Author: June11th

[LISTEN HERE]

In our latest interview for the June 11th International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason & All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners, we spoke with Daniel McGowan.

Daniel is a former eco-prisoner who did seven years in prison for actions he took part in with the Earth Liberation Front. Prior to and since his time in prison, Daniel has been active in prisoner solidarity projects, including the Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners calendar.

We talk about Daniel’s experiences with solidarity on both sides of the walls, the particular importance of long-term prisoner support, which forms of solidarity felt most important during his time in prison, post-release support, Communication Management Units, inter-movement prisoner support, mutual aid, supporting New York state prisoners and younger anarchist prisoners, and the origins of June 11th.

 

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JUNE 11TH: Can you start by telling us about yourself and your experiences with prison and prisoner support?

DANIEL MCGOWAN: Sure, my name is Daniel McGowan, and I’m a former political prisoner. I’ve done seven years in prison for actions I took with the Earth Liberation Front, or the ELF, in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. My experience with prisoner support, for most of my activist life I’ve been involved in prisoner support, and then I found myself being on the receiving end of tremendous amount of support and solidarity from friends and comrades on the outside.

J11: Can you speak to the importance of prisoner support as part of the anarchist project and other liberatory struggles? And specifically to the necessity of supporting long-term prisoners?

D: Well I think prisoner support is really something that’s needed for anyone that goes to prison. Unfortunately the networks that exist are largely built around our comrades or people that we know in prison. I think long-term is a thing that means different things to different people. I tend to think that a person who has a two year sentence feels like it’s long-term, so it’s sort of relative. But I would say that obviously the longer the sentence, the more solidarity and support is needed. I think any movement that takes itself seriously, anarchist or otherwise, needs to provide for the consequences of state repression or interactions between our movements and the right-wing, in terms of incidents between antifa and right-wing fascists. I think that without having that safety net, not only are people less inclined to take actions they feel like are part of a movement, they realize that it almost feels like a martyr situation where people are willing to confront state power or fascists and then there’s literally no one to help them or work with them when they’re in prison.

I think as a person is in prison longer, the needs often change. Prison degrades and haunts individuals, so I think the longer you’re in, the more it’s necessary. And understanding that statistically most people that go to prison come out, but we also obviously have situations where we have people with intense cases, political cases, where they potentially have life sentences, or they technically have access to parole but it’s meaningless because they get rejected all the time. I think the needs of long-term prisoners are slightly different than short-term. A short-term prisoner might have their eye on their out date, and so they don’t want to basically catch a new case, or catch new time. I think we see situations like Jared Chase where his release date has been pushed back, so he is already supposed to be out of prison, but due to interactions with the cops inside, his sentence has been extended to I believe 2019, which is obviously problematic in a lot of ways.

J11: What forms of solidarity were most important to you while you were in prison, and what could have been done better or different?

D: I think having access to people I could call and e-mail (when they finally instituted that) was really important. The fact that I knew I had a crew of people that I could rely on, that when I was bundled up and put in transit I knew that people were looking where I was, that they would reflect on the fact that they didn’t hear from me, and would be looking out for me. I liked feeling that there were these people, my family, my friends, even people I didn’t know around the country and the world, that were willing to make a phone call, to e-mail the BOP or bother them to have lawyers that were willing to come and visit me while I was in transit. I remember there’s this one time I was at Oklahoma City and my partner at the time, I found out later, paid a lawyer to come in and visit me just to get me out of the segregation unit, and for me to let the lawyer know what was going on, and that lawyer was able to relay it to my long-term lawyers and let them know. So knowing that people gave a crap about me, that I had an outlet, that I had friends that I could ask for things that made my time a little easier, that people were willing to basically pressure those in power on my behalf, that was really affirming and supportive.

As far as how things could’ve been done different, I think we learned the hard way. Because my communications were monitored, it was really hard for me to make specific requests and so of course people want to do right by you so they don’t want to do something that puts you in harm’s way. I remember for instance when I first got to the CMU, I remember thinking how awesome it’d be for people to have a support demo outside, and how that would’ve probably flustered the Bureau of Prisons, like “this dude’s from New York and he’s somehow able to mobilize people to be in the parking lot banging on pots and pans and making noise.” It’s not something the prison gets a lot of, in the Midwest and often in rural areas. But I always thought that would be something I would love, but it was pretty much impossible for me to ask, since my phone calls, even my legal visits were all monitored on some level. They’re obviously not supposed to monitor legal visits but I think it’s imperative that people with cases that are scary to the prisons understand that more than likely their phone calls and legal visits are potentially going to be recorded. So we just realized along the way that there’s basically just going to be a whole bunch of things they can’t communicate to me, and I can’t communicate to them.

J11: Can you speak more about your time in the CMUs and other tactics that the state used to try to silence and isolate you?

D: I was in the Communication Management Unit at both prisons, both CMUs. I was at the Marion one for twenty-six months, I got moved into general population at Marion and then the government concocted some fake reason to throw me back in the CMU, and I spent the remaining twenty-one months of my sentence at Terre Haute, Indiana. I think a lot of what it had to do with is that I was put there because I was in a sort of vulnerable position. I had a terrorism case, I had a violence case, since they consider arson violence, and it came with what they call a public safety factor for what they consider a greatest severity offense. So it’s the kind of case that has a lot of highlighting and asterisks on my file. I’m not a Muslim and I have a terrorism case, so when they opened up the second CMU at Marion, they put a few people in there that could basically make some point to just say, “oh no, it’s not a Muslim unit.”

They put myself and Andrew Stepanian from the Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty case, they had sovereign citizens which are from all different races and nationalities, they put an old neo-nazi from “The Order,” a group that engaged in targeting people and armored car robberies. So they put a few of us in there as their “proof” that these CMUs were not just Muslim terrorist units. I was doing academic work with a university in the Midwest, Antioch University, I was doing a Sociology Degree so I was writing a lot about my case, and I think they found those documents and saw the amount of mail I was getting, and essentially when the place I was at was asked for nominations, it was pretty easy for them to send me there because I was vulnerable because of my case. I was at a low-security prison, but it was very easy for them to put me there.

I think part of it was I wasn’t breaking any of their so-called rules, but I was writing a lot of political stuff, I was writing about the drug war, about fellow people in prison that I had met, as well as how basically fraudulent and bogus prison is and what prison does to people. I had met a ton of people when I was at FCI Sandstone that were there basically for crossing the border and who had five to seven year sentences. I met a bunch of people who were being put away for crazy thirty and forty year sentences for meth. It just opened up my eyes to a whole other element of the prison world. So I wrote a lot and I put it online through my friends and family. They were unable to give me incident reports, they were unable to stick me with that. So they just put me in a place where I think they thought I would just roll over and do quiet time.

It didn’t really work that way, I felt like I was doing quiet time and I got sent to the CMU, and that really lit a fire in me again, and I decided I was gonna go to war with them over the next five years, which is pretty much what I did. The other thing they did in terms of isolating me and silencing me was – there are particular aspects about the CMU that were pretty onerous in terms of communication, so they did things like limit the communication in CMUs to (when I first got there) one phone call a week, which you had to sign in a week in advance and you could only call one person. They made the visitation so bad it was like four hours a month. It was really kinda hard for me to ask people to come 2,000 miles to essentially come for this horrible, non-contact visit.

They monitored all the communications, I think they had people in the units that were rats, who were willing to help the government out, and they did an immense amount of rejections of my mail. So my mail going out was monitored obviously and recorded and all that, but really my mail coming in, if it was political. They were very broad in their use of rejections. I had something like 100 magazines and newspapers rejected over the time I was in prison. I pretty much gave grievances for all of them, which was my way of being a bit of an asshole and a stubborn bastard. I basically grieved every single time they rejected anything from the prison level up to DC, which is crazy. It takes like nine months, and at that point you’re allowed to sue. Obviously I didn’t sue on any of my magazine rejections, but I basically pissed them off. I wasn’t able to get Earth First! Journal or Rolling Thunder or a lot of the magazines that to this day really don’t publish anymore.

J11: A topic that has come up for us a number of times is continuing support for people as they’re released from prison. How was your transition, and what was helpful for you? What would you want other people to know about post-release support?

D: It’s interesting, I think the release thing is getting a lot more attention these days from our community because I think we’re getting better. We have a lot more people going to prison, a lot more people come out back into the movement, and we’re sort of learning the hard way how rough re-entry is. Most of the programs that exist for re-entry don’t work so well for politicized individuals for a lot of different reasons. For instance, maybe people come out and they already have good housing, maybe they have a college degree or something like that, maybe they even have job prospects, but usually people are coming out of prison with some struggles? And sometimes it’s everything: it’s housing, it’s legal difficulties, it’s ‘stay-away’ orders from felons or co-defendants.

My situation was such that I was married, I had a place I could go to live, and I got six months in the half-way house. I also had a crew of people that were really amazing in their dedication and fundraising. So when I got out I had a couple thousand dollars, actually more than a couple thousand, to buy some clothes, to buy a computer, to buy shoes. It had been six years, so I needed to replace some things. I was really good at that level. I had my material needs met, I was at the half-way house and came home on the weekends, we’d order takeout food because I wasn’t really allowed to leave. I also did very well, like I was remanded back into custody for writing an article basically about the CMU, and I had lawyers so they were able to get me out of prison the next day, which is really amazing.

But I struggled psychologically, they say you leave prison but prison doesn’t leave you. When I first came home I just had a lot going on and I had a hard time. I was at the half-way house, and it was kinda hard for me, they wouldn’t let me see a shrink or a social worker. I had some contacts from the movement that were willing to get me some access to mental health care. The half-way house, which is essentially a contractor of the government, would not accommodate that. Essentially what happened was I had a lot of two-steps forward, one-step back. And then I had a bit of crisis based on some stuff that went down in my personal life, and at that point it was kinda essential that I see someone. A friend of a friend who was a social worker offered. Because I wasn’t actually even able to go to her office, she came down and met me every week in a coffee shop near my job on my lunch hour. That’s the kind of thing not everyone has access to, and I felt really supported and spoiled by the whole thing.

And then when I was able to get out of the half-way house I saw this person in a professional capacity for three or four years. My problem was more feeling lots of anxiety, having a real hard time with crowds, and that’s the sort of stuff that everyone’s struggle when they leave prison is going to be different. I used to tell myself, “oh you only did six years,” and I was living with men that did thirty, forty years, or life. I thought I was going to get out and everything was going to be peachy keen and fine, but when I got out it was really tough, I got out and I felt like I was still in. I was really sensitive to any kind of offense, everything hurt my feelings and I wanted to fight all the time. I sort of stayed out of trouble, but inside my head it was just rolling emotions.

So I think when people come out we need to reach them where they’re at. Some people are going to get out and they’re going to have amazingly hard times with every aspect. They’ve been in a long time, they might be like, “I’ve never seen a smartphone, I’ve never seen a computer.” I taught computers in CMU and I dealt with men that had pretty much never even seen a computer or used the internet, so it can be really challenging. My situation, I was in for six years, and I had never seen an iPhone, but I certainly understood what a phone was and how to use it. So my ability to get back into things was good on that level. But everyone is going to have different situations. In New York in the last year there was a political prisoner that was in for thirty-seven years. His name is Maliki Shakur, and he came home and he took like a fish to water with phones, I mean he’s good on the smartphone, he texts, he sends photos, he knows how to use it. His housing situation was aided. But I can’t imagine he has a lot of great job prospects, hasn’t been out in the job market for thirty-seven years.

Then you have people like Zolo Azania who gets out and has a crew in the Midwest that have been helping him. Everyone’s going to have a different time, a different struggle. I don’t know if we need to have an organization, but I try to help people when they get out, and I try to help their support crews in getting through some of these issues around housing, legal support, health care especially for older folks, mental health care, all that kind of stuff. I think it’s something that we’re just starting to deal with, I know there was a wave of people that had shorter sentences like the Tinley Park Five, Jason Hammond, and the other people in the NATO Three case, they all got out.

My co-defendants and myself, a ton of us got out after serving anywhere between two and seven years. And we’re all out there in the world as felons trying to get some work, trying to deal with the issues that work presents when you’re a felon. So I think we just have to reach people where they’re at, to start sharing more information. People that are out, who are on probation and are felons, need to talk to each other more, and kinda prepare for when we know people are getting out to help them: materially, but also just as a sounding board. I talk to people when they get out if they’re able to talk to me, and just try to hear them out and see them through the tough times.

J11: How has serving years in prison changed your perspective and your practices around prisoner solidarity?

D: Well, like I said, I did a lot of prisoner support before I went to prison. Maybe something like eight years. I started doing prisoner support in the late Nineties. I did prisoner support for Rod Coronado and a number of other animal rights and eco-people. I did support for Jeff Luers. One thing, probably the main thing, is that I realized that charity-based prisoner support that is like a group doing stuff on behalf of people on the inside can be really problematic. I think regardless of whatever people on the outside think, people that are doing time know what prison is like, and are better able to decide how they need to do their time.

I know a lot of times you have political prisoners or people, political cases or politicized individuals that are very vocal, they decide to buck, so to speak. They do hard-time, they are bucking within the administration, and that’s definitely one way to do time. It’s sort of the way I did my time. I felt like what I was doing was really minor, but the way the government responded to it was so insane. But everyone needs to do their time the way they need to, and I think that when groups on the outside put expectations onto people, I think that’s problematic. I have some good co-defendants, they reported to prison, they kept their heads down and they did their time. I think at the same time that we understand that people need to do their time they way they need to, we also need to recognize that part of the time they use things like the CMU or the special management unit or supermaxes is to scare people.

