The Opening Statement – Fall 2024

Michigan Abolition and Prisoner Solidarity presents a new issue of The Opening Statement.

MAPS presents Issue 22 of The Opening Statement, a free quarterly newsletter that features articles, poetry, political writing and opinion pieces, as well as other relevant pieces by non-incarcerated authors.

THE OPENING STATEMENT – FALL 2024  (CLICK THE LINK TO DOWNLOAD PDF)

ARTICLES AND AUTHORS LISTED BELOW:

• To Build an Abolitionist Future, We Must Look to Indigenous Pasts Cherise Morris
• The Perplexing Smiles of Children from Palestine Khaliifah Ibn Rayford Daniels (Marcellus Williams)
• As Climate Change Worsens, Deadly Prison Heat Is Increasingly an Everywhere Problem Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg

Happy autumn, comrade!

We wrote and organized this issue of The Opening Statement as the leaves on the trees outside turn from green to red, orange, and brown and as the nights get a little cooler. In this issue, we present three articles and one poem. In past issues, we’ve talked a lot about the political urgency of prison and police abolition—projects that are often dismissed as utopian or unrealistic or just “crazy.”

The first article, “To Build an Abolitionist Future, We Must Look to Indigenous Pasts,” directly addresses this tendency to dismiss abolition as a project. It does this by exploring the historic social structures and practices that predate the creation of prisons and police. The article also shows that abolition isn’t just a future we have to envision and build together, but also an actually-existing past that can guide us in the process. The author, Cherise Morris, is writing from Detroit, in occupied territories called Waawiiyaataanong, named by the Anishinaabeg which includes the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Bodewatomi (Potawatomi) peoples.

The second article discusses how global warming is affecting prisons across the US, and how few prisons are equipped to cope with it. Michigan ranks near the bottom of the barrel with few facilities having any air conditioned housing. 2023 was officially the hottest year on record and this year is on track to surpass it. Also, the author of the article notes that six states, including Michigan, refused to respond to the survey on which the article is based, so they had to use local news reports instead. Let’s just say that we’re not surprised by MDOC’s lack of transparency. So, if you have anything to add about heating and cooling in MDOC, we’d love to hear from you.

The poem we’ve chosen to include is by the martyr Khaliifah Ibn Rayford Daniels (Marcellus Williams). Khaliifah was a father, an imam, and a poet who was held captive by the state of Missouri until he was executed by the state on September 24, 2024. Despite enormous evidence of his innocence, and of police and prosecutorial misconduct, the killing took place, despite enormous evidence of his innocence and of police and prosecutorial misconduct. The prosecutors in the case, the victim’s family, 1.5 million Americans, and three U.S. Supreme Court Justices expressed their opposition to the execution. But governor Mike Parson and the state supreme court refused to halt it or grant clemency. Note that this is the same governor (formerly a rural sheriff) who pardoned 600 people in three years, the highest rate since WWII. Those granted his forgiveness include a white minister, a white man from Parson’s home county whose drunk driving put a 5-year-old into a coma, and a white couple who pointed firearms at passing Black Lives Matters marchers. We include Khaliifah’s poem, “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine,” in tribute to him and in honor of his international solidarity.

And now for the news roundup. First, a Metro Times article by Steve Neavling discusses a new online tool called the National Police Index, which allows people to access the employment history of police officers. The idea is to keep track of cops who engage in misconduct and are forced out of one police department, only to be hired at a different one. For example, a cop named Kairy Roberts was forced to resign from the Detroit Police Department in 2021 after punching an unarmed man in the face, failing to provide medical aid, and lying about it. However, the Detroit police failed to report his misconduct as required, and he quickly got a job with the Eastpointe Police Department. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the Michigan State Police “have refused to disclose public records about the identities of current and former police officers.” so Michigan does not appear in the database.

The Detroit Free Press published an article on September 10 about the new Wayne County Jail. Built by Dan Gilbert’s construction company for $670 million, the new jail had opened the week before and was already plagued by problems, including:

1. Fewer visiting rooms. There are only five visiting rooms for the entire facility, whereas the old jail had two or three rooms on every floor. As a result, lawyers are being forced to wait for hours to meet with their clients.
2. Lack of privacy for legal conversations. A defense attorney told the reporter that “confidential conversations between attorneys and inmates can be heard so clearly throughout the complex, including in courtrooms, that passersby can hear nearly every detail of their client’s cases, causing possible constitutional violations.”
3. Technological failures: “Doors aren’t working right, and neither are brand new TVs, phones, and tablets for inmates.”

