Conghaileach
26th September 2003, 20:00
Prison is Ground Zero: The Break The Chains Conference
In August I attended an intense three-day weekend at the Break the Chains
Conference in Eugene, Oregon. If only all of our gatherings could be
organized this well, have this great an attendance, and contain as much
solid content as this one did. A big hats off to Lydia, Brenton and the
whole Break The Chains gang of hard workers who put this event
together. Each day there were workshops held at the University of Oregon,
and each evening there were off-campus events where activists in the prison
abolition movement gave talks. Here is the preamble to the conference:
“Perhaps no other single issue so convincingly illustrates the
inter-connectedness of the struggle for total liberation as does the
prison-industrial complex. Resisting prisons is resisting state repression
and blatant social control; it is resisting the most terrifying examples of
racism, sexism, and homophobia, the criminalization of the poor and
capitalist exploitation of labor. For this reason, the Break the Chains
Conference hopes to exemplify the need for continued and heightened
prisoner support with our ultimate goal being prison abolition. Prison
abolition is a political vision that seeks to eliminate prisons and
acknowledges the devastating effects that prisons have on poor,
marginalized, and politicized communities. Prisoner support, for both
social and political prisoners, means learning from the incarcerated,
making their voices heard and their existence visible and meaningful.
“The Break The Chains Conference is dedicated to fighting repression,
supporting prisoners, and eliminating prisons altogether. By providing
anti-prison education, building on existing prisoner support efforts,
learning from veteran prison activists, and initiating new campaigns
against the prison industrial complex, we want to use this conference to
initiate a new era of heightened prisoner support and anti-prison activism.
“We feel that the prisoner support and prisoner resistance movements, by
virtue of their broad-based nature, offer one of the best starting to
points to begin to dismantle the webs of power.”
On the opening night of the Break The Chains Conference there were lectures
by Ward Churchill, Native American author. Ward is a former chairperson of
the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, veteran American Indian Movement
[AIM] activist, and author, co-author or editor of over a dozen books about
Native American struggles for liberation, movement strategy, and the
politics of imprisonment. Safiya Bukhari was scheduled to speak but came
down with what was to become a terminal illness.
On Saturday night there were presentations by Chrystos, a writer and
artist. Her work as a Native land and treaty rights activist has been
widely recognized and the political aspect is an essential part of her
writing - even though she refuses to be taken as a "voice" of Native women
or as a "spiritual leader." Also speaking Leslie Bull, an activist, writer,
speaker, photographer, poet, and performer living in Portland, Oregon.
Sharing her experiences as a white girl, street hooker, homeless junkie,
prisoner family, survivor, and now graduate student in fine arts at Antioch
University, Leslie calls herself a compulsive truth teller in her writing.
On Sunday night Laura Whitehorn took the stage. Laura is a revolutionary
anti-imperialist who spent over fourteen years in federal prison, charged
with a series of property bombings that protested police brutality and U.S.
foreign policy. Released in August, 1999, she currently lives in New York
City and works toward the release of political prisoners incarcerated in
the United States. Ed Mead, this writer, followed Laura. What the
literature said about me was that I was a “former political prisoner of the
George Jackson Brigades, the co-founder of Prison Legal News, organizer of
Men Against Sexism (a group that militantly opposed sexism, racism,
homophobia and rape) inside the walls of the Washington State Penitentiary
at Walla Walla” etc. Laura and I were billed as “Enemies Of The State.”
Almost every night there was the talking was followed by the great by a
musical performance with Jim Page. Jim has been on the scene for more than
twenty years and his reputation continues to grow. Often cited for his
biting political pieces he is in constant demand by the social movements of
the day.
The crown jewel of this event was not the nightly speechifying by movement
luminaries, however, but by the daily workshops on all aspects of the
prison experience. I did one on the history of Men Against Sexism, other
workshops included The Struggle Against Prison, Repression, and Social
Control; The Jericho Movement & the Struggle to Free Political Prisoners;
Women In Prison/Free Battered Women Now; The Prisonification of Indigenous
Women; Connecting the Dots: From COINTELPRO to the Patriot Act; Support
Prisoners: Make your own tattoo gun; Chemical Prison: The Merger of the
Psychiatric and Prison Industries, and many, many more. All of the workshop
were well attended. Thee were four or five others going on at the same time
mine was scheduled. I thought sure I would be alone in that big room, but
it was full, with people sitting on the floor. The others were all full
too. A great Conference.
