MIM(Prisons) has already sent out
many copies of this book and is prepared to send out many more to enable
further study and discussion of Burton’s very worthy research and
ideas.
We are asking our readers to send their own feedback on this book, to
write up their own local histories or stories applying the framework
below, and to popularize this understanding of U.$. prisons as part of
the imperialist war on the oppressed peoples of the world that we must
unite against.
Prisons are War
Burton begins his investigation with George Jackson’s observation
that Black people “were defeated in a war and are now captives, slaves
or actually that we inherited a neoslave existence.” (2) Prison
conditions don’t originate in the law or in ideas but in the historical
fact of defeat in a war that still continues.
But what kind of war is it? One side surrounds the other and forces
it to submit daily, the way that an army laying siege to a city tries to
wear down the resistance of the population. These sieges include not
just starving prisoners of food but of social life, education, and
culture. In maintaining its rule the state uses the tools of
counterinsurgency to split the revolutionary ranks, co-opt the cause and
re-establish its rule on a more secure level. On the other side, the
prisoners have themselves, their ability to unite and organize in
secret, and their willingness to sacrifice for the cause – the
attributes of a guerrilla army. (3)
Burton spends an entire chapter, “Hidden War,” laying out the
strategies the state pursued when its naked brutality failed to prevent
prisoner organization and rebellion. After the smoke cleared at Attica
and wardens, politicians and prison academics had a chance to catch
their breath, they settled on four strategies to prevent another Attica
from happening: (4)
One, prisons were expanded across the state, so that
density was reduced and prisoner organizing could be more effectively
disrupted. If a prisoner emerged as a leader, they could be sent to any
number of hellholes upstate surrounded by new people and have to start
the process all over again. The longer and more intense the game of
Solitaire the state played with them, the better. We see this strategy
being applied to USW comrades across the country to this day.
Prisons were also superficially humanized, the
introduction of small, contingent privileges to encourage division and
hierarchy among prisoners, dull the painful edge of incarceration
somewhat, and dangle hope. Many prisoners saw through it, and Burton
makes the point that the brief periods of rebellion had provided the
only real human moments most prisoners had experienced during their time
inside. For example, Attica survivor, John “Dacajeweiah” Hill described
meeting a weeping prisoner in D yard during the rebellion who was
looking up at the stars for the first time in 23 years. (5) Burton sums
this up: “the autonomous zones created by militant action… had thus far
proven the only means by which Attica’s oppressive atmosphere was
substantially ameliorated.”
Diversification went hand in hand with expansion,
where a wide range of prison experiences were created across the system.
Prisons like Green Haven allowed prisoners to smoke weed and bring food
back to their cells, and permitted activities like radical lectures from
outsiders. At the same time, other prisons were going on permanent
lockdowns and control units were in development.
And finally, programmification presented a way for
prisoners to be kept busy, for outsiders (maybe even former critics of
the prison system) to be co-opted and brought into agreement with prison
officials, and provide free labor to keep the system stable by giving
prisoners another small privilege to look forward to. To this day, New
York, as well as California and other states, require prisoners who are
not in a control unit to program.
All of this was occurring in the shadow of the fact that the state
had demonstrated it would deploy indiscriminate violence, even
sacrificing its own employees as it had at Attica, to restore order. The
classic carrot-and-stick dynamic of counterinsurgency was operating at
full force.
Before Attica: Tombs,
Branch Queens, Auburn
Burton discusses Attica, but doesn’t make it the exclusive focus of
his book, as it has already been written about and discussed elsewhere.
He brings into the discussion prison rebellions prior to Attica that
laid the groundwork, involved many of the same people, and demonstrated
the character of the rebellions overall.
The first was at Tombs, or the Manhattan House of Detention, where
prisoners took hostages and issued demands in the New York Times,
denouncing pretrial detention that kept men in limbo for months or
years, overcrowding, and racist brutality from guards. Once the demands
were published, the hostages were released. Eighty corrections officers
stormed the facility with blunt weapons and body armor and restored
order, and after the rebellion two thirds of the prisoners were
transferred elsewhere to break up organizations, like the Inmate
Liberation Front, that had grown out of Tombs and supported its
resistance. (6) Afterwards, the warden made improvements and took credit
for them. This combination of furious outburst, violent response and
conciliatory reform would repeat itself.
Next Branch Queens erupted, where the Panther 21 had recently been
incarcerated. Prisoners freed them, hung a Pan-Afrikan flag out of a
window, took hostages and demanded fair bail hearings be held in the
prison yard or the hostages would be executed. The bail hearing actually
happened and some of the prisoners who had been in prison for a year for
possibly stealing something were able to walk out. The state won the
battle here by promising clemency if the hostages were released, which
split the prisoners and led to the end of the rebellion. Kuwasi
Balagoon, who would later join the Black Liberation Army, was active in
the organization of the rebellion and learned a lot from his experiences
seeing the rebellion and the repression that followed after the state
promised clemency. (7)
At Auburn Correctional Facility on November 4th, Black prisoners
rebelled and seized hostages for eight hours. Earlier, fifteen Black
prisoners had been punished and moved to solitary for calling for a day
off work to celebrate Black Solidarity Day. After the restoration of
order, more prisoners were shipped away and the remainder were subject
to reprisals from the guards.
