Cardiff Smash IPP Demo and March

I ddarllen yr erthygl yn y Gymraeg cliciwch yma.

On Saturday the 4th of April 2015, the Smash IPP group held their first a demonstration in Cardiff. For those of you who do not know what IPP is, it is an indeterminate sentence for “public protection”. This allows the court to add time onto an existing prison sentence often for minor crimes and therefore pushing back the release date indefinitely. This means that IPP prisoners live under the constant mental torture of having no release date. It was abolished in 2012, however this was not done retrospectively leaving more then 5000 people in jail for a non existing law with no release date.

At 2pm the group gathered at the Aneirin Bevan statue on Queen Street. We were joined by friends and family members prisoners under the IPP sentence. We stayed at the statue for about an hour handing out leaflets and talking to the public about IPP sentences as it is not a very well known subject. We then marched down queen street with black flags and banners. Everyone, including children who were marching with us, took turns chanting “Smash IPP, Set them Free” and “Our Passion for Freedom, is Stronger then their Prisons”.

We arrived at the prison entrance where we were joined by others who were visiting loved ones in prison. We continued to chant things like “Freedom for all, Tear Down the Walls”. We then we went to the top floor of the a nearby car park where there was good visibility. We could see the prison cell and the the prisoners could see us. We hung banners, chanted and communicated with people in the prison. The friends, families and demonstrators kept were still chanting, “Give them a Date, Set them Free, Smash IPP!”. The prisoners themselves sent us signals of their support and asked us to return.

There will be more events like this in future. This group Smash IPP is a collective of Anarchists and anti-authoritarians as well as the loved ones of IPP prisoners. We have chosen to stand against IPP because it is one of the most blatant abuses by the state of the “justice” system in order to punish those it deems criminals, while some of the worst crimes of all are begin committed by the cops, judges and screws.

Solidarity to all persons in prison and those who’s lives are affected by the prison system, including all those in the racist detention centers of the UK. All in all, it was a successful demonstration, there was a good atmosphere and no police presence. More stuff coming up soon, to get involved e-mail smashipp@riseup.net

Info Night & Fundraiser for Smash IPP Campaign, Thursday 2nd April

First issue of the Incarcerated Worker

Introducing a new publication from the Industrial Workers of the World, the Incarcerated Worker! Over the last year or so, some prisoners in the U.S. and outside supporters have gotten together and formed the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee to address concerns such as prison labor and conditions.

CONTENTS

• The IWW by Sean Swain
• Biographical Profile: Dennis S. Boatwright, Jr. by Imam Siddique Abdullah Hasan
• Understanding the Role of Prisoner Intellectuals by Dennis S. Boatwright
• Forgotten Warrior Waits on Death Row By Isa Abdur-Rasheed
• Lynching: Then and Now By Imam Siddique Abdullah Hasan
• Induced Failure By Imam Siddique Abdullah Hasan
• Crime and Punishment by Bomani Shakur
• A Flicker Turns into a Flame: Alabama’s Prisoners want change by The Free Alabama movement

PDF AVAILABLE HERE

Kevan Thakrar Urgently Needs Your Support!

Despite being found not guilty of attacking three prison officers, but instead that he acted in self-defence after months of racial, physical and psychological abuse (a ruling that goes against prison officers is VERY unusual in a court) Kevan Thakrar continues to be held in the prison services ‘Close Supervision Centres’ more than five years later.

The CSCs are places of extremely restrictive solitary confinement where he, and his family visiting him, have suffered constant harassment. Kevan’s solicitor recently arranged for an independent psychologist to make a report on Kevan. Kevan has suffered with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as a direct result of the way he’s been treated by prison guards, since before he was placed in the CSCs. The independent psychologist’s report concluded that as Kevan has displayed no violent behaviour since being in the CSCs, and because solitary confinement and the regime in these units only makes PTSD worse, Kevan should be moved back into the mainstream prison population.

The CSC management did not like the conclusion in this report so have instead decided they want to move him to Rampton high security psychiatric hospital to treat his PTSD. In a place like this doctors will be allowed to force mind altering and damaging drugs on him. Kevan, his family, and supporters are very worried about this proposed move, and whilst he tries to challenge this legally, he needs help to campaign against this happening.The number of people suffering from PTSD in England’s prisons is probably too high to imagine. It is extremely unusual to transfer someone that has PTSD to a high security psychiatric hospital.

