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.
I disagree with this California prisoner’s definition of snitching in
the 2nd paragraph of the “Stop
Snitching on Pigs” article (also in ULK 86). Not all
snitching is done to a “higher authority.” To snitch is to incriminate
an ally, or should-be ally, through written/verbal statements made to
anyone who could be a pig/rat/enemy, in general. If I take
incriminating info/intel to a rat, or to somebody who views the pigs as
“allies”, through gossip/rumors/incriminating raps (AKA rhyming witness
statements), then this is snitching. It’s well-known that this type of
gossip/rumors often finds its way to the higher authorities. The problem
is that this form of snitching, via gossip/rumors/raps, happens so
routinely that everybody is typically guilty of doing it, which
means that nobody’s trying to enforce
anti-gossip/anti-rumors/anti-incriminating rap. You never know you’re
gossiping to a MFer on 60-days-in, or a fuckin’ pig dressed up/tatted up
like a convict. I’ve seen many rats feed all kinds of gossip to the
enemy. Convicts gossiping about other convicts is just as bad as
convicts writing grievances on other convicts, snitch-wise, it’s just
that grievances are documented on paper while gossip isn’t always
documented. However, just because an incriminating statement isn’t
documented on paper doesn’t mean it’s not what it is – snitching.
Gossip, rumors, and incriminating raps aren’t silence, and thus, violate
the code of silence.
Why would you gossip about somebody who you claim to be loyal to,
when that “somebody” is somebody you claim you’d never snitch on? Some
say “a man’s only as good as eir word,” but if you’re using your word
behind somebody’s back, it means your words can’t be trusted. If your
word can’t be trusted, it’s no good. How am I supposed to be loyal to
people who I can’t trust? Besides, if you’re gossiping about everybody
else, then why can’t they be gossiping about you? What they’ll do to
you, they’ll do to me. An organization plagued by gossip is a ship
that’ll sink at the words of loose lips. (Mao discussed this in part in
eir essay Combat Liberalism). Plus infiltrators can weaponize
gossip to keep everybody against each other. The revolution demands open
confrontation. In a time of war (seeing as how prison is war,
gossiping to any enemy about an ally is disloyalty/snitching.
Don’t be scared to pull MFer’s up and encourage confrontation.
Gossip/rumors, as an aspect of communication, are a contradiction
within the masses that stirs up all kinds of dramatic
manipulation/schemes/disorganization/confusion/division/etc. If we’re to
wage a campaign against gossip/rumors/incriminating rap.
Criticism/self-criticism is not to be conducted behind comrade’s backs.
We need our organizations gossip/rumor-free, if we’re to succeed in our
number-one goal.
Time, for a Revolutionary, is more than just money; Time, for a
Revolutionary, is waging Revolution – with emphasis placed on the word
“wage”/“waging.” You wage Revolution against the enemy, not
with the enemy. Don’t waste much time loosening one’s lips with
the enemy, if it’s not words spoken in the name of the Revolution.
Seeing as how Communism is a society where no group has power over
any other group, I’d like our next articles to discuss how we can change
individuals, who collaborate with our powerful enemies and view them as
allies, into viewing the powerless as allies, who aren’t to be
collaborated against, or snitched on – a shift in loyalties, through
dialectical materialism’s resolution of contradictions.
In y’all’s experience, what strategies/tactics have y’all applied
behind bars, in order to internally change other prisoners’ loyalties,
in favor of Revolution? What new strategies can we come up with? How do
we get people to start caring about people who need help, instead of $,
drugs, sex, and power?
Can a communist society exist with individuals abusing powerful words
against each other, through snitching, gossiping, rumors, incriminating
raps, etc., or with collaboration against one another? (I personally
don’t see a communist society tolerating bullshit like that). What will
communication, on/off the internet, look like in a communist society and
how will it be organized? Remember, communication rules the nation(s),
so it’s very important to address this in our campaigns, if we’re to
succeed. The problem is that it’s hard enough for many of us to control
our own mouths, let alone the mouths of an entire society. How do we
organize our communications leading up to socialist Revolution?
It’s time to put the Revolution where your mouth is.
NOTE: This is why MIM said that, under the dictatorship of the
proletariat, party members will be paid the rate of the lowest paid
workers in society.
I actually did many years in the Arizona Department of Corrections.
The last six of those years was spent in the max (Brickeys/Cummins), cuz
I ‘bucked’ on em repeatedly. I’ve personally been through years
of what this Arkansas prisoner is describing. I filed hundreds of
grievances and they always responded with a denial of allegations and
found the grievance without merit, as this Arkansas prisoner said. I’ve
also had similar experiences with the disciplining hearings, with
disciplinary hearing officers, like ‘no-socks’, cutting the hearing
camera off on me mid hearing and automatically finding me guilty, etc.