Let me close this off with a quote from the Manifesto for the Break The
Chains Conference. It does a better job of laying it on the line than I
could have done:
“To struggle against the prison system is to struggle against capitalism.
Both are dependent upon prejudice and hierarchal power relations, which
serve to keep people divided and to rationalize and legitimate the
oppression and exploitation of a given group of people.
“Capitalism cannot exist without the existence of a massive prison complex
for several reasons. The first reason being that a system such as
capitalism, with its dependency on exploitation and imperialism, needs to
create an effective deterrent to opposition; prisons serve this purpose
they serve to terrorize and intimidate the opponents of capitalist
brutality with the threat of imprisonment, and all the suffering that
implies. Prisons are used as efficient tools of class society (capitalism)
in other ways; prisons can be and all too often are used to warehouse
oppressed peoples and those deemed undesirable by the capitalist system.
These imprisoned "undesirables" make ideal workers for capitalist
enterprises because they have little or no rights - they're forced to be
obedient providers of cheap labor.
“The anti-prisons movement is increasingly anti-capitalist precisely
because prison growth is the logical outcome of the capitalist system.
Likewise, the anti-capitalist movement is increasingly focused on prison
issues because within prison walls, are masses of dissatisfied people who
have become politically conscious and are searching for resistance
movements to become part of. If the anti-capitalist movement can form
alliances with politicized prisoners, its likelihood of succeeding is far
greater.
“We are organizing this conference to educate people about the bleak
reality of the prison crisis, to mobilize people from the anti-repression,
prisoner-support, anti-authoritarian, and anti-capitalist movements, to
humbly host like-minded activists from other regions in what we hope is to
be an extremely powerful and productive convergence, to learn from
survivors of the prison system and gain from them invaluable lessons about
the nature of the beast we are up against, and to begin the difficult task
of developing a cohesive, organized, diverse, and effective movement
against state repression and the politics of mass imprisonment. As the
ruling elite intensifies its repression more and more broadly, such a
movement becomes necessary now more than ever before.”
You on the inside should know that there are those of us out here working
to crush the worst manifestation of the state’s apparatus of repression –
the prisons. We can support you, but ultimately you must be your own
liberators.
In August I attended an intense three-day weekend at the Break the Chains
Conference in Eugene, Oregon. If only all of our gatherings could be
organized this well, have this great an attendance, and contain as much
solid content as this one did. A big hats off to Lydia, Brenton and the
whole Break The Chains gang of hard workers who put this event
together. Each day there were workshops held at the University of Oregon,
and each evening there were off-campus events where activists in the prison
abolition movement gave talks. Here is the preamble to the conference:
“Perhaps no other single issue so convincingly illustrates the
inter-connectedness of the struggle for total liberation as does the
prison-industrial complex. Resisting prisons is resisting state repression
and blatant social control; it is resisting the most terrifying examples of
racism, sexism, and homophobia, the criminalization of the poor and
capitalist exploitation of labor. For this reason, the Break the Chains
Conference hopes to exemplify the need for continued and heightened
prisoner support with our ultimate goal being prison abolition. Prison
abolition is a political vision that seeks to eliminate prisons and
acknowledges the devastating effects that prisons have on poor,
marginalized, and politicized communities. Prisoner support, for both
social and political prisoners, means learning from the incarcerated,
making their voices heard and their existence visible and meaningful.
“The Break The Chains Conference is dedicated to fighting repression,
supporting prisoners, and eliminating prisons altogether. By providing
anti-prison education, building on existing prisoner support efforts,
learning from veteran prison activists, and initiating new campaigns
against the prison industrial complex, we want to use this conference to
initiate a new era of heightened prisoner support and anti-prison activism.
“We feel that the prisoner support and prisoner resistance movements, by
virtue of their broad-based nature, offer one of the best starting to
points to begin to dismantle the webs of power.”
On the opening night of the Break The Chains Conference there were lectures
by Ward Churchill, Native American author. Ward is a former chairperson of
the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, veteran American Indian Movement
[AIM] activist, and author, co-author or editor of over a dozen books about
Native American struggles for liberation, movement strategy, and the
politics of imprisonment. Safiya Bukhari was scheduled to speak but came
down with what was to become a terminal illness.