The article also points to staff shortages similar to those in MDOC. It’s worth remembering that Gilbert, a power-hungry real estate developer, made the deal to build the new jail in exchange for taking over a property in Greektown where the county had started building a jail (known as the “fail jail”). The county abandoned that project in 2013 after it had gone $91 million over budget and was nowhere near completion. So, not only did Gilbert make hundreds of millions of dollars off this (flawed) construction project, he also acquired a piece of prime real estate from the county.

One part of this new jail complex houses the Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility. Some of you might have been locked up at the old facility on St. Antoine in Detroit, which was so overcrowded and unsafe for youth that in 2022, they were temporarily moved to an empty adult jail in Hamtramck. The Free Press has reported since then on the endless and horrifying stories of “deplorable” and “inhumane” conditions for youth. Most shouldn’t even be housed in detention, but because two residential facilities were shut down after their own horrors came to light, there are long waitlists for the few “secure” residential beds for youth. The county blames the state for not doing more to replace facilities, and the state blames the county for violating licensing regulations. We don’t believe MDHHS that they do not “compromise on child safety.” From the stories, too numerous to summarize here, they do far worse than that. The state is repeatedly and directly endangering the lives of our most vulnerable youth in countless deplorable ways. A recent report by a retired cop who worked at JDF for four months revealed even more neglect. He was fired for trying to blow the whistle. Since September 4, youth have been housed at the new jail facility, but the whistleblower said, “You can’t take an old broken system into a new building. You still have the same problems…It’s hurtful to understand that you are working to help kids and that the whole system is set up for disaster, for failure.”

We’ve written before about the students, staff, and faculty at the University of Michigan who have been protesting the university’s complicity with Israeli genocide. The university’s $18 billion endowment is invested in (among many other terrible things) US weapons companies that sell arms to Israel—fighter planes, missiles, bombs, bullets, and so on that the Israeli military is using in its ongoing campaign against Palestinians and others—which means that the university profits from Israel’s genocidal violence. In response to their protests, the university has doubled down on repression, sending in the police to violently dismantle the Gaza solidarity encampment, charging students and staff members with disciplinary violations, banning some of them from campus and firing others, and getting the Washtenaw County prosecutor to charge four protesters criminally for their alleged role in a sit-in in the administration building. Now, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has announced that, at the request of the president of the university, her office is filing criminal charges against 11 additional protesters. Protesters released a statement denouncing the charges and contrasting the attorney general’s decision to charge student protesters while deciding last year to stop pursuing criminal charges over the Flint water crisis: “In conjunction with [Attorney General] Nessel’s recent failure to deliver justice for the victims of the Flint Water crisis, this unfounded attack is a clear demonstration of the remarkable ineptitude of the attorney general office, and the criminal justice system as a whole.”

At the same time, news came out in early October that Attorney General Nessel will not be investigating the illegal destruction of thousands of prosecutor files in Wayne County. Nearly all files dating from 1995 and before were destroyed by someone at the prosecutor’s office between 2001 and 2004—the period when current Detroit mayor Mike Duggan was prosecutor and AG Nessel worked in his office. Michigan law requires prosecutors to retain files of defendants serving life sentences for at least 50 years, or until the defendant dies. The destruction of these files makes it extremely difficult for defendants to prove wrongful conviction. The reporter Steve Neavling writes in the Metro Times that many of the records that were destroyed came from the 1980s and 90s, a period when the Detroit Police Department’s homicide division was notoriously corrupt and engaged in “rampant misconduct, false confessions, [and] constitutional abuses of witnesses and suspects.” The result was “an alarming number of wrongful convictions and false confessions, as illustrated by a spike in exonerations and court settlements stemming from that era.” It’s not entirely clear what happened with the records, but Neavling concludes that “there are indications of a coverup.” For example, a county logbook that is supposed to record the destruction of public records appears to have been tampered with.