In each case, prisoners formed their own organizations, took control,
made demands and also started building new structures to run the prison
for their own benefit – even in rebellions that lasted only a few hours.
After order was restored, the state took every opportunity to crush the
spirits and bodies of those who had participated. All of this would
repeat on a much larger scale at Attica.
Attica and Paris: Two
Communes
Burton acknowledges throughout the book a tension that is familiar to
many of ULK’s readers: reform versus revolution. He sees both
in the prison movement of the 1960s and 1970s in New York, with some
prisoners demanding bail reform and better food and others demanding an
end to the system that creates prisons in the first place. But in
telling the story of Attica and the revolts that preceded it he
emphasizes two things: the ways reforms were demanded (not by petitions
but by organized force) and the existence of demands that would have led
to the end of prisons as we know them. On Attica itself, he writes that
the rebellion demanded not just better food and less crowded cells but
the “emergence of new modes of social life not predicated on enclosure,
extraction, domination or dehumanization.” (8) In these new modes of
social life, Burton identifies sexual freedom and care among prisoners
emerging as a nascent challenge to traditional prison masculinity.
Attica began as a spontaneous attack on a particularly racist and
brutal guard, and led to a riot all over the facility that led to the
state completely losing control for four days starting on September 9th,
1971. Hostages were again taken, and demands ranging from better food to
the right to learn a trade and join a union issued to the press.
Prisoners began self-organizing rapidly, based on the past experiences
of many Attica prisoners in previous rebellions. Roger Champen, who
reluctantly became one of the rebellion’s organizers, got up on a picnic
table with a seized megaphone and said “the wall surrounds us all.”
Following this, the prisoners turned D Yard into an impromptu city and
organized their own care and self-defense. A N.Y. State trooper watching
the yard through binoculars said in disbelief “they seem to be building
as much as they’re destroying.” I think we’d agree with the state
trooper, at least on this. (9)
Burton’s point in this chapter is that the rebellion wasn’t an
attempt (or wasn’t only an attempt) to get the state to reform
itself, to grant rights to its pleading subjects, but an attempt,
however short-lived, to turn the prisons into something that would be
useful for human liberation: a self-governing commune built on
principles of democracy and solidarity. Some of the rebels demanded
transport to Africa to fight the Portuguese in the then-raging colonial
wars in Mozambique and Angola, decisions were made by votes and
consensus, and the social life of the commune was self-regulated without
beatings, gassings and starvation.
Abolition and the
Concentric Prison
Burton is a prison abolitionist, and he sees the aspirations of the
Attica rebels at their best as abolitionist well before the term became
popular. But he doesn’t ignore the contradictions that Attica and other
prison rebellions had to work through, and acknowledges the diverse
opinions of prisoners at the time, some of whom wanted to abolish
prisons and some of whom wanted to see the Nixons and Rockefellers
thrown into them instead. (10)
The Attica Commune of D Yard had to defend itself, and when the
rebelling prisoners suspected that some prisoners were secretly working
for the state, they were confined in a prison within a commune within a
prison, and later killed as the state came in shooting on the 13th.
There was fighting and instances of rape among the prisoners that freed
themselves, and there were prisoners who didn’t want to be a part of the
rebellion who were forced to. And the initial taking of the guards
constitutes a use of violence and imprisonment in itself, even if the
guards were treated better than they’d ever treated the prisoners.
Burton acknowledges this but doesn’t offer a tidy answer. He sees the
use of violence in gaining freedom, like Fanon, to be a necessary evil
which is essential to begin the process but unable to come close to
finishing it. Attica, even though it barely began, provides an example
of this. While violence is a necessary tool in war, it is the people
organized behind the correct political line in the form of a vanguard
party that ultimately is necessary to complete the transformation of
class society to one without oppression.
Counter-intelligence,
Reform, and Control
The final part of the book, “The War on Black Revolutionary Minds,”
chronicles the attempts by the state to destroy prison revolutionaries
by a variety of methods, some more successful than others, all deeply
disturbing and immoral.
Some of the early methods involved direct psychological
experimentation, the use of drugs, and calibrated isolation. These fell
flat, because the attempts were based on “the flawed theory that people
could be disassembled, tinkered with, and reprogrammed like computers.”
(11) Eventually the state gave up trying to engineer radical ideas out
of individual minds and settled for the solution many of our readers are
familiar with: long-term isolation in control units, and a dramatically
expanding prison population.
There is a lot else in this book, including many moving stories from
Attica and other prison rebellion veterans that Burton interviewed, and
who he openly acknowledges as the pioneering theorists and equal
collaborators in his writing. Burton engages in lengthy investigations
of prisoner correspondence, outside solidarity groups, twisted
psychological experiments, and many other things I haven’t had the space
to mention. We have received a couple responses to the book from some of
you already, which the author appreciates greatly, and we’d like to
facilitate more.