For the longest time I held yards/showers down, barricaded cells with
spears, stabbed people, flooded toilets, busted sprinklers, slipped cuff
and attacked pigs to get justice, but I learned several things towards
the end of my set that helped a lot.
So when you – this Arkansas prisoner – ask what to do I decided to
give you a few answers in the long/short term; it’s inspiring to see
fellow Arkansas comrades goin’ down the same path as me, while “fighting
and spreading the word” in chains.
Okay, so in the short-term, request the prisoner’s self-help
litigation manual (4th edition) from the law library, they usually keep
several torn-up copies of them on hand, go to the exhaustion of remedies
section and pull up the case law at the bottom of the pages to
“shepherdize”. In 2016, while I was at Brickeys, Prison Legal
News sent me a free copy of their magazine and it had a case in
there from the Supreme Court that says that when a remedy (grievance) is
unavailable, then it is a “dead-end” process and doesn’t have to be
exhausted.
What I’m getting at is that there are certain circumstances (such as
when you’re being retaliated against as a result of exhausting your
remedies) that enable you to file the 42 U.S.C. §1983 lawsuit, without
completing the grievance process. You just gotta explain to the courts
in the §1983 complaint package why you had “no available remedy to
exhaust”, which sucks, cuz then you gotta survive a “summary judgement
motion” – it’s not easy either – once you file the lawsuit. The Arkansas
pigs are aware of this, which is why they don’t mind not signing
grievances or doin’ anything about your grievances once signed. Plus
they’re aware that the chances of them gettin’ sued are low.
Successfully sue them a couple times and watch their attitude adjust. I
personally went through this and didn’t get to finish the lawsuits cuz
the pigs where I am now trashed all my files.
Don’t just take my word for it though. Study into the case law on
grievance exhaustion and go from there (there’s no way to cover all the
case law inside of one article). If you don’t know how to shepherdize
cases, the book I told you about will instruct you on all that. On the
bright side it’ll give you something to do in the max. Get in the law
library, cuz while grievances don’t work in Arkansas, lawsuits do.
In the long term, I plan on collaborating with MIM(Prisons) to get a
campaign going against the PLRA (Prison Litigation Reform Act §1997) –
we’ll call it the “PLRA campaign”. The PLRA is what demands that
prisoners exhaust all available remedies, prior to filing any Bivens/42
U.S.C. §1983 lawsuits (Bivens are filed against the federal government,
while §1983 is for the state/local level). According to the 1st
Amendment of the U.$. Constitution we have the right to “petition the
government for redress of grievances.” And according to the 14th
Amendment of the U.$. Constitution we have a right to equal protection.
The PLRA violates both the 1st and 14th Amendments and I intend to
organize a class action challenging the constitutionality of the PLRA,
through the PLRA campaign.
In theory, our ability to “petition the government for redress of
grievances” is life-threatening and often injurious, cuz we’re forced to
exhaust dangerous grievances, prior to filing §1983’s. The fact is that
prisoners can and do get killed and fucked off – injured – for filing
grievances nation-wide. Filing grievances is dangerous in an infinite
amount of ways. They can’t legally force us to participate in a
grievance process that’s going to get us stabbed in the neck or jumped
on by fuck-boys, who are often in collaboration with the pigs. We are
unable to petition the government if doin’ so is going to get
us hurt in any kind of way. We can prove in a trial that it’s common
knowledge that guards, nation-wide, are capable of silencing and do
silence prisoner litigants’ petitions through retaliation which
intimidates many prisoners from initiating grievances or lawsuits. The
feds spent decades tryin’ to take down the five Italian mafia families,
in part for silencing litigants, so why not help us take down the pigs’
PLRA, which is essentially a technical loophole that they use to evade
justice or trials and silence litigants with mafia-like tactics.
The whole “deliberate indifference” standard that applies to 8th
Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment) lawsuits wouldn’t apply in a
1st Amendment claim. We’d be arguing that the PLRA exhaustion
requirement is “abridgement”, which doesn’t necessarily have to be
deliberately indifferent.
