Dec 25, 2024
Holiday Season?
Countries are hate crimes
Tax dollars buy death
Comrades scream in prison
Is there still a Palestine left?
You don’t get many Merry Xmas wishes from many Muslims and you won’t get one from me. I felt so guilty for every “You, too” I uttered after “Happy Holidays” greetings that I just started responding “Falasteen”. There’s no need for any treasonous attempt to be polite in this season of genocide, with so many pretending to live by the creepy maxim “be good for goodness’ sake.” While so many are slaughtered in real time, right now, returning their holiday cheer would equate treason against the sovereign nature of my soul. What was the name of the Palestinian child gunned down while I responded politely to a thoughtless Merry Christmas? What is the surname of the family who is frantically trying to figure out where they will go when Trump begins hunting them in 26 days? While Palestine starves, America feasts. While Palestinians freeze, Americans drink wine by the fire. While Palestinian babies are murdered by an American-supported psychopath, Americans joyfully gather near the graven image of an infant god sweetly wrapped in warm clothes under another carved image of an older version of that same god dead or dying. How sweet. Palestine weeps because there’s nowhere to bury their dead, while those who send weapons to Zionist murderers sing songs of unity, love, peace and goodwill to men. I sit in prison serving my unNatural Life sentence wondering what the f#@% is really going on?
I am not writing this essay to whine about prison, there is too much of that and it is damaging if unaccompanied by struggle. This day is irritating, it always has been, but for these past six years it is a day of partial liberation for me. Today is the day I became so disgusted with hypocrisy that I was permitted by the One Power that Be, to break away from a set of iron cross shackles prisons use to mentally beat down their populations, not unlike during slavery. Arabic is a forbidden language in prison, just like Arabic and every African language was forbidden to the slave. The Christianizers come in by the dozens, where Muslims are allowed only one volunteer who strives to divide the Muslim community in order to weaken us at the behest of the masters. A volunteer ex-con, the kind that leaves prison to hold the whip for the master, the kind that is better than all of us, controlling, hateful, unstable and fake. She drives the sincere away and Admin prays she turns us to their chosen faith of controllability. The other faiths have no volunteers and are not permitted services. They place those strategic shackles of Christianity on the population to blind the captive, to encourage the captive to submit to the captor without a struggle and then rewards the captive for giving up any resistance. In the name of Jesus.
Women are at a natural disadvantage as a birthright. America likes to pretend that women are free and equal to men, if America does anything consistently, it’s lie about everything in the past, the present, and the future. You’re not a free woman because you are encouraged to make men happy by shaking your ass half-naked (or naked) wherever you want. That’s just another cage you can’t see yet. If you are a female convict, you are considered nothing, worse than nothing even, to most people. What brings women to prison? What do we endure in here that diminishes our odds of remaining out after prison? On this Xmas Day of death and destruction in Palestine, and heart-wrenching separation from friends and family in here, let’s look at whether we incarcerated women who have fallen prey to recidivism could have done differently, or could we have not?
When we live in here, day after day, we will feed the wolf inside that we are able to reach, and we feed her with what we have available, our captors are very aware of this fact. We are pressured to submit to America’s commercialized Christianizing gods of war, which some of us simply won’t do but, either way, the odds of recidivism increase for us all. If a woman submits to the faith the prison makes readily available to her, she will become immersed in a false sense of security that can coddle her, praise her, make her feel valuable and wanted, pretend to prepare her for the world and fill her with what she thinks is love. Her rude awakening upon release will be crushing. She will feel as if she failed, but she didn’t, she accomplished exactly what the system set her up to succeed in, which is coming back to prison. She is hard-pressed to get out of that cycle, because looking closely at the system causes her to have to look at her faith into which she is fully indoctrinated and maybe can’t live without. She can’t bear to question the origins thereof, can’t handle any hint of critical thought regarding the little cages the captors build for us inside our Complex cage. How could she even take a deep breath and ponder the reality that her god has been refashioned from everything that was once real into a stifling bag over her head? How can she trace back to find the truth that the texts she has bet her soul on were altered for political gain while she sits in an 8×10 concrete box with access only to colonizers of souls that get rich from manipulating the vulnerable?