^Notes: 1. Burton, Orisanmi Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism,
Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt p. 19 All citations will
be of this book unless otherwise specified. 2. Jackson, Soledad
Brother, 111–12 cited in Burton p. 10 3. p. 3 4. pp. 152-180
5. Hill and Ekanawetak, Splitting the Sky, p. 20. cited in Burton,
p. 107 6. p. 29 7. p. 48 8. p. 5 9. pp. 88-91 10.
p. 95 11. p. 205^
In the United $tates, prisons mean war against the oppressed nations.
In occupied Palestine, war means prison for the Palestinians. Two sides
of the same blood-stained coin which built the richest empire in
hystory. Imperialism considers war to be a legal method of resolving
issues, in deeds if not in words.
The struggle for Palestine is a national liberation struggle. The
only consistently revolutionary class that may overthrow the bourgeoisie
is the proletariat, but imperial domination can unite a whole nation
against their occupiers for the establishment of independence. If
independence is a precondition for the dictatorship of the proletariat,
then Palestine’s struggle is revolutionary and progressive. If I$rael is
an arm of imperialism, then the Palestinian struggle against them is
revolutionary and progressive. Leadership of the proletariat in that
struggle would intensify its revolutionary character, but it is
revolutionary even without the proletariat in the vanguard. When
Palestinian communists align themselves with all revolutionary forces
against I$rael in a united front, that is a correct policy. We have a
clear hystory on this subject, and this practice is what led to the
victory of the Chinese people in creating the most advanced socialism
yet.
We in the United $tates face the strongest enemy in humyn hystory,
and I$rael is an arm of the United $tates in the Middle East. Everything
which weakens I$rael weakens the United $tates, which puts us in a
stronger position. Our comrades fighting in Gaza today are putting us in
a position of advantage for the final victory of the oppressed in
Occupied Turtle Island. To oppose the struggle in Palestine is to oppose
that which objectively weakens our enemy, to leave behind real friends
who are fighting real enemies.
“Leftist” support for I$rael in this war is often concealed by a
position against Hamas. This anti-Hamas, but allegedly pro-Palestine,
sentiment is often based on the supposedly inhuman crimes that have been
committed. On top of this being a complete deflection from the primary
question of imperialism, the claims surrounding such crimes as the
decapitation of infants have zero evidence behind them. Even bourgeois
press has shown that the claims are based on videos which show no
beheadings, only IDF soldiers claiming that the events occurred.(1)
Media campaigns in support of imperialist interventions can go much
further and be many times more difficult to uncover than what we are
dealing with here. This is a particularly obvious example of an
imperialist lie, and the propaganda will not always be so easy to see
through. Therefore, in addition to exposing blatant falsehoods, we also
need to be able to separate what makes a movement an ally or enemy and
what doesn’t, and be able to understand what line the media is
attempting to push when they tell a particular story.
The media will tell us that Hamas is committing heinous crimes,
killing babies and civilians. We need to ask why they are deflecting
from the principal contradiction in the world today. We need to ask who
weakens empire, and critically support those who do. We need to ask who
strengthens empire, and make ourselves their enemy. That is what it
means to understand what is principal and what is secondary. Contrary to
popular belief, the moral position of communists is not to do with
concepts like eternal justice and true liberty. Communists have one
moral position: we are for those actions which strengthen the
international proletariat. We understand that the work of Hamas as a
whole strengthens the international proletariat. Therefore we understand
that they are the allies of the oppressed and we align ourselves
alongside them.
We explored some of the developments of the Cop City struggle in our article The Struggle Against Cop City in Atlanta in ULK 81. Cop City, or the “Atlanta Public Safety Training Center” as the state calls it, has recently begun construction in Weelaunee Forest in Southwest Atlanta. This effort is funded primarily by the City of Atlanta and is to be owned and operated by the Atlanta Police Foundation. This is a pig training center with a supposed construction cost of $90 million, which will include a fake cityscape for police to learn tactics for suppressing urban resistance. This pig training center is part of a larger assault by the Amerikan state on New Afrikan communities and neighborhoods, along with the rise in gentrification, mass surveillance, police brutality and imprisonment rates. Some readers may remember the establishment of the community-run Rayshard Brooks Peace Center in 2020 and the subsequent state repression. No one can doubt that New Afrikan oppression is intensifying as the police and prison apparatus of the state continues to wreck havoc for the interests of the Euro-Amerikan nation.
In response to these developments, many diverse groups have organized against Cop City. For a while construction in Cop City was stalled because of forest defender activists occupying the intended site of deforestation, resisting raids by police to move them off the site. In this struggle an indigenous anarchist who went by the name Tortuguita was viciously murdered by police agents in a final raid of the forest.
Ongoing Developments in the Struggle
As the Stop Cop City movement continues, dozens of forest defenders and other protesters have been arrested on various felonies, from “domestic terrorism” to “intimidation of an officer.” For example, on 5 March 2023, Atlanta police arrested 23 protesters on “domestic terrorism” charges due to alleged property damage and trespassing, and that number has since risen to more than 40 over the last few months.(1, 2) These felonies are at least 20-year sentences in Georgia.
