Our coalition’s member Dr. Romarilyn Ralston interviewed by Maanvi Singh for The Guardian, July 10, 2020
“Every fire season it’s the same,” said Romarilyn Ralston, who leads Project Rebound, a California State University program that supports formerly incarcerated students. “The pay is so little, the work is so dangerous. Now we add Covid-19 to the story, and it gets even worse.”
The crews are both crucial and heavily exploited, said Ralston, who worked at a fire camp while incarcerated. In exchange for extremely dangerous work, prisoners earn time off their sentences and are paid between $2 and $5 a day, plus $1 per hour when they are on a fire. Because incarcerated firefighters are paid so little, the program saves the state of California $90m to $100m a year.
“It’s a super imbalanced system; it’s much like the system of slavery,” said Deirdre Wilson, a master’s student of social work at the University of Southern California and a member of the California Coalition of Women Prisoners. “There’s a reliance on this population, on this cheap labor.”
Authoritarian capitalism and the prison industrial complex is a two-tiered tyrannical system designed to enslave through mass incarceration.
Parchman Penal Farm. Female prisoners sewing, circa 1930. Flickr/Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Some rights reserved.More than 60% of women in state prisons in the US have a child under the age of 18. On any given day, over 2.7 million, or 1 in 28 children have a parent in prison. Children with incarcerated parents are more likely to experience depression, anxiety, poor academic performance, school absenteeism/drop out, poverty, homelessness, difficulty transitioning to basic adult roles, and physical health problems including migraines, asthma, and high cholesterol.
Children with incarcerated parents are 6-9 times more likely to become incarcerated themselves. Black children are seven-and-a-half times more likely than White children to have a parent in prison, and Latino children are two-and-a-half times more likely to experience this family dynamic.
In 2000, in Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex, Angela Yvonne Davis examined the infamy of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), a term first coined, maybe by Angela Davis herself, in the late 1990’s. What is the PIC? It is a term used to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems. Davis stated:
“Prison privatization is the most obvious instance of capital’s current movement toward the prison industry. While government-run prisons are often in gross violation of international human rights standards, private prisons are even less accountable. In March 1998, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest US private prison company, claimed 54,944 beds in 68 facilities under contract or development in the US, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Following the global trend of subjecting more women to public punishment, CCA opened a women’s prison outside Melbourne.
Private prison companies are only the most visible component of the increasing corporatization of punishment. Many corporations whose products we consume on a daily basis have learned that prison labor can be as profitable as third world labor power exploited by US-based global corporations. Both relegate formerly unionized workers to joblessness and many even wind up in prison. Some of the companies that use prison labor are IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, and Boeing. But it is not only the hi-tech industries that reap the profits of prison labor.
The California Prison Industry Authority (CALPIA) uses inmate labor to build, grow, and manufacture products for state agencies, institutions and schools. Products such as furniture, food products & agriculture, clothing, bedding, shoes & boots, and more. The 2016 revenue earned by PIA was approximately 225M, while inmates work pay ranges from .32-$1 per hour.
PIA Mission Statement: CALPIA is a self-supporting, customer-focused business that reduces recidivism, increases prison safety, and enhances public safety by providing offenders productive work and training opportunities.
Vision Statement: Changing offenders’ lives through innovative job training for a safer California.
While these messages may be the mission and vision of CalPIA, the training provided seldom if ever leads to work post-release. Unemployment and underemployment are the biggest barriers to successful reentry.”
Davis continued:
“Nordstrom department stores sell jeans that are marketed as “Prison Blues”, as well as t-shirts and jackets made in Oregon prisons. The advertising slogan for these clothes is “made on the inside to be worn on the outside”. Maryland prisoners inspect glass bottles and jars used by Revlon and Pierre Cardin, and schools throughout the world buy graduation caps and gowns made by South Carolina prisoners. “For private business”, write Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans (a political prisoner inside the Federal Correctional Institution at Dublin, California) “prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers’ compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for airlines, raise hogs, shovel manure, make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria’s Secret all at a fraction of the cost of `free labor'”.