So I think we do need people that are willing to struggle in prison, and not just put their head down. I’m cool with my co-defendants doing their time, a lot of them kept their head down and had their eye on the clock, and were trying to perhaps lessen the impact on their families. But I also thought that in my situation I felt like I was faced with an intolerable situation, and I thought, “who better to fight back than myself?” I mean – I’m in prison, I’m someone that doesn’t want to look askance when there’s horrible stuff going on, so I thought I was in the right position. So I think the model of working with prisoners, not for them, getting rid of that charity mindset.

I think a lot of that is happening with work that people do on the prison labor front, understanding that it’s a mutualistic relationship. A lot of old-time prisoners, long-term political prisoners or whatnot, have a lot to offer. I have some really interesting relationships with people in prison from both when I was in prison and when I got out. I definitely do support for prisoners, but they’re certainly not limited to the anarchist movement. I feel like my rapport with older leftists is very good and it’s not sectarian, and there’s no belief that I support everything they think: I’m definitely not interested in the tenets of Marxism or state-building. But I engage people on things that we have in common.

So getting away from the charity mindset, working with prisoners and helping them get their voice out there when they can’t do it themselves. But always understanding it in a context of mutual aid and solidarity and not in the context of thinking of them as just a poor person that needs help. I’m sure there are a lot of innocent people in prison – whatever innocence means – but we got to also recognize that our comrades have agency and they made choices, and we’re supporting them through the consequences of that stuff and the repression. But we don’t have to think of people as victims.

J11: So you mentioned that you were doing prisoner solidarity both before and after you went in. Do you want to tell us more about the prisoners that you’re actively supporting?

D: I got politicized through this organization that was run out of the basement of a bar in New York City called Wetlands, and it used to have these monthly or weekly meetings. So a large part of the first meeting I went to was an animal rights thing. There was someone there speaking on behalf of Rod Coronado. I got very involved in writing him. I did support for people in the Santa Cruz Two case, and a bunch of different environmental saboteurs or animal rights prisoners. That was definitely my politics at the time, limited to that, and so I wasn’t really interested in interactions with people.

I lived in Eugene, Oregon and I was friends with Jeff Leurs (“Free”), and was part of his support committee. When he got sentenced to twenty-two years and eight months, I had actually written a bunch of long-term political prisoners, almost out of desperation, and asked them for help. I realize now, and laugh at myself for having the nerve to write all these prisoners and ask them for help when they’re doing all this time, but I got a lot of really great answers from people like Marilyn Buck, and I think Leonard Peltier. There were a bunch of people that were willing to give me some advice on that. So being exposed to that out of a need, I sort of started to pay more attention to the political prisoner world.

I’d been involved for a while, doing stuff kinda related to Anarchist Black Cross political prisoner support. Since I’ve gotten out, I’ve mostly been focused on two different things: support for long-term New York State political prisoners, and then also mostly younger and newer cases from the anarchist movement. So I help out a little bit on the Cleveland 4 and NATO 3 case, I’ve made myself available to talk through legal issues that people are dealing with, helping people get lawyers for different situations. I also have been heavily involved in trying to get some of the long-term Black Panthers in New York out. It’s like Herman Bell, Jalil Muntaqim, Robert Seth Hayes, and also (not a Black Panther but a long-term New York person) David Gilbert. So I write most of those individuals, and I work with them on basically trying to raise their profile and fight back attempts from the Policemen’s Benevolence Association (basically the pig union) and the Fraternal Order of the Police, who are very actively campaigning against the Black Panthers that are going up.

So I try to do a little mix of both. My ideas about prisoner support are rooted in that we have to definitely support our comrades that we struggle with, that we fight with. I think it’s disingenuous to be part of a movement that, if your movement is effective, you are definitely coming into contact with law enforcement, and so to not see through that situation where you have comrades that are getting popped for various things, I think it’s kinda fraudulent. It’s just cheerleading if we’re not willing to support our comrades, so that’s my mindset for why I do political prisoner support, or prisoner support for Cleveland 4, or NATO 3, or Eric King, people like that. And like I said, the rest of my time I mostly spend working on the long-term New York political prisoners, but I tend to be one of these people that finds myself drawn to different campaigns if friends are asking for help.

J11: So you’ve been doing this for a long time. What are your hopes and visions for prisoner solidarity in the years to come, and how can June 11^th as a project fit in to that?

D: That’s a good question. I think June 11^th is a great thing. I’m not sure if people know, but I was involved in the beginnings of June 11^th in 2004. June 11^th is the day Jeff Luers was sentenced to twenty-two years, eight months in 2001. And he got that for burning three pickup trucks at Joe Romania Chevrolet. There was actually a very spirited rally and march, and cops got a little crazy in 2003, people in Eugene sorta pulled off this act. But in 2004 we decided we wanted to do a worldwide thing. So we did this International Day of Solidarity and Action for Jeff Luers and the FBI sort of aided our efforts by releasing what they called “an eco-terrorist bulletin,” and so there were all different events around the world, there were 57 of them, and all the domestic ones were messed with by the FBI. There was a tremendous amount of law enforcement attention paid to it, to even a film screening in Worcester, Massachusetts.

I was actually in New York at the time, and we went around ticketing SUVs with these fake tickets, and in Eugene they had a bunch of very large events. And so we did it in 2004, we did it in 2005, and then I got indicted and the people that were part of Jeff’s crew extended it to a day of action for eco-prisoners. I think it’s a good thing, and I think that things change, and days of action morph. I understand going from the Eco-Prisoners, to Marius and Eric, and now Marius and Long-term Anarchist Prisoners. I think these sort of days are good in terms of rallying support, and reminding everyone that we have people inside. I hope that there’s material gain that can be made for people in terms of raising funds and raising awareness.

From my own personal perspective, I think it’s important for anarchists to not just do prisoner support for anarchists. I think that there’s a broader world out there, and that when we limit ourselves just to people that share our ideology or our identity, we’re really limiting ourselves in some ways from mutualistic work, as well as lessons we can learn from elders that are inside. I think also when we consider when we’re doing work that’s limited to anarchist prisoners, but then we’re asking other people to care about anarchist prisoners, it seems a little empty if we’re not engaging in some sort of mutualistic prisoner solidarity with other movements.

I know it’s probably not something that many people want to hear, but I do think that when we focus on just anarchist prisoners invariably, we end up focusing on a lot of white people, which when we’re considering the racial identities or racial makeup of the prison system in the United States, it is largely a black and brown and red thing. And I just think we need to be addressing in our work the white supremacist culture that we are in. That said, I think June 11^th is something to support, and I think it’s a good opportunity to rally support for anarchist prisoners, and I think it should continue. In terms of my hopes for prisoner solidarity movements or whatnot, I think we have a situation in the next couple of years where we have an opportunity to get a lot of the old-timers out on parole. I think we have a limited time to do so.

Campaigns that are not specifically focused on political prisoners but sort of are focused on the prison system as a whole are important, I think not only on their own accord, but also that those kind of campaigns could end up helping the political prisoners, whether they’re the old-timers or the new folks. I’m thinking about groups like RAPP (Release Aging People in Prison). That’s a group that exists in New York and a few other places, and they’re addressing the fact that people have been put in prison for insane sentences, these 25 to life sentences. And they’re beating back this punishment idea that America has, where if someone does something wrong according to the system, they have to be punished, and it’s just this lifelong thing. What groups like RAPP and others have done has done more to change the narratives around prison than sometimes the somewhat narrow focus of the political prisoner groups.

So I hope in the next five years we get a significant amount of the old-timers out, and I think we have a lot to do in terms of the current anarchist prisoners. From my understanding a lot of them do not have access to adequate funds, and in situations like Jared Chase where it’s been very difficult to maneuver through the complexity of having someone that’s suffering from a terminal illness that affects his cognition and his judgment, at the same that he’s being kept in the SHU in segregation, that is rapidly contributing to that situation. So I think the anarchist movement can really gain a lot and get a lot better at supporting its prisoners. That said, I think June 11^th can be part of that, and I think it should.

J11: Are there any other projects you’re involved with or things you have interest in that you’d like to share with us?

D: Yeah sure. I’ll just tell you about one project I work on: it’s this calendar called Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners. We are currently collecting submissions until June 7^th, from people that are incarcerated. It is a calendar that is in its seventeenth year. It exists as an educational thing about prison and prisoners, but also exists as a fundraiser. So last year we raised a bunch of money, we gave it away to different groups, like that group I mentioned, RAPP, a group called Addameer which works with Palestinian prisoners, and a group called the Unist’ot’en Camp, which is an indigenous homestead in Canada made up of Unist’ot’en people that are basically resisting development in their territory.

We’re right between calendars right now. We’re working on the 2018 calendar, but if you check out certaindays.org online, you can find it on Facebook and Twitter too. You can see our call for submissions, as well as bookmark it for later because our calendars come out in August. We also usually get organizations to sponsor prisoner calendars. The prisoner calendars are a lot cheaper, so groups will give us like $100 and you can send us prisoners’ names and we will send them virtually free of charge. That’s pretty much what’s got my attention right now. Like I said, I’m working on supporting a number of different anarchist prisoners. Trying to help them increase their capacity to raise money, get books, get birthday cards, stuff that makes their days a little more passable, and support them in whatever they’re working on.

[LISTEN HERE]

In our latest interview for the June 11th International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason & All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners, we spoke with anarchist prisoner Sean Swain.

Sean is an anarchist prison rebel held captive since 1991 for the self-defense killing of a court official’s relative. In fall of 2012, Sean was blamed for widespread sabotage at Mansfield Correctional as part of the Army of the 12 Monkeys. He continues to organize, write, and contribute weekly segments to The Final Straw radio program.

We talk about Sean’s history and experiences in prison, outside support as essential to breaking the control prison imposes upon its captives, the Army of the 12 Monkeys’ campaign of diffuse sabotage at Mansfield Correctional, Sean’s critique of and participation in hunger strikes, the upcoming republishing of two of Sean’s books, prisoner self-organization, the Palestinian hunger strike, and making every day June 11th.

 

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JUNE 11^TH: Can you start by telling us about yourself and your experiences with prison?

SEAN SWAIN: I grew up just north of Detroit in the ‘burbs. I was in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts; probably nobody was more obedient with the program than I was. I went into the army and spent two years miserable and traumatized, and not long after I got out, the ex-boyfriend of the woman I was living with at the time kicked in the door. I stabbed him and killed him, and he was the nephew of the clerk of courts. What actually happened doesn’t really matter, because if you ever kill anybody more equal than you, you go to prison. I’ve been locked up since 1991. The more I protest that I didn’t commit a crime, the longer those bastards keep me held hostage. Go figure.

I had a writing scholarship before I came to prison. Because I was a writer, I was writing for prison reform groups and other reformist stuff. That kind of annoyed prison officials. I had a psychologist at Toledo once tell me that the most annoying thing to people who run prisons is somebody who is articulate; they hate that. As a result, it created this situation where prison officials hate me more as time goes on. You would think they’d just let me go. That’s what I would do.

J11: Can you speak to the importance of prisoner support as part of the anarchist project and specifically to the necessity of long-term prisoner support?

S: I hope I can give you a sense of what it means to be the beneficiary of prisoner support. It’s not about the funds, which are certainly nice, and it’s not about the visits, which are also nice—it’s about a sense of identity, too. It’s about validation. The prison complex does what it can to define each of us as offenders and inmates and criminals; they impose identities on us. It’s much easier to reject that kind of pathology when there’s a base of support—when there’s a group of people who know you and define you differently. Because of those relationships and those connections, I’ve spent most of my prison time not in prison. What I mean is: I’m real to people on the other side of the fence. I’m present in their lives on that side of the fence. That makes the prison fence somewhat irrelevant.

I’m reminded of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote about how he marveled at his captors’ blunders when they confined his body in the jail, but let his thoughts slip out through the bars right behind them when they left for the day. For me, prisoner support isn’t “prisoner support;” it’s more like mind and identity reclamation. I exist on the other side of the fence, and I have meaning out there, which gives me meaning and purpose for getting up in the morning. I care about those people and they care about me; they make it possible for me to participate in changing the world. These people have reduced prison and captivity to a question of geography. I happen to be on this side of the fence, which is really meaningless, since my physical body isn’t what makes me dangerous to our common enemy. In many important respects, my physical captivity has become of practical irrelevance. People out there have made that true.

J11: Earlier this year you went on a successful hunger strike for more than fifty days. Could you tell us more about that?

S: I have to begin with the disclaimer that I have consistently said hunger strikes are stupid; they are. They rarely work, because prison officials—going all the way back to Margaret Thatcher with the IRA hunger strikers in something like 1980—they’ll either let you die (if they can get away with it), or they’ll torture you until you eat if they can’t get away with killing you. They’re ruthless sociopaths. You can’t really appeal to the consciences of ruthless sociopaths because they don’t have any.

This hunger strike was a partial success because I got my communication mediums restored after fifty days without food. That wasn’t because of their concern for my health or any other such nonsense; it was because of outside forces that came into play. There’s a website (blastblog.noblogs.org) where Ohio prison officials’ home addresses were posted; it might still be there. They decided I’m somehow responsible for that. I run the internet with my tin-foil hat from my prison cell, I guess. Anyway, after 32 days on hunger strike and no negotiations at all, I handed them the obituary I had written. That said, essentially: Swain’s dead. The prison director killed him, and they’re denying it because they want to get security around their homes before they announce that Swain’s dead.

