Prisoner Advocate Elaine Brown on Georgia Prison Strike:
"Repression Breeds Resistance"
http://www.democracynow.org/seo/2010/12/14/prisoner_advocate_elaine_brown_on_georgia
December 14, 2010
At least four prisons in Georgia remain in lockdown five days after
prisoners went on strike in protest of poor living and working
conditions. Using cell phones purchased from guards, the prisoners
coordinated the nonviolent protests to stage the largest prison
strike in U.S. history. There are reports of widespread violence and
brutality by the guards against the prisoners on strike. We speak to
longtime prison activist Elaine Brown of the newly formed group
Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners' Rights.
AMY GOODMAN: "Seize the Time" by Elaine Brown, who is our next guest.
That's right.
At least four prisons in Georgia remain in lockdown five days after
prisoners went on strike in protest of poor living and working
conditions. Using cell phones purchased from the guards, the
prisoners were able to coordinate the protests across Georgia. On
Monday, Georgia officials confirmed four prisons are still in
lockdown: Hays State Prison in Trion, Macon State Prison in
Oglethorpe, Telfair State Prison in Helena, and Smith State Prison in
Glennville. There have also been reports of prisoners going on strike
in several other facilities.
The prisoners say they'll continue refusing to leave their cells or
perform their jobs until they receive better medical care and
nutrition, more educational opportunities, payment for the work they
do in the prisons. In addition, they're demanding just parole
decisions, an end to cruel and unusual punishments, and better access
to their families.
Well, joining us now is the longtime prison activist Elaine Brown.
She's a member of the newly formed group Concerned Coalition to
Respect Prisoners' Rights. She's the former chair of the Black
Panther Party. She's joining us from Berkeley, California. Up until
recently she lived in Atlanta, Georgia.
Elaine Brown, it's being called the biggest prison strike in U.S.
history. Explain what's happening.
ELAINE BROWN: These men created what is effectively a spontaneous
decision by networking with each other and saying, you know, "We're
tired of all of the abuse we've been suffering here," as so many
other prisoners before them have said. "We're going to do something,
but the something we're going to do is not to try to initiate a
violent response or initiate violence, but to simply say we will not
work until we're paid," and the other demands and petitions that they
have made, as you've outlined. And they made a decision that that
would be on December 9th.
I have no idea why they picked that date and how they ended up
getting perhaps ten prisons involved. But at that point, of course,
the guards and the administration became aware of their intention.
And so, when they locked down on the night of the 8th, their decision
was to not get up. And they didn't. But the prison pretends, and the
administration has pretended, that they locked the men down. But
they're talking about four prisons, and there were probably ten in
the initial one-day strike, as it was slated to be. They have
refusedwe're in day six, and they are still holding out and saying
they will not come out and work unless they can sit down at the table
and begin to get their demands met and their issues dealt with.
AMY GOODMAN: Elaine Brown, your son is in the Macon State Prison? He
is there, still on lockdown there?
ELAINE BROWN: Not only is he on lockdown, but he's in the hole right
now, because from almost day one or so, I was informed that he was
taken off to the hole, deemed some sort of leader. Just for the sake
of the record, because somebody askedwell, said, "Well, I understand
Elaine Brown doesn't have a son." Well, I didn't give birth to this
boy. I have known him for 15 years, and I have been with him for that
long, since he was incarcerated and put into an adult facility at 14
years old. And he's done 14 years now. And so, he is my son for
allin all meaningful ways.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe the conditions in the Georgia state
prison system, Elaine Brown?
