CALIFORNIA—On July 8, 2013, more than 30,000 inmates, from 11 different prison units in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation concentration camp prison system began what was to become the largest prison hunger strike in California history.
Initiated by the Security Housing Units (SHU) Short Corridor Collective Human Rights Movement based inside the Pelican Bay Unit, the hunger strike is in protest of the inhumane and deplorable conditions that is policy within the entire California system of dungeons.
The African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and the Uhuru Movement stand in complete solidarity with the struggling captives within the California prison system and the just demands they have raised. Those five absolutely reasonable demands are:
1. Eliminate group punishment and administrative abuse.
2. Abolish the debriefing policy and modify active/inactive gang status criteria. (This is a policy that dictates that once an inmate is in solitary confinement, the only way out alive is to snitch on fellow inmates.)
3. Comply with the recommendations of the U.S. Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons and end long-term solitary confinement.
4. Provide adequate and nutritious food.
5. Create and expand constructive programming.
These sensible demands being made here by the activist leadership and general population in the California dungeons are not too much different than those made by our courageous brothers at Attica maximum security pen in New York State in 1971, more that 40 years ago.
The Attica demands were met with a shoot-to-kill order. When the smoke and the smell of cordite cleared the air, more that 40 lay dead, murdered by an order given directly from a leading member of the white ruling class—New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.
We raise up Attica as a historical reference to demand of the State of California, “HANDS OFF STRIKING PRISONERS” which is to include not only guard and gun violence, but medical (force feed) violence also.
African relationship to U.S. prisons is colonialism
The African People’s Socialist Party has long understood the slavish relationship Africans in the U.S. have to the U.S. prison system. We define that relationship as a colonial relationship.
In 1979, we knew that the government had a jail or prison cell waiting for one out of every four Africans in this country and that they could do this because we were the colonized and they were the colonizer.
We did not call it mass incarceration. We called it colonialism, just as Dedan Kimathi and the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) called the roundups of tens of thousands of Africans in Kenya and throwing them into concentration camps colonialism.
For more than three years non-stop—from the forward motion of the struggle to Free Dessie Woods in 1977 to the founding convention of the African National Prison Organization (ANPO) in 1979 in Louisville, Kentucky—wherever our Party was located, we walked door to door with a campaign to expose the colonial relationship and to build an organization and movement that could tear down the walls.
ANPO was not a prisoner organization. It was an anti-colonial, pro-independence formation that needs to be put back on the ground today.
It should be unnecessary for those of us on the outside to be sending “solidarity” statements and messages of support to our locked down comrades. We should be part and parcel of this heroic movement. Never should they have to go it alone.
This colonial relationship that Africans, Mexicans, and the Indigenous populations have to prisons inside U.S. borders is most manifested in the so-called border states of California and Texas, both former territories stolen from Mexico at gunpoint.
Texas holds 152,000 and California 132,000 inmates respectively. Ninety-five percent of the countries on this earth hold less people than these two states in captivity.
Furthermore, the state of California holds, according to some estimates, nearly 20,000 people in solitary confinement. A great number of them being held in isolation for more than 20 years consecutively are housed in the SHU at Pelican Bay.
Therefore, it is no surprise that this is where this movement would have its roots.
Build a revolutionary movement
Our responsibility here is to build a revolutionary movement to generalize the understanding that the U.S. prison system is an illegitimate colonialist authority that has imposed its will on the African, Mexican, and Indigenous working class people inside U.S. borders, and this is the relationship that must be ended.
In the meanwhile, the hunger strike in the California prisons must be supported and their resistance popularized throughout the U.S.
The African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement stands with you.
Hands Off the Hunger Strikers!
Abolish the SHU!
Rebuild the African National Prison Organization!