Because Blast! Blog was out there, that scared them. They realized that if that got posted online, people might actually get mad enough to do something. The deputy warden came in around 6:30 one morning and he was pissed. He said he was getting calls from exotic area codes giving him death threats. At the very least, fifty days of that nonsense was annoying enough for the state to make some concessions, so I have my communications restored. They never should’ve been suspended in the first place.

I really hate hunger strikes because, in a sane world, we wouldn’t threaten to hurt ourselves to get what we deserve. We’d hurt the fascists who have it coming. To me it’s a lot more psychologically healthy to punch your enemy in the face than it is to refuse food. The problem is, they neutralize you before you get your hands on the ones who’ve really got it coming: senators, judges, corporate executives, and the NSA guy who’s recording this. Those people.

J11: For years you’ve contributed regular segments to The Final Straw (an anarchist radio show). What has this meant to you, and what do you hope it could mean to others and to the wider struggle?

S: It’s strange, because when you’re doing the segments—I’m calling on the phone, just like when I’m talking to you. I don’t necessarily get a whole lot of feedback. It’s almost like putting a message in a bottle and flinging it into the ocean; you don’t know where it ends up. What’s funny is that it seems to have an impact on the way the prison administration deals with me. I get a lot of feedback from listeners, but I get a good sense of the impact it has on the people who are holding me captive. That’s kind of cool. I’m hoping it impacts how people view—not just prisoners, but the relationship that people out there can have with prisoners (or should have with prisoners): that there’s something potentially of value in interacting with people who are in here.

J11: We’re looking forward to the publication of two of your books (How Emma Saved the World and Last Act of the Circus Animals) in the coming months. Can you tell us more about those stories?

S: Last Act of the Circus Animals was co-written with Travis Washington, who is another prisoner. It stemmed from some conversations we had. He actually started it; I was really jealous because he hadn’t really done any writing before that, and I was writing all kinds of stuff.  He came up with this excellent metaphor of animals who are in the circus, in cages, and they start talking to each other. There’s one panther in particular who starts raising the consciousness of the other animals as to the real nature of the circus. He came up with what’s actually the first chapter of Last Act of the Circus Animals. I read that, and that’s all he was going to publish, and I said: No, this is just the beginning. He didn’t have any confidence in his ability to write what I was proposing, so he suggested that we write it together. I took over the writing aspect of it and he and I worked on the remainder of the story … it’s kind of a metaphor.

Anthony Rayson was the first publisher/distributor who put that out in 2007, probably over the course of about two and a half years. It ended up everywhere. I was getting mail from Russia; people in Russia had read Last Act of the Circus Animals. It was reviewed in the UK in a publication. In every prison I’ve been to, somebody has walked up to me at some point and said: Are you Swain? Are you the guy who wrote Last Act of the Circus Animals? They expect me to be taller, I guess. It’s cool that’s it’s everywhere.

With How Emma Saved the World, I deliberately set out to write something as subversive as it could possibly be for young kids. It’s a story about a little girl who jumps on the couch.  She’s told not to, so she goes into a whole series of investigations in order to find out why it is that she can’t jump on this couch.  She then undertakes to teach the adults what it is that they’re missing.

The idea behind it is that kids know something we’ve forgotten, and what they know is valuable. It’s valid; their experience of the world is valid. It’s very subversive in the sense that Emma, the main character of the story, is self-deferring, so to speak.  She defers to her own sense of how things ought to be rather than deferring to those who are supposedly in authority. Hopefully, if that book gets published far and wide, and a lot of kids read it, we’ll have a whole generation of kids who are pulling the fire alarms at their schools in the next few years. That could be really exciting.

J11: What forms of solidarity have been most important to you while you’ve been in prison? What could’ve been done differently, or better?

S: In 2012, when the Army of the 12 Monkeys happened at Mansfield . . . I haven’t talked about that yet. We’ll probably get to that. After that happened, the ODRC engaged in a regimen of torture under the supervision of the FBI. (The FBI was actually involved in some domestic torture stuff: surprise.) In response to that, there were some people who set up a website called Blast! Blog (blastblog.noblogs.org); I’m not sure if it’s still there. The people who’d been involved in that torture regimen had their home addresses posted there, with pictures of their homes and Google Maps features so people could find the quickest routes to get into their houses. . .

Prison officials at the highest levels of the ODRC have told me that they know I’m behind that; they hold me responsible for what’s going on on the internet. Their entire procedure has changed in the last two years. To give an example: in segregation now, they have big-screen TVs. They have programs. They have people who pass out crossword puzzles. Segregation is no longer called segregation; it’s a temporary housing program. On top of all that, it’s now policy that you only go to segregation for violence. Anything that’s nonviolent—you don’t go to seg anymore. There’s no longer long-term segregation. Any kind of long-term punishment happens out in population, in a special housing unit where you get programming.

Everything that was going on when I went to segregation after the 12 Monkeys thing and the whole torture regimen occurred—all of that has changed now. They’ve done a complete about-face, and there’s other reforms, like the whole three-tier system they had before—it was pretty draconian—it created a revolving door so people couldn’t get into lower security . . . That’s all been undone. All of that came about, I believe, as a result of prison officials. First there’s the implied threat of their home addresses getting posted online (I’m sure nobody likes that). On top of that, nobody likes to be seen as a torturer. Nobody wants to be publicly exposed to their kids and their wives and their neighbors and coworkers; nobody wants to be seen that way. In that way, Blast! Blog had a huge effect, I think. It really changed the way the entire Ohio prison system works.

That’s one thing; the website is another. Friends of mine put together SeanSwain.org, and that broadcasts my voice to a much larger audience than just within the prison system. Whether or not anybody’s actually going to the site—I think possibly, maybe, five people keep visiting there—but prison officials don’t know that. Once there’s a web presence, they simply assume that seven billion people on the planet are going there on a regular basis. It has an impact on the way they behave. I think, on top of all that, there’s the added unconscious fear in the back of their minds that it’s going to set a trend—that other people are going to start doing this. Not just the website, but Blast! Blog. Theoretically—I’m not advocating this in a recorded phone call—but things like that have implications beyond the prison complex. You have the same kind of tactics that were employed by Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty. If you start having corporate executives’ home addresses posted all over the place . . . This is something that has much wider implications. Possibly.

J11: You mentioned the Army of the 12 Monkeys, but we haven’t heard a lot about that yet. Can you tell us more of that story?

S: It’s an interesting thing. I was at Mansfield, which is in the middle of Ohio, in the middle of nowhere, and seemingly out of nowhere, there were fliers in every single block. They had some pretty cool graphics on them, and they were listing all the things prisoners can do to disrupt the orderly operation of the prison. In my own thinking, what was really significant about all this is that they didn’t really pose any argument as to why prisoners ought to resist the system or rebel; they just assumed that prisoners would already know.  There didn’t seem to be any kind of political line that was promoted, and there didn’t seem to be any real demands. It was just—seemingly—rebellion for its own sake. At first—you have these thousands of fliers everywhere, describing all of these actions that prisoners can do, and at first, nothing happened at all. Almost as if the whole prison compound, the whole population, was wondering if this was some sort of practical joke.

There was a two- or three-day lag, it seemed, and then immediately after that, there were staples in locks all over the prison. Somebody crammed potatoes down the drain in the kitchen and collapsed that.  That cost them six figures; they had to dig up the entire floor of the prison and re-lay all the cement, and then three days after they did that, somebody poured dry cement down the pipes and collapsed the plumbing again.  So we’re talking about six figures followed by six figures. When you think about all the locks you have in a prison setting, and you start jamming staples in locks, it becomes really disruptive, because nobody can perform the functions of their job. They can’t get into their offices. So you had all of that going on, and then somebody lit the kite box on fire, which is kind of symbolic, because the kite box is the box you put communications in so that prisoners can communicate with staff. So that was lit on fire. The OPI factory (the penal industry factory) was shut down continually by disruption and sabotage of the machinery, so they were getting no production done. This went on for quite some time.

Two weeks into it, the FBI was there on site. So you have Bloods, Crips, Gangster Disciples, Aryan Brotherhood—these prison organizations that have been around for decades, and I’ve never seen the FBI show up. Two weeks after the 12 Monkeys disruption began, the FBI was there doing ideological profiling, and they came and got me. I was taken away. There were three of us: myself, Blackjack Dzelajilja, and Les Dillon. They had us in the special management unit for about a year.

We were subjected to a special regimen that other prisoners had not been subjected to. It was really terrible: sleep deprivation, starvation rations, extreme cold, you name it. Under filthy conditions, they’d cut the soap rations in half and then cut them in half again. They suspended laundry service . . . It was terrible, and then they were messing with communications. They were actually photocopying all my outgoing mail for a year. They had thousands and thousands of pages. In fact, the FBI now has something like 12,000 pages in my files. The last time I contacted them, they said I could get a three-disc set for $40, which is roughly what it costs to buy the Sex Pistols box set. I would recommend, if you ever have the money, to probably go with the Sex Pistols; you can’t really go wrong with that.

As a result of all this, they sent us off to the super-duper-max. The 12 Monkeys materials, by the way, are still out there online somewhere. But if it could happen at Mansfield, it could happen at any prison, at any time. I think that’s what really upset them: that this happened seemingly out of nowhere, and it reminded them of just how powerless they are. At any time, they could lose control of an entire prison. Somehow I was responsible for that.

J11: What are some of the challenges you’ve experienced in prisoner solidarity, and what do you think we could collectively be doing better to support prisoners?

S: I don’t like to be critical anytime people are attempting to do something; I would prefer to be critical of people who are attempting not to do anything at all. Having said that, there’s been a focus in the past (and I’m not saying just anarchists—particularly with reformist groups) of attempting to get legislative things accomplished in order to help prisoners: trying to get reforms instituted through things like the Corrections Institution Instruction Committee in Ohio, and other things like this (lobbying efforts and so on). It seems that what all those have in common—that anarchists typically don’t do—is that this is an effort to do for prisoners what prisoners don’t do for themselves.

If there’s something we need to consciously focus on, it’s getting prisoners involved in their own liberation: getting us to realize consciously what power we possess, personally and collectively, and getting us to act for ourselves. That is far more beneficial, especially for a long-term project, than anything you see in this liberal/lefty/reformist approach to things; that has never really worked. I think we have that going for us; it’s our inclination to do that kind of stuff anyway. I would like people out there to not assume that prisoners aren’t down for doing something for their own liberation, but to assume that they are, and then to act accordingly. Like I said, those materials are still everywhere. They’re out there.

J11: Do you see ways in which June 11^th can contribute to addressing these challenges? What are your hopes for June 11^th this year?

S: It seems to grow in its visibility every year, and that’s something I like. Particularly among people who are doing things. It’s all good and fine, I suppose, if this starts to get coverage in mainstream media, and poor, delusional hierarchs all over the world start seeing some different kind of orientation or trajectory regarding prison and imprisonment . . . But I don’t know that that’s ever going to go anywhere. What I like is that it seems the anarchist community all over the world is becoming more and more aware, and more and more involved, in June 11^th actions, activities, and events. I think the next step is to make every day June 11^th; that would be cool. The more June 11^ths we can have in a year, the better off I think we are.

It seems to me that it really is to everybody’s benefit to oppose this kind of pathology. Prisons, like the military, are a bulwark of this whole hierarch collusion. It’s one of the main pillars that prop the whole thing up. If we can take away the power to punish, then the whole system unravels, essentially. To be against prisons is really to be against the state; I’m hoping people start seeing the convergence.

J11: What are your broader hopes and visions for June 11^th in the years to come and prisoner solidarity in general?

S: My hope is that a lot of things converge. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I’d like to think that we could succeed, and succeeding means the prison-industrial complex goes away (probably not without a fight) and the state goes away (probably not without a fight). My hope is that we develop strategies that cripple the systems of our enemies. That’s my hope.

J11: Are there any struggles or moments in the recent past that have inspired you?

S: A couple: there’s the 12 Monkeys thing, which I already talked about, but there’s also that callout that happened last September for the work stoppages that happened across the country. I don’t hold much stock in widespread work stoppage as a tactic or strategy in and of itself, but I think it’s something that can be used as a springboard for something else. For instance, now that the callout for the September work stoppage last year had pretty decent success—that identifies, for people out there, people they can work with in here (and maybe take things to the next level and the next level and the next).

There’s a current struggle that probably a lot of people don’t know about: the Palestinian hunger strike that’s happening in the occupier state of Israel. You have about 1,000 Palestinian hunger strikers. I don’t know how successful that’s going to be, because they’re up against a state that’s probably just as ruthless as Margaret Thatcher was. But the fact that there’s that kind of solidarity among prisoners there makes me hopeful that we can generate the same kind of solidarity with prisoners in this country.

J11: I’m really glad you brought that up. I haven’t heard much about it; it seems really impressive.

S: Isn’t it strange that here in the United States, we don’t hear anything that’s all that critical of Israel? Or anything that’s really sympathetic to Palestine? How strange.

J11: Are there any other projects or things you’re involved in that you’re excited about and would like to share with us?

S: I’m glad you asked. Right now, with the planned publication of Last Act as a book and How Emma Saved the World, I’m thinking ahead. I’d like to get Ohio published as a book. I’m thinking about this possibly for 2018, and then running for governor of Ohio at the same time, using that as my platform—getting enough funding from selling the book that we can get some bumper stickers and t-shirts and campaign pins and make a real fiasco out of the whole election process. That’s my next big dream.

by Michael Kimble

[PDF for printing]

For me communication with comrades on the outside of these prison walls has been key in keeping me on point and sane in this artificial world of all-pervasive domination. We anarchists are not immune to the blues and the sometimes-attractive pull of resignation in the face of dizzying odds.