For those of us who haven’t bought into the prison’s faith which teaches refusing to fight for rights, our faiths are handled by Administration in subversive ways to prevent us from furthering that faith. Until recently, it was very difficult for a Christian to convert to anything else, our wicked Senior Chaplain Bobby J. Harris, who is being sued by several inmates including myself, once told a woman she was stupid for thinking about converting to something else and to keep looking for Jesus, like Jesus was hiding in some kind of Where’s Waldo life-puzzle. That Senior Chaplain will no doubt be promoted for his cruelty, lack of professionalism and furthering the agenda of the Administration to swaddle the vulnerable in a manger of submissive, distracted false hope. Non-Christians have to fight years for the things we need, and the only way to be heard is to get serious about fighting back. If prisoners who don’t take what the captors offer, then we have to fight very hard to adhere to our beliefs, and that keeps us busy from learning what we need to learn to stay free; they keep us coming back to prison either way. With faith weaponized, they have a powerful grip on us, especially on those who don’t realize these aspects of the Prison Industrial Complex are deliberate.
Something else that we don’t often realize is deliberate, is the ways visual environments are used to manipulate us, not just the steel, concrete, razor wire and half-inch thick plastic windows, but the colors. Our cells aren’t industrial greys and beiges with 20–40-year-old lead-based blue showing through worn areas because it’s cheaper, but because it dulls our senses, a technique to deprive us of color, of variation, of comfort. We aren’t just denied our freedom, which is our sentence, we are denied even the most basic semblance of beauty. We had a Deputy Warden a while ago who declared all arts and crafts were forbidden. One staff member would throw any art she found in a cell onto the ground outside and stomp it into the dirt, making sure no one else would pull it from the trash and return it to the robbed convict. Beauty is illegal in prison.
Beauty is not the only thing illegal in prison, so is good health. We live in a carcinogenic, hazardous environment and drink toxic water. Staff pay for cancer insurance because their risk of getting cancer is so high just from working 8-hour shifts. We have every type of foulness creeping all around us, on us, on everything we possess. We are dying in these cages from things we did not come into prison with. We look around and we wonder why so many women have cancer. Why so many women in here have had to get hysterectomies? Why so many women have obvious lumps in their breasts and Medical says, “There’s nothing there.” We talk about this often on the yard, but we don’t know what to do. We know what is happening is wrong but the enormity of the normalization of heinous and depraved treatment of female prisoners dwarfs our cries for humane treatment. “During Hitler’s Germany, incidentally, 250,000 sterilizations were carried out under the Nazi’s Hereditary Law. Is it possible that the record of the Nazis, throughout the years of their reign, may have been almost equaled by U.S. government funded sterilizations in the space of a single year?” (1) Why do more than half of us have to get our reproductive organs removed after we come here? Why are they so lax about making us so sick? Is removing reproductive organs a corrective measure? Is making us drink toxic water rehabilitative? Is the mold that is crawling upon the walls of my tier a few feet away from where I sit a preparation for reentry? Is forcing women to work horrible jobs for long hours to buy a bottle of shampoo to clean herself, her clothes, and her cell so she cannot get sicker a form of correction?
The pinta economy is such that one cannot live off what she is paid. A side hustle is a necessity if she has no loved ones to help, and side hustles are breaking pinta law. No prisoner can live on 10 cents an hour and take proper care of herself. This reality enables people outside the prison to label convicts as hustlers, to make us appear as if we all want to take money from people inside and outside. When I hear people accuse us of such ridiculousness, I automatically think the person saying that about us is projecting their own selfish inclinations onto us. The majority of us do not live like that, we don’t even think like that. We give away everything we have, and everything we are, to try to help others not end up where we are, or to make things better for those who come after us. Women try to help others and each other, even though it is against prison policy to do so. It is against the law in here to barter and trade, to give gifts, for paralegals to help other convicts with legal paperwork, and to visit each other in other cells. All those simple things are punishable offenses that have consequences that separate us further from our families outside. If you do something wrong you aren’t punished with tasks that would make the prison better, that would teach responsibility and promote unity, instead you are deprived of external contact. You can’t see, or talk to, your mother, your children, or your spouse. Prison is disgusting, and it is designed to harm and to punish, not to correct, not to rehabilitate, not to help us stay out of prison if we are allowed to leave alive. “The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the American system itself, the stark difference between the rich and poor, the racism, the use of victims against one another, the lack of resources of the underclass to speak out, the endless reforms that changed little” (2).