The state’s repeated arrests were an obvious cause for concern. A non-profit, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, organized funding to bail out these protesters who were the target of state repression. On 31 May 2023, the 3 organizers of that fund have also been arrested, charged with “money laundering” and “charity fraud.”(3) This is yet another example of the state suppressing even the most legal forms of resistance.
While the DeKalb district attorney has declined to prosecute the arrests related to Cop City due to the unpopularity of Cop City, the Georgia attorney general has taken the cases and will still prosecute them.(4)
A “Stop Cop City” referendum petition has been filed (and approved on 21 June 2023) that will put Cop City on the Atlanta ballot if 75,000 signatures are produced in less than 60 days after the approval.(5) Many of the groups against Cop City have focused on this effort, which may have the unfortunate effect of completely legalizing the struggle (which is not a strategy for long-term political development).
Bigger than Cop City
As Maoists we always seek to develop a dialectical materialist perspective that correctly denotes the relations of nation, class, and gender at play. Cop City is no exception. One of the most critical weaknesses of the Stop Cop City movement is that an advanced politics (one that is revolutionary nationalist and aimed at the long-term struggle) is not yet a leading line. If this problem is not properly resolved, the movement will give way to movementism and the Stop Cop City struggle will fizzle out like the 2020 BLM struggle, becoming co-opted into liberal electioneering politics.
We must also look at the global nature of Cop City. The Atlanta Police Foundation is funded by Amerikan finance kapital, from the likes of Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Amazon, Delta Airlines, and Waffle House.(6) Prisons and policing are not a struggle unique to the United $tates. The development of these bourgeois state organs are being rapidly replicated around the world. Cop City can and will be a test run for building pig facilities among the Third World nations as capitalism-imperialism decays. The struggle against Cop City will thus also play a part in the larger anti-imperialist struggle, and this is why developing a revolutionary nationalist line on Cop City is a must in this struggle.
Towards a preliminary analysis, we can say that Cop City is an intensification of New Afrikan oppression in Atlanta. The Euro-Amerikan nation – both Euro-Amerikan kapital and Euro-Amerikan communities – is united towards the policy of increased policing, gentrification, and imprisonment of New Afrikan and other oppressed nation communities. The Stop Cop City movement requires a united front, one that includes all those groups opposed to these methods of oppression, whether these groups be New Afrikan, Indigenous, Chicano, Euro-Amerikan, etc, but maintains some form of dialectical-materialist, revolutionary nationalist leadership in order to expand scientifically.
We have readers often tell us they want to start non-profits, but the Cop City arrests show that there are limitations to this type of organization: the state can and does retaliate against non-profits who pose a threat to the Amerikan state’s interest. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund is one example, where the Amerikan state has no problem arresting protesters or even legal organizers under charges of money laundering if they pose enough of a threat to its expansionary interests.
Cop City reminds us of the need for independent institutions of the oppressed which are flexible and secure, and involve the masses at every step of operation. Campaigns like “Stop Cop City,” or “Abolish Control Units,” attack the war apparatus that is aimed at the population within U.$. borders, especially the internal semi-colonies. As the above recent events demonstrate, we must build organizations that are prepared for the repressive response of the state.
Since 2021, the city of Atlanta in conjunction with its police force and local developers and contractors, has been trying to bulldoze a significant part of the remaining forest in the city and construct an urban warfare training center for police officers. The forest, which formerly contained a slave labor camp and then a state farm ran on prisoner labor, has been the site of occupations, sabotage of construction equipment, protests and raids by the police. Recently, the cops murdered an activist staying in the encampment defending the forest, while revolts in downtown Atlanta and confrontations with police at the site of the forest have resulted in arrests and terrorism charges for dozens of activists. The movement has racked up several victories already, including delaying the construction of the training center by several months and driving several contractors off the project entirely. But the struggle continues. At press time, the forest faces clear-cutting for the initial stages of construction.
Background
Atlanta is a rapidly and brutally gentrifying city, with a nominally Black elected leadership but a housing and economic policy that has displaced thousands of lower income New Afrikan residents. Cops have been used to harass New Afrikan tenants out of public housing to facilitate redevelopment, rent has spiked well above the already bloated national average, and the arrival of movie production companies (facilitated by tax breaks and other favors) has been a major motor of gentrification across the city.(1) The elected leadership of the city is in a bind – they have to deliver economic growth and good jobs, and get re-elected by appearing to stand against police brutality and white supremacy, but are constrained by their own commitment to capitalism and inability to confront the real power structure of the city, which, as we will see soon, is mostly unelected.
Like most Amerikan cities, Atlanta saw a weeks-long uprising against the police following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. In Atlanta, also like other Amerikan cities, local cases of police brutality added extra impetus to the protesters and their demands. The murder of Rayshard Brooks in June of 2020 led to a revolt that burned down the Wendys he’d been killed at(2), the resignation of hundreds of police officers and even the trashing of the offices of the state police. Local lumpen organizations saw a temporary truce and occupied the Wendys site with arms against rumors of white militas seeking to march near the site of Rayshard Brooks’ death. In the wake of these and similar events police and correctional forces nationwide are facing difficulties filling their ranks and reeling from their abject failure to contain the disturbances of 2020, when over sixty thousand (3) National Guard troops had to be called out to back them up. The need for Cop City is itself a sign of weakness, paranoia and poor morale of the police force.