Communication means more than receiving letters and publications. It means survival. It means resistance. It means saving lives on the margins of prison society.

Through communication and acts of solidarity I have been able to save the lives of queer and non-queer prisoners whose life was threatened because of debts, and yes, drugs for the sick, with funds sent to me by comrades on more than one occasion. Without communication none of this would have been possible.

Communication has allowed me and many others to create projects that “aim toward the destruction of this social order – that is to say an insurrectional anarchist projectuality.”

The point of this brief statement is my attempt to show how far and extensive communication extends for those of us anarchists being held in these man-made tombs.

Communication now needs to extend to the pigs of capital and authority – that no longer will their oppressive, authoritarian and brutal acts go unpunished. Let’s communicate that!

Dare to struggle!

Dare to be free!

by Sean Swain

[PDF for printing]

As humans, we are the lucky beneficiaries of three biological developments that greatly contribute to our long-term survivability. The first one is the structure of our jaw which is conducive to eating meat and taking in proteins that non-meat-eating mammals don’t get. That’s the only one of the three that’s irrelevant to the discussion.

The second of the top three biological developments that contribute to our long-term survivability is our cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is the outer-most layer of the brain, and is principally responsible for conceptual thought. Because of our cerebral cortex, we can imagine things that we cannot see. We can conceive of stuff we did not experience.

The third biological development that contributes to our long-term survivability is our opposable thumbs. Our opposable thumbs are pretty useful. They gave us the ability to carry things and to share with others. They gave us the ability to use and manipulate tools.

This is really important when you consider that we humans are, really, the least fit for survival on the planet, all things being equal. We are most dependent upon tools, upon stuff outside of ourselves. All other species pretty much get by on what they were born with. You don’t see beavers putting on scuba suits or monkeys in the rain forest wearing rain coats. No other species requires assistance in locomotion or cooks their food on barbecue grills because their digestive tracts are so sensitive. Just us. So, without the opposable thumb to develop all the tools we need, we would have sputtered out a long time ago.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not anthropocentrist. I’m not under any delusion that we humans are the center of the universe. We’re not. We’re not a special or superior form of life. We do have some benefits we developed – our jaws, our cerebral cortexes, and our opposable thumbs – and those have been very useful to us. But, in all fairness, we cannot perform a death-roll like an alligator or race a cheetah across an open plain or go toe-to-toe with a low-land gorilla. So, all other forms of life have their biological developments that have served them quite well too, and ours do not make us superior or special.

That said, of the three biological developments, two of them are relevant. As our meat-conducive jaw-line is not, we can start with our cerebral cortexes.

Because I have a cerebral cortex, I have it within me to imagine, however imperfectly, the experience of fighting the police in Greece and tipping over a cop car – even though I’ve never been there. I can close my eyes and smell the burning gasoline, hear the bewildered screams of a running police officer as he is chased by a masked rebel swinging a tire tool. I can imagine the rush and the thrill, the euphoria of seeing the billowing black smoke rising from the roof of the police station, and realizing what that means.

As humans with our big cerebral cortexes, we have the ability to transmit, one to another, our experiences, our feelings, our ideas. We do that principally through language. Language is a tool for this transmission of experiences and feelings and ideas, from one to another.

For this transmission to work properly, we must have agreement as to what sounds and symbols mean. For instance, if I use the word “elephant,” and by those collections of sounds, I mean to transmit to you the idea of a large, gray mammal with big ears and a long trunk, I have failed miserably if you imagine a yellow piece of fruit shaped sort of like a crescent and serving as a principle staple in the diet of chimpanzees. If I use the word “elephant,” but you imagine what I would otherwise call a banana, then we do not have communication. We have mis-communication.

We need agreement on the meaning of sounds and symbols, and then we can use them as tools – tools that are only properly used when shared. Unlike rakes or shovels or blow-guns, tangible tools, words are intangible tools that really only work in collaboration between two of us. Words are special tools used only in collaboration, which means they can only be used in social spaces, unlike rakes or shovels or blow-guns.

And, again, this all goes back to our cerebral cortexes. If you attempt to communicate some complex story to a golden retriever or to a lizard, you’re likely wasting your time. Not even dolphins or chimpanzees or crows can fully participate in the complex transmission of symbolic thought the way that we can, any more than we can death-roll like alligators or race cheetahs or beat up gorillas. As humans, with our big cerebral cortexes, we are singularly capable of complex transmissions of symbolic thought.

This means we have two different kinds of tools at our disposal. We have tangible tools we can grasp, like rakes and shovels and blow-guns, using our opposable thumbs; we have intangible tools that we can grasp with our cerebral cortexes. And I think it is probably worth mentioning that anything we can use as a tool, we can use as a weapon. That is, a weapon is really only a tool used for inflicting injury. Consider, a rake is a tool used for collecting leaves but can just as easily be used as a weapon to rip someone’s face off. Shovels are useful for digging holes but can also be pretty handy for cracking skulls. As to the argument that pens are mightier than swords, I once saw a guy stabbed in the neck with a pen in the chow hall, and he bled profusely into his mashed potatoes.

All tools are weapons. And I would suggest to you that, in some ways, the intangible tools we grasp with our cerebral cortexes can be immeasurably more dangerous than tools we grasp with our opposable thumbs.

Take, for instance, the weapons that our enemy uses. As I write this, I’m looking out of my cell window at the perimeter vehicle positioned directly across from my cell on the other side of the double fences, and I know that vehicle has a shotgun in the shotgun rack. Although I cannot see them, I know the enemy also has a compliment of Apache attack helicopters somewhere. Off in the distance, as this typewriter pecks out my thoughts onto this handy computer paper, I can hear the staccato pop-pop-pop-pop of shots fired at the not-so-distant firing range where the enemy practices.

But, you know what? I’ve never been shot. In fact, none of the enemy’s agents have ever so much as fired at me. I’ve never even seen the enemy shoot at another prisoner. The reason I have spent twenty-five years in custody without witnessing anyone get shot while trying to hit the fences is that, apart from the shotguns and helicopters, the enemy’s weapons include intangible weapons – the dual ideas of the enemy’s legitimacy and perpetuity.

This is what I mean: I’m surrounded by criminals and law-breakers, but it turns out that most of them broke the laws not because they recognize the laws as illegitimate, but because they generally recognize that the law sucks. Once caught, these same law-breakers recognize the authority of those who claim it and they submit to the punishments imposed on them in the belief that the punishments they receive are legitimate consequences of violating the laws. Further, there exists a shared sense among most prisoners that this system is perpetual, that it will go on forever, that it is immutable, and therefore resistance or efforts to escape would be futile.

These ideas have not been implanted so thoroughly by recourse to rakes and shovels and blow-guns. What the enemy has used is a powerful weapon crafted with words, a weapon called “mythology.” This “mythology” has to some degree paralyzed all of us, more so than we are paralyzed by the actual reality of the threats posed by cops or soldiers or attack helicopters.

This mythology might be the most powerful weapon that the enemy employs, one that we cannot smack with a rake or shovel, or shoot with a blow-gun. We have to attack this false mythology in another way. We have to develop weapons just as powerful, or more powerful, than the enemy’s.

That is, if we want to liberate ourselves and others from this false mythology that keeps us paralyzed, we have to develop a weapon that will work for that purpose, so others can use both their cerebral cortexes and their opposable thumbs in a way that will best bring about the future we would like to make manifest together.

The key to whatever activities we undertake, I think, is to demonstrate to ourselves and to whatever audience might be watching that the enemy’s systems are not legitimate and they are not unassailable. They are illegitimate and fragile.

We have the ability to develop and project an alternative mythology, a different “story to be in,” to borrow a phrase from writer Daniel Quinn. In developing a different story to be in, and in projecting it, we will be taking back from the enemy the power and authority over words, exercising our own power to define what words mean rather than deferring to the enemy’s self-serving use of them. This is a kind of collective “re-orientation” to language itself. By challenging and dismissing the enemy’s claimed legitimacy and perpetuity, we take back our power to form a new narrative, one where the old “good guys” are exposed for the swindle they’ve been committing on us all.

In this struggle between competing narratives, the truth is on our side. And the truth is dangerous.

The fact of the matter is, our enemy’s systems are not perpetual. They will not go on forever. The fact is, humans have been around for about four million years and this hierarch delusion has been foisted upon us for roughly eight thousand years – that’s a fraction of one percent of human existence. That means that humans lived in other ways for the vast majority of our existence. Further, after only eight thousand years, this hierarch delusion is falling apart. Their own experts use terms like “unsustainable,” which means it cannot keep going. It has, in a very short time, done great damage not only to the environment, to the planet we inhabit, but has devastated our ability to live lives of general happiness and purpose. So, this system is not just unraveling before our very eyes, but it is a system we really have no reason to keep around anyway because it has never worked as advertised and it never will.

This thing is about as perpetual as the Titanic.

As to the system’s legitimacy, it seems laughable that some small group of privileged elites should assume some right to rule the vast majority and to impose rules that clearly benefit those who make them. Not only are these elites miserable failures in creating anything that resembles “order” after eight thousand years of passing law after law for achieving the “order” that eludes them, but I am aware of no argument that has ever been presented as to why any of us have some kind of “duty” to obey those we never agreed to obey in the first place. Such a hijacking of our autonomy and freedom can never be “legitimate,” so all such decrees and demands and laws are absolutely unlawful and invalid, serving as nothing more than tools to impose the will of the ruling opportunists onto the rest of us. The fact of the matter is, the true enemies of real peace and real prosperity are those who maintain this oppressive system at our expense.

Everyone alive has a sense of their own suffering and their own trauma, a sense of their own experiences of diminishing returns for their obedience and compliance. What they do not connect is that what they experience is a universal suffering and trauma, to lesser or greater degrees, and that the source of it is the very system of authority they have been indoctrinated to worship. So, if by our words and by our symbolic acts, we can make larger and larger numbers of those currently hypnotized and mesmerized fully aware of the system’s invalidity and vulnerability, we can provoke wider and wider rejection of the system.

This is fatal to the enemy’s program.

Consider, this massive, sprawling, global machine only functions optimally if it manages to maintain a hundred percent participation, all of us performing whatever roles have been assigned to us. That optimum performance is diminished if even one of us stops performing that assigned role, and the machinery gets progressively more clunky and cumbersome with each one of us that bails. Also, it becomes progressively more unmanageable with each of us that becomes actively opposed to the machinery’s operation. That is, the more that we seek to sabotage the operation of the machine, the more that this sprawling system of centralized control and distribution breaks down.

So, we can certainly use our opposable thumbs to pull the proverbial fire alarms in a number of imaginative and highly-disruptive ways, but such actions will not even occur to us until we use our cerebreal cortexes for something other than hat-racks. And that means we have to win the battle of ideas, the war of conflicting narratives.

The hierarch delusion cannot possibly win from here. Every day, there is an increasing dissonance between what the program promises and what it delivers, between the narrative and the reality. Every day, there arise billions of opportunities to puncture the hierarch mythology, not with rakes and shovels and blow-guns, but with words.

Our words are our weapons.

The truth is dangerous.

Freedom,
Anarchist Prisoner Sean Swain
Warren Corruptional Institution

May 6, 2017

From Philly Anti-Capitalist

As a small show of solidarity with anarchist prisoners I put up posters in West Philly and South Philly. Along the way I also took down some annoying infowars and right libertarian stickers 😛

Fire to the Prisons
For a Dangerous June

Sing Me Home: Songs Against Prison

Sing Me Home is an album of folk and country cover songs against prisons and the police. All proceeds from the album go towards benefiting long-term anarchist prisoners in tandem with the June 11th international day of solidarity.

These are the voices that sing through us, sing with us, sing us home. These songs are about killing guards and getting free, about the concreteness of prison walls and also how dream and memory are able to travel through those walls, about the pain of missing the ones you love and about the strength of solidarity. We hope that these songs become part of our lives and that singing them becomes a source of power.

[LISTEN HERE]

In this interview for the June 11th International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners, we talked to Grace from Jeremy Hammond support.

Jeremy Hammond is a long-time anarchist and hacker who is serving 10 years in prison for leaking information about Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), a private intelligence firm engaged in spying at the behest of corporations and governments. Jeremy was arrested in March 2012, and has remained vocal and defiant behind bars.

We talked about Jeremy’s case, repression Jeremy has faced for his defiant attitude, the potential for solidarity between the hacker and anti-prison worlds, long-term support for prisoners, the generalization of prisoner support amongst anarchists, Lauri Love, and the specific nature of supporting anarchist prisoners.

 

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JUNE 11TH: Can you start by telling us about yourself and your experience with prison and prisoner support?

GRACE: Sure. My name is Grace North. I’ve been heading up the Jeremy Hammond committee since 2013. Before that I had really no formal experience in prison support. I had participated in it tangentially through other activist work that I did, but before that I had never really done any formal prison support. When Jeremy asked me to do it I said, “Sure!” not really realizing what I was getting myself into. All of my experience with prison support has really been learning as I go along. I joke with people that my strategy is to just bumble along and hope I don’t mess things up too badly. It seems to be going okay so far.

J11: Can you speak to the importance of prisoner solidarity as part of the anarchist project and other liberation struggles, in specific to the necessity of long term prisoner support?

G: Absolutely. I feel that prisoner support, especially for us anarchists, is inextricably tied with our values as anarchists. One of our core principles is the principle of solidarity, especially solidarity with the oppressed, and honestly prisoners are some of the most oppressed and the most marginalized people in this country, especially because most of the prison population is made up of black and brown people. If we as anarchists are not engaging in all areas of solidarity, we really have no business calling ourselves anarchists in the first place because anarchy is all about solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized. I think it’s hugely important for us to engage in this and so often it is a little bit overlooked.