Prisons are foul places, and the majority of the staff that move the machine become foul people, assuming they didn’t start that way, even if they don’t see that about themselves. They believe in their little, dark, twisted hearts that we deserve nothing better than to rot and die, that we are worthless garbage, and that they are doing a service to society by causing us discomfort and harm. Is that in the top ten list of the dumbest shit you ever heard? I agree. But they are convinced, in the very same way all other servants of the Prison Industrial Complex are convinced, and they wholeheartedly believe in harming people and then throwing them back out into the world even more damaged than when they came. They believe they are helping society. If you think no one can be stupid enough to believe that, come to prison and watch our captors.
Our captors hate us, and they hate our teachers. Being a cop is just a job, right? Why would they hate those who educate us? Because to do the things they do to us they have to essentialize us as something “other,” something “less than,” something they can harass, humiliate, and kill with impunity and feel superior and good when they see their crimes judged by their underdeveloped consciences. And it is their duty, as they see it in their blindness, to send us out uneducated and furious, desperate and destitute, with nowhere to go but back here. They don’t want us to have any external support because it robs them of their power to prohibit transparency, and they certainly don’t want to admit that those they deem beneath them are quite possibly far more intelligent than they are. “The teachers and students in a prison classroom cannot communicate outside of class, cannot meet for office hours, cannot appear to be developing friendships or connections that might threaten to strengthen the bonds with the outside world that prison works tirelessly to destroy.” (3) The staff feel threatened by intelligence, an intellectual convict is a dangerous convict from their limited perception, and transparency is a threat to their livelihood. The public must never know the details of crimes against humanity that are everyday happenings inside the machine they support.
We female prisoners all started our lives in different places, under different circumstances, we are as unique as the occupants of any other city. We are enclosed in very tight quarters without the ability to move if we are not compatible with our cellmates. We are not allowed to get proper medical care, we are not allowed to interact with the teachers of our faiths, we are discouraged from appreciating our secular teachers too much, we are not allowed any choices in almost every aspect of our lives. Most female prisoners came from situations that offered limited, if any, choices. Without the knowledge that we have choices outside of prison, how can we make good ones? Without the awareness of how to begin to make good choices when we are eventually faced with options, how can we do anything except come back?
It is easy for people outside to believe we are simply “bad people,” that we are deficient, inferior, and incapable of being worthy human beings. It is also necessary for people outside to believe we got what we deserved, because if they acknowledge all that is a lie, they become complicit in the most egregious hate crime imaginable. There is no word for hating prisoners, no “convictobia,” no “antiprisonerism”. If there were, people would have to admit all of this Prison Industrial Complex shit would have to end. Actively hating us would become publicly the crime that it already is privately, setting us up for failure would suddenly become morally wrong, exploiting us and our families in every way would become illegal, because we’d be recognized as humans, not disposable garbage in these concrete soul-compactors called prisons.
When I left the Department of Corrections in Indiana in 1993, I understood that I would end up in prison again. I had been told that I would go to prison for Life when I was young, and I believed it. Everyone’s experience is not that bold, not that precise, but in different ways many women in here were set on a trajectory that propelled them towards prison long before any of us got here. When we think of recidivism, we think of grown people returning to the prison again, and again . . . but we don’t think of the magnitude of the aggregate of States’ tactics, and the impact of those tactics within a system as being a strategy to make money off underprivileged children for their entire life. I wasn’t first told I would end up in prison for Life when I was arrested for any violent crime, but many years before my first arrest when I became a ward of the state. Being placed anywhere in the system as a child feeds humans to the prisons. If you don’t think of Foster Care as part of the Prison Industrial Complex, you’re not paying attention. When you see us in here, understand that our children are victims of State violence now too, and their odds of success in life are slashed as the State throws them into their profit system as well. Once in the system, you will probably never escape it while you’re alive, by design.
There’s a huge percentage of women here because they loved their man, and he asked them to do something with him or for him. Sometimes it’s as simple as “hold this” or “you drive,” sometimes it’s a little more complicated like “handle that” or “bury that.” Depending on where we were raised and what we believe we are worthy of, there may be a slight moment of hesitation in complying, but usually not. Sometimes there is no real choice, and sometimes we don’t believe we are worthy of imagining we deserve any choices. When people say those stupid things about how we chose to be here, they are adding 2 + 2 without acknowledging the string of 15 variables attached to each 2: it’s just not that simple.
