Protesting Prisons: Rights and Reforms by Kirsten Anderberg

Protesting Prisons: Rights and Reforms
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

Jail is a place where dehumanization is high on the agenda of the state
and guards, and thus humane interactions from the outside are greatly
needed for the preservation of prisoners’ sanity. This necessary jail and
prison support can take on many forms. You can visit prisoners, organize
legal help, write press releases, send prisoners books, phone cards, money
and letters, organize rallies, help translate testimonies, and more. A
wide variety of organizations are devoted to prison abolition and reform,
and prisoner support. Just as there are many ways to help prisoners, there
are many distinct populations with specific problems in jail, as well.
Mothers with children may have special needs, gay partners have troubles
penetrating the immediate family visitation rules, reintegrating into
society after serving a long sentence requires help, translation issues
need more attention, prison conditions themselves are an issue, as well as
scams within prisons, such as those that overcharge prisoners for phone
usage.

The Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) Network
(http://www.anarchistblackcross.org) is a warehouse of information on
defensive and offensive jail support. They define defensive support as
educating the community about the problems within prisons and the legal
system, as well as working with prisoners through legal teams and support
groups. They define offensive work as direct challenges to the prison
conglomerate, which includes protesting prison conditions, and getting as
much press as possible focused on these issues. The ABC says its goals are
“struggling to expose injustice, corruption and oppression; supporting
prisoners who (consciously or unconsciously) are combatants against the
state; providing advice and support to activists who put their bodies on
the line in defense of freedom and revolution; and seeing our continued
activism, campaigns, etc. in the larger picture of prison abolition and
revolutionary change -- as well as our own experiences in creating
conditions for change.”

The ABC website says that the Anarchist Red Cross was formed in Tsarist
Russia to organize support for political prisoners of the Cossack Army.
Then during the Russian civil war, they changed their name to the Black
Cross to avoid being confused with what is now known as the Red Cross. The
Black Cross has died down and resurfaced several times. The site says the
North American sector of the Black Cross started in the early 1980’s. The
ABC focuses primarily on anarchist and class war prisoners. Their website
provides an extensive list of anti-prison support resources. ABC
organizations exist all over the world. Some of the countries with
organizations listed on the central ABC site are: Australia, Mexico,
Canada, Denmark, Germany, the UK, Greece, South Africa, Sweden, France,
Poland, Spain, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Brazil, and the U.S.

Many prisoner support groups exist for different jailed sectors. For
instance, there is support for anarchist prisoners
(http://www.breakthechains.net), as well as vegan prisoners, Chicano
Mexicano prisoners (http://burn.ucsd.edu/~udb/cmpp/index.html), Earth
Liberation activist prisoners (http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk), gay
prisoners (http://prisonactivist.org/ooc), parent prisoners
(http://www.inmatemoms.org), juvenile prisoners
(http://www.angelfire.com/al4/juveniles), etc. There are also specific
support groups for individual prisoners, such as the support networks in
place for Leonard Peltier (http://www.leonardpeltier.org), Jeff Free Luers
(http://www.freefreenow.org), and Mumia Abu-Jamal (http://www.mumia.org).
There are groups that work for the abolition of prison, such as the
Coalition For The Abolition of Prisons, Inc.
(http://www.noprisons.org) and Critical Resistance
(http://www.criticalresistance.org/). Excellent prison activism resources
exist online, such as http://www.homesnotjails.org,
http://www.prisonactivist.org/, http://www.celldoor.com, and
www.prisonsucks.com. Pen pal programs exist, and there are also
organizations that help prisoners sell their art, such as Prison Art
(http://www.prisonart.org/).

Books for Prisoners programs are very important. An Ohio books for
prisoners program reports that the most requested books, that they cannot
keep up with the demand for, include dictionaries, health books, books on
Native American and Black studies, and books by Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky,
Mumia Abu-Jamal, Louis Lamor and Anne Rice. The types of books the Ohio
books for prisoners organization needs are GED and college level
educational materials, legal texts, history books, especially on struggles
of peoples, art books, fiction, skill/trade books, revolutionary writings,
and medical texts. The Anarchists Black Cross site lists books for
prisoners programs in PA, WA, LA, CO,  MD, GA, OH, NY, IN, OR, MA, NC, CA,
and MN. They also list programs in Canada.

Once you are in prison, your choices are so limited. You rely on people
outside for your freedoms in so many ways. You rely on help to place phone
calls that are expensive, to mail letters that take stamps, to reach the
press and legal aid; it all takes more than one prisoner’s arms and legs,
and money. We often take our freedom to walk outside when we want for
granted, yet we also acknowledge that injustice is rampant within the
criminal justice and prison systems in America. It is frightening to think
of the people in prison for crimes they did not commit. There but by the
grace of God go you or I in that situation! And political prisoners,
again, it could have been me, and it may be me before we are through. I
think any time invested in prison activism is time well spent. And it is
something you know you would want someone to do for you, if you were in
prison.


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