The PLRA violates the 14th Amendment cuz the prison class
can’t seek redress for mental injuries without there being a
physical injury, and the non-prisoner class can seek redress
for mental injuries even if there isn’t any physical injuries involved,
which is unequal protection. Shutting the doors of the courts in
prisoners’ faces so that we can’t seek redress for mental injuries
doesn’t allow us equal access to the courts, which also violates the 1st
Amendment. An injury is an injury. Take it from me, a severely mentally
ill prisoner, when I say that many mental injuries are just as bad, if
not worse than, physical injuries. Suffering from mental injuries is
also a “grievance” that we should be able to “petition the government
for redress” for, under the 1st Amendment. We have to ask ourselves what
the aim of the PLRA is when it comes to barring us from the courts for
redress of mental or psychological grievances? I think that the answer
to the question is obvious and speaks volumes.
How would the prison system look without the PLRA? The PLRA is an
obstacle standing in our way of combating the number one form of
psychological torture of the Amerikan nation’s prison system – control
units. And this is due to the fact that we can’t sue anyone for the
mental injuries involved with doing hole time if it doesn’t cause
physical injuries, and doing hole time, by itself, doesn’t cause
physical injuries. If we can successfully take down the PLRA, then we
can sue to receive compensation when we suffer mental injuries as a
result of doing long-term hole or max time, without there being any
physical injuries. If they have to compensate prisoners every time
somebody suffers a mental injury as a result of living long-term in
control units, they may lean more towards changing living conditions in
the hole (such as giving one access to books, radios, phones, jobs,
fixing temperature issues, etc.), flat out abolishing the control units,
or reducing length of control unit sentences.
Anything mentally injurious going on inside of the prison that is
simply for revenge-based punishments and not for security purposes could
then lead to mass amounts of compensation. The compensation will deter
psychological torture and amplify mental-health treatments.
The last aspect of taking down the PLRA is that prisoners would no
longer have to exhaust remedies in order to file Bivens/§1983s. If we
can end the PLRA in the long term, then this would end the grievance
campaign altogether.
With that I’ll close. I hope my response was helpful.
We ask our imprisoned lumpen readers, can snitching really be
stopped without independent power from the oppressor?
What would it mean to be loyal to “your people” or “your
folks”?
Can the principle of anti-snitching be applied to the enemy who it
is designed to protect fellow oppressed nations or lumpen from in the
first place?
Lumpen as Aspiring
Oppressors
First off, I’m not gonna sugar coat shit. We must identify the
‘oppressed’ and the ‘oppressor’, with a concrete analysis, which can get
confusing; because the two groups are united under the flag of the 2nd
Beast and because the oppressed lumpen in the United $tates of Amerika
are struggling to ‘transform themselves’ into the oppressors, so when
they look in the mirror their reflections often resemble the opposite;
in a political, spiritual, psychological, geographical and sexual
essence. Keep in mind that, subjectively and objectively, the U.$.
lumpen are in a figurative yacht compared to the canoes of the
proletariat and peasants of the Third World, as seen in their past and
present conditions. They also sail on entirely different waters,
figuratively speaking.
However, neither ship has an arsenal of cannon balls, as does the
oppressive Imperial Navy, which is a similarity. The problem is that the
U.$. lumpen are trying to arm themselves with cannons inside their
yachts, as a means of initiating the Imperial Navy and are aspiring to
become oppressors themselves, not as a means of internationally ending
oppression/exploitation – it’s the Amerikan nightmare. They are a
spitting image of their culture. They want to grow up and get spanked by
porn stars, like Donald Trump, with herds of piggy banks to save the day
like captain-save-a-rate. The majority of them worship Amerikan Idols,
not because they have to, but because that’s what they strive, with
blood, sweat and tears, to become.
What use is it for the lumpen of the oppressed nations to wrestle
power away from the oppressors only to use that power to restore, or
intensify imperialism? Chances of success is less than a gamble, with
these people steering the ship, it’s a guaranteed loss, because they
only understand bourgeois revolution, not a communist endgame. In a
materialist sense, the lumpen have never demonstrated, throughout
history, any success in establishing socialism. The lumpen have always
failed as a vanguard for very specific reasons, because they are a root
of imperialism. And if you don’t uproot the entire plant, from the roots
up, then the weeds resurrect, inside of the garden, and we find
ourselves in the same situation. It’s a rookie mistake to paint an
idealistic picture of the lumpen dictating to the rest of the world; not
only that, it would be revisionism for the lumpen to jump the
proletariat’s place, as dictators.
The lumpen of the oppressed nations often as not tend to feed into
the weed of imperialism, by cheer leading for and supporting the pigsty
with its state and federal criminal injustice system. What I’m trying to
say is that, even if the oppressed nations establish independent power
from the oppressor, they are likely to keep the same police system in
place, or worse. So, not only will snitching not ‘really be stopped
without independent power from the oppressor,’ snitching will not stop
even with independent power from the oppressor. There’s no
telling what the lumpen will do, if they get cannon for their yacht, but
the way that it looks from my hypothetical perspective is that the
lumpen are likely to use cannons to hunt down, loot, rape and sink the
canoes of the Third World proletariat, who aspire to eliminate
imperialism. Yachts, canoes and the Imperialist Navy represent the
material forces keeping each group afloat. Cannons represents an ability
to commit piracy, to dominate and sink other ships.
