East Coast 'In the Belly' tour report!

We just got back from a two week tour talkin' bout prison abolition along the East Coast. Here's our report-back, including where we went, who we met, and what we learned:

ATHENS, OH-

Played a performance art space in a converted church. It's an art center, subsidized by the city to encourage culture in Athens. Our audience consisted of maybe 30-40 people, students, artists, local eccentrics, old hippies. Athens is a college town, and it seems like most people in the audience were involved or associated with the university in some way. The audience was mostly white, but there was a pretty wide array of ages present.
It was interesting performing in a "real" theatre space, even though we had the audience come up on the stage with us. Having black outs and control of our lighting was nice. We felt good about our performances, and crashed with an old geography friend of Wes'. Stayed up into the night taking about Colorado and artificial arrangements of public space.

Lucasville uprising prisoner dies in Ohio

By Sharon Danann
in: Workers World
Published Sep 17, 2011

Abdul-Muhaymin Nuruddin

Abdul-Muhaymin Nuruddin, a prisoner convicted as James Bell, died this past week of an apparent heart attack while in custody. His body has yet to be released so that his funeral can take place, in disregard of Muslim custom of burial within 24 hours.

Nuruddin was a negotiator on behalf of the prisoners during the 1993 rebellion in Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio. He was held in high esteem by his fellow prisoners for his work in SOCF’s law library, where he prepared appeals, writs of habeas corpus and civil law suits.

Update on Pelican Bay Hungerstrike.

The most important part of this update is that Pelican Bay inmates intend to resume their hunger strike on Sept 26th. We will keep everyone informed about what is happening and will hopefully be bringing some solidarity actions together.

Workshop Recap: Lucasville Uprising.

Our presentation about the Lucasville uprising had four parts. 1. the case. 2. Why it’s political. 3. What support may look like. 4. How racial dynamics complicate support.

1. THE CASE We shared a quick summary of the case, with some visual aids. We focused on thosewe knew the most about: Siddique Hasan, Bomani Shakur, Jason Rob, Namir Mateen, George Skates, and Greg Curry. These were by far not all of those involved in the uprising. There weren’t a lot of questions, so we either did a pretty good job of getting A LOT of information transmitted in 15 minutes, or people felt too overwhelmed and confused to even know what to ask.

Reportback: ABC conference!

Collaboratively written by Kate, Wes and Ben
We decided to apply to participate in the North American Anarchist Black Cross (ABC for short) conference in Denver, and look at that, we ended up going. Though we don’t focus specifically on political prisoners, as ABC groups do, we definitely do some of this kind of work and are happy to exist in the space between political prisoner support and resistance to incarceration in general. We booked a couple shows on the way out there, developed a workshop on the Lucasville Uprising, performed at the conference and had a great time meeting people and learning from them.

The conference was organized by Denver Anarchist Black Cross, who is based out of the 27 Social Center - a warehouse space that includes a print shop, health collective, childcare collective, zine library, lending library, office space, show space, and a collective house upstairs. It’s a really amazing and inspiring place. Denver ABC seems to have more members and more activities than any other ABC in the US these days, they’re not sure why. Members are also involved in a lot of diverse activities, supporting political prisoners, copwatch, courtwatch (specifically for Immigration and Customs Enforcement cases), rallies and actions against police violence, the Denver Armed Resistance Committee, and I can’t even remember all the others. 