We do a really good job in the beginning where there’s all this hype and energy, but sustaining that energy can be a hard in any activist project. For long term prisoners, we need to especially keep that going because prison is so brutally dehumanizing that the longer you’re there the more it wears on you, the more it does its best to grind you down. We need to be especially supporting long term prisoners.

J11: Can you tell us more about Jeremy, his case, and what he’s up to now?

G: Sure. Jeremy is a lifelong activist. He’s being doing activism pretty much his entire life. He was part of a hacking group. They were known as LulzSec, later known as AntiSec. AntiSec was sort of an offshoot of LulzSec. In the beginning, it was hacking just for a little bit of mayhem. Later, especially with Jeremy’s hacks, it became more political. Jeremy tied in his politics as an anarchist with his hacking. He hacked Stratfor. He hacked several police and law enforcement related groups and organizations. Unbeknownst to him, unfortunately, one of the other members of the group, Hector Monsegur, had been arrested several months prior on identity-theft-related charges and agreed to turn state’s witness. So, all this time he was being watched by the FBI. Hector Monsegur helped the FBI connect the dots and lead them to Jeremy. Jeremy was then arrested in March of 2012.

J11: Can you speak to how the strengths or failings of prisoner support have personally affected Jeremy?

G: I know absolutely 100% that the support that he received from the outside and from various groups, such as yourself and from other individuals have absolutely helped him maintain his spirit. He remains strong, vocal, and defiant. I know a large part to the support from the people outside is writing him, sending him books, really just keeping his spirits up and reminding him that he’s not alone and that no matter how much prison and the system tries to strip him of who he is, he’s still there and there’s still people that care about him and see him. I think that importance of being seen just really has kept his spirits up.

J11: Years into his sentence, Jeremy has remained vocal and defiant. I know he releases a lot of statements, there’s some sort of Twitter feed. Has he faced any repercussions for his outspoken attitude?

G: Absolutely. For those who may be listening who do not know, he was sent to the segregated housing unit, also know as solitary confinement. I believe it was last summer right after the shooting in Dallas where several police officers were killed, he released a tweet that basically said that everybody on the inside was excited to see the police get some get back and he ended it with “Support the Dallas shooter.” He didn’t say, “you yourself should go out and kill cops” or anything like that, he just said “Support the Dallas shooter.” For that statement, he was placed in SHU. At first, he didn’t know why. They wouldn’t tell him why he was placed in SHU. And unfortunately, the process in SHU is that they can put you in SHU for 90 days without charge. At the end of 90 days they either have to charge you or let you go. Unfortunately, if they charge you and you are found guilty of whatever infraction it is, the 90 days that you’ve already spent in SHU doesn’t count towards whatever sentence you’re handed out. So, you can spend 90 days in SHU and if it’s a severe shot you can get however much longer. SHU and solitary are torture. They are absolutely inhumane.

At fist when he was sent down to SHU they wouldn’t tell him why he was there. They wouldn’t tell him what was going on. And then the warden personally visited and basically said to Jeremy, “Look you’re not our problem anymore. We’re sending you to a CMU”, which again, for those who may be listening who don’t know what a CMU is, it stands for Communication Management Unit. There are only two in the entire country. It’s sort of like a prison within a prison where your communications are very highly restricted, there are no in-person visits, you get one 15 minute phone call per week that must be between certain hours of the day. It’s extremely restrictive. They’re hell. Several anarchist prisoners have spent time in them. Daniel McGowan. Walter Bond, also I believe may still be in a CMU or may have just got out. People that are in CMU are people that have been convicted of terrorism-related charges. I think something like 80% of people in CMUs are Muslim. They came down and they said, “Look you’re not our problem anymore.” Those were their exact words: that he was not their problem and they were sending him away. We all worried for weeks and weeks and weeks. We didn’t know what was happening. He didn’t know what was happening. He didn’t know if he was going to get transferred, so we were all sick. Everybody that knows him and supports him was sick for weeks wondering what was going to happen, where he was going to go, how they were going to punish him.

In the end, he had another talk with people at the prison that basically outlined exactly what he could say and what he couldn’t and they sent him back to general population. So, he was sent to solitary, threatened with being transferred to this other prison environment that is even more highly restrictive than the one he’s in, and then nothing. He was given a low level shot and then sent back. He’s had email and phone taken. He had email taken for writing a letter of support for Barrett Brown because he sent it to someone else to be given to Barrett Brown’s judge. He has over and over again been penalized for speech and been penalized for being just who he is.

J11: That reminds me – I recently saw a picture of Jeremy with one of the Cleveland 4. I think it was Connor or Brandon?

G: Connor Stevens, yeah. They hang out pretty regularly. Jeremy has tried to befriend Connor considering they’re both sort of the same kind of person on the inside. He has tried to be someone that he can talk to if he needs it. Of the Cleveland 4, he’s a little bit of the reclusive one. Connor’s been going through some stuff recently that I don’t know if I’m at liberty to talk about so I’ll just leave it at that. And Jeremy has tried to befriend him and guide him through what he’s going though.

J11: So, with Chelsea Manning recently released from prison and the government still seeking to capture Edward Snowden and Lauri Love, what do you think the future looks like for repression against hackers and information leakers?

G: Well, with this administration I honestly don’t have much hope. I feel like especially with Trump saying over and over again he’s the law and order candidate and Sessions taking such a hard line against things like prison reform, hackers, activists, and people with a political motive are going to be treated a little bit more harshly because they’re going up against such a fascist regime. It hurts me to say that, but I’m not hopeful and I feel like these next four years are going to involve a lot of really hard work to support a lot of really good people. I don’t want that fear to hold people back. I do want people to be very careful. I do want people to follow their conscience and do what they feel is right and what they feel is necessary, but honestly it really scares me. It really scares me, which is why I feel like prisoner support – we’re going to need more people, we’re going to need people who are committed, we’re going to need people who are in it for the long run because again, I’m not hopeful with the administration with the way it is.

J11: On that note, generally we see a pretty small number of people doing a lot of the support work for anarchist prisoners. Do you see any potential for expanding those roles and building on connections between other movements and communities and prisoner support efforts?

G: Absolutely. I’ve spoken about this before. The internet has become such an integral part of how we communicate with each other and how we spread information that I feel like the hacker community is really good at supporting its own. It’s pretty good at that. But unfortunately, the hacker community tends to be overwhelmingly white and male and they sort of forget about all these other really awesome people that also need support. The potential is there. It’s there. The hacker community just needs to open itself up a little bit. We also tend to be very insular. The hacker community just needs to open itself up a little bit more and recognize that they have such a huge potential to help so many people and to spread information and to get activists mobilized and to just do things. They need to recognize that it’s not just them that’s suffering. Many other communities are suffering. Many other people are suffering. We need to, as a community, offer our skills to not only lift up their voices, but to expand the scope of who we reach and how we reach them. I just think it’s so important for hacktivists and the hacker community to get in line with.

J11: It’s really good to hear that you’re hopeful about those connections being strengthened.

G: I really hope that they can be because there’s just so much potential there. I know I keep saying that, but there is. There’s so much potential. Look at how protests can be mobilized in a day just getting the word out, especially on social media, Twitter, Facebook. You don’t even have to be technically a hacker. I mean right now we’re looking at the prospect of the government going after WikiLeaks. What’s going to happen to people like Jeremy? I talked to some friends who are hackers and computer people and I said, “Look, I might need some help if this happens” and immediately I had 8-10 people go, “You know what? We got you if this happens. We can put websites back up. The down time will be a day at most. We got this.” I would really like to see that solidarity expanded further beyond supporting fellow hacktivists.

I did a talk in Berlin where I tied in other whistle blowers from other movements. People know who Chelsea Manning is. They know who Jeremy Hammond is, but do they know who Jeffrey Sterling is? He’s a black former CIA agent that blew the whistle on the CIA. People know who Eric Garner is. Do they know who Ramsey Orta is? Ramsey Orta filmed Eric Garner’s death and, to me, that’s being a whistle blower. That is taking action in the face of the overwhelming repression that Ramsey Orta has faced. I mean, he’s in jail on trumped up weapons charges. Do they know who people like Ramsey Orta are? Not just do they know who he is, but do they support him? Do they support the NODAPL protesters, who again in the face of overwhelming government repression brought light to the brutality of capitalism and the police state by being there, by putting their bodies on their line to protect sacred land and water? Do they support activists in countries that are facing overwhelming repression by the government just being out on the streets? It’s not just hackers who can be whistle blowers and that’s something that I really think the hacktivist community needs to get in their heads. You don’t have to hack to be a whistle blower. If you support whistle blowers, you need to support all whisper blowers, including people like Jeffrey Sterling, people like Ramsey Orta, people like those out there protesting DAPL. We need to support them all, not just the ones that fall within our narrow, overwhelming white and male community.

J11: That’s a really good point that you bring up. There are just so many people in prison who need and deserve our support. Can you speak to other challenges of prisoner solidarity and what you think we could collectively be doing better?

G: I think one of the major challenges to supporting prisoners is that after a while it’s not flashy anymore. When there’s the trial, we got all this great momentum. We got to support them, we got to make sure they got letters, we got to do this, this, this, and this. And when there’s a sentence and when the hype dies down a little bit, it doesn’t become so urgent. It becomes doing things like making sure he has books, making sure we collect money so he can have a little bit extra for commissary. It becomes these not flashy tasks and people tend to fall away because it’s not such an urgent need. It’s not right now. It’s just these little things you have to do every month, every week, just these little tasks that take time and energy, but they’re not the big or flashy things.

I think that we need to get to a place where we carry that momentum through the entire sentence, not just when there’s a big urgent need. When there’s a big urgent need people show up, even after the sentence is over. When Jeremy gets thrown in SHU, it’s outrage. It’s, “Should we write letters, should we make calls, should we do this or this or this?” That’s great. I really love seeing people support him in any way that they can, but then what about right now? When he’s doing okay? And when I say okay I mean as okay as you can possibly can be in such a horribly, brutally dehumanizing and repressive environment. When I ask him how he is and I try to feel out how he’s doing, he always tells me, “I’m fine” so when I say okay that’s sort of what I mean. What about now? When things are relatively quiet? When there’s not that big urgent need? Are people still writing? Are people still sending him books? It doesn’t even have to be a whole letter. He loves getting memes because he’s like, “I miss the internet.” So, if you see a meme and you’re like “Oh man, that’s funny” do you print it out? Do you send it to him? Or do you just click over to the next meme? Like I said, now there’s not a huge need to raise for a lawyer, but we still need money for his commissary so he can be as comfortable as possible. Do you send him $5 a month so he can buy stamps, so he can make phone calls? Are you writing to other prisoners that maybe aren’t as famous as him and making sure they have what they need? Building that initial momentum, but time and time again I’ve seen that momentum just die out. That’s frustrating as someone who’s in it for the long term, but especially for the prisoners. That is really frustrating for them because they’re like, “Well I’m really good at being recognized when there’s an urgent need, but what about right now when I just wish I had a letter to read?”

J11: Yeah. That’s something that we’re hearing from a number of people that we’ve been talking to.

G: That makes me really frustrated. It just hurts my heart because I know how important support is for people on the inside. That you’re hearing it from multiple people just really hurts my hurt.

J11: In what way can you see June 11th addressing some of these challenges? And what are your hopes for June 11th this year?

G: I really love you guys because you are that momentous push, that little reminder that these prisoners are still here and they still need your support, even though we’re not in that time of crisis. I love days like June 11th because again it just reminds people that prisoners are still there and that even though they may not be hearing much from them or that they may be quiet or that they may have already taken a plea or are serving a sentence, that they’re still there and they still need support. I love you guys. I love other groups that do days like this, like the day for trans prisoners. I really love them just because again it reminds people that they’re still there. My hope this year is the same as every year: that people don’t forget, that they remember, that they use that remembering to not just remember but to also go out and educate others, get other people who may not be involved or might not know about these people to get involved.

J11: What are your broader hopes and visions both for June 11th, but also prisoner solidarity in general for the years to come?

G: My hope is that prisoner support, instead of being a side project of the anarchist movement, becomes central to the anarchist movement. Because from what I’m seeing a lot of prison support is a side project. It’s like a niche market. “Oh, these people do prison support.” No – everyone should do prison support. Everyone should be writing to prisoners. There are groups out there – Black & Pink, all Anarchist Black Crosses – that keep lists, not just of anarchist prisoners, black liberation prisoners, eco prisoners. There are so many people from such a wide swath of life experiences that even if you’re not an anarchist, you can write to people. You can write to people that have zero political views, if you want. Just please write to them, send them pictures, memes, if you can financially support them, please do. It’s not just anarchist prisoners that need support. It’s all prisoners. No matter what they’ve done. No matter what they’re in for. They need support.

J11: Are there any struggles or moments in the recent past that have been inspiring to you?

G: I am just so floored to see that the antifascist movement is getting more mainstream, getting more press, and getting way more visible. I’ve been antifascist and involved in antifascist work for over a decade at this point, so it really just thrills me that that’s getting more mainstream, that people are getting out there and getting in the streets. I’ve been absolutely inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, by the Indigenous Water Protectors that again, in the face of brutal police repression mixed with the brutality of capitalism have been out there putting their lives and bodies on the line to bring these injustices to light. It’s super inspiring. I feel like especially under Obama people got – well, some people, not all people – got a little complacent because we had this great liberal president. Meanwhile, deportation sky rocketed, use of drones skyrocketed. “It’s okay because he’s liberal. It’s a liberal dropping the bombs on wedding parties, not some evil Republican doing it.” Again, it worries me that we’re really good at starting movements, but we need to  keep that momentum going and carry that through. I want to see that done and the fact that it is being done warms my heart.