On Saturday night there were presentations by Chrystos, a writer and
artist. Her work as a Native land and treaty rights activist has been
widely recognized and the political aspect is an essential part of her
writing - even though she refuses to be taken as a "voice" of Native women
or as a "spiritual leader." Also speaking Leslie Bull, an activist, writer,
speaker, photographer, poet, and performer living in Portland, Oregon.
Sharing her experiences as a white girl, street hooker, homeless junkie,
prisoner family, survivor, and now graduate student in fine arts at Antioch
University, Leslie calls herself a compulsive truth teller in her writing.
On Sunday night Laura Whitehorn took the stage. Laura is a revolutionary
anti-imperialist who spent over fourteen years in federal prison, charged
with a series of property bombings that protested police brutality and U.S.
foreign policy. Released in August, 1999, she currently lives in New York
City and works toward the release of political prisoners incarcerated in
the United States. Ed Mead, this writer, followed Laura. What the
literature said about me was that I was a “former political prisoner of the
George Jackson Brigades, the co-founder of Prison Legal News, organizer of
Men Against Sexism (a group that militantly opposed sexism, racism,
homophobia and rape) inside the walls of the Washington State Penitentiary
at Walla Walla” etc. Laura and I were billed as “Enemies Of The State.”
Almost every night there was the talking was followed by the great by a
musical performance with Jim Page. Jim has been on the scene for more than
twenty years and his reputation continues to grow. Often cited for his
biting political pieces he is in constant demand by the social movements of
the day.
The crown jewel of this event was not the nightly speechifying by movement
luminaries, however, but by the daily workshops on all aspects of the
prison experience. I did one on the history of Men Against Sexism, other
workshops included The Struggle Against Prison, Repression, and Social
Control; The Jericho Movement & the Struggle to Free Political Prisoners;
Women In Prison/Free Battered Women Now; The Prisonification of Indigenous
Women; Connecting the Dots: From COINTELPRO to the Patriot Act; Support
Prisoners: Make your own tattoo gun; Chemical Prison: The Merger of the
Psychiatric and Prison Industries, and many, many more. All of the workshop
were well attended. Thee were four or five others going on at the same time
mine was scheduled. I thought sure I would be alone in that big room, but
it was full, with people sitting on the floor. The others were all full
too. A great Conference.
Let me close this off with a quote from the Manifesto for the Break The
Chains Conference. It does a better job of laying it on the line than I
could have done:
“To struggle against the prison system is to struggle against capitalism.
Both are dependent upon prejudice and hierarchal power relations, which
serve to keep people divided and to rationalize and legitimate the
oppression and exploitation of a given group of people.
“Capitalism cannot exist without the existence of a massive prison complex
for several reasons. The first reason being that a system such as
capitalism, with its dependency on exploitation and imperialism, needs to
create an effective deterrent to opposition; prisons serve this purpose
they serve to terrorize and intimidate the opponents of capitalist
brutality with the threat of imprisonment, and all the suffering that
implies. Prisons are used as efficient tools of class society (capitalism)
in other ways; prisons can be and all too often are used to warehouse
oppressed peoples and those deemed undesirable by the capitalist system.
These imprisoned "undesirables" make ideal workers for capitalist
enterprises because they have little or no rights - they're forced to be
obedient providers of cheap labor.
“The anti-prisons movement is increasingly anti-capitalist precisely
because prison growth is the logical outcome of the capitalist system.
Likewise, the anti-capitalist movement is increasingly focused on prison
issues because within prison walls, are masses of dissatisfied people who
have become politically conscious and are searching for resistance
movements to become part of. If the anti-capitalist movement can form
alliances with politicized prisoners, its likelihood of succeeding is far
greater.
“We are organizing this conference to educate people about the bleak
reality of the prison crisis, to mobilize people from the anti-repression,
prisoner-support, anti-authoritarian, and anti-capitalist movements, to
humbly host like-minded activists from other regions in what we hope is to
be an extremely powerful and productive convergence, to learn from
survivors of the prison system and gain from them invaluable lessons about
the nature of the beast we are up against, and to begin the difficult task
of developing a cohesive, organized, diverse, and effective movement
against state repression and the politics of mass imprisonment. As the
ruling elite intensifies its repression more and more broadly, such a
movement becomes necessary now more than ever before.”
You on the inside should know that there are those of us out here working
to crush the worst manifestation of the state’s apparatus of repression –
the prisons. We can support you, but ultimately you must be your own
liberators.