The Campaign in the City Council
In 2021, after the rebellion, the Atlanta City Council met in secret to arrange two land deals in the South Forest, the largest expanse of forest remaining in the Metro Atlanta area. One was to give a movie studio CEO, Ryan Milsap, a swathe of public land to bulldoze and build a large movie production studio on. A second was to give another large chunk of land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, a private nonprofit that gathers money from some of the largest businesses in the region and funds policing initiatives. The APF was to construct a mock city out of concrete, similar to U.S. Military urban warfare training sites, to prepare police to prevent another 2020 from happening. (4)
The Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) is interesting all on its own. It’s entirely private, with unclear finances and no accountability to the public. It’s staffed by former national security officers, real estate investors and retired police; and it has enacted several large-scale programs around the city by itself such as building a center for a massive surveillance network across the entire city which allows footage from thousands of cameras the foundation has installed to be reviewed at one location. The APF has also built up a house renovation program that buys cheap real estate in New Afrikan neighborhoods, remodels it and gives it to police recruits to live in. All of this is done with money donated by corporations ranging from Coca Cola (who did drop out of the Foundation after pressure from activists) to Norfolk Southern. To repeat: large capitalist firms are directly funding, with no public oversight, the extension of massive surveillance networks, police colonization of New Afrikan ghettos, and the construction of a training center intended to make cops more proficient at urban warfare.
The APF is best understood not as a slush fund or a shady organization behind the scenes, but as a de facto shadow government that actually runs the city on behalf of a mostly white bourgeoisie.(5)
Activists uncovered the land deals and organized protests and a campaign to persuade the city council to not approve the projects. After months of rallies, lobbying and canvassing, the Atlanta City Council voted in late 2021 to allow the project to proceed. This outcome, which many of the activists involved in the campaign predicted, marked the first defeat for Stop Cop City. The coalition that managed this campaign, DARC (Defund Atlanta Police Department, Refund Communities) dissolved among accusations that the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had tried to take over the campaign and use it (and its failure which they banked on) as a recruiting tool. The DSA’s plan was to allow the campaign to fail instead of criticizing it openly, with the hope that its failure would radicalize people into their organization. Commenting on this, a local communist wrote “the notion that working class Atlantans, people who live their entire lives in the trenches of the city’s class war, require a civics lesson to be radicalized is self-evidently chauvinistic.” (6)
The Campaign in the Weelaunee Forest
Parallel to the campaign against the city council and continuing after it had been defeated, a growing and mostly anonymous group of people calling themselves “forest defenders” were ramping up their activity. Some engaged in tree-sits in the forest, others established gardens or engaged in mutual aid projects and free concerts, and others routinely sabotaged construction and surveying equipment preparing the forest for the project.(7)
At one point members of the Muscogee (Creek) tribe from Oklahoma, who lived in the South Forest before being expelled during the 1820’s, returned to the forest, conducted a stomp dance ceremony and shared the forest’s pre-colonial name: Weelaunee.
Several times, crews hired by Ryan Milsap to start demolishing the forest ahead of official permitting were driven out after direct confrontation by forest defenders. Outside the forest, protests against contractors, politicians and business-people involved in the project routinely escalated to vandalism and provoked repression from the police. In one case, a protest in East Atlanta Village was attacked by cops as it was ending, but the heavy-handed tactics of the police resulted in all 17 arrests being dismissed and thousands in restitution paid to those targeted. One of the general contractors of the project, Reeves + Young, dropped out after another direct protest at their officers and after several of their vehicles were sabotaged in the forest. It should be noted that not all interactions between construction workers and the forest defenders were hostile – when crews from the local power company showed up to do maintenance on a line in the forest, they worked around a garden that forest defenders had planted instead of destroying it.
Throughout late 2021 and 2022 this back and forth continued, with coordinated Weeks of Action bringing hundreds of people into the forest and a fluctuating smaller body of activists building and defending the forest in the interim.
Raids and the Murder of Tortuguita
Different police agencies routinely entered the forest and raided it repeatedly. Last May, following a Week of Action, cops came into the forest and smashed up a lot of protest infrastructure that was on the ground. Activists retreated to the trees, continued confronting work crews and burning equipment that was left unguarded at night. A statement issued after one of these incidents read “if you build it we will burn it.” In December of last year another raid resulted in the destruction of more shelters and 6 people were arrested and charged with ‘domestic terrorism.’
On 18 January 2023, a final raid into the forest by officers from the Georgia State Highway Patrol and numerous other police agencies attacked the forest with guns drawn. During the raid a forest defender sitting under a tarp refused orders to get up and leave, and the cops shot em several times at close range, claiming self defense. Eir name was Manuel Paez Teran (nicknamed Tortuguita or Tort), an indigenous anarchist from Venezuela, and ey’d been living in the forest for almost a year helping to coordinate its supply and defense. The cop story, that Tort had fired first from under the tarp and wounded an officer, began to unravel quickly. On body camera footage released weeks later an officer can be heard saying ‘you fucked your own officer up?’ after the shots, implying that the officer who was wounded was shot by his own people. Tort’s autopsy showed bullet wounds through the palms of eir hands, a story more consistent with an encounter killing than a firefight.(8)
Today
The movement is mostly evicted from the forest for now, and initial tree clearing has begun. The murder of Tortuguita, however, has dramatically raised the temperature of the struggle. The City council has already started walking back some of their plans for Cop City, and support for the movement and criticism of Mayor Dickens for being involved in it, has swelled. It’s also important to remember that without the resistance the whole forest would be gone and Cop City would be half-built already.