According to an article from September 5 in The Appeal, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has opened an internal investigation into a brutal deployment of pepper spray and brutality on August 2 at Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) where more than 100 women were locked in a cafeteria for several hours without air conditioning. COs pepper-sprayed the women and beat them when they asked for food, medication, or even for a reason why they were being held there. Women were zip-tied and continued to be sprayed with chemical spray as they lay on the ground. With “a round of spray that looked like a river of orange,” guards continued to attack prisoners until many of the women were vomiting and had seizures. In the aftermath of the attack, many victims of guard brutality were intimidated into signing “non-enemy chrono,” or paperwork that indicates that the prisoner is not concerned for their safety and that they had not experienced brutality from the guards. The investigation is ongoing, though we don’t have much faith in these investigations which take a long time and rarely offer even a modicum of justice. Have you heard of similar types of intimidation where you have been held?

Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 26, 2024 causing devastating floods and power outages throughout the southeastern US. Western North Carolina was especially hard hit. The Intercept reports that many prisoners in the state were essentially abandoned: “more than 550 men incarcerated at Mountain View [Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine, NC] suffered in cells without lights or running water. . . . As nearby residents sought refuge from the storm, the men were stuck in prison—by definition, without the freedom to leave—in close quarters with their own excrement for nearly a week from September 27 until October 2.” There was also little food or water: “four crackers for breakfast, a cup of juice or milk, and two pieces of bread with peanut butter for lunch and dinner. Potable drinking water did not arrive for several days.” All in all, 2,000 prisoners were eventually evacuated from five prisons in the region that were hit by floods. As we write this introduction, Hurricane Milton, which looks to be even more powerful, is approaching Florida’s Gulf coast, and the governor has refused to evacuate jails and prisons in mandatory evacuation areas.

Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza has expanded to Lebanon in recent weeks. Lebanon is where Hezbollah, a militant group that formed to liberate the country during a previous Israeli invasion, is based. Over the past year, Hezbollah has fired rockets at Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, to try to divert Israel’s military resources away from Gaza. Many displaced Palestinians also live in Lebanon today, including tens of thousands of the 750,000 Palestinians who Zionist forces violently expelled in order to establish the state of Israel in 1948, a process that Palestinians call the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic). The Israeli escalation began with a terrifying “pager” attack. Hezbollah began to use pagers to communicate because cell phones are more vulnerable to hacking and surveillance—especially dangerous because Israel can identify someone’s location from their cell phone data and use that information to bomb them. But at 3:30 pm on Tuesday, September 17, some 3,000 pagers in use across Lebanon exploded simultaneously, killing at least 12 people, including several children, and injuring nearly 3,000 more. The next day, walkie-talkies and other devices exploded across Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, killing another 20 people and injuring 450 more. There’s a lot that’s still unclear about what happened, but it seems that Israel infiltrated the supply chain and planted explosives in a shipment of pagers of the brand that Hezbollah had ordered. Of course, they had no way of knowing who was using the pagers at the time of t}he explosion, so many of the victims of the attack had no connection to the militant group. Also, the pagers were programmed to beep for several seconds before exploding, which meant that people picked them up to look at them, and the devices exploded in their hands and faces—many, including children at their kitchen tables, shoppers at grocery stores, and health care workers at clinics, were blinded and mutilated by the bombs.

Things escalated further on September 27 when Israel attacked again, using US-made F-15 fighter jets to drop US-made BLU-109 bunker-buster bombs on a residential area of a suburb of Beirut in an assassination attempt on Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. Nasrallah was killed in the attack, and six apartment buildings were completely flattened. All in all, according to the Lebanese government as of October 11, Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon have killed over 2,000 and injured about 10,000 people. And now Israel has begun a ground invasion, sending troops across the border. (Hezbollah has stated that their fighters repelled the initial Israeli offensive, and the Israeli military acknowledged that on October 2 eight Israeli soldiers had already been killed in the fighting and others wounded.) Here in Michigan, the Arab ethnic enclave of Dearborn has been the site of daily funerals for families whose loved ones are being killed in Lebanon.

