Under Lock & Key

I refuse to lay down,
in my struggle against the oppressor.
Anti-imperialist efforts,
settling for nothing lesser.

Striving together with my brotherz and sisterz –
Utilizing knowledge, wisdom and understanding.
“We’re fighting for world peace!”
Is what my comrades past and present is demanding.

Anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist,
fuck it! I’ll be devoted
to fighting against that old slave mentality
that my older peers seem to keep holding.

We rise together and never fall.
Nor stumble in sudden speech.
So to the brotherz and sisterz down in this struggle –
Without initiative and motivation you’ll forever remain stuck with
your slave mentality!

Join this United Front for Peace!

Here is the fundamental science: when we act we achieve! Over the past year we have acted in unity to exemplify our collective strength. We joined a nationwide grievance petition. We campaigned for a non-violent resolution. We organized with the Islamic community and an on point social network. We conducted round table discussions. Many brothers enjoyed our track and field events, and we conducted a mass rec grievance campaign so that we could hold these events. We ended with a unit wide collective fellowship meal.

In 2013 we are refocusing our efforts on our primary function of sharing information. If you look back over the trajectory of the African history in this land you will see that every time we gained knowledge and acted on it we advanced. This must always be the comrade’s conscious focus. Acquiring and distributing intelligence. We understand that roughly 95% of prisoners won’t put in the effort to do this, and it may well be true that 4% of the ones who do will only seek to acquire certain knowledge for personal profit and gain. OneLife intends to focus its developmental efforts on that critical 1% who will both actively seek to inform themselves as a part of their daily routine and exercise due vigilance in passing that intelligence along to others in a sustained, structured way.

Our vanguard development understands the importance of knowing what is going on in Syria, Mali, or Nigeria. Understanding our u.s. economy, how it impacts other world peoples, and what is our place and power of potential in determining the greater scheme of things. We want to learn about specific political actors, the actual function of their office, and how specific policies impact our lives and the lives of our families and communities. Then we want to learn how to affect these processes. The 1% must lead such struggle. This is what is meant by movement. Any single campaign or event is pointless without solid comrades who are committed to sustained struggle.

As I’ve said before, you don’t have to be with OneLife to be serious about this movement, but you do have to be consistent. If your word ain’t shit, neither are you. Comrades preach what they practice, knowing it’s not about them. It’s about the people. Real lives are at stake based on what we do or don’t do.

MIM(Prisons) adds: We print this leaflet as an example of what organizations that join the United Front for Peace in Prison are doing on the ground in their prisons. This group has declared its agreement with the UFPP five points of unity, and is striving to implement them by organizing and educating others, and fighting winnable battles for change. As they point out, you don’t have to be with their organization to be in the movement, but you need to be doing something.

On October 10 a peace accord went into place across the California prison system to end hostilities between different racial groups. The Pelican Bay State Prison - Security Housing Unit (PBSP-SHU) Short Corridor Hunger Strike Representatives issued a statement in August, and hundreds responded on October 10 with hunger strikes to continue the struggle against so-called gang validation and the SHU. The original statement calls on lumpen organizations to turn to “causes beneficial to all” instead of infighting among the oppressed. Recently leaders in Pelican Bay State Prison reasserted that this applies to all lumpen organizations in CDCR, down to the youth authority.

The campaign to launch a peace treaty by influential leaders in Pelican Bay is not new. In 2000 prisoners worked with California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to organize peace talks, but those efforts were sabotaged by the CDCR whose class and national interests conflicted with those of the prisoners. It is inspiring that comrades find now to be an opportune time to initiate the process without the state, which is in line with the principles of the United Front for Peace in Prisons initiated by MIM(Prisons) and USW in 2011.

We share the PBSP-SHU Collective’s view that peace is key to building unity against the criminal injustice system. Prison organizations and individual prisoners across the country have pledged themselves to the United Front for Peace in Prisons (UFPP) principles and are building this United Front in their prisons, communities and organizations.

We know this won’t be easy, but there is a basis for this unity and peace. As was written in the original announcement of the UFPP:

“We fully recognize that whether we are conscious of it or not, we are already ‘united’ – in our suffering and our daily repression. We face the same common enemy. We are trapped in the same oppressive conditions. We wear the same prison clothes, we go to the same hellhole box (isolation), we get brutalized by the same racist pigs. We are one people, no matter your hood, set or nationality. We know ‘we need unity’ – but unity of a different type from the unity we have at present. We want to move from a unity in oppression to unity in serving the people and striving toward national independence.”

