We are stripped of many rights once we become captives in the US Criminal Injustice System. But not all of our rights are taken from us. We still have the right of Free Speech. We are women who know first-hand how the System destroys lives, and we are obligated to use our right of Free Speech to make others aware of what is happening.
Baby girls are being born right now who will be caught up in the beast of the US Injustice System. In the first few years of their lives, they will be trapped by the beast in ways that are impossible to escape. There are baby girls being born in Arizona today who will one day occupy the bunks we occupy right now. Chattel, property, slaves existing year after year to profit the State. So many tiny baby girls wrapped in hospital blankets with the pink and blue stripes today will soon experience the wrongful intrusion of the Injustice System into their young lives. A System that preys on the young, and the black and brown, the ill and the lost, and the poor and all otherwise marginalized.
The US Injustice System is a sophisticated capitalist machine and was designed to ingest babies into its cavernous depths as young as possible. Devouring children yields the State the most profit. It has a multitude of ways of forcing baby girls into rebellious behavior so it can define them as criminals. It needs a perpetual flow of children to keep the profit machine alive. We were once those babies, and it is too late for us. As women brutalized throughout our young lives and into our adult lives, and some of us into old age in this System, we must summon the courage to speak freely.
Crops of marginalized baby girls are being planted for the System to harvest in a cycle of systemic abuse to make its money off their souls. We are the women sitting at the end of that road, and we Lifers sit at the worst possible end of that road. People say death is worse than Life, but they aren’t paying attention. We must speak, if not for ourselves for whom it is too late, then for those newborn babies en route to the plantations we reside in. We have an obligation to each and every baby girl destined to be snatched up in the claws of the US Injustice beast.
I first wrote this originally on 1/18/2025 and mailed it out handwritten via USPS. The cops pretended like it went out and then returned it to me weeks later with a sticker on it saying it was contraband because the correspondence “mentions staff.” This act was designed to silence me, to make me believe staff were above even being mentioned by a lowly convict. Their act was illegal in at least three separate ways…
1) Prison staff have 72 hours to send mail or produce documentation stating the reasons why they are holding it, and they are dramatically restricted in what those reasons can be.
2) The correspondence was to an editor which, by law, they cannot hinder.
3) Cops interfering with me speaking about prison staff to anyone in any way ever violates the 1st Amendment Right of Free Speech.
Most prison staff usually don’t know either the law or prison policy. Sometimes when they are challenged, they’ll learn something new, but most often they continue committing the offense anyway. Female Lifers have the responsibility of knowing our rights, teaching them to others, and fighting for them. When staff lie to our faces and try to convince us we are stupid and have no rights, we are obligated to all of our sisters to not submit to their manipulations. No one can fight from the inside for us except us. And our comrades outside cannot help us if we refuse to help ourselves.
According to law, convicts are allowed to mention staff by name, by physical description, or by behavioral characteristics. We are permitted to discuss the conditions of our confinement and any abuses that occur in prison in clear and precise detail. The only thing we cannot do is threaten them, except in terms of advising them we intend to sue them. The consequence of not speaking out is to be complicit with the evils of the System.
It is most often the case that we convicts know the law better than our captors. We have to understand the Constitution and prison policies so we can help to protect ourselves, and others here now and coming here years from now, from the continuous onslaught of violations that have overwhelmed and killed our sisters in the past.
Cops of all brands operate under the guise of being above the law. It is not surprising that most prison staff act on criminal traditions of unwritten policy, and most of them often disregard the law altogether. I could fight this instance of unlawful handling of correspondence, but this is not the time. We have to be aware that we cannot fight every little thing because they commit multiple Constitutional violations every day. If you know there will most likely be a better fight later, one that will help more women down the road, don’t get sidetracked by their lesser offenses.
To illustrate that it is unlawful for prison staff to steal, hold, reroute, or contraband mail because it “mentions staff,” we can look at a popular case called ‘McNamara v. Moody’. Mr. McNamara had been wronged by their mail room cop and wrote a letter saying that officer was masturbating and having sex with a cat. The prison censored him (which, in prison, means stole the entire letter). He sued. He won. His prison had to pay him punitive damages for their crime of violating his 1st Amendment right to Free Speech. We are allowed, according to the Constitution of the United States, to say anything we want about prison staff in our mail. Don’t let them discourage you or convince you otherwise.