The Other Side
People need to wake up and realize that the reason why the
oppressed/exploited have historically been opposed to the oppressors
(the pigs, badge-less pigs, rodents of all varieties, who serve the pigs
for many flavors of cheese/slop, and reptilian serpents of the
Illusionati) is because they were common enemies who openly oppressed
along all three strands of oppression (nation, class, and gender). The
fucked up part that’s got all of the oppressed clawing at each others’
throats is that the slick ass enemies are disguising themselves as
friends and acting out delusional charades to convince the oppressed
masses into believing that the united snakes of pigtropolis are friends
and not infiltrators.
On to the next aspect of the contradiction; silence versus full
disclosure. To this day, the oppressed lumpen do not truly uphold and
adhere to a code of silence in a solid, revolutionary way. Originally,
the code of silence was meant to bolster organizational unity and
loyalty amongst the communities, so that our oppressed nations could
grow, struggle and develop internally. Making moves in silence is a
powerful organizational strategy and tactic, when applied correctly.
Codes of silence are meant to shield allies, who we are loyal to,
from incrimination. They are not to shield enemies, who are not loyal to
us, from incrimination. Why would we show loyalty to the enemy? Showing
loyalty to the enemy is showing disloyalty to your allies. The problem
is that we’ve got snakes and such trying to silently ride with the enemy
and apply codes of silence to them, in their defense.
With that said, it’s one thing to disseminate information to the
enemy to get should-be allies targeted, but it’s on a whole other level
when somebody, who’s claiming to be anti-pig, decides to put in actual
work in collaboration with the pigs. The collaborators even go so far as
to let these pigs into their L.O.’s, so that they’re official gang
members who get to transform at will and exercise their ability to set
you up on fraudulent disciplinary reports to get you stuck in maximum
security prisons. To get away with murder and police brutality, with
manipulating sex-starved prisoners into weird ass situations, with false
jacket allies, etc. Cooperating and coordinating with pigs on these
types of levels is against the code and should be serious violations for
all L.O.’s involved.
In my experience, these L.O.’s typically police the prisons and
streets more so than the actual pigs, with detective investigations full
of incriminating ass pig-questions and their violent enforcing of
childish rules, laws, codes, etc. Different names for the same shit. The
key word is enforce. When they enforce laws, that makes them
law enforcers. Their game of dress-up comes with the same biased and
prejudiced judgments that lead to sentences which are much more
oppressive than the pigs prisons and jails. These sick mfer’s are liable
to force innocent people into physical and sexual torture chambers,
where they do fucking weirdo shit to em, on an intense level that
happens in prisons. They use coded lingo like pigs, they wear uniforms
and badges like pigs they hide behind numbers for protection like pigs
and they get paid to do evil ass shit like pigs.
It sucks if I hurt anybody’s soft, mushee-gushee, sensitive ass
feelings, but I’m not going to refrain from speaking the truth in
criticism.
Our Tasks
What I’m wondering is why do we even maintain a code of silence
towards any of these piggly-wiggly ass L.O.’s, when they ride with the
enemy against us on a regular basis?
Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that, in order for the
oppressed to win power and keep our feet down on the necks of those who
prayed on our downfall, we’ll need an independent intelligence network
of our own. So, technically we just need to redirect intelligence
gathering apparatuses in our favor and win them over to our side of the
fight, so as to counteract the counter-revolutionaries and others of
their ilk. And by this, I mean that snitching isn’t to be stopped when
we have our own independent institutions of the oppressed but that we
have to look at this aspect of the contradiction in a different light.
We have to call it something positive instead of a hackneyed,
connotative phrase that’s been abused and distorted since its conception
and use it to our advantage against our enemies, who seek to use such
tactics and strategies against us. It’s impossible to support an
emerging socialist government without an agency that specializes in this
field of work. What I’m saying is that we need to police the police.
In the meantime, we can locate the enemy’s snitches, show em mercy
and recruit em to our side without letting the enemy know. Then, we
flood the imperialists with double-agents who feed the imperialists
misleading or false intel. I mean, one way to look at this is that if we
try to “kill all the rats/pigs,” we’d have to kill almost the entirety
of every imperialist country. We can’t kill the entire world.