The ending of hostilities between large lumpen organizations has sweeping implications for the possibilities for prisoner organizing. USW comrades in California should work to seize this opportunity however possible, to translate the peace agreement into meaningful organizing in the interests of all prisoners.

Both fliers are double sided featuring the 5 principles of the United Front for Peace in Prisons. The first one is two fliers per 8.5”x11” piece of paper and is recruiting students to volunteer with us. The other is just the 5 pts and is four fliers per 8.5”x11” paper as quarter sheets.

North Carolina’s so-called Department of Public Safety has joined a number of state agencies in openly sabotaging efforts to prevent prisoners from fighting in their facilities.

MIM(Prisons) and our readers in North Carolina have received multiple notices of censorship of Under Lock & Key 27, most of them citing page 3, which contained the Call for Solidarity Demonstration on September 9. In their doublespeak, they justify this with reasons such as that it promotes “violence, disorder, insurrection or terrorist/gang activities” and that it “encourages insurrection and disorder.” This was in reference to a call for 24 hours with no eating, working or fighting, where prisoners only engaged in solidarity actions and networking to build peace.

Many other states censored Under Lock & Key 27 for threatening the security of the institution (including New York, California, Wisconsin, and Illinois). Wisconsin Department of Corrections later claimed that ULK 27 “teaches or advocates violence and presents a clear and present danger to institutional security.” So there you have it. Prisoners coming together, for whatever cause, is a security threat to them. Making it clear what they are trying to secure, which is the prevention of the self-determination of the oppressed nation lumpen. This has nothing to do with the persynal safety of humyn beings, which the Call for September 9 was clear in promoting.

Folsom State Prison in California went so far as to say that ULK 27 was censored for “advocating civil disobedience in prisons.” Even this claim is a stretch, unless fasting and not working for a day, a Sunday no less, is disobeying the law in some way. Texas seems to think so, as they censored many copies of ULK 27 with the consistent reason that it “advocates hunger strike and work stoppage.” Well we know Texas is big on unpaid labor in their prisons. And we suppose it’s not breaking news that peaceful civil disobedience is a crime in the eyes of the state of California.

Despite the more honest justifications given by some state employees in California and Texas, safety and security concerns remain the number one reason given by states to censor MIM(Prisons)’s mail to prisoners. To call these agencies on their bluff, MIM(Prisons) proposes that organizations within the United Front for Peace who are working to build off of September 9 focus on promoting safety in their agitational and organizational work. From the countless painful letters we get from U.$. prisoners who fear for their life everyday in these places, we are pretty sure that working together we can do a better job of creating a safe environment than they can.

Comrades should brainstorm ideas of how to launch a campaign to change the conditions that the state creates that lead to unsafe conditions for prisoners. Often unsafe conditions for prisoners are potentially unsafe for staff as well. Either way, an effective campaign to make prisoners safer should bring around new recruits.

Can we get enough stories of comrades working to help each other out and improve each other’s well-being to make ULK 29 an issue focused on creating safer prisons in the U.$? And you artists out there, any ideas on how to promote issues of safety and security that speak to the prison masses?

Let’s see what we can do with this. And look out for each other in there.

The first protest that got the world’s attention was in Libya, where U.$.-backed forces recently overthrew the decades-old government there. Timed to occur on the anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United $tates by Al Qaeda, rebels grabbed headlines by laying siege to the embassy, killing as many as a dozen people, including the new U.$. ambassador. Since then protestors have attacked imperialist embassies in Tunisia, Yemen and Sudan without firearms.

While incumbent U.$. President Barack Obama has been making plenty of mention of his role in the assassination of Al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama bin Laden in campaign speeches, hundreds of protestors in Kuwait chanted outside the U.$. embassy, “Obama, we are all Osama.” Osama’s vision of a Pan-Islamic resistance to U.$. occupations and economic interference in the Muslim world has reached new heights this week.

