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Letter from Keith “Malik” Washington, in Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Nov. 2014)

Comrades:

Prison conditions in Texas are horrible. Now we are delving into the deep nuances of the “Happy Slave” mentality, which is so very pervasive in Texas and is counter to any movement which seeks to liberate us. In order to liberate our bodies, we must first liberate our minds.

The Crisis: → The number of aging people in New York State prisons is skyrocketing, confining thousands of seniors to cruel and degrading conditions.

→ The number of incarcerated people ages 50+ in New York increased by more than 64% between 2000 and 2010, even as the total number of people locked up fell by 21% during the same period.

On the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, activist-scholar Michelle Alexander counseled all of us to “connect the dots,” and speak out about militarism, mass surveillance and mass incarceration. To her list, the Freedom and Unfreedom in the Digital Age conference adds “Big Data,”¹ as it brings together grassroots activists, trade unionists, techies, and hackers.

American film, whether documentary or fiction, has been relatively silent about the enormous prison population in the United States. The groundbreaking documentary was no doubt Frederick Wiseman’s 1967 exposé in Titicut Follies of the shocking conditions in the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Mass.

Mass imprisonment and the growth and concentration of increasingly militarized police in the oppressed communities are, like the slave patrols and racial terror of the old plantation slave system, weapons of counterinsurgency aimed at containing potentially rebellious social groups, in order to preserve and protect the political-economic ascendancy of the ruling class.

Why did mass incarceration rise in the US and what are its political uses?

This article will consider three topics: the existentiality of imprisonment, what the nature of the prison system reveals about the US as a colonialist society, and finally, some aspects of the prison abolition movement and what kinds of alternatives are being posed in terms of resistance.

Hope and Change

Abstractions are important, but when too far detached from the mulch of things they become ludicrous. If the abstractions are firmly rooted in Tradition, it becomes harder both to question them and to show that, belonging to a different age, they make little sense in our time.

I first heard Mumia’s voice when I took Dr. Mark Taylor’s “Systematic Theology” class my first semester at Princeton Theological Seminary. Mumia was sitting on death row, and had been for nearly 30 years—longer than I’d been alive. Having heard about his story, I expected to hear a man scarred by brutality and bitterness. To my surprise, Mumia’s voice radiated with a beauty and brilliance that both arrested my attention and captured my conscience. Soaking in every word, I somehow knew my life would never be the same.