For Rayshard Brooks, for Tortuguita, and for victims of poverty and police violence in Atlanta whose names we know and those we don’t, we say Stop Cop City.
In Texa$ we have received more reports from prisoners about the worsening conditions overall behind bars. Multiple reports of increased repression regarding food quality, medical care, lack of respite for Ad-Seg and increased censorship. Much of the staff is not following any regulations laid out for it regarding the grievance process. Many writers have reported guards throwing out grievances. One report from Clements Unit mentions 100% denial of grievances.
The reports from Clements show some of the worse conditions prisoners face in Texas, with people in isolation suffering worsening health conditions and mental health. From Choper’s report:
“In protest fires burn daily on each of the Ad-Seg lines. Prisoners burn any and all items that will burn. So many so often they don’t even react or bother to put them out, consequently we have no mattresses. Waiting list over 18 months to get a mattress. We sleep on steel and concrete. There are no radios for sale on commissary.”
There is some unity in action going on, but without intentional organizing efforts to facilitate further education in proletarian ideology and connecting the masses behind bars to the oppressed nations in and out of the United Snakes, it may fizzle out due to lack of organization. Tactics such as setting fires can also bring about more repression from guards while taking away energy and materials for organizing. We will continue to fight the censorship and prepare for increased repression, and continue to grow USW inside Texa$ prisons.
We’ve also recently gotten a report of a new SPD (Security Precaution Designate) of Self Harm which is a measure the state is likely taking in response to organizing efforts and legal action against solitary. We are still awaiting updates from the court on the Anti-RHU lawsuit Dillard v. Davis, et al. Civil Action No. 7:19-cv-00081-M-BPs.
The most censored units are Allred and Hughes units. Censorship rates for ULK in TX have been increasing. Censorship rates for the last four issues of Under Lock & Key are as follows:
These are confirmed censorships while many are unconfirmed as received at the moment, so rates are likely much higher.
Much of this is in response to increased pushback from the prisoner population regarding the conditions already prevalent across Texa$ and organizing efforts such as the Juneteenth Freedom Initiative which initiated a wave of censorship which has been ongoing since June.
One comrade has been pushing a censorship lawsuit Owolabi v. TDCJ Allred Unit, et al., 7;22-cv-00094-0 which could have massive implication on facilitating further organizing efforts inside Texa$ prisons, however there have been issues with the Courts trying to dismiss the case on payments grounds despite payment being made for legal documents, that has been resolved for now but it goes to show how unwilling the Texas Department of Criminal Injustice is to follow in own procedure if prisoners use it to further progressive interests in making Texas$ prisons into liberation schools.
Regarding the BP 3.91 case Martinez, ET AL. vs. Members of the TExas Board of Criminal Justice, ET AL. #3:21-CV-00337, it is currently pending and the Judge had sided with the defendants and denied to issue summons to the TDCJ board members and director, however further action is being taken, its not over yet. More proof that this system is completely biased towards the oppressor and we cannot let up on any fronts.
On December 16, 13 comrades have unified in the Michael Unit to stop eating in response to ignored grievances, which both step 1 and 2’s have been filed, and hazardous conditions inside the isolation cells, where we’ve gotten a report where an entire row got sick due to improper ventilation. As with some other units, chow is being left out for hours at a time before being served, and people aren’t being let out to shower. We stand with these comrades and encourage other prisoners to find unity through these worsening conditions.
North Texas AIPS has been established and will be working in coordination with other groups such as Texas T.E.A.M. O.N.E. to ramp up more outside support and awareness of the struggle behind bars, and spreading MIM line in and outside of prisons in Texa$. We will continue to expand our efforts in order to bring awareness and strategize on combating the increased repression Texa$ prisoners have been facing
One project we will be working with a number of jailhouse lawyers on is updating the Texas Campaign Pack to include anything we can find to update the grievance information as well as information regarding the new independent Ombudsman for Texa$. Please send us your edits and changes for the Texas Pack so we can make the next edition as complete as possible.
The struggle in Texa$ is growing, as is state repression, our goals to establish institutions of the oppressed nation and facilitate the study of Maoism and peoples war is our path forward. Stand up for your right, don’t give up the fight.
In early December of last year a hunger strike was called at Ely State Prison, joined by at least 39 prisoners at the start and fluctuating over the following weeks. A prison advocacy group, Return Strong, represented the prisoners’ demands as follows:
End the continued and extended use of solitary confinement, lockdowns, modified lockdowns, and de facto solitary confinement.
End correctional abuse.
End group punishment and administrative abuse.
Address due process interference and violation in the grievance process.
Provide adequate and nutritious food.