The Amerikan media has tried to play it off as a small group of trouble makers protesting, while Amerikans are shocked that they can be blamed for a fringe movie they have never seen and think is a piece of crap. At the same time, Amerikans seem very willing to condemn the protestors as ignorant, violent, low-lifes – just as the movie in question portrayed Muslims. But the trigger of these protests is far less important than the history of U.$. relations to the people involved. The most violent reactions occurred in countries that have all been under recent bombing attacks by the U.$. military, two of them for many years now, and the other had their whole government overthrown. Cocky Amerikans won’t recognize that the ambassador was targeted as the highest level representative of the U.$. puppet master in Libya.

MIM has held for some time that Muslim organizations have done more to fight imperialism in recent years in most of the world than communists have.(2) And while there are plenty of ways communists could theoretically be doing a better job, they are not. As materialists we must accept and work with the people and conditions we are given. And we do not hesitate to recognize that Islam has brought us the biggest internationalist demonstration of anti-imperialism we’ve seen in some time.

On 9 September 2012 at Everglades Correctional Institution, FLDOC, individual members of The Blood Nation honored the soldiers of Attica by doing one or more of the following: fasting, boycotting the canteen/commissary, accepting chow hall trays and dumping them, and explaining why. Also participating individually were one or more members of the following (in alphabetical order): Black Gangsta Disciples; Crip Nation; Insane Gangsta Disciples; Almighty Latin King Queen Nation; Nation of Islam; Spanish Cobras; Shi’a Muslim Community; Sufi Community. My apologies to anyone I missed. It was a small step at a spot with no history of unity, but even a single drop of water in a dry glass makes it wet. Respect to those who made the sacrifice, those who joined us midday, those who expressed interest the day after. I’m as human as anyone, but let’s TRY to remember who the enemy is!

Supporters on the outside can use these two-sided, quarter sheet fliers to let the people know about the Day of Solidarity being organized across U.S. prisons for September 9, 2012. Just click the image above to download the PDF, print them out, cut them up and hand them out. Don’t leave it to the bourgeois media to report on and define this movement.

Myself and the Revolutionary Order I am co-organizing would like to formally join the United Front/USW. We recognize the 5 principles as essential and they are also woven into and throughout our structure.

We are WOMMB (Warrior’s Order Mobilized for Maximum Building) and we’re focused on personal/social liberation and personal/social re-building, beginning with ourselves and fellow prisoners. Our methods and curriculum will center on rites of passage and initiatory values and structures. We aim to awaken the population, instill discipline, build character and destroy the bourgeois/slave identity. There are codes of conduct to voluntarily follow and a host of topics to be studied and mastered.

I will enclose our communique and 5 point plan/mission statement so that you will have a complete understanding of our position and goals.

We are seeking a relationship/partnership of solidarity, mutual assistance and collective planning and organizing. We would like to know more about MIM(Prisons) and how we can be of service.

1. Fasting for the period above cited unless a medical need necessitates eating.
   
2. Refrain from working for our captors (or slow work to minimal output) for the period above cited.
   
3. Engage only in anti-oppressor, networking and solidarity actions for the period.
   
4. Cease all prisoner-on-prisoner hostilities regardless of set, race, custody, gender, religion or other division.
   
5. Show respect for our mutual bondage and suffering as well as the sacrifices of all revolutionary brothers and sisters.
   

We welcome all prisoners - confined or not - to show support by participating or speaking out.

Just one day, just one voice!

We do not expect our brothers and sisters to incur casualties or harm - we do want to send a message, not to them only, but to each other. This is an us thing - a true united front.

Just one day.

MIM(Prisons) adds: We support this call from a group participating in the United Front for Peace in Prisons (UFPP) for a day of peaceful unity and protest, and will work with local organizing cells to coordinate this demo. This is an opportunity for the UFPP to build on the principle of Peace: “WE organize to end the needless conflicts and violence within the U.$. prison environment. The oppressors use divide and conquer strategies so that we fight each other instead of them. We will stand together and defend ourselves from oppression.”

This 24 hour action will require a little sacrifice by prisoners, but should incur no harm, and should lead to a reduction in violence as all prisoner-on-prisoner hostilities cease for the day. We can build greater awareness of the oppression against which we fight, and build the unity that is necessary for that battle, by organizing groups and individuals to participate. Comrades organizing around the solidarity demo are encouraged to send their plans or reports to Under Lock & Key. Note that copy for the next issue will be due the week of the demonstration, so send your reports in on September 10 to make the deadline.

From Georgia to California, from Virginia to Illinois, all across the United Snakes, let’s show that the prisoner struggle is one common struggle.