bcbm
30th November 2008, 19:11
(All from Infoshop News)
On Saturday November 8th, the National Socialist Movement held an anti-immigrant rally and march in Jefferson City, MO. The gathering was part of a national effort by the NSM, with a similar event happening in Tyler, Texas.
Decked out in their Nazi best, swastikas and bomber jackets were the color of the day. Flanked by dozens of riot cops and local sheriffs, the Nazi group marched from the Governor’s Mansion to the steps of the Capitol Building. There they gave a few un-inspired speeches before driving away in there SUVs.
Along the march they were met with some resistance. About 50 people lined the route chanting and shouting at the Nazis. They were members of the Jefferson City community as well as those of us who traveled there specifically for the occasion. Some were there just to gawk at the absurdity of it all. While the Nazis Sieg Heiled, and chanted white power slogans, the crowd responded with “Nazis go home”, “fascists not welcome here” and the more colorful “fucking kill yourselves”.
After an incident along the parade route before the march turned toward the rally area, I and one other person were arrested on the lawn of the capital building. Both of us were quickly cuffed and loaded into a police wagon and driven the few blocks to the Cole County Jail. The other arrestee was initially charged with obstruction of justice and resisting arrest while I was initially charged with obstruction of justice, resisting arrest and 3rd degree assault. We were released from the Cole County Jail after 24 hours with no formal charges pressed, but they may still be pending.
The real point of this story starts with that arrest, and with what this anarchist found on the inside of the Cole county jail…
The Cole county jail sits in the capitol of Missouri, just blocks away from the Capitol Building. While wealthier counties and newer jails employ a “keyless system” where the feeling of isolation is built into the design, the Cole County jail was a throw back to an older era. It was all concrete slabs, cinder blocks and steel bars. It smelled like sweat and disinfectant and the mold that seemed to form on everything.
I sat in the tiny intake room for a few minutes, while my information was gathered, tattoos photographed and a lime green jump suit 3 sizes too big was issued. At first I was housed in a holding cell on the ground floor next to my comrade from the streets. After about 2-3 hours in the single person cell, with a security camera trained on me the whole time, I was moved to a larger holding cell already occupied by four women. Their stories give us the better understanding of what’s going on behind this jail’s crumbling façade.
Two of the women had been in there for weeks, one was doing an 8 day bid, and the last had just been arrested with no idea when she was going to court or if she was going to get bailed out. All four of them were mothers. Some with kids being looked after by family, and one woman’s child was already being held prisoner at that same facility.
The cell was freezing, cold air came through the ventilation system and only a thin gray blanket was given to each of us to try and keep warm. Eventually after enough pleading we were each given another thin blanket to fight off the 30 degree temperatures that permeated through the building’s concrete walls and floors.
I was the last person to join their group for a while, so I received the least desirable bunk facing along the walk way where guards patrolled regularly. They showed me how to tie the end of my sheet together so it would stay put on the thin rubber mattress we were each given to sleep on. The women who had been in there the longest had a few personal affects, stationary, extra white t-shirts, real shampoo and some candy. One woman had even managed to scrounge up enough money to buy an overpriced clock from the commissary. For them, knowing the time was one small way to stay sane, routine was something they could latch on to. Headstrong and loud, they talked shit on the guards and about how they wanted to “switch places with the CO’s for a day”, so that they could “leave them up here-not give them any water and inedible food and have them freeze their asses off”. When I told them where I had gotten arrested they echoed my hatred for the thoughts and ideas the Nazis were espousing. I felt at ease almost immediately. We even watched my arrest on the 10 o’clock news. For all their toughness and years spent in and out of correctional facilities in states and counties across the US, I would see almost all of them breakdown and cry at least once.
One woman laid in her corner bunk and silently sobbed about missing her family, her children and life outside of that two room cell. She’d been in and out of the psych ward, where your time didn’t count toward your sentence and mental health wasn’t on the agenda. The great “mental disturbance” she suffered from was simply home sickness, she had been there three weeks and had some weeks still left. The life she was leading in Cole County care was killing her mentally, the weight of it dragging her into depression. The thought of getting any actual help for her depression was unheard of. The psych unit was simply a place to shuffle people away, to keep them until they regained enough composure so as not to be a nuisance to the guards and staff.
The loudest and most headstrong woman there had been there the longest as well. She had bleached blond hair and was probably in her forties. She’d been arrested at the jail, on a bogus house arrest violation while trying to put ten dollars into her son’s commissary account. There was no one on the outside to help her get out, or to get a lawyer, so there she sat until she was to go to trial almost a month away. Her physical pain was the most obvious. Her distended belly gave away the incredibly inflamed liver underneath, and she had been periodically coughing up blood. She was still waiting on the blood work she was ordered to have by a jail doctor several weeks before. They’d even started her on a ten day anti-biotics cycle to help clear the infection, but while I was there the anti-biotics only came once, and hadn’t come for a while before that. For those who don’t understand how this medicine works, it must be taken every day, near to the same time of day for the entire cycle, or you might as well not take it all.
