Title: Activists call for end to new form of slavery in American prisons
Date: May 10, 1999
Disciples News Service
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Contact: news@cm.disciples.org
99b-33
ENFIELD, N.C. (DNS) -- Although slavery was outlawed more than 150 years ago, U.S. prisons now represent 21st Century plantations, according to a network of prison activists.
Approximately 65 advocates of prison reform met April 30 -- May 2, at Franklinton Center in the tiny hamlet of Enfield. Franklinton Center is home to staff members of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice and the denomination's Southern Conference. While here, the group engaged in wide-ranging discussions on the prison industry, alternatives to mandatory minimum sentences, political prisoners, police brutality and the death penalty.
"Faithful Resistance: A Strategy Conference for Prison Activists in the Religious Community," was sponsored by the Interreligious Taskforce on Criminal Justice. The conference is an outgrowth of a September 1998 gathering, "Critical Resistance," which drew 3,000 prison activists to Berkeley, Calif. The North Carolina meeting was aimed at continuing the goals of the Berkeley conference.
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) representives included the Rev. Gerald Cunningham, senior associate for justice ministries, Homeland Ministries; the Rev. Mose and Mildred Laderson, Indianapolis; the Rev. Karey E.L. Gee, Jacksonville, Fla., and the Rev. Dwight Bailey, Wilson, N.C. The contingent also included ecumenical guests who are members of the Disciples' Church Action for Safe and Just Communities program.
The conferees called for alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders and abolition of the death penalty. People of color, according to experts, are disproportionately represented on Death Row. The group also demanded eradication of inhumane living conditions and practices of brutality in American prisons.
The "21st Century plantation" language belongs to former convict Abdul Rashid Ali of Cincinnati. America's prisons, he said, have become more like holding pens filled with political activists and the criminal element. Released from an Ohio prison in 1974, Ali has worked since then to help other formerly incarcerated persons make successful transitions to their home communities.
There are 1.8 million men and women in prisons and jails, according to keynote speaker Jose Lopez of Chicago. An instructor at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Lopez also is a leading advocate for Puerto Rican independence and the release of Puerto Rican political prisoners.
Sixty percent to 70 percent of these persons are people of color, he said. These statistics contrast sharply with the 1.8 million persons in universities and college -- 80 percent of whom are white.
Something is wrong that has "nothing to do with genetics," said the executive director of the Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rico Rican Conference Center. "What we have is a nation that is not at peace with its past sins."
Power issues are the driving force behind the "browning" of American prison populations, according to Lopez. That power takes root in U.S. colonialism, he said, calling racism and colonialism "two faces of the same coin." To combat racism and colonialism "we must change the basic structures of society. No democracy can be a colonial system."
Since establishment of the 13 colonies in the 1600s the U.S. has been an imperial power that unjustly claims land, but never native peoples, Lopez said.
Native American activist Dennis Banks (also known as Nowacumig) agrees, citing the Battle at Wounded Knee and other conflicts between American Indians and the U.S. government. "Europeans didn't receive a credit card allowing them to run roughshod over our people. They didn't have carte blanche, but day by day we began to feel it," said the American Indian Movement co-founder.
"America came to burn our sweatlodges and longhouses," said Banks who served 18 months as a political prisoner for his leadership in AIM. "They never came to pray with us . . . but to banish our way of life. They have criminalized our struggle and criminalized who we are."
That colonialism is now transforming American cities into a "sea of whiteness with islands of people of color." Today's urban revitalization efforts are similar to the apartheid practices in South Africa, according to Lopez. In American cities "they're bringing in yuppies and driving out people of color" to "select suburbs -- far away from the centers of power."
The same "creeping imperialism" is going on abroad via U.S. foreign policy. "That's what's going in Serbia right now," Lopez said, comparing the U.S. military to policemen of a multinational corporation.
In addition, it has taken place in his native Puerto Rico. The Chicago resident has been a longtime leader in his country's quest for independence from the United States. "You cannot divorce the military complex abroad from the prison industrial complex at home."
The role of prisons in America began to change during the Reconstruction period ( after slavery). Discriminatory laws, passed then, further disenfranchised freed slaves and filled U.S. prisons with African Americans. The 13th Amendment provided freedom for former slaves until they were duly convicted for some crime, said Lopez.
Young blacks in particular went from being slaves to the prison system, said Lopez. This new labor pool rebuilt the south, especially its railroads, major cities and their infrastructures. In short, it was a "change from chattel slave society to civil slavery."
America's prisons are becoming American concentration camps, according to Lopez. They are "centers of production" in which able bodied young people are "demonized and criminalized. When they are no longer productive -- you kill them."
Ali, the Cincinnati community activist, calls the U.S. prison industrial complex a business. He cites as proof, the increasing number of institutions run by private corporations that "farm out convicts to local businesses." An eight-year prison construction boom is a sign of the "inflationary proof" industry, said Ali. Ten private prison corporations in the country have earned profits of $65 billion.
The combined prison/military industrial complex, at work in the U.S. and abroad, devalues or objectifies people of color and indigenous people, according to Lopez. In doing so, vast contributions to their countries social and economic development are "written out of history."
Banks, the American Indian activist, says U.S. school children in particular have been shortchanged by this incomplete history of their country. "They don't know we're here. But we're here, America," he declared.
In the 1960s civil rights movement, Lopez said, African Americans "placed themselves back in history" by resisting. He called for creation of more "pockets of resistance in cities and in prisons." In them are "possibilities of changing the world" and "creating a new vision."
Outposts of resistance here and there are not enough for people like the Rev. Yvonne Delk, Norfolk, Va. The United Church of Christ minister and longtime activist wants something more. "I'm not ready for pockets of resistance. I want a movement. This (movement) is one way of writing ourselves back into history!"
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