Yes, the United States government is a child predator, but don’t let your holiday cheer make you forget that there are innocent women in prison too. Women that literally committed no crimes, they never broke the law in their lives, they were good citizens that simply didn’t have the money to fight the accusations put forth against them. I have read hundreds of police reports, and I’ve never come across one that was even 75% true. Our injustice system is predicated on lies and deception. Lawyers are very clear; the truth is not what the court cares about, it doesn’t matter if someone is innocent or guilty, the law in this country is a charade, a circus, another set of corroded cogs in the machine. Imagine getting pulled over later today, handcuffed, taken to jail, your car towed to impound, your belongings inventoried, you’re strip searched, cavity searched, you sleep on the concrete floor of a large cell packed in, spooning with strangers so there’s enough room for everyone, using your shoes for a pillow, shivering, gathering warmth from strangers while unjustifiable arrogant, ignorant sadists in uniform laugh at you. Knowing it’s possible you may never be free again. If you don’t have money in the bank right now to pay for a lawyer, it could happen. They can pin you to things you didn’t do, put you in places you never were; people have been executed for things they weren’t proven innocent of until it was too late. These aren’t far-fetched conspiracy theories, they happen every day in this country, and you could be next. Merry Xmas?
So here I sit in prison, on this morning of debt and decadence, this morning of dead babies in mangers in Palestine, this morning of depraved indifference and globalized armed robbery. I sit here, thinking of you, my readers, before the morning prayer, wondering what we can do to try to fix this mess? I am so happy to understand that I don’t have to ask, “How do we begin to try to fix this mess?” Because even though I am new to my awakening, new to my awareness, others have been fighting this fight for centuries. I am grateful that I can look back and I can see the enormous impact those people have had, not just on my world inside the walls, but on many other marginalized populations around the world. These people are everywhere, and they fight for us; we are honored to fight from the inside too.
Here I sit in the dark in my concrete cell hearing women call “Merry Christmas!” to each other while the world falls apart, while they ignore the destruction of earth and all human life and the tragic situations of others. What can we do? Would anything we could do from inside the cage make any difference? Can anyone outside the cage make any difference? Yes, it’s a proven fact, it’s already in motion, we can find a way to be a drop in that ocean.
“How many waves does it take,” a wise man asks us, “to knock that ledge off that cliff?” Someone quickly answers, “A lot of waves.” A wise man asks a lot of rhetorical questions, but we don’t care much for fancy rhetoric around here; the teacher asks, we answer. The wise man’s question helps us understand that even when we can’t see behind us, another wave is coming; even if we feel alone, we are part of something bigger, and there are a whole lot of drops bound together in a single purpose that hit that cliff. As I said a few lines ago, I am new to this, but it is easy to get frustrated and angry, it is easy to think others are idiots for not wanting to join the fight to make the world better. It’s overwhelming trying to triage which fight to take on in prison when others won’t fight for themselves. Why on a yard of 700 convicts did only 5 people show up to the meeting? I imagine the numbers may be about the same out there. We can appreciate that 5 is not 0. And 1 could be enough if the 1 were swimming in an external wave.
From inside, our voices are weak, our reach is short, we were robbed of even the most menial choices, we are trapped in a cycle of being nothing more than numbered products on a twisted shelf, itemized commodities. We are stigmatized, we are degraded, we are slandered as dishonest which is highly ironic because the lies told by our captors are exceedingly outrageous on a regular basis. We are presented as stupid, desperate, manipulative and pathological liars because prison Administrators cannot allow their prisoners to be believed by the external public. What we can do inside is speak truth, regardless of the lies cops tell about us; we don’t turn the other cheek, we raise our voices, at the very least, everywhere that anyone will hear us. We have a responsibility to refuse to silently submit to injustice; even if things cannot get better while we are alive, we can speak truth to the future. “[A] world in which sounds can include themselves in one great sound . . . the multiplication of resistances, the ‘I am not resigned,’ the ‘I am a rebel,’ continues . . . the world, with many worlds that the world needs, continues.” (4) We do what we can. We use whatever means and talents we have to tell the world that this is wrong, that we are still people in these cages, and that no matter what ridiculousness they believe and perpetuate to keep their sickening money-making machine fueled by our souls operating, prisons are the problem, not the solution. Prisons rob us of options, rob us of agency, rob us of potential. Being a repeat offender is not an aggravated circumstance; it’s a mitigating factor.