Address health and safety concerns in all Nevada facilities and provide resolution status to them.
In response, the Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC) ignored several of the demands, calling them “false,” (2) but addressed some of the concerns related to food and administrative handling of punishments. Lower-level sanctions that result in loss of privileges will now run concurrently instead of consecutively, and Aramark, the food vendor, is being questioned about the portion sizes. Even the head of the local prison guards union mentioned that they’d noticed the portions shrinking recently.(1) Aramark has faced repeated legal challenges regarding its poor food from prisons across the country (3), so the fact that it’s now squeezing portion sizes in Nevada doesn’t come as too much of a surprise.
Some of the more serious allegations NDOC ignored include food being stolen from prisoners by staff, the existence of no-camera “beat-up rooms,” collective punishment and indefinite 23-hour lockdowns excused by laying the blame on “staffing issues,” and the de facto suspension of programming for many prisoners.(4)
Prisoners at Ely State Prison voluntarily suspended the strike after four weeks and the adjustment of some of the handling of administrative sanctions were addressed.(5) We didn’t receive any info from inside or outside coordinators about how/why the strike ended, just that it did. If any of our readers can provide insight we’d appreciate it.
Texas prisoners face some of the harshest conditions in the kkkountry mainly due to neglect from prison staff, and disregard for prisoners’ health, safety and rights. For example recently in Estelle High Security we had received a report from one of our readers on dialysis, and a copy of eir grievance,
On 15 August 22 at 5:45PM-7:10PM 11 Dialysis patients were put in a van with NO Rear A/C. We got to the rear gate of high security at 6:10pm our officer driving the van told Lt. Phillips:
“Hey there’s Dialysis in the van and it’s hot for them.”
Lt. Phillips said ,“I don’t give a fuck, I’m crossing my kitchen crew to the main building. They can fucken wait.”
It was about 90 outside. Our officer driving the van told her again, “They just got off dialysis.”
Lt Phillips said, “They’ll be fine.”
Their report describes a fellow prisoner who had passed out after they were left in there for an hour. This is not the only heat related incident, as heat waves were going on for weeks, many units went without A/C or adequate ice or respite as reported on from the Luther Unit. Meanwhile, Stiles Unit spent much of September in lockdown during the heat with no showers and limited food. Heat exhaustion and health issues are being exacerbated by lack of respite, this all being against directive A.D. 1064 requiring access to ice during times of elevated heat. The oppressors at this unit deny this happening of course, and show their own unwillingness to follow their own laws, which gives light to the real purpose of prisons of course being national and political oppression. Unity and mass action is the only way to address this, such as TX T.E.A.M. O.N.E.’s mass petition to mail to the U.$. Department of Justice as mentioned in ULK 78Juneteenth Freedom Initiative (J.F.I.) Phase 2.
This year has seen an increase in reports (at least 135 recorded by Texas Dept. of Criminal Injustice (TDCJ)) of censorship of mail from MIM(Prisons) across Texas, since the start of the J.F.I. As stated in the last 2 issues of ULK, the J.F.I. is simply organizing for prisoners’ legal rights as stated by the imperialist’s own laws (peacefully advocating for legal rights is not inciting a disturbance). Massive censorship continues in the Allred and Hughes Units, among many others, where conditions are some of the worst in the state. The reason behind this as stated before is to prevent organizing and political education from prisoners, and to limit their knowledge of their legal rights. The state’s interest are of population control, and torture (Restricted housing for decades is unconstitutional torture) along with the many cases of neglect beyond what’s referenced here.
"MIM Distributors and our subscribers within the TDCJ have exhausted all administrative remedies with our appeals, letters and grievances. The TDCJ is not interested in following the law on it’s own accord. Therefore we have begun to step up outside pressure on two fronts.
the legal front by filing a lawsuit
the public opinion front via our postcard campaign"
“A prisoner’s administrative remedies are exhausted when prison officials fail to timely respond to a properly filed grievance.” (Haight v. Thompson 763 F. 3d 554 (6th Cir 2014)) According to this, if they do not respond to our grievances we can go on to a §1983 Civil Action.
Anti-imperialist Prisoner support (AIPS) has been hitting the streets with ULK, J.F.I. Flyers, and postcards to be mailed to TDCJ’s Director’s Review Committee office and Jimmy Smith’s (Warden of Allred) office, collecting donations and educating those on the outside. We can always use more feet on the ground, and legal funds from those on the outside, more support in general.
This short summary of some of the conditions recently faced by Texas prisoners is a call to unite against all oppression, primarily against the United Snakes of Amerikkka, and to unify under the common banner of Anti-imperialism. Don’t let the divide and conquer tactics work as intended, this political oppression cannot and will not go unanswered. We need the people on the outside to support those on the inside in their efforts to further organize, rehabilitate, and educate in the United Struggle from Within in Texas. We need public opinion to shift, so keep on the pressure from both sides. The more they censor and oppress, bigger our fight gets!
Since Monday, 26 September 2022, Alabama has struggled to keep its prisons operating as prisoners across the state have not been performing work in their facilities until their demands for reform of the parole system, sentencing, and oversight are met. Organizing around this campaign began back in June among prisoners and their families, after years of protests and litigation over the escalating brutality of the Alabama Department of Corrections failed to make the state budge.