Another woman was complaining of an increasingly worsening headache. When she asked the CO for Tylenol she was told she would have to see the jail’s nurse before she could be administered any pills. She suffered through it in silence. The woman with the inflamed liver told us that the last time she asked to go the medical wing they brought her to the hole instead. They isolated her for 23 hours a day until she quit complaining. None of these women were willing to risk that, at least in this cell there was some kind of camaraderie.
It was a tense camaraderie at times. At one point in the night tempers flared, and two women got into a heated shouting match about something that I don’t think any of us could even recall now if we tried. It ended in bitter silence, until one woman turned to the other and said “let’s not do this, the CO’s get off on this shit, on us fighting each other, they fucking love it, so let’s just say we’re sorry and move on, not give these fuckers the satisfaction of hearing us fight”. And true to her words halfway through the argument, the intercom made a noise and switched on. They were listening.
The bunk area of the cell was connected to a “common area”, with a phone on the wall that would only allow you to call collect to phone numbers that had an account set up by the recipients. If you didn’t know you were going to jail ahead of time, there was no way to call family and loved ones to let them know you were there. Each woman tried calls while we were there, and almost every time the calls came back with the same recorded message “this phone number is restricted”.
The common area had a few books, mostly romance novels and crime thrillers. As well as a bible, specifically for the jail titled “free from the inside” a constant reminder that while their spirits could be “free”, their bodies were caged.
They asked me to write their story. About the mothers and daughters, partners and friends confined to a cell for weeks at a time, some for completely fabricated charges, some for defending themselves, some for breaking laws against property designed to satisfy business owners and politicians. These women and their stories are echoed in the prisons, jails, juvenile detention centers, ICE detention centers, and psychiatric hospitals across the united states. Watching them weep with anger and frustration, hearing them plead to go home and see their babies reminded me of the nearly 2.3 million people languishing in facilities of all kinds across the country.
Our work against the prison industrial complex has barely begun. We have yet to scratch the surface of what it means to be a prison abolitionist, let alone to build a movement around it. Our comrades, those we have known for years and those we have never met, are sitting in these facilities as we speak. We’ve supported them, in a variety of amazing ways over decades of imprisonment. Unfortunately, that support has more often then not fallen short of freeing our comrades from the grip of the state. The time to re-organize ourselves, to confront the prison industrial complex more strategically is now. In fact, the time was years ago, but looking back now does not bring a world without prisons any closer. We need to take the frameworks we have built, the networks on the inside and the outside, the books to prisoners programs and the letter writing nights and push it forward. We must move beyond the rhetoric of “prisoner support”, which has turned into a chore for too many anarchists in this country, and (re)create that prison abolition movement that we desire, that we will someday depend on.
Our outside movement alone will never bring about prison abolition, as much as the abolitionist movement did not end chattel slavery in this country, mass slave uprisings supported by an abolition movement did. The unfortunate reality is that prisoner led organizing, and prisoner resistance movements go largely ignored by the broader anarchist movement in this country. It’s noted in our journals and websites but rarely do we actually stand in solidarity with those rising up against there confinement.
When prisoners rise up, whether its through an organized commissary strike, a mass revolt or organized civil disobedience; those of us dedicated to prison abolition must be ready to react in a variety of ways. We must be ready to help spread the passion and dedication from one prison to the next in ways that prisoners themselves cannot. And to take their struggle, which is our struggle, into the streets!
Here’s the beginnings of a list of resources about prison revolts, uprising and organizing…
www.criticalresistance.org (http://www.criticalresistance.org/)
www.myspace.com/alliedresistance (http://www.myspace.com/alliedresistance)
http://www.ecoprisoners.org/
http://www.4strugglemag.org/
http://breakallchains.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/alongingforcollapsePress
-check out Fire to the Prisons #4
-----
And a support and call for an upcoming demonstration against prisons:
Like every prison, Trenton State is a daily threat to us and to any person who chooses to live their life as they see fit. In this society of control, the filth in the police cruisers, the ID cards, the cameras, the judges, the psychiatrists, and the courthouses all culminate in incarceration; in forced confinement. We see ourselves in each of the 1,900+ inmates who struggle inside daily just as we do on the streets. This system regards us all as cogs to move it along, threatening us with a jail cell if we choose to live for ourselves instead of the misery we endure.
We support the call by Trenton Anti-Racist Action and will march December 10th in solidarity with all the prisoners whose reality are the walls of the New Jersey State Prison. We have absolutely no "demands" but for the
destruction of all prisons and of the society they have created.
See you all in Mill Hill Park.