All of this is happening as Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people grinds on. Gaza, as you know, has been devastated. According to Al Jazeera, as of October 2, Israel has officially killed over 41,500 people and wounded nearly 100,000 in Gaza, with an estimated 10,000 more unaccounted for beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings. Although the Gaza Health Ministry has done impressive work, it has gotten harder and harder for them to keep track of the dead, not only because so many have been killed or remain trapped under the rubble, but also because Israel has targeted the facilities they use to do this work, including hospitals. We likely won’t know the true number of deaths until many years from now. But a report published on July 10 in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet tries to estimate a more accurate total number of deaths for which Israel is responsible. The authors point out that conflicts have “indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence.” For example, since Israel has almost completely destroyed Gaza’s health infrastructure and public utilities, and has continued to prevent food and humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, many people will continue to die from lack of healthcare, food, and water even if the fighting were to stop. Using the current direct death toll, the estimate of total direct and indirect deaths would now be over 207,000.

Did You Know? Someone suggested a new feature for TOS in which we share facts about history that have been kept secret or that we’ve been lied to about. We thought this was a great idea, so here’s the first entry of Did You Know? We’re writing this introduction around the federal holiday of “Columbus Day,” which this year falls on Monday, October 14. This gruesome holiday celebrates the beginning of Europe’s genocidal colonization of the Americas. We wanted to say something about this genocide—an important term for understanding the past as well as the present, as the news from Palestine continually reminds us. In the entry of his diary for October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus described reaching an island he called “Hispaniola” (that’s the island in the Caribbean that today is divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic). About the Indigenous people, Columbus wrote: “They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion. Our Lord pleasing, at the time of my departure I will take six of them from here to Your Highness in order that they may learn to speak.” From the very first moments, Columbus saw the Indigenous people as resources to be taken and exploited, as slaves. The processes of conquest, dispossession, enslavement, forced labor, and disease that were set in motion as a result together contributed to the mass death of the Indigenous population of the Americas. It’s hard to know exactly how many people there were at the time of Columbus’s voyage because population statistics and censuses didn’t exist until centuries later, but historians who have studied this topic estimate that there were about 50 million Indigenous people living across the Americas, from what’s now Canada in the north to what’s now Chile in the south. Within 100 years, these historians continue, the number had dropped to about 5 million, which means that 90% of the Indigenous population, or 45 million people, were wiped out as a consequence of European colonization.

The numbers are so large that they’re hard to even grasp. How can we comprehend a catastrophe on such a vast scale? One way to approach this question comes from a recent study from 2019 by a group of climate scientists. By boring holes into Antarctic glacier ice, climate scientists can read how much carbon dioxide or methane there was in the atmosphere at particular moments in the Earth’s history. The authors of the study found that the year 1610 (a little over a hundred years after Columbus’s voyage) was the point with the lowest levels of carbon dioxide. They explain this finding by suggesting that one consequence of the genocide caused by European colonization was the elimination of millions of Indigenous farmers, whose agricultural lands, where they had previously grown crops like corn, beans, and squash, were taken over by forests. Trees are a carbon sink, which means they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Since rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means a warming planet, as we know from the science of climate change, falling levels of carbon dioxide will do the opposite, cooling the planet. The authors conclude that the genocide of the Indigenous people of the Americas set off a “Little Ice Age” that affected the entire planet, reducing global temperatures to their lowest point in at least the last two thousand years. So, if fossil capitalism and industrialization have demonstrated how human activity can affect the climate in devastating ways, the European colonization of the Americas and the consequent genocide of the Indigenous people is another example of the same phenomenon, but flipped.

Finally, we want to suggest a topic to think and talk about with each other. Throughout the history of prisoner support organizing, the question of “political prisoners” in relation to incarceration in the US looms large. Some of you don’t identify as political prisoners, some do, some of you may consider yourselves to be politicized by your experience of incarceration, but not political prisoners per se. We’d love to hear your reflections on this topic, and to add to the conversation here is a quote from George Jackson: “All Black people, wherever they are, whatever their crimes, even crimes against other Blacks, are political prisoners because the system has dealt with them differently than whites.” Do you agree with Jackson? Why or why not? Do you consider yourself to be a political prisoner? Is it useful to distinguish between “political” and “non-political” prisoners? Have your ideas on this issue changed, and if so in what way? We’d be really interested to read your thoughts about these or other related questions.

As always, please send us art, poetry, writing, reflections, etc! Unfortunately, as we’ve already explained, MDOC now blocks TOS issues that contain writing by Michigan prisoners. But we would love to hear your thoughts, analysis, and suggestions in response to the contents of the newsletter. Be sure to share this issue with friends.

In solidarity,
MAPS

Photo by Satit Wongsampan on Unsplash