In the state of Alabama, prisoners manufacture license plates, furniture, clothing, while maintain the prisons themselves by working in the kitchen, laundry, or doing yard and road work. Without this work the prisons are dramatically short-staffed and can barely even keep prisoners fed. Meals being served to prisoners in recent weeks are basically slices of bread and cheese, a powerful indication of the willingness of the state and its employees to run the basic infrastructure prisoners need to survive.
The prisoners’ demands are not centered on overcrowding or the fact that Alabama doesn’t pay its prisoners anything for their labor, or specific acts of brutality by correctional officers, as galling as all of that is. Instead, they are targeted at the parole and sentencing systems, which have led to “more people coming out in body bags than on parole,” in the words of outside organizer Diyawn Caldwell of prisoner advocacy group Both Sides of the Wall.(1) The prisoner’s demands are:
Repeal the Habitual Offender Law immediately.
Make the presumptive sentencing standards retroactive immediately.
Repeal the drive-by shooting statute.
Create a statewide conviction integrity unit.
Mandatory parole criteria that will guarantee parole to all eligible persons who meet the criteria.
Streamlined review process for medical furloughs and review of elderly incarcerated individuals for immediate release.
Reduction of the 30 year maximum for juvenile offenders to no more than 15 years before they are eligible for parole.
Do away with life without parole.(2)
The sentencing and parole systems in Alabama have always been bad and have been getting worse in recent years. In mid-October while prisoners in some facilities were still refusing to work, the Alabama parole board granted two paroles out of 124 cases, a rate barely above one percent. Whether this was conscious retaliation or just the day-to-day brutality of the system is unknown at this time.
Supporters Rally outside Capitol
An investigation initiated by the Justice Department under the Trump administration identified horrific overcrowding (182% of capacity) and neglect that has led to some of the highest rates of homicide and rape among prisoners in the country.(3) Following this investigation, the Justice Department then took the extraordinary step of suing the state of Alabama over the conditions of its men’s prisons.(4) According to prison organizers, nothing has changed in the almost two years since the lawsuit.
Because of the prisoner participation across the state, the government wasn’t able to ignore it like they normally prefer. Governor Kay Ivey called the demands ‘unreasonable’ while also admitting that the building of two new mens’ prisons (with misappropriated COVID-19 relief funds) would meet the DOJ’s demands to end overcrowding.(5) Regarding parole and the basic fact that the state is putting more and more people inside with longer and longer sentences with no end in sight, she had nothing substantial to say.
The warehousing of predominately oppressed nation men, with no opportunities for rehabilitation or release is why we charge genocide against the U.$. criminal injustice system. Alabama is part of the Black Belt south, with 26% of it’s overall population being Black/New Afrikan. Yet, 54% of prisoners were New Afrikan across the state in 2010!(6) Alabama is in the top 6 states in the United $tates for overall imprisonment rates, with most of those states being in the Black Belt.
Caldwell discussed the despair prisoners in Alabama feel because of the lack of opportunities in Alabama prisons:
They’ve taken all the exit and second chance options away from these men and women in Alabama. There’s no hope for parole because the parole board is practically denying everyone and sending them off [with] five [more] years with no explanation, even though these men and women meet the set criteria that has been established.
They practically have a living death sentence, if they don’t have an EOS date, so all the hope is gone. They have nothing to strive for there, they feel like they’re not worthy of a second chance, they’re not given a second chance. And no one has any type of trust or hope in them to come out and reintegrate into society and be a stand-up citizen.
People incarcerated in Alabama face excessive force from correctional officers, a high risk of death, physical violence and sexual abuse from other prisoners and are forced to live in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, according to the DOJ.
The prison authorities have responded to the work refusal by cancelling all visitation, cutting programming back to nothing, and serving next to no food. The Alabama Department of Corrections is one of many prison systems across the country struggling to function without enough people to run its operations. While prisoners are the primary people to suffer under these conditions, this also indicates a contradiction in the United $tates use of prisons to control large populations that could offer opportunities for change. As Under Lock & Key goes to print, the prisoners have faced the state of Alabama down for three weeks. We will continue monitoring the situation and try to extract lessons for the rest of the country.
UPDATE FOR AUGUST 2022: Now that Juneteenth 2022 has passed, please use this updated flyer and these updated postcards now address the censorship across the state of Texas in recent months. We need your support to keep increasing the pressure to fight this censorship of political speech.
Download and print this flyer to hang or hand out.
We are also asking others to join our letter writing and postcard campaign in support of the rights of MIM Distributors and activists in Allred to freely communicate. There has been a rise in mail censorship as organizing has progressed.
download PDF below
print 2-sided on cardstock
cut into 4
add $0.40 stamp (or more)
go to event or public space and ask people to sign their name, city and state
explain the Junteenth Freedom Initiative to them
hand them a flyer (above) or Under Lock & Key
ask for a donation to pay for postage & printing
drop postcards in mail box (don’t mail them all at once we want a consistent stream of cards coming in)
