This is the accusation in a lawsuit filed by three inmates in a Michigan prison where ten people have died of COVID-19 as of April 13, 2020.
A recent CNN report described U.S. prisons as “a petri dish of Coronavirus” infections.
This has resulted in lawsuits and rebellions throughout the United States, which threaten to become a generalized response by a mostly African prison population still held in captivity by a government that has its origins in our enslavement and colonization.
Death and infection
A staggering 276 inmates and 172 staff members have tested positive at Cook County Jail in Chicago. At least two detainees have died while more than 20 have been hospitalized.
A total of 416 inmates have tested positive throughout the Michigan prison system, with 10 reported deaths.
Infections quintupled in little more than a week in one D.C. jail.
Lawsuits
Lawsuits have been reported in Louisiana and Connecticut in addition to those in Michigan.
“Some inmates are housed three to a cell, measuring 10 by 15 feet,” said an attorney representing a group of Louisiana inmates.
Rebellions
We see rebellions in Washington state, where prisoners led an uprising after six inmates at the Monroe Correctional Complex tested positive.
An uprising in Kansas circulated across social media platforms where 12 inmates and 16 staff members at Lansing Correctional Facility tested positive for the virus.
Amid the recorded rebellion, one African man exclaimed “that’s what they get for not giving us no healthcare for the Coronavirus[…].
“They’re giving [the virus] to us[…] They won’t let us take showers; they turned the water off.”
Resistance has not been contained to the borders of the U.S. however.
Reports of prison uprisings have come from Indonesia, Colombia, China, South Korea, Italy and Brazil.
The response of imprisoned colonized workers to COVID-19 has exacerbated the fears of the international bourgeoisie.
Yet, in contrast to their trend of locking their borders, locking access to accurate information and locking people in their homes in a fervor of white nationalism, the white ruling class refuses to unlock these dungeons they refer to as prisons.
As a result, scores of more imprisoned Africans will likely die.
Social distancing is not possible because capitalism has jammed 2 million African women and men inside jail cells across North America.
Africans and colonized people locked in prisons have the right to rebel!
It is no accident that the U.S. has a prison system bursting at the seams.
After the brutal slaughter of an Indigenous population that existed for millennia before the European settlers, hungry for African bodies, would erect a social system that required the intense exploitation of African men, women and children.
Over four centuries this exploitation would require a military strategy of constant police containment and population control, calculated to ensure Africans would never reproduce a revolutionary moment akin to the one which shook the country in the 1960s and extended throughout the African world.
Therefore, Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and The People’s War Campaign have declared that “this is not a medical problem. This is a colonial problem.”
The Coronavirus is a colonialvirus and the cure is Black Power
While Africans in prison are obvious sitting ducks, the fact is that African people everywhere, with no power, are completely vulnerable to the whims and machinations of a foreign and alien hostile entity referred to as the United States.
Africans in prison will not be tested. They will not be diagnosed and will not be treated.
Neither will the vast majority of Africans who live in colonies throughout North America.
30 percent of the African population lives off an average of five dollars a day in St. Louis, MO, where 84 percent of all reported COVID-19 deaths are African people.
America is a prison and African people are still captive. A parasitic economy has attached itself to the body of a once free people.
It has interrupted our food supply and imprisoned our nurses and doctors. Our leaders languish in solitary confinement and we are made to reproduce life for another people at the expense of our own.
This is why APSP has waged The People’s War Campaign!
It is a campaign for African people to win the power to decide who is guilty and who is not; who should go to prison and who should not; how food and healthcare is distributed and ultimately to fight for African people to live rather than die.
