The Opening Statement: Winter 2024

Michigan Abolition and Solidarity presents another issue of The Opening Statement.

MAPS is delighted to present the 20th issue 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.

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

ARTICLES AND AUTHORS LISTED BELOW:

• Slavery, Involuntary Servitude, and “Forced Prison Labor and Punishment” Charles Garrison
• Drawing Connections From the Palestinian Liberation Struggle to Amerikkkan Prisoners Monsour Owolabi
• Prison Lockdowns are Becoming More Frequent and More Brutal Across the US Silja J. A. Talvi

Happy Spring! May it be a revolutionary one.

This issue of The Opening Statement features three main articles. The first is an essay by Charles Garrison, who is currently locked up in Colorado. Charles describes how in spite of the fact that in 2018 Colorado amended its constitution to eliminate the exception clause that had permitted slavery as a punishment for crime, the state continues to force prisoners to work and punish those who resist. As a result, you might see some parallels between the reality on the ground that he describes in Colorado and what you’re dealing with in Michigan, even though Michigan’s constitution still contains an exception clause like the one Colorado got rid of (Article 1, Section 9: “Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude unless for the punishment of crime, shall ever be tolerated in this state”). If you’d like to reflect on Charles’ analysis for the case of Michigan, we’d love to read it and publish it on our website. And feel free to write to Charles as well.

The second article is by Monsour Owolabi, who is currently held captive in Texas. In “Drawing Connections from the Palestinian Liberation Struggle to Amerikkkan Prisons,” Monsour explores the parallels between the forms of racist and colonial violence, domination, and disposability that characterize everyday life in both Palestine and in U.S. prisons. We hope you find his analysis illuminating and solidarity inspiring.

Last but not least, we include a long article by Silja J. A. Talvi that was published in Truthout back in February. In this investigative piece, Talvi writes that prison lockdowns are becoming more frequent and more brutal across the United States. Whereas in the past, lockdowns were supposedly used only for major disruptions, this investigation shows that these days—and especially since 2016—they are issued for almost any reason at all. Based on painstaking research, Talvi calculates that around 22 percent of the total state and federal prisoner population—that is, over 250,000 people—is on lockdown on any given day. Does this resonate with your experience? Let us know what you think.

And now for the news roundup. First off, we’re delighted to share some good news. Shortly after printing and mailing the Winter 2024 issue of TOS, Indigenous forest defender and Stop Cop City defendant Víctor Puertas was freed! Víctor was arrested at a music festival along with other members of the movement to prevent the construction of a massive police training facility known as Cop City in Atlanta. He was held captive in DeKalb County jail without bail for three months, then transferred to an ICE facility, where he was held for another eight months and threatened with deportation. As of February 25, 2024, he has finally been released! We featured Victor’s statement and poetry in our last issue.

An article in The Appeal dated March 21 reports on two lawsuits that were recently filed in state court here in Michigan. The suits allege that two Michigan counties banned in-person jail visits as part of a “kickback scheme” to profit from videochat fees. You might recognize some of the names involved: “The lawsuits say St. Clair County and Genesee County conspired with the prison telecommunications firms Securus and Global Tel*Link (GTL), respectively, by giving the companies lucrative contracts that exploit incarcerated people and their loved ones. The companies then allegedly split the profits with the counties.” St. Clair County, which contracts with Securus, banned in-person visits in 2017. Call revenue jumped from 4 percent of total jail revenue before that year to 14 percent since then. The suit against Genesee County and GTL is similar, alleging that the county banned in-person visits in 2014, signed a deal with Securus, and four years later switched to GTL when that company offered them a more profitable “kickback” arrangement. While we hope that the two lawsuits are successful in restoring in-person visits at these jails, we also know that these kinds of kickback relationships will be difficult if not impossible to eliminate until we end capitalism and incarceration altogether. We plan to include further info on this issue and more generally on the issue of surveillance in the next issue of TOS.

An investigation from October 2023 by the Prison Policy Institute indicates that the parole board in Michigan is releasing 33% fewer people and holding 22% fewer hearings per year since the pandemic started (the report compares data from 2019 and 2022). These declining trends seem pretty consistent across the country—for example, the report states that only one state parole board (South Dakota) released more people in 2022 than 2019.