As a youth, I was arrested and convicted of a crime and sentenced to life in prison. I served 23 years at the California Institution for women in Corona, CA. When I was first incarcerated in 1988, the women’s prison in Corona was the largest women’s prison in the world. Since the 1980s prison expansion in California CIW has become second to the California Central Women’s Facility in Chowchilla which opened in 1991. We often saw tours given to visitors from other countries who were looking to CIW as a model to emulate. Many countries now look away from the American carceral system as a model, seeing prison expansion and mass incarceration of its citizens as disgraceful and a human rights violation.
CIW was built in 1952 to hold approximately 500 women. When I arrived, there were 2800 female bodied prisoners packed into converted dayrooms, custodial boiler rooms, doubled bunked cells, and the auditorium. From the vast number of women locked up, it was clear that CDC was only interested in human capital as a means of profiteering. The majority of women behind bars were convicted of drug-related and property crimes. Black women made up 47% of the population in 1988 and continued to grow through the late 1990s.
By the time I was released in 2011 Black women made up approximately 37% of the population behind bars a decrease of 10% but still a disproportionate number in relationship to the general population. Thanks to prison abolitionists, criminal justice reformists and policy changes, black women are less impacted today. However, the damage has been done and the cycle of generational poverty and incarceration is still high for black Americans.
To further illustrate these remarks Davis points out:
“To deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment, the political economy of prisons relies on racialized assumptions of criminality – such as images of black welfare mothers reproducing criminal children – and on racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns. Colored bodies constitute the main human raw material in this vast experiment to disappear the major social problems of our time. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages. Prisons thus perform a feat of magic.
“But prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become a big business. Once the aura of magic is stripped away from the imprisonment solution, what is revealed is racism, class bias, and the parasitic seduction of capitalist profit. The prison industrial system materially and morally impoverishes its inhabitants and devours the social wealth needed to address the very problems that have led to spiraling numbers of prisoners.”
The prison industrial complex is a business!
The impact and intersection of race, mass incarceration, state violence and authoritarian capitalism can be seen and felt in places like Ferguson, Missouri. After the murder of Michael Brown, Jr, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri by Darren Wilson, a white police office, the world witnessed the use of military force and weaponry on US soil against peaceful protesters and on American citizens like never before.
I was living in North County St. Louis when all this happened. I protested, attended rallies, and volunteered with the Ferguson Commission, a body of 16 local leaders. The charge was to address the underlying root cause that led to the unrest in the wake of Michael Brown’s death and to publish a report with transformative policy recommendations for making the region stronger and a better place for everyone to live and to guide the community in charting a new path toward healing and positive change for all residents of the St. Louis region.
We know the 2015 report concluded what most reports have concluded after investigating the cause of unrest in Black communities over the past century (i.e., East St. Louis (1917), Watts (1965), Detroit (1967), and Los Angeles (1992)). Strategies for healing racial wounds, dismantling structural racism, and promoting racial and ethnic equity are needed but never produced.
The continuous mistreatment, torture, terrorism, and murder of Blacks in America as sanctioned by State violence and white supremacy have been normalized by authoritarian capitalism.
Not much has changed in St. Louis since August 9, 2014. On September 15, 2017 another White police officer (ex-police officer) Jason Stockley was acquitted for killing Anthony Lamar Smith (24 yrs. old) after being caught on tape stating: “I’m going to kill the nigger,” despite the investigation concluding that he had planted a firearm in Smith’s car.
Authoritarian capitalism and the prison industrial complex is a two-tiered tyrannical system designed to enslave through mass incarceration. The white imagination that sees black people as less than human, sees poor people as slaves, and profit as justice.
California Institution for Women, Aerial View,2004. Wikicommons/ California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Some rights reserved.
The video of a white police officer pressing his knee on the throat of George Floyd, a Black man for eight minutes and killing him, demonstrates the reality of white supremacy and the legacy of slavery in the U.S. George Floyd was lynched by police officers while some bystanders stood by and watched. Others on the scene protested and a young woman filmed the murder.