ELAINE BROWN: Well, I'm sure they're not very much different from
other prisons, I mean, or as the men would say, the chain gang or the
camp they're in. You know, you have overcrowded conditions. There is
no activity other than the work tasks that they're assigned to do. In
other words, there's no real educational opportunities. There's no
exercise. There's nothing else. The food is bad. They have poor
nutrition. They have crowdedovercrowded cells. A lot of the
day-to-day thing, I think the most important part is that, as it was
outlined many years ago in a Stanford study conducted by Dr. Phil
Zimbardo, one of the most important things is that the constant
violence being perpetrated against them by guards, who with their own
idle time look to try and instigate an incident here or there, so
there's a lot of screaming, hollering, you know, aggressive behaviors
that go on. And so, there's always some incident jumping off, as it
were, and so forth and so on. It's just a life of idleidleness and
violence and a lack of any basic human condition.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what they do in their work. I mean, among the
conditions, the demands of the prisoners are a living wage for work,
talking about being a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment of the
Constitution that prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude. What
are the work conditions? What are they paid? Are they paid? What are they
ELAINE BROWN: No, in Georgia, they're not even paid. They're not paid
one dime in the state of Georgia. I mean, the State Department of
Corrections would like to say they have some workers that are paid.
There are probably some people doing life without parole who work at
the Governor's mansion, maybe 15 of them who might be getting some
money. But the prisoners in the state of Georgia are paid nothing at all.
Now, that's not to say that the prisoners in other states are being
paid. They're mostly being paid a dollar a day to 50 cents an hour.
That would probably be the maximum. So they're not exactly being paid
enough money to accumulate anything over the years of their
incarceration and maybe come out of the prison with more than the $25
check they give them upon release in the state of Georgia. So, they
are not paid one single dime, and they are required to clean the
floors, clean the showers, do the yard work, do the dishes, cook the
foodin other words, to maintain the prison itself.
AMY GOODMAN: I'm looking at a report out of the Black Agenda Report,
and it talks about how there's no educational programs available
beyond GED with the exception of a single program that trains inmates
to be Baptist ministers.
ELAINE BROWN: That's absolutely correct. I believe that's at Phillips
State Prison, and it's a school out of Louisiana. And I think there
are about 20 people even enrolled in that program. So, it's almost
pointless to even mention it.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how this largest prison strike in U.S.
history was organized, sort of redefining the term "cell phone," Elaine Brown.
ELAINE BROWN: Well, you know, a lot of people have been fascinated by
this, and I'm glad that you made note immediately thatyou know, so
many people say, "Well, these guys have contraband." Well, the
greatest avenue for their obtaining these cell phones is by sales
from guards, and these guards are selling these phones at exorbitant
prices. I learned the other day that one guy said he paid $800 to a
guard for a cell phone that was probably worth about 50 bucks. So,
that's the first point that has to be made, because people imagine
that there's all this smuggling going onand there is, but it's on
the part ofin the main, on the part of guards that are inside these
facilities.
The cell phone played a part, but the other part was that there are
leaders of different factions in the prison, and they were able to
sort of discuss what could they do. Instead of fighting among
themselves, is there anything that they could do to try to change the
conditions of being just constantly bombarded with violent attacks,
with, you know, idle time, and so forth and so on? And theyat some
point, a number of them just decided, "Well, we just shouldn't work."
And it just became a prairie fire. It was truly the spark that lit
the prairie fire. And everybody was saying, "Well, I'm down with
that. We're not going to get up." And each groupyou know, you have
blacks in various subsets, and you have Muslims, you have Mexicans
and other Latinos, Hispanics, you have Whites, you have Rastafarians,
you have Christiansall of them, for reasons that I cannot explain
how they suddenly understood how to be unified, decided, "Yeah, we're
not working, and we're down with this, and we're not going to get up,
and we're going to stay united." And across the prisons, in the
various sets, they called each other, sent text messages, and they
all agreed to do it. And they agreed on the date, and that was December 9.
AMY GOODMAN: Elaine, I interviewed you a long time ago when your
memoir came out, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story. You're the
former chair of the Black Panther Party. Can you tell us a little bit
about your life and how you came to be a prison activist today?