North Jersey Antifascists
[email protected]
Shoelacetown Anarchist Black Cross
[email protected]
On Saturday November 8th, the National Socialist Movement held an anti-immigrant rally and march in Jefferson City, MO. The gathering was part of a national effort by the NSM, with a similar event happening in Tyler, Texas.
Decked out in their Nazi best, swastikas and bomber jackets were the color of the day. Flanked by dozens of riot cops and local sheriffs, the Nazi group marched from the Governor’s Mansion to the steps of the Capitol Building. There they gave a few un-inspired speeches before driving away in there SUVs.
Along the march they were met with some resistance. About 50 people lined the route chanting and shouting at the Nazis. They were members of the Jefferson City community as well as those of us who traveled there specifically for the occasion. Some were there just to gawk at the absurdity of it all. While the Nazis Sieg Heiled, and chanted white power slogans, the crowd responded with “Nazis go home”, “fascists not welcome here” and the more colorful “fucking kill yourselves”.
After an incident along the parade route before the march turned toward the rally area, I and one other person were arrested on the lawn of the capital building. Both of us were quickly cuffed and loaded into a police wagon and driven the few blocks to the Cole County Jail. The other arrestee was initially charged with obstruction of justice and resisting arrest while I was initially charged with obstruction of justice, resisting arrest and 3rd degree assault. We were released from the Cole County Jail after 24 hours with no formal charges pressed, but they may still be pending.
The real point of this story starts with that arrest, and with what this anarchist found on the inside of the Cole county jail…
The Cole county jail sits in the capitol of Missouri, just blocks away from the Capitol Building. While wealthier counties and newer jails employ a “keyless system” where the feeling of isolation is built into the design, the Cole County jail was a throw back to an older era. It was all concrete slabs, cinder blocks and steel bars. It smelled like sweat and disinfectant and the mold that seemed to form on everything.
I sat in the tiny intake room for a few minutes, while my information was gathered, tattoos photographed and a lime green jump suit 3 sizes too big was issued. At first I was housed in a holding cell on the ground floor next to my comrade from the streets. After about 2-3 hours in the single person cell, with a security camera trained on me the whole time, I was moved to a larger holding cell already occupied by four women. Their stories give us the better understanding of what’s going on behind this jail’s crumbling façade.
Two of the women had been in there for weeks, one was doing an 8 day bid, and the last had just been arrested with no idea when she was going to court or if she was going to get bailed out. All four of them were mothers. Some with kids being looked after by family, and one woman’s child was already being held prisoner at that same facility.
The cell was freezing, cold air came through the ventilation system and only a thin gray blanket was given to each of us to try and keep warm. Eventually after enough pleading we were each given another thin blanket to fight off the 30 degree temperatures that permeated through the building’s concrete walls and floors.
I was the last person to join their group for a while, so I received the least desirable bunk facing along the walk way where guards patrolled regularly. They showed me how to tie the end of my sheet together so it would stay put on the thin rubber mattress we were each given to sleep on. The women who had been in there the longest had a few personal affects, stationary, extra white t-shirts, real shampoo and some candy. One woman had even managed to scrounge up enough money to buy an overpriced clock from the commissary. For them, knowing the time was one small way to stay sane, routine was something they could latch on to. Headstrong and loud, they talked shit on the guards and about how they wanted to “switch places with the CO’s for a day”, so that they could “leave them up here-not give them any water and inedible food and have them freeze their asses off”. When I told them where I had gotten arrested they echoed my hatred for the thoughts and ideas the Nazis were espousing. I felt at ease almost immediately. We even watched my arrest on the 10 o’clock news. For all their toughness and years spent in and out of correctional facilities in states and counties across the US, I would see almost all of them breakdown and cry at least once.
One woman laid in her corner bunk and silently sobbed about missing her family, her children and life outside of that two room cell. She’d been in and out of the psych ward, where your time didn’t count toward your sentence and mental health wasn’t on the agenda. The great “mental disturbance” she suffered from was simply home sickness, she had been there three weeks and had some weeks still left. The life she was leading in Cole County care was killing her mentally, the weight of it dragging her into depression. The thought of getting any actual help for her depression was unheard of. The psych unit was simply a place to shuffle people away, to keep them until they regained enough composure so as not to be a nuisance to the guards and staff.
The loudest and most headstrong woman there had been there the longest as well. She had bleached blond hair and was probably in her forties. She’d been arrested at the jail, on a bogus house arrest violation while trying to put ten dollars into her son’s commissary account. There was no one on the outside to help her get out, or to get a lawyer, so there she sat until she was to go to trial almost a month away. Her physical pain was the most obvious. Her distended belly gave away the incredibly inflamed liver underneath, and she had been periodically coughing up blood. She was still waiting on the blood work she was ordered to have by a jail doctor several weeks before. They’d even started her on a ten day anti-biotics cycle to help clear the infection, but while I was there the anti-biotics only came once, and hadn’t come for a while before that. For those who don’t understand how this medicine works, it must be taken every day, near to the same time of day for the entire cycle, or you might as well not take it all.
Another woman was complaining of an increasingly worsening headache. When she asked the CO for Tylenol she was told she would have to see the jail’s nurse before she could be administered any pills. She suffered through it in silence. The woman with the inflamed liver told us that the last time she asked to go the medical wing they brought her to the hole instead. They isolated her for 23 hours a day until she quit complaining. None of these women were willing to risk that, at least in this cell there was some kind of camaraderie.
It was a tense camaraderie at times. At one point in the night tempers flared, and two women got into a heated shouting match about something that I don’t think any of us could even recall now if we tried. It ended in bitter silence, until one woman turned to the other and said “let’s not do this, the CO’s get off on this shit, on us fighting each other, they fucking love it, so let’s just say we’re sorry and move on, not give these fuckers the satisfaction of hearing us fight”. And true to her words halfway through the argument, the intercom made a noise and switched on. They were listening.
The bunk area of the cell was connected to a “common area”, with a phone on the wall that would only allow you to call collect to phone numbers that had an account set up by the recipients. If you didn’t know you were going to jail ahead of time, there was no way to call family and loved ones to let them know you were there. Each woman tried calls while we were there, and almost every time the calls came back with the same recorded message “this phone number is restricted”.
The common area had a few books, mostly romance novels and crime thrillers. As well as a bible, specifically for the jail titled “free from the inside” a constant reminder that while their spirits could be “free”, their bodies were caged.
They asked me to write their story. About the mothers and daughters, partners and friends confined to a cell for weeks at a time, some for completely fabricated charges, some for defending themselves, some for breaking laws against property designed to satisfy business owners and politicians. These women and their stories are echoed in the prisons, jails, juvenile detention centers, ICE detention centers, and psychiatric hospitals across the united states. Watching them weep with anger and frustration, hearing them plead to go home and see their babies reminded me of the nearly 2.3 million people languishing in facilities of all kinds across the country.
Our work against the prison industrial complex has barely begun. We have yet to scratch the surface of what it means to be a prison abolitionist, let alone to build a movement around it. Our comrades, those we have known for years and those we have never met, are sitting in these facilities as we speak. We’ve supported them, in a variety of amazing ways over decades of imprisonment. Unfortunately, that support has more often then not fallen short of freeing our comrades from the grip of the state. The time to re-organize ourselves, to confront the prison industrial complex more strategically is now. In fact, the time was years ago, but looking back now does not bring a world without prisons any closer. We need to take the frameworks we have built, the networks on the inside and the outside, the books to prisoners programs and the letter writing nights and push it forward. We must move beyond the rhetoric of “prisoner support”, which has turned into a chore for too many anarchists in this country, and (re)create that prison abolition movement that we desire, that we will someday depend on.
Our outside movement alone will never bring about prison abolition, as much as the abolitionist movement did not end chattel slavery in this country, mass slave uprisings supported by an abolition movement did. The unfortunate reality is that prisoner led organizing, and prisoner resistance movements go largely ignored by the broader anarchist movement in this country. It’s noted in our journals and websites but rarely do we actually stand in solidarity with those rising up against there confinement.
When prisoners rise up, whether its through an organized commissary strike, a mass revolt or organized civil disobedience; those of us dedicated to prison abolition must be ready to react in a variety of ways. We must be ready to help spread the passion and dedication from one prison to the next in ways that prisoners themselves cannot. And to take their struggle, which is our struggle, into the streets!
Here’s the beginnings of a list of resources about prison revolts, uprising and organizing…
www.criticalresistance.org (http://www.criticalresistance.org/)
www.myspace.com/alliedresistance (http://www.myspace.com/alliedresistance)
http://www.ecoprisoners.org/
http://www.4strugglemag.org/
http://breakallchains.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/alongingforcollapsePress
-check out Fire to the Prisons #4
-----
And a support and call for an upcoming demonstration against prisons:
Like every prison, Trenton State is a daily threat to us and to any person who chooses to live their life as they see fit. In this society of control, the filth in the police cruisers, the ID cards, the cameras, the judges, the psychiatrists, and the courthouses all culminate in incarceration; in forced confinement. We see ourselves in each of the 1,900+ inmates who struggle inside daily just as we do on the streets. This system regards us all as cogs to move it along, threatening us with a jail cell if we choose to live for ourselves instead of the misery we endure.
We support the call by Trenton Anti-Racist Action and will march December 10th in solidarity with all the prisoners whose reality are the walls of the New Jersey State Prison. We have absolutely no "demands" but for the
destruction of all prisons and of the society they have created.
See you all in Mill Hill Park.
North Jersey Antifascists
[email protected]
Shoelacetown Anarchist Black Cross
[email protected]