The truth is that the leading cause of death for young Black men in the U.S. is police killing. Not one week goes by without several unarmed Black individuals being killed by the police. This state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies is the vilest aspect of racial capitalism. In fact, racist violence and brutality against people of African descent is not just an issue in the U.S. but exists everywhere. It is urgent for global activists to combat that in their own countries and communities.
Scenes of multiracial protests and street battles against police brutality and state violence in Minneapolis and more than 140 U.S. cities reveal that there is something new emerging in the U.S.: A powerful movement against the police’s systematic killing of Black men and women. It is also a movement inspiring solidarity protests of thousands in other countries, who are declaring loudly and clearly: Black Lives Matter!
As the openly white supremacist Trump administration is using his racist base and machine gun-wielding thugs to push workers to go back to work despite unsafe working conditions in the middle of a pandemic, and now threatening to launch a full-scale assault of the U.S. military on the protesters, there are groups of people of all races coming together to protest white supremacy, police brutality and systemic violence. It is Black people however who remain at the helm of these protests as they fight, quite literally, for their lives.
While some protesters are calling for a complete defunding of the police and the use of those resources instead to help communities that have long been exploited, neglected and targeted with state violence, most are demanding much more. At a rally in Minneapolis on 30 May 2020, activist Tamika Mallory made a powerful speech: “This is not just a few cops doing things across the country. This is not a good cop versus bad cop situation. This is Ahmaud Arbery being shot down by white men on the streets of Georgia. Breonna Taylor being killed in her home. This is in New York City… we were just in New York, fighting the police officers, who in the name of social distancing were damn near killing Black young people on our streets. This is a coordinated activity happening across this nation, and so we are in a state of emergency. Black people are dying in a state of emergency.” The state of emergency extends to the Covid-19 pandemic, which reveals once more that Black lives are expendable to the white supremacist power structure on which the U.S. rests. Figures compiled by the non-partisan APM Research Lab and released just a few days before Mallory’s speech provide evidence of the monumental divide in the Covid-19 death rate between Black Americans and the rest of the country. African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans.
For this reason and many others, Black protesters say that getting rid of Trump and his administration is simply not enough. There has to be a complete and fundamental change in race relations, social and economic relations in the U.S.
In the meantime, Trump is using the intensifying capitalist competition and war threats with China to turn attention away from the deep crises at home and globally. Both the U.S. and China are instrumentalizing the pandemic to increase state security and authoritarian rule. In China, the state silenced frontline healthcare workers who warned about the rise of the coronavirus epidemic in December 2019. China is also where Africans have faced intense racism during the pandemic. In the U.S., the Trump administration denied the seriousness of the pandemic and then refused to coordinate the effort to stop the disease’s spread and to provide testing, safety, protective equipment for workers on the frontlines and basic needs and healthcare for the population. This has resulted in a catastrophe with more than 100,000 people having died from Covid-19 in the U.S. up to now. The U.S. accounts for only 4% of the global population and 30% of the Covid-19 deaths, putting it ahead of any country. To conceal their incompetence in addressing the pandemic, both the U.S. and China are accusing each other of negligence and corruption and each is using disinformation to promote lies, claiming that the coronavirus was made in a lab to wreck havoc on the other.
Although street protests without a genuine alternative to this inhuman capitalist racist sexist system are not enough on their own to overcome this ominous reality, it is very inspiring to see that youth and dispossessed communities around the world, through their creative and tech-savvy struggles, are building networks of solidarity across national borders. The U.S. protests against the murder of Floyd, Arbery and Taylor and more generally against state violence, represent a new hope for people around the world.
Juliana Goes, a Brazilian activist, draws comparisons between the systematic murder of Blacks by US police and the killing of Afro-Brazilians by Brazilian police. She writes: “In recent days, resistance by Black people has taken different forms. In Brazil, more than 800 organizations, brought together by the Black Coalition for Rights, protested the death of João Pedro, a fourteen-year old Black teen who was killed in his home’s living room when the police came in, shot him and disappeared with him.“ (See article by Juliana Goes elsewhere on this website)
There are long lasting relationships between the U.S. and Brazilian Afro-descendant communities which the recent protests in both countries will hopefully further consolidate.