ELAINE BROWN: Well, it's prettyyou know, it's sort of organic, very
much like this prisoner strike. You know, we used to say in the Black
Panther Party, "Repression breeds resistance." Pardon me. I was born
in the ghettos of North PhiladelphiaI was raised, rather, in the
ghettos of North Philadelphia. Even though I went to sort of
privileged schools and so forth and so on, I was very conscious of
that. When I ultimately joined the Black Panther Party at around 24
years old, I knew then that I was fully conscious that the things
that I experienced in my life were a part of a larger picture and
that I was a part of a group of people who were an oppressed group.
From that point on, the question was liberation. The aspects of
ourof liberation and the ending of all exploitation, as we would say
it, was just a matter of looking at all the various aspects of our
oppression and how it played itself out. In the Black Panther Party,
there was a 10-point platform and program that articulated some of
the manifestations of our general oppression, talking about lack of
education, as a matter of fact, not having enough food and housing.
In essence, what we called for was freedom and right of self-determination.
We recognized that our plight was not much different as black people
than other oppressed people, and we joined arms and forces with a
variety of other groups like the Brown Berets, the Red Guard, the
Young Lords, the Young Patriots, and so forth. And then we linked
ourselves to the international struggle of people around the world
for national liberation in Vietnam, throughout the continent of
Africa, and in Latin America, South America. So, we became internationalists.
And I remain that person. So it isn't complicated to draw the line
from that struggle to the struggle of the most oppressed group in
America: the prisoner class. The prisoners in this country, as you
know, make up the largest prisoner group in the world. America
confines more people than any single country at a higher rate and a
higherand the largest number. Fifty percent of those prisoners, or
nearly 50 percent of them, are black men. And so, we have to ask the
question, how did that come to be? Either the black men are the only
peoplewhen we consider that we black people make up approximately 12
to 13 percent of the overall population and yet almost 50 percent of
the prison population, we have to ask the question, is this the
result of some genetic flaw in black people? Are we obviously some
sort of criminally minded? Or is there something wrong in the scheme
of things? Obviously, the latter is what I would say. And so, I've
committed myself to bringing people out of prison.
I have a very close friend who was a member of the Black Panther
Party here in California, who has been in prison since 1969, over 41
years, Chip Fitzgerald. So I helped to organize the Committee to Free
Chip Fitzgerald. These people have been buried in prison for their
political beliefs, and they've been buried in prison for their
poverty. There are no rich people languishing in the prisons of
America. So, there's a class question. There's a race question. And
this is just a continuation of expressing my efforts or of continuing
my efforts toward the goal of the liberation of all oppressed people.
AMY GOODMAN: Elaine Brown, I want to thank you very much for being
with us and just ask you a final question about what you expect the
outcome ofit was planned as a one-day strike, December 9th, biggest
strike in U.S. history in prisons. But with the lockdown continuing
in a number of the state prisons in Georgia, what's going to happen?
ELAINE BROWN: Well, wethis coalition that you have mentioned, the
Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoner Rights, which includes
everything from the NAACP national office and the state office to the
Nation of Islam and a number of other organizations, All of Us or
None, so forth, across the country, we've been talking in conference
calls over the last two days. We are having a meeting at this point
with either the commissioner or deputy commissioner of the Department
of Corrections. We plan on imploring them to first stop instigating
the situation and trying to escalate it to a violent confrontation,
which is what they are doing by prodding men with everything, turning
off the heat, beating people, forcing them out of their cells,
turning off the hot water, destroying and trashing people's property,
not feeding them, and so forth and so on, all kinds of tactics to
instigate a violent response. So our first goal is to make sure this
does not become Attica, although it is not like Attica because the
prisoners have not taken hostages or anything of this sort. They are
simply not leaving their cells.
AMY GOODMAN: Elaine Brown, we're going to have to leave it there.
ELAINE BROWN: And then the next step
AMY GOODMAN: But I thank you very much for being with us.
ELAINE BROWN: Alright, thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Longtime prison activist
ELAINE BROWN: OK, thank you.
AMY GOODMAN:former chair of the Black Panther Party. Thank you so
much. We'll continue to follow the Georgia strike.
.
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