Why should free workers care about prisoners?
Great article by IWW member Sean Swain in Ohio, USA.
By Sean Swain
–While the majority of prisoners committed crimes to end up in prison, we have to keep in mind that the extremely wealthy who control the “commanding heights” of the economy have created desperate situations that lead to crime. Poverty, crumbling schools, widespread unemployment and under-employment– these are all conditions created by a maldistribution of wealth and power. Prisons, then, are a way to punish those without opportunities; prisons punish those effected w a free pass to the wealthy who are the cause of crime.
— While the vast majority of prisoners commit crimes to end up in prison, we also have to keep in mind that government has criminalized just about every human activity. The U.S. has more criminal statutes than any other nation in history. As a consequence, selective enforcement of these laws in poor areas where police are most heavily concentrated serves political, economic, and demographic interests totally unrelated to crime or crime control. The more “radical” element who may pose a challenge to the wealthy and powerful is silenced and neutralized while more wealth and power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
— The prison industrial complex has created a kind of “third world colony” right here in the United States. Prison systems outsource prisoners for slave labor to major corporations for pennies per day. Prisoners perform data entry and work auto industry jobs that used to belong to free world workers. The workers left unemployed become the desperate criminals of tomorrow, getting locked up and getting their old union job back… in the prison factory… for pennies per day…
–Those in prison today are your neighbors tomorrow. Freed prisoners won’t live in gated communities with Fortune 500 executives; freed prisoners move in next door to you. As a practical question, do you want a fellow worker with community activism and labor organizing experience moving next door and using those skills to create a functional life, or would you prefer a bitter, desperate, unemployable criminal with no prospects and little or nothing to lose?
— The modern prison system is the government’s “canary in the coal mine.” All of the strategies and tactics for surveillance, crowd control, and population pacification have been perfected on prisoner populations before being employed in the free world. Mass surveillance including centralized monitoring via security cameras and the collection of communications meta-data originate in prison; response tactics such as the use of tasers and pepper spray, “kettling” unruly mobs, and formations of phalanxes behind riot shields all arise from corrections applications.Even the use of torture was employed on prisoners before going mainstream. How authorities have pushed prisoners is soon how authorities push the workers. So, the conditions that prisoners are allowed to suffer today become the conditions imposed on workers tomorrow.
CONCLUSION
Personal feelings about crime aside, the interests of workers and the working class are bound together with the interests of prisoners. In fact, those who truly would like to see crime diminish should work for prisoner-worker solidarity, empowering prisoners and expanding the labor market, widening opportunities and prosperity that pose as a real alternative to crime.
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Please contact us today to find out how you can get involved. Let us know if you can:
* Add people in prison to our mailing list
* Write letters to people in prison
* Make phone calls to state officials
* Typing and transcription
* Research various items for people in prison
* Donate money and or writing supplies (stamps/envelopes/etc)
* Reach out to other organizations and ask them to get involved
* Make phone calls to friends and family of people in prison
* Be a personal advocate for an individual person in prison
* Collect art, pictures from magazines, etc for letter writing groups
* Write letters to state officials
* Research various aspects of the prison industrial complex
* Read letters and identify certain data for letter writing groups
* Ask your friends and neighbors to get involved
* Let us know your ideas!!