Many Iranian activists inside Iran are also following the protests in the U.S. closely. The writers of Sarkhat, a progressive underground Telegram station, draw connections between the murder of George Floyd and the Iranian police murder of poor and dispossessed women or Afghan refugees or the Iranian state’s brutal repression of a popular uprising in November 2019. Many youth oppose the Iranian government’s repression, and also oppose Trump, U.S. imperialism, capitalism and white supremacy.
It is in the spirit of bringing these and other global struggles together and developing their revolutionary potential that the Global Prison Abolitionist Coalition was formed.
This coalition brings together the expertise and knowledge of socialist and abolitionist groups and individuals who struggle against racism, police brutality, state violence and the carceral system in different regions and joins that effort with a dialogue on alternatives to capitalism, racism, sexism, heterosexism and all forms of dehumanization.
We invite individuals and organizations who are interested in participating in this effort to read our statement of purpose and contact us.
Hongkongers must make a choice: stand with or against Black Lives Matter. It’s time to pick a side.
The US has erupted in protests after a white police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, a 47-year-old Black man. While Floyd’s death may have been the catalyst for this nationwide outrage, these protests point to a much older pattern of police officers murdering Black people across the country. But despite similarly being victims of police brutality, some Hongkongers have refused to stand with Black Lives Matter. […]
In this panel we will we offer an overview of the prison and refugee camp populations and situations in the U.S., Syria and Iran. We will address some key obstacles to the formation of a global prison abolitionist movement, offer ways of overcoming them and present ideas about an alternative to the capitalist carceral and authoritarian system.
The COVID-19 pandemic has given new urgency to the need to abolish prisons, refugee camps and the inhuman capitalist carceral system. Prisoner and refugee populations are facing an imminent death sentence from the fast spread of the virus in the crowded and unsanitary conditions of prisons and camps.
During the past three weeks, there have been protests inside some detention centers and prisons in the U.S., Iran, Italy, Colombia and elsewhere. Prison abolitionist and refugee and immigrant support groups around the world are calling for the release of people from jails, prisons, and detention centers. Although, the U.S. and several other counties have started to release limited portions of their prison populations, the numbers released are too few to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Effectively fighting the COVID-19 pandemic demands a global prison abolitionist movement based on opposition to all forms of exploitation and domination.
In this panel we will we offer an overview of the prison and refugee camp populations and situations in the U.S., Syria and Iran. We will address some key obstacles to the formation of a global prison abolitionist movement, offer ways of overcoming them and present ideas about an alternative to the capitalist carceral and authoritarian system.
Speakers:
Romarilyn Ralston:
Program Director of Project Rebound at California State University, Fullerton, a program that supports the higher education and successful reintegration of the formerly incarcerated. She served 23 years at the California Institution for Women (CIW) and is a long-time member and organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP). Incarcerated at 24 and released at 47, Romarilyn has seen and survived the effects of extreme sentencing and medical neglect in prison. Since her release, Romarilyn was a Women’s Policy Institute Fellow, a volunteer with the Ferguson Commission, and an organizer with the Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People & Families Movement (FICPFM) voting rights campaign in Florida. Romarilyn is a prison abolitionist tirelessly advocating for the women she left behind in prison in California, many serving life without the possibility of parole.
Joseph Daher:
Author of Syria after the Uprisings, the Political Economy of State Resilience (Pluto Press and Haymarket, 2019) and Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God (Pluto, 2016). He is an academic, social activist, founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever and a co-founder of the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists.
Sina Zekavat:
Architect, anti-war activist and member of the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialist. He has written articles on the student movement in Iran and solidarity with Syrian revolutionaries.
Moderator
Shiyam Galyon:
Communications coordinator at War Resisters League, the oldest secular antiwar organization working to resist war in the United States and abroad since 1923. She is also a member of the Syrian Women’s Political Movement, a multinational network of Syrian women fighting for political justice for all Syrians.
The moderated discussion will be followed by 30 minutes for answering questions from the facebook audience.
