Category: Prisoners

Summary review of SOLITARY by Albert Woodfox

Post author By carolina
Post date February 1, 2020

Albert Woodfox: Solitary: Unbroken by four decades in solitary confinement. My story of transformation and hope. New York City: Grove Press. 2019.

Summary review by Carolina Saldaña (A brief synopsis of the full Spanish language article)

Albert Woodfox got out of prison on February 19, 2016, after spending 43 years in isolation, that is to say, in solitary confinement. Robert Hillary King had been released on February 8, 2001, and Herman Wallace on October 1, 2013, three days before he died of cancer. They are known as the “Angola 3” for organizing a chapter of the Black Panthers in a prison widely recognized as the most violent in the country on a former slave plantation in Angola, Louisiana, which continued to function in much the same way.

In this autobiographical work, Albert Woodfox tells us of his childhood and youth in the Black community of Tremé in New Orleans, his incarceration in Angola and other prisons, his dawning consciousness, and the work of the Angola 3. He writes about what they achieved in conditions of torture and white supremacy as well as the support they received from the New Orleans Panthers and others. At every step of the way, he reflects on his anxieties, hits and misses, and what he learned.

Tags Albert Woodfox, Angola 3, solitary confinement

Prisoners

Torture, Tears, and Desperation in Mexico’s Migrant Jails

Post author By scott
Post date July 9, 2019

By Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano
Translated by Scott Campbell

“‘You’re going to die! Sign your deportation and go back to your country!’ was what I heard as I struggled to recover from the asthma attack I suffered in the migrant detention center. I felt cornered by the guard and considered doing it, but remembering the problems that led me to leave my country, I dropped the idea.”

Lizzi is one of 51,607 people detained in Mexico by the National Migration Institute (INM) during the first four months of 2019. She was detained for 45 days, during which time she says she suffered physical and psychological torture. “We felt like we were in a jail, it was horrible! I had two asthma attacks inside. When we came back from the doctor, another guard asked me, “And you want to ask for refuge? Do you know you’ll be locked up for three to six months?”

A few meters from Pakal’ Ná park, near the train tracks in Palenque where hundreds of migrants meet to share their stories, the young, twenty-year-old mother recalls her painful experience. She left Honduras because she had problems with her son’s father, who belonged to one of the gangs. After years of abuse and threats, one day she decided to flee with her son to the United States to start a new life.

Prisoners Solidarity

Nationwide Strike Targets U.S. Prisons

Post author By carolina
Post date September 24, 2018
1 Comment on Nationwide Strike Targets U.S. Prisons

by carolina saldaña

The Nationwide Prison Strike throughout the United States began on August 21, 2018, the anniversary of the assassination of George Jackson in San Quentin Prison in California and ended on September 9th, 47 years after the rebellion in Attica prison, NY. Two historic dates in the revolutionary movement inside the country’s prisons.

On July 17th of this year, the artist, analyst and organizer Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson, of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, wrote an article that places this strike in the context of several years of resistance in the prisons of Texas, Georgia, Alabama, California and Florida as of 2010. Rashid argues that a new movement is on the rise against slavery and the inhuman conditions in prisons, which is eroding the structures of isolation imposed almost half a century ago to put an end to the prison movement that existed in the 60s and 70s.

During the Nationwide Prison Strike of 2018, there were actions in at least 36 institutions in 17 states.

Indigenous Prisoners Repression

CODEDI Demands Justice for Assassination of Abraham Hernández Gonzales

Post author By carolina
Post date July 18, 2018

TO THE PEOPLES OF OAXACA

TO THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS

TO HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS

TO INDEPENDENT AND COMMERCIAL NEWS MEDIA

Today Tuesday 17th of July at 11:30 AM, a group of armed men with ski masks dressed in military style uniforms broke into Abraham Hernández Gonzales’ home in Salchi, Pochutla, and they violently took the compañero from his home. They later transported him in a gray pick-up truck with license plate number RH-70-92 along with motorcycles which escorted the truck.

Immediately after Hernandez Gonzales was picked up several police agencies were notified and none of them made any effort to find the compañero, who after five hour was found dead near the same community.

Oaxaca Governor Alejandro Murat is directly responsible for this kidnapping and assassination of our compañero Abraham Hernández, who carried out the important job of local coordinator for the community of Los Ciruelos. The government’s lack of interest in solving cases like this one demonstrates its complicity with criminal organizations that operate in the region and the state. Allowing these organizations to operate freely at all hours of the day without being detained by anyone illustrates the farce that is the government operation “Safe Beach”; in reality these are the places with the greatest degree of insecurity, and even more so with the return of the PRI to Oaxaca’s state government, whom we know are connected to narcotics trafficking.

Prisoners Solidarity

Urgent Support Needed for Mexican Anarchist Prisoner Fernando Bárcenas

Post author By scott
Post date June 8, 2017

Fernando Bárcenas is an anarchist political prisoner in Mexico. Earlier this week, he learned he must pay a 35,500 peso (1,950 USD) fine imposed during his sentencing by Friday, June 9 or have his imprisonment extended for 550 days. Let’s ensure he doesn’t spend one more day locked up.

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