Students, staff, and faculty at the University of Michigan have been protesting against the university’s complicity with Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Activists and organizers have carried out a series of escalating protests, including disruptive marches, temporary street blockades, and a sit-in in the administration building, at which 42 people were arrested and ticketed. Among other things, the campaign has called for the university to divest its endowment from corporations that profit from Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza and more generally its colonial occupation of Palestine. Currently, the university’s $18 billion endowment is invested in numerous corporations like defense contractors and security companies, so when the US government gives Israel billions of dollars in military aid, and Israel uses that aid money to purchase armaments and technology from US companies, the university takes a cut of the profits. Most of that money is reinvested in the endowment, but a small portion of it is used to fund university operations.

Palestine solidarity activists researched and wrote about the companies the endowment is invested in—this information is very hard to find because the university doesn’t want people to know. Along with giant defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the university has also invested in an Israeli company called Attenti, which sells ankle monitors and other surveillance tech and has contracted with the MDOC, among other prison systems. Scenarios like these make it easy to see how capitalism and racism link very distant institutions, including the MDOC, the University of Michigan, defense and tech corporations, and the Israeli military that is carrying on its genocidal war.

Israel’s genocidal operation in Gaza is ongoing. At the time of writing, according to Al Jazeera, more than 33,000 people have been killed by Israel, including more than 13,800 children. Nearly 76,000 people have been injured by Israeli attacks, including approximately 1,000 children who have lost one or both of their legs. At least 17,000 Palestinian children are currently unaccompanied or separated from their parents. The true numbers are undoubtedly much higher. Israel’s food blockade is intentionally starving the entire population of Gaza, and the World Health Organization has confirmed that as of March 25 at least 27 children have died from malnutrition. About 1.9 million people, or 80 percent of the population, have been internally displaced within Gaza. All or nearly all of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, libraries, water treatment facilities, and other necessary infrastructures have been damaged or destroyed, as have about 62 percent of the housing units in Gaza. According to a new analysis by the research group Forensic Architecture, the Israeli military has also destroyed about 40 percent of the land in Gaza that was previously used for food production.

In our last issue, we promised that in addition to covering the ongoing genocide in Palestine we would include some updates about the situation in Sudan and the Congo here. We’d like to give brief summaries of each, because we want to highlight the connections between all of these struggles for dignity and life, not only in terms of the forms of mass displacement, capitalist resource extraction, and colonial war they involve but also because of the forms of resistance they have inspired. You may see a connection to your own everyday struggles to live and fight for freedom.

In Sudan, over 7.5 million people have been displaced due to ongoing armed conflicts between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since the popular uprising in 2019. This conflict follows two previous civil wars (1955-1972 and 1983-2005) and a brutal military dictatorship that can all trace their roots back to the ethnic divisions created and violently upheld by the British colonial administration between 1899 and 1956. 25 million Sudanese are currently suffering from hunger or malnutrition, and diseases like cholera have begun to rapidly spread across the country. Two members of the Sudanese diaspora in Canada wrote in Briarpatch Magazine that “the people have continued to demand a civilian government, but are up against the power struggle between the Sudanese Army and the RSF, which turned into a full-blown war between the two powers in mid-April 2023.”

One bright light that has emerged, however, are local neighborhood committees or mutual aid networks: “As the catastrophic war unfolds and global powers prey on Sudan’s resources, neighborhood committees are still the only bodies looking out for Sudanese civilians, who are now facing an unprecedented level of violence. While we haven’t yet achieved a government without military rule, the movement for a civilian-led government remains strong and the neighborhood committees are resilient.”

