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["Disciples Off. of Communication"<wshuffit@oc.disciples.org>]

slavery in American prisons
Date: May 10, 1999
Disciples News Service
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Contact: Clifford L. Willis
E-mail: CWillis@oc.disciples.org
on the Web: http://www.disciples.org

99b-33

	ENFIELD, N.C. (DNS) -- Although slavery was 
outlawed more than 150 years ago, U.S. prisons 
now represent 21st Century plantations, according 
to a network of prison activists. 

	Approximately 65 advocates of prison reform met 
April 30 -- May 2, at Franklinton Center in the 
tiny hamlet of Enfield. Franklinton Center is 
home to staff members of the United Church of 
Christ Commission for Racial Justice and the 
denomination's Southern Conference. While here, 
the group engaged in wide-ranging discussions on 
the prison industry, alternatives to mandatory 
minimum sentences, political prisoners, police 
brutality and the death penalty.

	"Faithful Resistance: A Strategy Conference for 
Prison Activists in the Religious Community," was 
sponsored by the Interreligious Taskforce on 
Criminal Justice. The conference is an outgrowth 
of a September 1998 gathering, "Critical 
Resistance," which drew 3,000 prison activists to 
Berkeley, Calif. The North Carolina meeting was 
aimed at continuing the goals of the Berkeley 
conference.

	Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) 
representives included the Rev. Gerald 
Cunningham, senior associate for justice 
ministries, Homeland Ministries; the Rev. Mose 
and Mildred Laderson, Indianapolis; the Rev. 
Karey E.L. Gee, Jacksonville, Fla., and the Rev. 
Dwight Bailey, Wilson, N.C. The contingent also 
included ecumenical guests who are members of the 
Disciples' Church Action for Safe and Just 
Communities program.  

	The conferees called for alternative sentencing 
for nonviolent offenders and abolition of the 
death penalty. People of color, according to 
experts, are disproportionately represented on 
Death Row. The group also demanded eradication of 
 inhumane living conditions and practices of 
brutality in American prisons.

	The "21st Century plantation" language belongs 
to former convict Abdul Rashid Ali of Cincinnati. 
America's prisons, he said, have become more like 
holding pens filled with political activists and 
the criminal element. Released from an Ohio 
prison in 1974, Ali has worked since then to help 
other formerly incarcerated persons make 
successful transitions to their home communities. 

	There are 1.8 million men and women in prisons 
and jails, according to keynote speaker Jose 
Lopez of Chicago. An instructor at Northeastern 
Illinois University, Chicago, Lopez also is a 
leading advocate for Puerto Rican independence 
and the release of Puerto Rican political 
prisoners.  

	Sixty percent to 70 percent of these persons are 
people of color, he said. These statistics 
contrast sharply with the 1.8 million persons in 
universities and college -- 80 percent of whom 
are white.

	Something is wrong that has "nothing to do with 
genetics," said the executive director of the 
Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rico Rican 
Conference Center. "What we have is a nation that 
is not at peace with its past sins." 

	Power issues are the driving force behind the 
"browning" of American prison populations, 
according to Lopez. That power takes root in U.S. 
colonialism, he said, calling racism and 
colonialism "two faces of the same coin." To 
combat racism and colonialism "we must change the 
basic structures of society. No democracy can be 
a colonial system." 

	Since establishment of the 13 colonies in the 
1600s the U.S. has been an imperial power that 
unjustly claims land, but never native peoples, 
Lopez said.

	Native American activist Dennis Banks (also 
known as Nowacumig) agrees, citing the Battle at 
Wounded Knee and other conflicts between American 
Indians and the U.S. government. "Europeans 
didn't receive a credit card allowing them to run 
roughshod over our people. They didn't have carte 
blanche, but day by day we began to feel it," 
said the American Indian Movement co-founder. 

	"America came to burn our sweatlodges and 
longhouses," said Banks who served 18 months as a 
political prisoner for his leadership in AIM. 
"They never came to pray with us  . . .  but to 
banish our way of life. They have criminalized 
our struggle and criminalized who we are."

	That colonialism is now transforming American 
cities into a "sea of whiteness with islands of 
people of color." Today's urban revitalization 
efforts are similar to the apartheid practices in 
South Africa, according to Lopez. In American 
cities "they're bringing in yuppies and driving 
out people of color" to "select suburbs -- far 
away from the centers of power."

	The same "creeping imperialism" is going on 
abroad via U.S. foreign policy. "That's what's 
going in Serbia right now," Lopez said, comparing 
the U.S. military to policemen of a multinational 
corporation. 

	In addition, it has taken place in his native 
Puerto Rico. The Chicago resident has been a 
longtime leader in his country's quest for 
independence from the United States. "You cannot 
divorce the military complex abroad from the 
prison industrial complex at home."

	The role of prisons in America began to change 
during the Reconstruction period ( after 
slavery). Discriminatory laws, passed then, 
further disenfranchised freed slaves and filled 
U.S. prisons with African Americans. The 13th 
Amendment provided freedom for former slaves 
until they were duly convicted for some crime, 
said Lopez.

	Young blacks in particular went from being 
slaves to the prison system, said Lopez. This new 
labor pool rebuilt the south, especially its 
railroads, major cities and their 
infrastructures. In short, it was a "change from 
chattel slave society to civil slavery."

	America's prisons are becoming American 
concentration camps, according to Lopez. They are 
"centers of production" in which able bodied 
young people are "demonized and criminalized. 
When they are no longer productive -- you kill 
them."

	Ali, the Cincinnati community activist, calls 
the U.S. prison industrial complex a business. He 
cites as proof, the increasing number of 
institutions run by private corporations that 
"farm out convicts to local businesses." An 
eight-year prison construction boom is a sign of 
the "inflationary proof" industry, said Ali. Ten 
private prison corporations in the country have 
earned profits of $65 billion.

	The combined prison/military industrial complex, 
at work in the U.S. and abroad, devalues or 
objectifies people of color and indigenous 
people, according to Lopez. In doing so, vast 
contributions to their countries social and 
economic development are "written out of 
history."

	Banks, the American Indian activist, says U.S. 
school children in particular have been 
shortchanged by this incomplete history of their 
country. "They don't know we're here. But we're 
here, America," he declared.

	In the 1960s civil rights movement, Lopez said, 
African Americans "placed themselves back in 
history" by resisting. He called for creation of 
more "pockets of resistance in cities and in 
prisons." In them are "possibilities of changing 
the world" and "creating a new vision."

	Outposts of resistance here and there are not 
enough for people like the Rev. Yvonne Delk, 
Norfolk, Va. The United Church of Christ minister 
and longtime activist wants something more.  "I'm 
not ready for pockets of resistance. I want a 
movement. This (movement) is one way of writing 
ourselves back into history!"

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