FCI Elkton Food Strike Update #3

Letter I wrote to the guy who dismissed my FOIA request:

August 8^th, 2011 Henry J Sadowski
US Department of Justice
Federal Bureau of Prisons
Northeast Regional Office
US Custom House – 7^th floor
2^nd & Chestnut Streets
Philadelphia, PA 19106 RE: Freedom of Information Request No. 2011-08416
 Dear Henry,
 I trust you know that your response was not responsive to my request. Nevertheless, I am very dissatisfied with this response. I requested shift logs and incident reports from specific days. Nothing you say can convince me that there were no shift logs or incident reports for those days. If there is a criminal investigation going on, the sensitive information could be redacted from those logs and reports.
 You are lying to me. I do not appreciate it. Do you know what “freedom of information” means? Are you trying to prove to me that we do not live in a country that is at all responsive to or respectful of it’s citizens? If so, you are doing a good job. I have to admit I’m not surprised, I've been on to you all for a while. I expect I’ll soon verify my suspicion that the bureaucrats in the appeals process share your disdain for the citizens you allegedly serve.
 Have a nice day, you authoritarian paper pusher.

Next I'll write a letter to the attny general appeals process, but that one will be dull. When i get a dismissive response from those fuckers, i'll share my snotty retort.

In other news on this subject, kate's working on publishing an OP ED article from our penpal at Elkton about their lighting policy. 

REPORTBACKS GALORE

We have been too busy for the internet. Here's what's up...

1. Pelican Bay- we went to Ohio State Penitentiary  for a "supermax to supermax" rally organized by the Lucasville Uprising Freedom Network. Before talking about the silly little action we did, I want to acknowledge both the amazing bravery of the hungerstrikers and the despicable apathy of the powers that starved them for four weeks (some are still refusing food). Read updates here. We made the group into about 15 people standing on the side of the road 1/4 mile away from the prison. Visitors came and waved. We chatted with folks and got sunburnt. Shift change happened and dozens of COs drove past scowling. We got bored and felt even more ineffectual than protests normally make us feel, cuz we were out of sight of both the inmates we were trying to express solidarity with and the administration we were trying to confront. So, we got our signs and some buckets and marched, past the no tresspassing signs making as much racket as we could. A couple other protesters joined us, including Brother Quahar of the new black panthers. We made it to the parking lot by looking at the ground, walking and not stopping with the noise every time a car pulled up next to us to try and talk to us. Finally in the parking lot an oily no-nonsense CO who clearly did not know how to talk with people he couldn't get away with beating up or macing with impunity informed us that the highway patrol was on their way to arrest us if we didn't leave immediately. We knew we weren't going to tear down any walls that day, and had important plans to come back and visit people the next morning, so we marched back, hoping at least half the inmates had seen or heard us. 20 minutes later 4 highway patrol cars rolled up and a much more polite officer told us that we ought not do that again. As usual he started with "who's in charge here" and when we told him no one was, he directed his statements at me, until Wes and Kate reminded him that they were there too.

2. ABC conference- We're going to the Denver ABC conference, and they've asked us to do a presentation on the Lucasville Uprising Prisoners. With that goal in mind, we visited Staughten and Alice Lynd at their house near Youngstown. They've both done a lot of work with the Lucasville cases, including writing the book on it. They have so much detailed knowledge to share. I feel like we could have talked to them all night, but we only had 45 minutes.  Then we camped out in a thunderstorm, which was surprisingly fun. The next day we went back to OSP to visit Siddique Abdullah Hasan and Bomani Shakur. This was an inspiring and very enjoyable experience. Bomani and Ben shared handshakes and book references. Hasan, Kate and Weslie talked about all kinds of current events and political prisoner issues. We also discovered they're celled on the other side of the prison. We'll have to march around the whole perimeter to be seen by them. We got a much better understanding of their case and their preferences for what we tell ABC. We'll be going back soon, for the bigger challenge of talking with Jason Robb about his affiliation with the Aryan Brotherhood and ABC's tradition of refusing solidarity with white supremacist groups. We're very much looking forward to helping the complexities of the lucasville situation enrich discussion and analysis at the ABC conference.

3. Elkton FCI food strike - got a letter from the shitheads claiming that they can't give me any records I requested. They say it's part of an ongoing criminal investigation and I can appeal to a higher authority, which I will be doing.

4. The "what are prisons for" puppet show from Mysterious Rabbit and Puppet Army was really great. If you have a chance to see them, please do.