These neighborhood committees, which began in 2013 as small-scale civil disobedience affinity groups during the protests against then-dictator Omar al-Bashir, work together to share food resources, medical care, transportation, and waste removal, because both the state and the paramilitary have failed to do so. Feminist and women’s groups have continuously protested for gender parity and also continued to organize sit-ins and demonstrations during the months of Ramadan. Neighborhood committees also found ways around Sudan’s digital blackouts and government surveillance, and were able to use private networks to share information internationally and rely on the Sudanese diaspora to disseminate it. This is one of many examples in history (that the state doesn’t want us to learn about) when decentralized groups, people power, and new forms of relating to each other enabled communities to survive when the state, and paramilitary groups, failed.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) supplies more than 70% of the world’s cobalt, an essential mineral for batteries used in cars, smartphones, and computers (including the JPay tablets and video kiosks that you all have no choice but to use). Cobalt mining in the Congo has exploded with the rise and demand for cell phone and computer batteries, particularly in the Global North, which has in turn created the conditions for militant groups and security forces to clash over territory and natural resources, while extrajudicial killings and political violence escalates. The violence has displaced 6.9 million people. Moreover, the DRC is at the epicenter of the United Nation’s sexual abuse scandal. It has the highest percentage of victims of sexual violence at the hands of UN troops. In February, angry protesters burnt the flags of the US and Belgium, DRC’s former colonial power, and protested outside of several Western embassies.

On March 11, the FBI raided the federal correctional institution (FCI) in Dublin, CA, which has been the target of 63 lawsuits regarding systemic sexual abuse. The prison, writes Victoria Law in Truthout, has long been called “the rape club.” In 2022, FCI Dublin made headlines when “six employees, including the warden and chaplain, were arrested for sexually abusing women in custody.” Two more guards were arrested soon after that and seven in total have pleaded guilty. These arrests, however, did not seem to change much at the prison. In August 2023, survivors at FCI Dublin filed a class-action lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons for allowing these conditions to continue. Finally, in early March, lawsuits were filed on behalf of 12 survivors at the prison, naming 23 Dublin employees and detailing “repeated forcible rapes, coerced sexual activity, inappropriate sexual touching, sexual harassment, voyeurism and retaliation against those who spoke about — or were simply perceived to be speaking about — the abuses.” The FBI raid occurred four days later. Law quotes Susan Beaty, one of the lawyers working on the case: “It’s not just about Dublin or one facility. . . . It’s about an entire system that has allowed Dublin to maintain this culture of abuse and retaliation.”

On a similar note, in an extensive new report published in Gothamist, Jessy Edwards and Samantha Max describe the “breathtaking scope” of sexual abuse by guards at the Rikers Island jail complex on the basis of their analysis of more than 700 civil lawsuits filed by prisoners. The lawsuits were filed in the last year or so under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York state law that made it possible for survivors of sexual assault to file claims outside of the statute of limitations. The authors write: “Accounts spanning from 1976 to as recently as last year describe a system where jail employees groped detainees, forcibly kissed them, ordered them to perform oral sex and engaged in violent rape. The lawsuits allege that jail officials knew — or should have known — about the ongoing attacks and allowed jail employees to continue to prey on incarcerated people.” These stories re-affirm our position that prisons and jails do nothing to address sexual violence – in fact, they produce it. We extend our solidarity to the survivors at FCI Dublin and Rikers, and to all survivors of sexual violence across the MDOC.

As always, please write with any information you wish to share about suspended programming, parole board delays, new policies, staff shortages, difficulty in accessing programs, commissary inflation, etc. We’ve seen some news reports about an incident requiring emergency response that took place at Marquette Branch Prison in early March. Reporting from WLUC in Marquette claims that MBP is now “under normal operations.” We think people on the outside would be interested to know more about what happened there, so if you have any information you’d like to share with us we’d be very grateful. We’ve also heard that local jails such as Monroe County Jail have been confiscating print books and magazines, and forcing prisoners to pay for tablets and exploitative licensing fees for books and music. Has anything like this been happening to you? Have print books become less available or more restricted? What about the library? We’ve also heard reports that administrators at Oaks CF are limiting soap and toilet paper for prisoners—has this been happening to you where you’re at? Write and let us know what’s going on.

As this issue was going to press, the Bureau of Prisons Director Colette S. Peters announced on April 15, 2024 that FCI Dublin will be shut down, as FCI Dublin was “not meeting expected standards and the best course of action is to close the facility” and that the people held captive will be transferred to other facilities. Though we have no love for Peters and her ilk, we celebrate the closure of any prisons and wish for freedom for all the people held captive at FCI Dublin.

Respect and solidarity,

MAPS

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash