Prisoner Advocate Elaine Brown on Georgia Prison Strike: "Repression Breeds Resistance" - 0 views
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four prisons in Georgia remain in lockdown five days after prisoners went on strike
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Using cell phones purchased from guards, the prisoners coordinated the nonviolent protests to stage the largest prison strike in U.S. history.
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Elaine Brown, Longtime prison activist and former chair of the Black Panther Party. Her books include The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America and A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story.
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until they receive better medical care and nutrition, more educational opportunities, payment for the work they do in the prisons.
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they’re demanding just parole decisions, an end to cruel and unusual punishments, and better access to their families.
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And t hey made a decision that that would be on December 9th.I have no idea why they picked that date and how they ended up getting perhaps ten prisons involved. But at that point, of course, the guards and the administration became aware of their intention. And so, when they locked down on the night of the 8th, their decision was to not get up.
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have known him for 15 years, and I have been with him for that long, since he was incarcerated and put into an adult facility at 14 years old.
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the constant violence being perpetrated against them by guards, who with their own idle time look to try and instigate an incident here or there, so there’s a lot of screaming, hollering, you know, aggressive behaviors that go on. And so, there’s always some incident jumping off,
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But the prisoners in the state of Georgia are paid nothing at all.Now, that’s not to say that the prisoners in other states are being paid. They’re mostly being paid a dollar a day to 50 cents an hour
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they are not paid one single dime, and they are required to clean the floors, clean the showers, do the yard work, do the dishes, cook the food—in other words, to maintain the prison itself.
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I learned the other day that one guy said he paid $800 to a guard for a cell phone that was probably worth about 50 bucks. So, that’s the first point that has to be made, because people imagine that there’s all this smuggling going on—and there is, but it’s on the part of—in the main, on the part of guards that are inside these facilities.
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all of them, for reasons that I cannot explain how they suddenly understood how to be unified, decided, “Yeah, we’re not working, and we’re down with this, and we’re not going to get up, and we’re going to stay united.” And across the prisons, in the various sets, they called each other, sent text messages
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Not only is he on lockdown, but he’s in the hole right now, because from almost day one or so, I was informed that he was taken off to the hole, deemed some sort of leader.
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In the Black Panther Party, there was a 10-point platform and program that articulated some of the manifestations of our general oppression, talking about lack of education, as a matter of fact, not having enough food and housing. In essence, what we called for was freedom and right of self-determination.
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when we consider that we black people make up approximately 12 to 13 percent of the overall population and yet almost 50 percent of the prison population, we have to ask the question, is this the result of some genetic flaw in black people? Are we obviously some sort of criminally minded? Or is there something wrong in the scheme of things? Obviously, the latter is what I would say. And so, I’ve committed myself to bringing people out of prison.
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So I helped to organize the Committee to Free Chip Fitzgerald. These people have been buried in prison for their political beliefs, and they’ve been buried in prison for their poverty. There are no rich people languishing in the prisons of America.
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which is what they are doing by prodding men with everything, turning off the heat, beating people, forcing them out of their cells, turning off the hot water, destroying and trashing people’s property, not feeding them, and so forth and so on, all kinds of tactics to instigate a violent response.