We know that prison staff operate as if they are above the law. Every convict should use the Constitution to check staff because they will not check themselves. If we don’t know your Constitutional Rights, we can learn or find a convict on the yard that can help. Prison staff have made it their custom to violate our rights wherever they can for as long as they can get away with it. They were trained to do it by those who have done it so long they sometimes don’t even know they are wrong. Their customs of abuse feel right to them.
As you begin to check them, they will swiftly adapt and put on a show to pretend like what they did never happened. The minute pressure is off them they will resort to doing it again. We should always be mindful of the countless innocent people in prison who didn’t have the money to buy their freedom from the beast. We should always remember that cop is a cop. They all chose to sign up for a career that entails daily harming people who are already enslaved in cages. If we, women set on the trajectory towards prison as small baby girls are responsible for our actions, regardless of the millions of things that factor into those actions, then so are they.
All convicts should comb their prisons policies to find Constitutional violations in the details of those policies, or in the ways staff intentionally misinterpret those policies in order to harm us. Their objective is to manipulate us, to rob us of hope and dignity, and to further subvert us in small ways. They know it is the small irritants and deprivations that compound our agonies. Punishment is not in their job description. Arizona Department of Punishment is not where they work. Punishment is simply where they derive their pleasure. Theft of anything, whether a plant or a censored letter or a paper flower from a sister, has nothing to do with Corrections, Rehabilitation or Reentry.
We should fight for our faiths, sisters, languages, families, voices, and our lives. Christians need not fight for their faiths, as their faith serves the ends of the Prison Industrial Complex. But the rest of us must stay diligent and stay strong. We know things have been worse, things in Arizona will be worse again. Our staff bide their time until Director Thornell leaves, and they can call us bitches and cunts openly again and act in all other ways according their true nature.
Smothering transparency is how they kill so many of us. We cannot be silent because silence supports their crimes against humanity. Our right to free speech is real, we have an obligation to others to use it. Speak for the lazy, the apathetic, the confused, the delusional. Speak for those who think the Band-Aids of Prison Reform at the big house level can help the children the beast pulls into its belly before they even have a chance of any other home than a cell in adulthood.
We are the slaves they make their money off of for lengthy sentences that crush souls, increase violence, and assure their necessary profit from recidivism. Long sentences are only necessary to make sure minds are too broken to adjust when they get out. Prisons make their living off of the pain of our families and friends and from damage to society. Every single staff member is Leonardo DiCaprio’s role in Django, every prison complex is Candyland. This is true even if staff are cordial and appear civilized, especially if they are cordial and appear civilized. We are their state property. We belong to them. They make millions of dollars off of some individual convicts per year. The public believes their tax dollars house us. The public would be wise to look into why Governor Ducey said the entire economy would crash without prison labor.
It is not only the illusion that the Prison Industrial Complex isn’t a multibillion dollar per year slavery enterprise that we must speak to shatter. We must help people see where we got snatched into the clutches of the beast as children. And we must open peoples’ eyes to the fact that making the cage more livable isn’t the answer. Performing plastic surgery on the exterior of one limb of a monster alters the monster in no way. Reform is a performance. It is a way to make more money longer off more souls. It will draw more people back into its depths. Prison Reform is a charade that will kill more of us trapped inside.
There is no easy way to end this slavery, just as there was no easy way to end the one before, or the one before. Abolition of every form of slavery seems impossible while it generates so much money. And every “slave” is deemed inferior to the non-slave by a multitude of fabricated “evidence.” But we inside the beast must find ways to do what we can. The theories of those who come into prison from the outside are not valid without the voices of those living the life of captivity. And most of the theories they forge serve the masters. Without our voices there is no hope.
We have a job to do during our enslavement, we have an obligation to speak about what happens in these pits of hell. We have a duty to speak about plantation staff and plantation conditions. We are responsible for everyone who comes to these plantations after us. Whether we opt to be workers for the slave masters for ten cents an hour or simply be still and be in the rows of crops on the yard they reap for profit from, we must speak. Even as slaves, especially as slaves, we must exercise our right to speak freely.
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