You look at me and you say that I tortured and chopped up a man for what you think is not a good reason. Then kidnapped, beat, and robbed another for another not so good reason in your opinion. Would I have done that or any other violent crime, if I hadn’t been tossed into the system at birth and done time in a Department of Corrections as a child? No. I was conditioned by the system our government created to kill without remorse. I grew up watching cruel, heartless captors break people and kill in many clever ways in the uniform of a “good person” for a paycheck from the State. Do they feel remorse? Of course not, they feel vindicated, righteous even. Prisons are a terminal disease that perpetuates violence. Period.
What can you do out there about this monster with humans trapped inside that spans this stolen continent from sea to shining sea? You can join people who don’t make up lies to justify these crimes against humanity, people that don’t just give up but seek other ways, better ways, humane ways of treating people that do things wrong. You can join movements that don’t make money from hateful places and from the destruction of families, generation after generation. We’ll find ways to meet halfway, we work inside, you work outside, we’ll figure it out if we don’t give up. We are trying to build alternatives to our current systems and break generational cycles of violence within our communities and families. “We do not believe that prison or cops make us safer. We believe that we can create what we need.”(5) “We are all hurting,” an unbelievably wise man says sometimes, “we all suffer.” The depth of the pain and devastation this system causes us all is worth us trying to work together to stop it. “The prison nation is an intolerable abomination. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and joining the insurgency becomes an urgent necessity.” (6) You see it, know what it is, you watch what it does, you struggle out there and fight it on the outside track. We on the inside track live it, breathe it, struggle within it, fight it back from inside, and some of us die in it. It is painful, but that doesn’t matter, what matters is that it is possible.
I have seen impossible things happen since Ryan Thornell became the Director of ADCRR. Not impossible because he accomplished things no other could, impossible because he accomplished things no other would. No one would do the things he has done because they are humane things. They also wouldn’t do them because they catered to the staff who hate us and desire to harm us, they dream of creative ways to suppress us, to break our hearts and spirits, to separate us from not only our friends and family outside, but our support systems inside. They are cruel, sadistic, mentally ill, narcissistic freaks of nature who honestly believe harming us is their job. Can you imagine being a drop in that stagnant, putrid pool of madness and being conscious of what it is? Thornell has allowed us to be educated at a college level, he gave us air-conditioning in sweltering cells, he gave us free ice all year round, upsetting the prostitution economy that officers used to pay girls a stack of $2.10 ice tickets for sexual favors. He has done things that are specific for women, firing those who he finds out are raping or sodomizing women that got away with it for years because no one cared, firing those who even use abusive speech. He is intolerant of cruelty. I know, it does sound like I’m drunk on holiday hooch, but it is true, and we can’t forget that these things happened when the white supremacist patriarchal poster boy in his tilted cowboy hat comes in to overturn the good Thornell had done. We see possibilities, we see hope.
As I sit here this Xmas morning writing this, still alive, for now, in my coffin, I am grateful for those of you who fight for us, pray for us, encourage us, publish us, or even just admit that we are still human. I sit here, warmed by the heating system Thornell put in, aware that our brothers and sisters in Palestine are outside, cold and hungry with nowhere to go as thieves build new homes on the corpses of their families. I sit here sick from a cure that harmed me, with parts removed years ago due to masses of tumors given to me as a corrective measure, wondering about how Netanyahu intends to inflict his Nazi-esque Hereditary Control program on the Palestinians who remain after America helps him with his ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The White House holiday theme for 2024 is “A Season of Peace and Light.” War is not peace, and white phosphorous is not light.
During your wonderful holiday of joy and family get-togethers, good food and laughter, think about us in our cages, and think about the Palestinians in theirs. Talk about all of the “anti” stances in your heart and know that inside we are thinking about you. We are dreaming the same dream as you, we are not your projects, we are your business partners in the business of slaying unfreedom. We are your family, your friends, your comrades. We are not the clingy, money-hungry, victim-seeking, manipulating monsters that our captors are themselves and want you to believe we are. We were placed on unstoppable trajectories that ended in these cages. Your options are not ours, and never were, if they had been you’d be right here. Those variables are handed to us all in childhood, many of us begin these tests of life with a deck stacked against us. Whether it be choices, chances, or Xmases, some have, some have not.
References
(1) Davis, Angela. “Women Races and Class” (1981) 218
(2) Zinn, Howard. “A People’s History of the United States” 515
(3) Ayers, Bill. “When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation” (2024) 105
(4) Selected Writings Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (2001). 122,12
(5) Article. Mingus, Mia. “Transformative Justice: A Brief Description” Jan 12, 2019
(6) Ayers. 129
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