J11: Are there any other projects you’re involved with or have interest in that you’d like to talk about?

G: Prisoner support is my main thing. Besides Jeremy, the case of Lauri Love is still going. People need to keep eyes on that. Even though Lauri’s not in jail and he’s currently free, the case and the ongoing worry about it has taken a huge toll on him physically and mentally. I would really like to see people support him because he’s such a great guy. He doesn’t deserve to be kidnapped to the United States to face our horrible, draconian legal system. Every legal system is horrible and draconian, but ours seems to be especially bad. I’d really like to see people support and not forget about him because he’s not in jail currently, but the case is still taking a huge toll.

J11: I’m actually not familiar with Lauri’s case. Could you talk about that a little bit?

G: Absolutely. I love talking about people. This is all alleged. Nothing has been proven in court. He was allegedly part of Op Last Resort, which was in response to the death of Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz, if people don’t know, was a hacktivist who was being tried for downloading academic papers and releasing them for free on the internet. Aaron was facing millions of dollars in fines, decades in prison, and instead of risking that, he instead chose to take his own life. Op Last Resort was in reaction to him taking his own life in the face of this brutal persecution. They did things like deface the US Sentencing Commissions homepage. Lauri is alleged to have hacked everything from the EPA to the Missile Defense System of the United States to the DoD. There’s a whole list of things he’s alleged to have hacked. Right now, what we’re fighting for is for him to be tried in the UK. They want to bring him here. He’s facing possibly over 90 years in prison, millions of dollars in fines. He has indictments in three separate jurisdictions: one is the southern district of New York, which is the district that Jeremy was tried in, one is the district of New Jersey (New Jersey’s all one district), and one is the eastern district of Virginia, which some other hacktivists have also been tried in. None of these districts are very friendly to hacktivists, so right now what we’re fighting for since he is a UK citizen and since the alleged crimes occurred while in he was on UK soil, we’re fighting for him to be tried in the UK. I’ve already highlighted the brutal repression of the American Justice System, but in addition to that there’s also huge sentencing disparities. For example, Jeremy’s co-defendants. The longest any one of them served is 20-30 months. I’m not sure the exact number, but Jeremy spent almost as much of that time just in pre-trial detention before he was sentenced. We’re talking huge sentencing disparities.

Lauri would have no family support, he would have no support system in the United States. Lauri has Aspergers. He suffers from depression. Bringing him here to try him would be a death sentence. Lauri has said very clearly numerous times that he will kill himself before he will allow himself to be taken here. He is autistic. He suffers from depression. He has physical medical problems as well. That’s all being exacerbated by the stress from the whole situation. From what I’ve seen from the American Justice System, I don’t blame him for saying that he’d rather kill himself than come here. One of the things that we’re trying to highlight in the case is the sentencing disparity from the UK and the US. In the US, Lauri’s facing decades and decades and decades in prison, millions of dollars in fines. In the UK, he’d be facing exponentially less than that. Lauri has no support system here. He has all of his family, his friends, all of this in the UK. Bringing him here, especially with the horrible way that mental health is dealt with in American prisons – in that, it’s not dealt with at all, it’s ignored, and people are left to suffer – that would be a death sentence.

J11: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

G: I think I want to speak specifically for a moment to the importance of supporting anarchists in prison. We touched on this earlier, but the one thing I want to get across to people about why prison support is so important is that prison is so brutal and so dehumanizing in a way that people who haven’t experienced it can’t understand. It does everything in its power to strip you of your autonomy, who you are, what you believe, just of everything. It grinds you down day after day to the point where you just lose who you are. For someone, especially like anarchists whose entire life has been decided to dismantling the state and the systems of oppression, to then be completely subject to the very system that you’ve been working your entire like to dismantle, is extra hard and brutal and dehumanizing. The support from the outside is what keeps people going. It’s what gives them hope that this is not forever, that one day they’re going to be free. I cannot stress how important that is for every prisoner, not just for anarchist prisoners, but I think especially for anarchist prisoners, that the letters and the books and the memes, it keeps them going and it reminds them that they’re loved and that they’re not forgotten. While it may just be 15 minutes on our end of writing a letter, sending a meme, donating, it’s the world to people that are in prison. I can’t overstate how important it is to the prisoners. If you don’t know what to say, if you don’t know how to go about it, ask. There are so many people out there that are willing to help, that are willing to guide you, that are willing to show you the ropes. I had someone DM the other day and say, “Hey, I want to start a letter writing night for prisoners in my town. How do I do that?” And I’m like “Great! Awesome! Here’s how you do this. It’s really simple.” It’s so simple. It’s such a simple thing that means so much to people. If you need help, if you don’t know what to do, if you don’t know how to do it, there are so many great organizations. The Anarchist Black Crosses – they’re always there to help people. The June 11th committee, you guys are there. People who run the Head Up defense campaign for prisoners. Ask them. Go to them. They’re always so willing to help. Please just do it. I can’t say it any more plainly. Just please do it because it means so much and is such a lifeline to so many people.

[LISTEN HERE]

In this interview for the June 11th International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners, we talked to two individuals from Eric King’s support crew.

Eric King is a vegan anarchist arrested in 2014 and charged with an attempted firebombing of a Congressperson’s office in solidarity with the Ferguson rebellion. In March 2016, Eric accepted a non-cooperating plea agreement and was sentenced three months later to 10 years in prison.

We talk about Eric’s case, prisoner support as part of sustained revolutionary struggle, restrictions put on Eric’s communications, and the increasing repression against radical prisoners.

 

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JUNE 11TH: Can you all start by telling us a little bit more about yourselves and about our experiences with prison or prisoner support?

X: Yeah, so I’m relatively new to the prisoner support community, I’ve just been doing it for a couple of years, and was really drawn to it as my radicalization progressed. I find it to be a really imperative way to support revolutionary movements that are either happening now or that have happened in the past, like the Black Liberation movement or Earth and Animal Liberation movements, and the like. I’ve been working with New York City Anarchist Black Cross, and do a bunch of support work for a variety of political prisoners, but my focus is mainly on the folks that are held in New York State, and of course Eric King.

Y: So I have been a part of this team of amazing folks who make up the Eric King support committee for a while as well personally supporting various other prisoners. As far as personally being effected by prison, Eric and I are partners, so all of this can be pretty intense and crippling at times. I have found that that personal experience has actually been really helpful in being able to relate and form bonds with other incarcerated folks.

J11: Can you speak to the importance of prisoner solidarity as part of the anarchist project and other liberatory struggles? And specifically, to the necessity of supporting long-term prisoners?

X: Definitely, so to just straight up quote David Gilbert, “prisons are an insult to the human spirit, and a shameful waste of human potential.” And fuck prisons, but I’m sure we can all agree there. I feel like supporting prisoners is an essential task and something that we should do for people, just because prison is inherently demeaning, dehumanizing, and a fucked up place. But that being said, there’s even more imperative for political prisoners to get support, and that isn’t to say of course that all incarceration isn’t somehow political. But I mean more in context of any kind of revolutionary movement or politically driven activity. I think that if we’re going to encourage anarchist praxis, encourage friends and comrades, and spend time in the streets or taking action fighting against the system and prevailing order, then we have to be realistic about how the state is going to respond to that. And they’re going to respond with repression, and that inevitably means prison time.

So it’s truly necessary and essential to support our friends and comrades when they go down for politically motivated action, whether that’s marching in a black bloc, or doing direct action, or just fighting state repression in whatever ways that are available to them. So doing prisoner support in this context emboldens movements in a variety of ways, first it takes the person who is going through the prison system, it makes them feel supported and not forgotten, which not only enriches their quality of life while they’re going through it, but also may make them feel more confident and comfortable standing up for themselves in the day-to-day. We’ve seen this with Eric and him fighting for various things, including vegan food and such.

But it also shows the state that our movement is strongest, that it goes beyond yelling at some pigs in the street, and can be put into action and be tangible support efforts that will directly combat their goals of breaking apart our movements. Also it will help people, embolden people, and make them more confident to take part in the movement, and perhaps even take riskier action. And if folks see that if they take a risk, or even if they just participate, you know we’re seeing so many people go down for just participating, that if there is some kind of support for them in the instance that they do face state repression or get hit with prison time. If they see that that support is already in place, and they will have a community who will back them up and be there with them as they go through the state repression, that deepens the trust you can build with each other, it makes our movements stronger. It ultimately has to be the basis for any kind of revolutionary movement moving forward. Mutual aid, taking care of our own: those are such tenets of anarchism, and that inevitably has to include supporting political prisoners.

J11: Can you tell us more about Eric and any other prisoners that you support?

Y: Eric is an anarchist political prisoner who is serving a ten year sentence after an attempted firebombing of a Congressperson’s office in Kansas City, as a show of solidarity with the Ferguson Uprising. His stance against the state has been no secret, all you have to do is just read his sentencing statement for that. And he’s under constant surveillance and threats because of it. The focus lately seems to be his poetry and stopping him from being able to use it to reach folks. Eric is currently teaching yoga and poetry, he is super into space, science, dystopian fiction, and always reading radical lit. He’s a recent Harry Potter fan, and loves magic, and is skilled at the art of rebellion through annoyance currently. As far as who I write, I also write Nicole Kissane, I write Krow, I recently started getting letters from Bill Dunne, which are pretty amazing, I’ve really enjoyed them. Recently I’ve found myself communicating more and more with different social prisoners that I support as well.

X: For me, in addition to doing support work for Eric, like I mentioned earlier, I focus mostly on New York state political prisoners like David Gilbert, Jalil Muntaqim, and Robert Seth Hayes. And then I’m also in touch with some other people like Nicole Kissane as well, and I’ve loved getting to know her so far.

J11: So you mentioned that Eric has faced retaliation for some of his writings and for his outspoken stances, including restrictions on his communication. Can you tell us a little more about this, and about Eric’s situation now that some of those communication restrictions have been lifted?

Y: Yeah, absolutely. From the get go, when Eric was placed in the federal system, Eric was placed under SIS restriction. SIS stands for “Special Intelligence Services,” it’s pretty much the BOP’s security team. Every piece of mail has to be personally approved by an SIS officer that goes out or that Eric receives. At one point they upped his restrictions so much that mail had to go through somebody in DC, who had to read everything before it went in to Eric, or out. He was constantly being pulled in and bullied for any reason they saw fit, even if he typed an exaggerated number into an e-mail, they had pulled him in to interrogate him so they could “discover” what the code was that he was writing. This has actually happened more than once. Every week they would threaten him, they would tell him, “we will take you from your family, and we will send you to CMU so fast your head would spin.”

And when Eric was brought up on disciplinary charges, they seemingly attempted to limit communications so that he was not able to gain support to help fight the allegations. He was prohibited from visits, from making phone calls, or even e-mailing anyone. And the mail going in and out took about a week to process. It limited communication in a very dramatic way. This tactic became apparent, even more so when we found a lawyer for him. They contacted the prison wanting to have a legal call with Eric, and the BOP immediately held a disciplinary hearing that was not on the books before that could happen, on the day that they don’t even hold disciplinary hearings. The BOP is not dumb, they know where the strength in communication is, and that becomes a super effective reason for them to limit communication. As of right now, Eric is still being monitored by SIS, but so far he hasn’t been constantly called in to the office at FCI Florence. He seems to also be getting all of his mail and e-mails, and he’s finally getting visits again.

J11: I think it was around the same time that Eric was dealing with those disciplinary charges that he was transferred to Florence. Can you speak to the implications of that move?

Y: Absolutely. In the Bureau of Prisons in the federal system there’s a point system, as many other prison systems have, in which it determines the security level of the prison that the prisoner’s going to be held at. When Eric was initially placed, he was in a low-security prison, FCI Englewood. He was one point away from being sent to a medium prison. When he was brought up on disciplinary charges, a write-up that he received was supposed to be for three points, however somehow they awarded him nine points for that. So after transferring into a medium, he’s now finding himself two points away from being placed in the USP, which is the next security level up. This weighs heavily on him every day as he watches the sunrise over the ADX in the morning, knowing that there’s a threat to send him there. The ADX is a Supermax, it is pretty much District 13 from the Hunger Games over there, and just every time he walks outside seeing it is pretty heavy.

J11: Could you talk about the International Day of Solidarity with Eric King, which is being called for the first time this year, for June 28^th?

X: Yeah, we are celebrating the first ever International Day of Solidarity with Eric on June 28^th, and it will be the one year anniversary, if you want to call it that, of his sentencing. So we decided it would be a good way to build a community of support around him and his case internationally. He’s been receiving a bunch of mail from international folks over the last year. Having this day to focus on we’re hoping will create a base of support that can be there for him throughout the course of his sentence, since he will be in for another six years. We’ve seen him go through things: fighting for the vegan food, or medical check-ups, or mail issues when he was at Leavenworth. And then going through the disciplinary hearing and that sudden transfer this January and February. And, you know, through those things we’ve reached out to the greater community to call and e-mail the prisons, advocate for him. So things definitely come up, and they definitely don’t want to make it easy for him in there, or really anyone on the inside.

So building that broader community of support and channeling it into the annual support day we think will be very effective in maintaining this base to call on when he needs more support. We’re encouraging folks to set up events in their cities or towns, whether it’s a fundraiser, a punk show, a poetry reading, or simply just handing out his support flyers. Anything to get the word out about his case, and just spread the word about him, and get people writing him and whatever else. And just to mention if folks do organize events, they can e-mail the information to us, and we can try and promote them. We’d also love to see whatever posters or fliers folks come up with, and however else people are choosing to bring attention to that day. And, can you remind me of the support e-mail?

Y: Yeah, it is erickingsupportcrew [at] riseup [dot] net.

J11: Can you speak to how the strengths or failings of prisoner solidarity have personally affected Eric? And also you all as people with close relationships with people in prison?

Y: Yeah, having direct support has made an amazing difference in Eric’s life. I’ve watched him going from living for the first six months in prison having to pick small amounts of the vegan offerings on the regular tray, and seeing him extremely malnourished, to now, seeing him walk in the chow hall and check them on every single item he’s being fed that isn’t vegan. And really advocating for himself in so many other ways. Having folks stand up and support him more than a few times with the prison has given him confidence. Letters, calls, all of that really brought him to this place where he can feel safe and confident, knowing that if he’s picked up and isolated and brought somewhere, that folks are going to figure out what’s happening, and fight for him even when his communication’s limited, so even when he can’t let us know. That is something at one point he did not initially feel, and the fear and terror that was involved was so immense. The way that I see it is: it’s constant little battles that we wage in effort to stop the state from stealing parts of folks that we love. And that support really destroys the state’s hold on prisoners. Having solid support can tear down the efforts made by the BOP to isolate and play out all their little psy-op tactics.

J11: What are some of the challenges that y’all have experienced in doing prisoner support work? And what do you think we could collectively be doing better?

Y: I think probably one of the biggest hurdles is prison tactics, the ever evolving and constantly growing pressure that’s being put on radicals in prison. It was stated in Eric’s last disciplinary hearing that the BOP is going after incarcerated radicals from every group. The most recent tactic we’re seeing play out is placing the prisoner in a vulnerable position right on the cusp of a security change, or a move to a higher security prison, and then attempting to isolate them from their support system. In Englewood, Eric was told that if they discovered anyone fighting for him on the outside, that they would remove that individual or group’s ability to communicate with him. In addition, the constant harassment by SIS, making that prisoner feel vulnerable makes them therefore less likely to continue to be strong and be political.

X: Yeah, I would add to that, and I definitely agree with everything you just said. For me personally, some of the hurdles in supporting prisoners is that it is very emotionally taxing and it is just so much administrative work. With someone like Eric it is a little brighter because he’s serving a ten year sentence, he will get out in 2023. It feels like fucking forever away right now, but he has an out date and will be out, compared to some other people like former Black Panthers who are going up for parole every two years, and just getting denied. But even still, to support someone inside who is serving six more years and to just know he’s going through all this every single day, or that he’s constantly getting brought up on charges, or he’s having to fight for food every single day. Being part of a support crew, or a friend, it’s just so emotionally intense to be a part of it.

And just that the work is a little monotonous. I mean… I love writing people and supporting people in that way, but to do the calling or emailing and dealing with talking to prison officials who don’t want to talk to you, and hate you and hate that anyone has any support at all on the outside, doing those kind of monotonous things. People just want these kind of bigger and sexier things for prisoner support, like getting people out or doing these bigger things, but really prisoner support is a lot of these monotonous day-in and day-out things. Being there for people, and doing the small things that need to be done to make sure that they are protected, and that they’re not getting totally messed with when they’re serving their time.

J11: Do y’all see any ways that June 11^th could contribute to addressing some of these challenges? And what are your hopes for June 11^th this year?

Y: We need to be ever-evolving. Something that I’ve been thinking about more and more is sharing our experiences with each other, what we’ve learned, things that were successful, things that were not so successful. These things are not just happening to one prisoner, as more and more political prisoners are arrested and sentenced from various uprisings around the country, they are scrambling to attempt to develop a system to deal with radicals in prison. As a community I don’t believe that we are communicating enough about this, things like the current attempt made in the North-Central region of the BOP where they are sneaking language in to every plea deal that limits the prisoners ability to ever file a freedom of information request about the investigation or prosecution of their cases, or even allowing a third-party to do so. This includes support folks, journalists, or anybody. This means that this info can stay hidden until the prisoner is no longer alive. This has not really been seen before and can really remove a major radical weapon from our arsenal.

We can learn so much from ourselves and others, and it’s super crucial that we get better at sharing that knowledge. As far as hopes for June 11^th this year, especially in this political climate where it seems like there is somebody constantly getting sentenced with long sentences, watching it grow from last year is what I hope to see every year for June 11^th.

J11: What are your broader hopes and visions for June 11^th in the years to come, and also prisoner solidarity more generally?

X: I think as the years roll on and as Eric serves the rest of his sentence, we hope that June 11^th will continue to grow and organize as it has been, and maintain this cross-movement community of support for the folks who are a part of it. And I know as a collective we’re super happy that Eric is one of the people recognized for June 11^th and just in general how this day of solidarity has evolved to bring such direct material support for these folks and really shed a light on and act as a tangible source for support for these long term eco and anarcho-prisoners. And especially, as we see more people go down in this political climate, I hope that June 11^th can continue to grow and gain more and more substance from the outside internationally, and just continue to be the space for the people who are a part of it.

J11: Are there any struggles or moments in the recent past that have been inspiring to you all?

X: Personally, I was really, really inspired by the NODAPL struggle. The tenacity of the Lakota people and their allies, the water protectors, protecting water and land in these omnipresent oil wars, against literally the scumbag slumlords of this earth. I found that to be unbelievably inspiring. The water protectors endured such intense repression and violence from the police, and of course the harsh weather as things got cold in North Dakota. Just maintaining their camps and their strength throughout, I was so impressed and inspired by that.

Y: I agree that watching that all play out was super inspiring. What isn’t really inspiring right now? [laughs] Watching Chelsea and Oscar come home was amazing. I woke up that morning and saw that Chelsea had already been released, and I started crying. And then that big celebration for Oscar, I could watch folks walk out of prison doorways all day long. It is personally a reminder as to why we do this work, and the end goal of tearing that shit down and dismantling this entire system.

J11: Are there any other projects that you’re involved with or have interest in that you’d like to talk about?

X: Yeah, I would like to mention briefly that former Black Panther and political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim is currently doing these bi-weekly – he calls them twitter-storms, but they’re also like days for calling and writing to Governor Cuomo. He’s trying to get him to grant him clemency. So every other Wednesday there’s this directed action towards the governor. So for info on calling, tweeting, you can go to freejalil.com. Also I just want to shed light on this project New York City Anarchist Black Cross is doing called Project FANG, which is basically a travel fund for Earth and Animal Liberation prisoners. It’s funded fully by a sponsor, so it’s not like it needs donations or anything, but definitely check it out, it’s really awesome. We’re brainstorming ways of how we can expand the project to potentially provide travel funds for folks from other movements. And you can find out more at nycabc.wordpress.com.

Y: I just have this fantasy that I keep thinking about, of setting up some sort of political prisoner book club. That’s been a really amazing part of communication, reading books together and talking about them. It’s been a really big escape for us, and I think it would be the most awesome thing in the world.

X: Yeah, that would be so amazing.

[LISTEN HERE]

For the latest entry in our series of interviews for the June 11th International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason & All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners, we spoke to Josh Harper.

Josh is long-time animal liberation activist and former prisoner in the SHAC7 case. He has, for the past few years, been involved in archiving the history of animal and earth liberation struggles with the Talon Conspiracy.

We talked about his experiences in prison, what forms of solidarity meant the most to him, the challenge of post-release support for prisoners, the successes and failures of earth and animal liberation struggles, staying vegan in prison, Marius Mason, and learning to treat each other well as we fight for a free world.

 

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JUNE 11TH: Can you start by telling us about yourself and your experience with prison and prisoner support?

JOSH HARPER: Absolutely. My name is Josh Harper, and I got active in probably about 1995 in Portland, Oregon with a group called Liberation Collective. Initially that organization was doing a bunch of voluntary arrest and civil disobedience type of stuff. My earliest encounters with prisoner support was actually something much simpler, which is jail support: people showing up to be there when you’re released, and making sure bail gets paid if that’s your wish, and so on. For the first many years of my activism that I was doing, environmental stuff and human rights stuff and animal liberation stuff, that was sort of the extent of my experience.

But a few years had gone by and I’d started to question the efficacy of voluntary arrest, especially I had actually done a little bit of jail time down in southern California. I was meeting people from outside of the small towns in Oregon where I had grown up, and I was talking to them about their struggles and their lives, and the idea that we would just voluntarily hand ourselves to the police to get the shit kicked out of us wasn’t very appealing to them. Seeing the end-logic of the voluntary arrest cycle – the actual jail time – I knew that it wasn’t something that I wanted to advocate for much longer. Unfortunately for me, that meant the tactics and strategies I took on became a little bit risky.

In the early 2000s, shortly after Bush Jr. declared his war on terror, I was a part of an organization called Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty, and we were indicted under terrorism statutes for a campaign we were running against a laboratory called Huntington Life Sciences. At that point I was sentenced to three years in federal prison, which I served at FCI Sheridan in Oregon. I want to say that I had tremendous prison support. I consider myself so lucky to be part of the communities that I had met through doing all sorts of different activism. There was actually one point early on in my sentence where I got called to the warden’s office, and I was told that I had to make the mail stop, that too much of it was coming in, and that because I was a terrorist, they had to actually stop and copy and read every piece. I basically told them, “tough shit!,”, that I was under no obligation to make the mail stop, and when I left his office, he handed me a hefty bag full of letters, and that was just one day’s worth of mail.

J11: Can you speak to the importance of prisoner support as part of the anarchist project or other liberation struggles? And specifically to the necessity of supporting prisoners with long sentences?

Josh: Absolutely. As anarchists, we are always going to be at odds with the state, and that puts us in a precarious position. It means that all of the state’s apparatuses are usable against us, and so if we want to keep our numbers, if we want to show our comrades that we love them, that we care about them, and that when they’re going through the worst of it, we will be there for them, we need to make good on those promises. And that means that, when one of us is in the arms of the state, we need to take care of people’s basic emotional needs, and try to get them through the American gulag as best we can.

That means putting money on people’s books, it means visiting them when possible, it means writing them letters, it means sending them magazine subscriptions and books and all of that. But it also needs to go past that. Prison is something that’s horribly traumatizing, I can’t imagine most people being incarcerated for very long at all without having some sort of long-term effect on their lives, and so one of the things that I would like to see going forward for anarchists and anti-authoritarians and liberationists of all stripes is that, when people walk through that gate, the support doesn’t end. Just because the prison sentence is over doesn’t mean that the trauma of prison has ended. And so I would really like to see us showing solidarity and supporting our comrades going forward by trying to work on things that do everything from help them to get housing and employment while they’re on probation, to projects that focus on long-term mental health care for former inmates. I think that is really the area that prison support needs to go next.

J11: Is there any sort of post-release support that you’ve seen that you thought worked really well? Or like a model or some sort of practices that would be good to suggest to other people?

Josh: Sure. Some of the organizations I often mention when I’m asked a question like this are organizations that support Irish prisoners after they’re released from prison. I don’t want to say that as an endorsement of the actions of the IRA, whose tactics and strategies I understand quite well but whose actions over the years I think at times have been pretty deplorable. But that said, the way that they treat prisoners in their communities is amazing. They help the families of prisoners, they make sure that everyone’s getting by financially, they pay for family members to take trips to prisons.

But then once somebody is released, they move into all this long-term area that I mentioned earlier. They make sure that people are able to get by, they make sure that all of their initial physical needs are met, that their medical needs are met, that if their probation officer is breathing down their necks, for them to have full-time employment or whatever, they make sure that all of that is taken care of. And the support never ends with them. Once somebody registers with one of those services, they continue to contact them, they continue to make sure they’re okay, and to ask what their needs are. Something like that is of course going to be quite difficult to put together, finding funding for former inmates in the United States. I mean you’re talking about a population that most of the citizenry never really thinks about or considers, and if they do consider them, it’s usually with disgust. So finding that funding and infrastructure is not going to be easy, but nothing worth having is. It’s definitely something we need to begin striving towards.

J11: Going back to your case or your history, and the fact that the case shows that doing aboveground work can face serious prison time – what implications does this have for public projects? And what can we do to mitigate this threat?

Josh: It’s really difficult when I talk about SHAC to give a complete picture of what the campaign entailed. On the one hand there was “Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty” and all of its various chapters and projects. Those organizations operated in an aboveground manner, they had public events and meetings that anyone could join. SHAC produced a newsletter and a website for which eventually six of us did prison time.

But SHAC was a bifarious campaign, much like the Black Panthers or many other organizations that proceeded it, people saw that there was a necessity for popular resistance and recruitment from the general public, there was a need to have a public face and an entry point. I definitely haven’t come to any hard and fast conclusions about what our case could mean for aboveground organizing. But I do know for myself, having watched so few of the people who actually participated in sabotage and the release of animals and so on, I’ve seen so few of them see any time, while the aboveground organizers in the group were sent to federal prison. It did sort of make me wish that I had reconsidered, and that perhaps I should have invested my efforts in those times into carrying out direct actions myself.

J11: The Green Scare and its subsequent string of snitching and harsh prison sentences severely damaged the Earth and Animal Liberation movements in the U.S. Are there lessons we can learn from this? And what do you think can contribute to a revitalization of these movements?