For more information about Kevan’s case:
http://www.justiceforkevan.com
http://www.facebook.com/JusticeForKev

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

Join the protest:

Monday 16th February, 12pm
HM Prison Service
Clive House, 70 Petty France, London, SW1H 9EX

If you can’t make it to London for the protest please try to find the time to phone/fax the following places on that day (or another day if that one is not convenient).

Please write letters of complaint to:

Rob Davis, Governor
HMP Woodhill, Tattenhoe Street, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, MK4 4DA
Tel: 01908 722 000
Fax: 01908 722 320

Alan Parkins (This is the main person recommending Kevan’s move to Rampton)
Head of Special Unit/CSC
HMP Woodhill, Tattenhoe Street, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, MK4 4DA

Claire Hodgson, CSC Operational Manager
HMP Woodhill, HMP Woodhill, Tattenhoe Street, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, MK4 4DA

Nick Hardwick, Chief Inspector of Prisons
HM Inspectorate of Prisons, Victory House, 6th floor, 30-34 Kingsway, London WC2B 6EX
Tel: 020 3681 2770

Independent Monitoring Board Secretariat
9th floor, post point 9.52, The Tower, 102 Petty France, London, SW1H 9AJ
Tel: 0203 334 3265
Fax: 0203 334 3024

Your own MP or Kevan’s (Ian Stewart MP). When writing to any MP the address to use is: House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA, or you can contact them on-line http://www.writetothem.com

Please write letters of support to:

Kevan Thakrar, A4907AE

Kevan was moved to HMP Full Sutton today (19/1/2015), we do not yet know if this is a temporary move or he is on his way somewhere else. Please check the links to his website and Facebook page above for his correct address.

New publication: Never Alone – A zine about supporting prisoners by those on the outside

To download the zine click here: Never Alone

Never Alone was created to give a voice to those that support people in prison. Often invisible, unsupported and unrecognised, thousands of people in the UK, and millions internationally, support friends, family, partners and comrades in prison.

Their support, love, money and solidarity help people survive their time inside. They directly experience the harm of the prison system; separated from the people they love and losing their lives to give time and energy to support people behind bars.

This publication, while not distracting from the acknowledgement that those behind the walls are the centre of our struggles, seeks to amplify the voices of those on the other side of the fence, and share their experiences of interacting with the prison system. We hear from mothers, nephews, lovers, friends and organisers of support campaigns, about how it feels to know those you care for are behind enemy lines.

Bristol Anarchist Black Cross is a prisoner support organisation based in the South West UK. While commonly focusing on supporting prisoners of political struggle, we should never forget that all prisoners are political. Human beings are in cages because of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, because they are poor, and it serves the state and capital to exploit and control them.

The Empty Cages Collective is a new collective launched in 2014, which aims to bring prison abolition to centre stage in the UK. We are fighting against prison expansion and connecting people in the struggle to resist and dismantle the prison industrial complex.

We have worked together to produce this publication and hope it is the first of many so that those impacted by the ever- growing reach of the prison industrial complex are not forgotten.

If you have any comments, criticisms or would like to submit articles for future editions please contact us. We welcome stories of your direct personal experience, the harm the prison system causes and how you have got through, or continue to get through. Political commentary is also more than welcome, as well as ideas of how we can better support each other to cope with the emotional, practical and financial challenges of supporting someone we care about through their time inside.

Until Every Cell is Empty,

Bristol Anarchist Black Cross & Empty Cages Collective September 2014

www.bristolabc.wordpress.com | www.prisonabolition.org

United $tates: Solidarity with the Incarcerated Workers of the Free Alabama Movement!

via Industrial Workers of the World

We in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) have been approached by a group of hundreds of people currently incarcerated in Alabama who are launching a nonviolent prison strike beginning this Sunday April 20th to demand an end to slave labor, the massive overcrowding and horrifying health and human rights violations found in Alabama Prisons, and the passage of legislation they have drafted.

This is the second peaceful and nonviolent protest initiated by the brave men and women of the Free Alabama Movement (F.A.M.) this year building on the recent Hunger Strikes in Pelican Bay and the Georgia Prison Strike in 2010. They aim to build a mass movement inside and outside of prisons to earn their freedom, and end the racist, capitalist system of mass incarceration called The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and others. The Free Alabama Movement is waging a non-violent and peaceful protest for their civil, economic, and human rights.

The conditions in Alabama prisons are horrendous, packing twice as many people as the 16,000 that can be housed “humanely”, with everything from black mold, brown water, cancer causing foods, insect infestations, and general disrepair. They are also run by free, slave labor, with 10,000 incarcerated people working to maintain the prisons daily, adding up to $600,000 dollars a day, or $219,000,000 a year of slave labor if inmates were paid federal minimum wage, with tens of thousands more receiving pennies a day making products for the state or private corporations.

In response, the Free Alabama Movement is pushing a comprehensive “Freedom Bill” (Alabama’s Education, Rehabilitation, and Re-entry Preparedness Bill) designed to end these horrors and create a much reduced correctional system actually intended to achieve rehabilitation and a secure, just, anti-racist society.

While unique in some ways, the struggle of these brave human beings is the same as the millions of black, brown, and working class men, women, and youth struggling to survive a system they are not meant to succeed within. We advance their struggle by building our own, and working together for an end to this “system that crushes people and penalizes them for not being able to stand the weight”.

The Free Alabama Movement is partnering with the IWW’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee to ask you to:

• Create a Incarcerated Workers Solidarity Committee in your area to raise money, take action, and spread the word of this struggle, including to local prisons.
• Amplify the voices of incarcerated workers by posting this and future updates to your website, facebook, email lists, and so on
• Join our email list so as to be kept up to date and amplify future updates. Contact us at iwoc@riseup.net and like us on facebook: www.facebook.com/incarceratedworkers
• Donate money to the Free Alabama Movement & Incarcerated Workers Organizing Cmt: https://fundly.com/iww-incarcerated-workers-organizing-committee-support-the-free-alabama-movement
• Join the IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee

Contact us at iwoc@riseup.net. Solidarity and be in touch!

The IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee in partnership with the Free Alabama Movement

• https://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-alabama-movement/1428198110745581
• https://www.facebook.com/incarceratedworkers
• http://www.freealabamamovement.com
• www.iww.org

The IWW is an grassroots, revolutionary union open to all working people, including the incarcerated and the unemployed. Founded in 1905, we’ve come back strong in recent years with struggles at Starbucks, Jimmy Johns, and the General Strike call during the Wisconsin Uprising. We are committed to amplifying the voices of prisoners, ending an economic system based on exploitation and racial caste systems like mass incarceration, and adding our contribution to the global movements for a just, free, and sustainable world. Our guiding motto is “An injury to one is an injury to all!”.

Tear Down The Walls: Prison Abolition Speaking Tour

Bristol Anarchist Black Cross will be helping to co-ordinate the Bristol date of the Tear Down The Walls: Prison Abolition Speaking Tour due to start on the 23rd March.

The Tear Down The Walls Tour is organised by members of the Empty Cages Collective as part of the Prison Abolition 2014 year of action & organising against the prison-industrial-complex.

From the poster:

There are currently 85,690 people held in prison, not including people detained under the Mental Health Act, in Secure Children’s homes or in Immigration detention. The prison population of Britain has doubled over the last twenty years.

“Tear Down The Walls” is the rallying cry of prison abolitionists around the world. When we begin to understand the harm caused by prisons, the concept of dismantling the prison-industrial-complex seems like the most logical conclusion.

But the common narrative surrounding prisons is that they are a necessary part of justice. As prison abolitionists we refute this and claim that prisons are the symptom of a broken system.

This March members of the Empty Cages Collective will be touring the north of the UK to discuss the ideas of prison abolition and alternatives to incarceration.

The talk will take place on Sunday 23rd March at Kebele as part of their regular Sunday lunch. Food will be served from 6:30PM with the talk due to start at 7:30PM. Bristol ABC will have copies of the prisoner list and writing materials available and we encourage everyone to write to a prisoner while they enjoy their food.

John Bowden: Americanisation of the British Criminal Justice System

A recent Government announcement that it was considering introducing U.S. style prison sentences like a hundred years custody for the most serious offences is on one level a straightforward attempt to undermine a recent European Court of Human Rights ruling that life sentence prisoners should be given some hope that their sentences will be reviewed before they die, and on another level evidence that the Americanisation of the British criminal justice system continues to increase and deepen.

Apart from the probable introduction of prison sentences that are in effect a slow form of capital punishment, an American penology has characterised the treatment of British prisoners for quite some time in the form of the treatment model with its psychology-based programmes and courses designed and inspired by Canadian and U.S. ideologies regarding “offending behaviour”, which is attributed not so much to social andenvironmental causes but more the individual pathology of the “offender”. So the fact that the prison population is drawn disproportionately from the poorest and most disadvantaged group in society is of absolutely no significance and instead a crude behaviourist notion prevails that providing prisoners can be re-socialised into behaving in a “normal” way then “offending behaviour” can be exorcised from their thinking before they’re released back into the same desperate economic and social circumstances.

Predictably, the” treatment model” with its programmes and courses has had absolutely no appreciable effect on recidivism rates.

As in American prisons, prison-hired psychologists in Britain have carved out a veritable industry for themselves in the prison system by subscribing to the belief that inequality, disadvantage and poverty have absolutely nothing to do with why most people end up in prison and instead everything to do with individual pathology in the form of inherent personality disorders and an inability to distinguish right from wrong. And again as in the U.S. prison psychologists in Britain have now become an integral part of the system of control and repression in prisons, legitimising it with a language and narrative of “treatment” and addressing prisoner’s “needs and risks”. So entrenched have psychologists now become in the prison system that, like their American counterparts, they often willingly assist in the use of the worst forms of repression against prisoners labelled the most “difficult” and “unmanageable”.

American prison officials penchant for euphemisms to disguise the reality of it’s worst practices and forms of punishment, such as “special management units” where in fact prisoners are clinically isolated and psychologically brutalised, is a tendency that finds expression in British prisons also now. “Close Supervision Units” and “Intensive Intervention Units”, overseen and managed by both jail managers and psychologists, are also places where “difficult” prisoners are subjected to extreme punishment and a denial of basic human rights, often to the extent where many are driven to insanity.

The American “treatment model” of prisons probably finds it’s most extreme expression in the U.K. Prison system in the from of the “Dangerous Personality Disorder Units” (DPDU) created and overseen by psychologists from the psychopath-spotter school of psychology that defines all “anti-social” behaviour on the part of the least powerful and wealthy as symptomatic of psychopathy. In the totalitarian world of prison either fighting the system or confronting the institutionalised abuse of power that prevails there is sufficient to have oneself labelled a “psychopath” by psychologists anchored mind, body and soul to the prison system. In the case of life sentence prisoners such psychologists now have the power to decide if they’re sufficiently risk-free to be released.

It is not just within the prison system that the American influence is apparent, it’s also recognizable in the radically changed role of probation officers and criminal justice system social workers from what was traditionally “client-centred” liberal occupations to a overtly “public protection” centred extension of the police and prison system. Now a closer equivalent of the American parole officer, probation officers and criminal justice system social workers in the U.K. now see their role as one of policing parolees or “offenders” on supervision orders and returning them to jail for the slightest technical breach of their licence conditions. The massive increase in the use of community supervision orders as a from of social control has created a veritable ghetto of marginalised people in poorer communities who exist constantly in the shadow of imprisonment and omnipotent power of their supervision officers. This mirrors what has been taking place in some U.S. states as the global economic crisis has virtually eradicated legitimate employment in poor communities and replaced it with an alternative economy of illegal drugs, resulting in the almost mass criminalisation of young working class men, especially those from poor Afro-American communities. In such U.S. states and deprived communities prisons now replace factories where the new underclass are increasingly concentrated and forced to work as cheap labour for multinational private security corporations that now own and operate a significant portion of the American prison system. This new prison industrial complex is laying roots in the U.K. too and it is from the poorest de-industrialised communities that it draws its sources of cheap labour and human commodities.

This U.S. cultural influence on the criminal justice system is far greater in the U.K. than anywhere else in Europe, which accounts for it having the largest prison population in Europe and the longest prison sentences. It is also forever vulnerable to the American style prison riot when despair and hopelessness overshadows prisoners lives completely and there is essentially nothing left to lose. As a model of either justice or retribution the American criminal justice system is riddled with corruption and failure, and yet Britain slavishly attempts to imitate it in its quest to achieve absolute social control at a time when the lives of the poor are being made increasingly unendurable and society continues to fracture and polarise.

John Bowden
February 2014
HMP Shotts