Oppression is a contagious disease that is transmitted through
imperialist society like an opioid addiction with withdrawals and
cravings. Once one contracts the disease, ey becomes desensitized,
individualistic and apathetic towards society. Voluntary and involuntary
participation in capitalist society is the cough that spreads this
disease. This sickness has an infinite array of symptoms, but the main
symptoms that pertain to this article are disloyalty, disunity and the
inability to distinguish ally from enemy. The oppressed nations have
maxims such as ‘it’s not about what you know, but who you know.’ The
oppressed seek to make friends with the powerful oppressors as a means
of rising from oppression to become oppressors themselves, and these
oppressed people will turn over all kinds of incriminating info (‘what
they know’) to these powerful enemies.
Successful socialist revolution is the medicine for the ailment.
Under communism, there are no pigs for rats to snitch to and no pigs to
police us. So if you wanna liquidate rats, pigs and serpents thus ending
snitching, socialist revolution welcomes you into the rank-and-file with
open arms.
The next question (one of my own) that I’ll explore is “what strands
of oppression are keeping snitching and policing alive?” Oppressed
nations don’t ‘keep snitching and policing alive’, per se. And from an
amerikan perspective one would automatically assume that the bourgeois
males of the white oppressor nations are the only ones to slam.
Nevertheless, snitching existed long before capitalism-imperialism and
long before white people had a nation. Despite what these ‘white power’
lunatics think, ‘power’ (snitching/policing being what ‘white’ people do
with ‘power’) is colorless. Ultimately, societal oppression itself, in
all three strands, is what fuels snitching/policing, because it concocts
an opportunity for all government of society to incentivize oppressed
people to desperately find a way out of said oppression through
cooperation with the oppressors, who have the power to lift the
oppressed up to their level. So if you end oppression altogether,
there’s no logical reason to snitch on anyone. Those who advocate for
the imperialist sources of oppression are to blame for keeping snitching
and policing alive. The criminal injustice system created oppressive
consequences for those who oppose their power structure and they feed
scooby snacks to the mystery-gang members who assist them in targeting
their enemies. Basically, it’s not the ‘strands of oppression’ that
keeps snitching/policing alive, but the oppressors who create oppression
that encourage people of every class, nation and gender to sell each
other out.
Snitching and policing will remain if current society remains. Only
under a communist society will snitching and policing end.
MIM(Prisons) responds: While these harsh critiques of
lumpen organizations do not apply to all L.O.s for all time, they
certainly will ring true for many. And while we look to the imprisoned
lumpen in this country as one of the most oppressed groups, which has
historically produced some dedicated and effective revolutionaries, it
is true that they are not the proletariat. And they/we all must
transform ourselves and combat the class (and often nation and gender)
interests that we are born into.
As this comrade points out, L.O.s power often comes from their
willingness to act outside what is normally allowed. “The ends justify
the means” is one version of this. This is why Tupac
and Mutulu
Shakur worked together to develop the THUG
LIFE code to promote among the oppressed nation lumpen via Tupac’s
music. They recognized the progressive capacity of the L.O. rejection of
the imperialist code, but the anti-people tendency of the L.O.s that no
longer had a code of their own, or had a very reactionary one.
This comrade gets to the heart of it when ey says we need to use the
tools that work to build an independent path for the oppressed towards
socialism. Just as the imperialists have intelligence operations, so
must we. Though our intelligence cannot mimic the pigs like so many
L.O.s do that use torture, sexual abuse, and other anti-people behaviors
to promote fear among the masses.
“Snitching”, or sharing information, is a tool that goes both ways.
You can tell the imperialists on the revolution, or you can tell the
revolutionaries about what the imperialists are up to. The real crime is
collaborating with the imperialists in either direction.
Swallowed alive by the 2nd Beast, digested for
eternity.
Encaged, isolated and eclipsed, by spotlights under scrutiny.
Splinters in my feet, as I walk the plank voluntarily;
Poseidon’s fishin’ for me, with liquid dreams of recrutin’ ye,
into the rank-n-file to crowd-surf waves momentarily.
suddenly, loose lips opened up, like cannon ports, aimed at you and
me.
verbal cannon balls sunk our ship, Amongst A counter-revolution of
mutiny.
The mutants sold us out and signed a deal with Big Satan.
Long Ago, Big And Lil’ satan gave birth to their nations.
Over time their baby nations mutated, like x-men,
but with anti-hero superpowers to drop bombs on the next myn;
And also on their next Ken,
who ain’t even grown myn,
just Palestinian baby P.O.W.’s, concentration camps, got em caged
in,
unescapable lion’s den of thieves, who steal lives from mere
children.
I guess children’s Lives Don’t Matter, without world superpowers, like
Biden.