Josh: I definitely think that there are lessons that can be learned from what happened to us during the Green Scare. I also think that there are lessons that can be learned from the self-cannibalizing nature of the radical animal and environmental movements of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and early 2000s. As I watch this anti-fascist moment that we’re in and I watch a revitalization of interest and excitement around the idea of self-governing and anarchism, I’m very cautious because I think a lot of the young folks who are coming into it right now are missing a few facts.

One of those facts is that our opponents have the greatest possible incentive to shut us down. You’ll have to forgive me for making a Star Wars reference, but one thing I always tell people is that the empire will strike back. If you’re putting your finger in the face of the U.S. government, they’re not going to let it stay there for long before they try to rip it off. One of the things that has to be confronted immediately by a lot of these movements is how are they going to counter those efforts. What is going to happen when somebody is arrested, what funds are in place to make sure that people are supported once that occurs? What lawyers are sympathetic? Who can be called when there’s an emergency happening? These things need to be considered long before action ever takes place.

We should be participating in projects and movements that are more liberal and less radical than the ones that we would like, because we are going to need those connections later. I remember all during the SHAC campaign, we were of course very, very critical of the people who we saw as being unwilling to move forward with militancy. We talked about our disgust and disdain for welfarists and liberals and moderates all the time. But when the hammer came down, when all of a sudden the Department of Homeland Security was raiding our houses with Joint Terrorism Task Forces, when eventually we were all rounded up in a coordinated sweep with air marshals flying helicopters outside of our houses, the people we had spent several years alienating weren’t exactly eager to help us.

And so, I think part of the anarchist project needs to be infiltration in some manner of some groups that are friendly with organizations like the National Lawyers Guild and ACLU. People see these things as investing efforts and reformism, I see them as something quite different. I see them as investing in radicalism, to make sure that we build up the defense networks that we are certainly eventually going to need.

But beyond that, one of the things that we need to find a way to do is to be softer with each other. By the time that the Green Scare started to come about, and the Feds were looking for the people they wanted to flip, when they were trying to figure out who they were going to get to snitch on people, they had a lot to go by. Because movement infighting and ideological clashing were so dominant during that time period, by the time the arrests and grand juries came, there were already a lot of those folks who didn’t like each other, who weren’t on good terms, and who weren’t in contact with each other. For the folks that had been pushed out, or whose ideology had been ridiculed or whatever, I think a lot of them perhaps had an easier time turning on their comrades than they might have had people treated each other with a little more gentleness and a little more acknowledgement of the culture that we’re all raised in, and how that affects us, and how that keeps any of us from being politically pure. I would really like to see us preempt some of the tools that the FBI and others use to flip activists, by just treating each other a whole lot better.

J11: Can you talk about your experience being vegan while you were in prison?

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. When I was sentenced to prison, one of the things that was very, very important to me was that I didn’t want to let it change who I was to the degree that I was able. I definitely wanted to be in the sort of position where I wasn’t going to let the state force me to consume the products of the animals who I was trying to defend to begin with. I’d heard that when I was first sent down that all federal prisons offer a vegetarian option, so I was very excited by that, and thought maybe it’d be vegan, but very quickly I realized that that wasn’t the case. All of the vegetarian options at FCI Sheridan contained animal lactation or they had eggs, it wasn’t easy to stay vegan in there.

I received a little bit of criticism because my track record wasn’t perfect. One of the jobs I worked we were required to wear steel-toed shoes. After I showed up several times wearing canvas shoes that I had bought off of an inmate who had been transferred from a place where they could buy them, they said, “if you keep wearing these canvas shoes, we’re going to send you to the hole.” So I did eventually wear a pair of used leather boots. Going back to that ideological purity thing I was talking about earlier, I’d got out and I dealt with some criticism over that. It wasn’t something that I was happy to do, it was a choice that I had to make.

Looking at the history of animal rights and environmental prisoners in the United States, I think that’s something we need to be aware of as well. Once somebody is behind bars, they are often pushed to a point where they have to make decisions that they would never make in the outside world. Jeff Luers, I remember during the early days of his time at Oregon State Penitentiary for example, decided that pressing for vegetarian diet was taking up all of his energy, and not leaving him with enough time or energy to then focus on his appeal. And so he sent out a statement saying, “this is a decision that I’m making, I’m not happy about it, this is just sort of what the system pushed me to.” I was really disappointed to see so many people throw backlash to him for that. I don’t know, it goes back to that sense of being kind to each other, and taking care of each other, and not letting ideology overshadow our basic human kindness.

J11: You mentioned getting lots of mail and commissary money while you were inside, what forms of solidarity were the most important to you, and what forms could have been done better.

Josh: The form that was most important to me as far as getting through the hell of each week at that place was the visits. When people would come on weekends, I had a window into the outside world. I could talk to them about current events and the organizing that they were doing, I had somebody I could finally discuss politics with. Those visits saved my life, I hate to imagine what my life would had been like if they had not occurred. A lot of those visits were made possible by my support group raising money, and helping pay for my mother to come, for old friends to come out, and of course members of my support team themselves. They would come almost every weekend. It gave me life in a place where, you know, you sort of feel like you’re in stasis. The world’s going on without you on the outside, and you’re just trapped in a place where time doesn’t move.

So those visits were the most important thing, followed close by letters. I loved hearing from people from around the world, and getting a glimpse into their lives. I loved looking at the pictures they would send, and getting to see sights that I would never get to see behind bars. People would go on hikes or they’d go drift-boating, or they’d see some gorgeous vandalism in the city, and they would send images of it, and it really did keep me going.

But there were parts of support that were a little bit lacking, and especially once again upon my release. Part of that was because the movement wasn’t really trained, I think, to understand the initial needs of a prisoner post-release. When people would come to me and say, “How are you doing?” I would say, “I’m doing great!” Because in the first time in three years, I was able to be around friends and family and the outside world. I had freedom of movement, I could cook good food at my own place, and everything seemed exciting and wonderful. And so, in some small way, it was my own fault that people didn’t offer post-prison support because I seemed so happy.

But one of the things that we need to learn is that a lot of inmates, after incarceration, feel that initial rush of joy and the answers they would give to questions like how they’re feeling about their incarceration are going to be overwhelmingly positive, because they don’t want to think about it. They don’t want to reflect on those things, they don’t want to share the hell that they went through, so they’re going to say, “I’m alright, I’m okay.” I wish that we had a little more knowledge that that would be the case. I think the people supporting me really wanted to do their best, in fact I know that they did. But now with the little more knowledge that we’ve gained since, yeah, I can see that the deficiency happened when I left prison. Moving forward, I think that Anarchist Black Cross chapters and so many other prisoner support projects are going to need to acknowledge that, and work to fix it.

J11: Are there any ways that June 11^th can address some of these deficiencies? And do you have any hope for June 11^th this year?

Josh: Oh, I have hope for June 11^th every year. And part of the reason I hold that hope in my heart is that one of the very first people that ever reached out to me when I was facing federal charges back in 1999 related to a grand jury that was investigating the Earth Liberation Front was Marius Mason. They sent me e-mails and they raised funds for me out in Indianapolis, and they sent pictures from a bake sale that they held to benefit my support fund at the time. And so when I think of Marius in there, and I think about June 11^th, I want June 11^th to be very successful because I want this wonderful person, who has given his all in order to save life on this Earth to make it a better experience for everyone here, to attack the industries that are attacking us, I want to make sure he gets the best possible support.

I want to make sure that there’s lots and lots of attention given to his case. That is my ultimate hope for June 11^th organizing. And I do think that the folks who organize June 11^th have an opportunity to begin to innovate new methods of prisoner support, to think beyond just the letters, the commissary funds, and such, and to begin asking broader questions. How can we support inmates’ mental health while they’re still in, how can we support it when they’re out? How can we expand on our ability to help our comrades?

And I think that can also be done with an eye towards movement-building, I think it can be done in such a manner that people see we’re a community that supports each other, that when the going gets tough and the chips are down, we step up, and we do our utmost, we don’t back away from the state, we don’t turn on each other, we don’t snitch. I think that all of that is something that can be done in a really high-profile way with June 11^th. My understanding is that there are still people working on organizing June 11^th events around the world, and hopefully all of them are trying to get that message of struggling alongside each other, and making sure that our efforts are as good as they can be for our friends behind bars.

J11: What are your broader hopes and visions both for June 11^th and for prisoner solidarity in general?

Josh: [laughs] Oh gosh, I don’t know. It’s difficult to talk about my hopes during such a dark time period because they stand in such stark contrast to the world as it actually is. It sounds naïve, I suppose, to say at this point, that I’d love to eventually see an end to authority. I would love to see an end to the interpersonal oppressions that we cast at each other. I’d love to see an end to surveillance and the police state, I’d love to have some sort of ecological sanity, I’d love to see us treating the other creatures we share this planet with in a manner I think that’s more consistent with all of our personal ethics.

It’s difficult when you look at the current regime and you see fascists and Nazis openly declaring themselves and marching in the streets. It’s difficult to believe that anything better is possible when we’ve already come this far in the opposite direction. But I think history provides us a lot of examples of people who had enough, who were tired of being told that the power wasn’t theirs. They were tired of being told that they didn’t deserve food, or new shoes, or clothing, that they didn’t deserve clean water or clean air or clean soil, that all of those things only belonged the hands of the few. And eventually they said, “no, fuck no, fuck no, we’re going to take it back!” I want to see that, I want to see that rupture, that breaking point, where people realize that they’ve been lied to, that they do have the power, and that they can resist. And they can do so in a manner that they’re directly participating in, that they’re not waiting for some savior from the Democratic Party to arrive, or another person to throw the first stone. I want everyone to realize that revolution is participatory and that it’s crucial that we all take part. I know that was a little rambling, I hope it actually answered the question.

J11: On that note, are there any struggles or moments in the recent past that have inspired you?

Josh: Oh my goodness, yeah. One of the things I work on right now is a website called The Talon Conspiracy. It’s been on hiatus for just over a year, but we’re about to come off of it. One of the things we do is archive old animal rights publications and environmental publications. The next thing that we’re going to put up is a book called The Old Brown Dog, which is about the Brown Dog riots in the early 1900’s in England. One of the really exciting things about that time period is that you had a feminist movement that was beginning to happen, that was coming out of the movement for suffrage, but was more radical. It was women who were realizing that the vote alone wasn’t going to bring them to freedom. You had members of the Britain Union to Abolish Vivisection, which was an organization originally founded by Francis Power Cobbe, a queer woman whose politics were very socialist-leaning. Most of the rank-and-file of the organization I wouldn’t say were as radical as she was, but there were definitely radicals amongst them. And you had labor unions, all of these organizations formed a coalition that actually physically fought with vivisectors and police in public plazas in England after vivisectors had actually rioted and destroyed a statue of Brown Dog, who was a monument to victims of vivisection.

History has so many examples of people who were outraged, but of course it’s not just historical stuff. It’s the folks nowadays who are rescuing people from collapsing buildings in Syria, and fighting back with force of arms against Assad’s regime. It’s the people who just recently in Greece went to the leader of a fascist organization’s apartment and broke in, and trashed the place. Every single day there are people out there who are committing acts of resistance, and are showing that this does not have to be tolerated, that we can answer this challenge. Anyway, it’s definitely one of joys in my life, to read about the past examples of that, but I get so much more joy to see current examples.

[LISTEN HERE]

Continuing our series of interviews for the June 11th International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason & All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners, we spoke to a supporter of the Cleveland 4, and Nicole Kissane and Joseph Buddenberg.

The Cleveland 4 are four Occupy Cleveland activists — Connor Stevens, Douglas Wright, Brandon Baxter, and Joshua “Skelly” Stafford — arrested in 2012 after being coerced into plotting a series of bombings by an FBI informant. Doug is serving 11.5 years, Brandon 9 years 9 months, and Connor 8 years 1 month. The judge applied a terrorist enhancement, resulting in longer sentences and harsher prison conditions. Skelly took his case to trial, refusing a plea deal. He was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years.

Nicole Kissane and Joseph Buddenberg are two animal liberation activists indicted in July 2015 under the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act for acts of vandalism against fur stores and the liberation of thousands of mink and other fur-bearing animals. In early 2016, both signed non-cooperating plea agreements and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. In May, 2016, Joseph was sentenced to two years in federal prison. In January, 2017, Nicole was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison.

In the interview, we talked about the ongoing situation of the Cleveland 4, post-release support, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, increasing the connections between the anti-prison and animal rights movements, the best ways to show solidarity with prisoners, and the importance of maintaining support after cases fall from the limelight.

 

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JUNE 11TH: Can you start by telling us about yourself and your experiences with prisoner support?

X: Yeah, so I got involved in doing prisoner support because I had been doing work in the Animal Liberation movement for quite a while and I was good friends with Kevin and Tyler, who were indicted under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act a few years ago. So I got thrown into doing prisoner support just being good friends with them and feeling like I had to do what I could to help my friends out as they were going through that experience. And that kinda opened me up to another world of prisoner support, and since then I’ve been working with them as well as doing support for Nicole and Joseph who were also indicted under the AETA. And I do work with supporting the Cleveland 4.

J11: Can you speak to the importance of prisoner support as part of the anarchist project and other liberatory struggles, and specifically the necessity of supporting long-term prisoners?

X: I feel like prisoner support is really important because we have to recognize that if we’re involved in these resistance movements that are challenging state power, if we are doing that in effective ways, there is going to be push back. And so we have to acknowledge that’s going to mean that our movements are going to have prisoners. So if we’re going to have prisoners, then we need to have prisoner support be part of the foundation of the work that we’re doing.

It needs to be constantly considered as part of our organizing, and we shouldn’t consider state repression as a surprising thing that happens. It should just be something that we take as something that is going to be there, and so we need to incorporate that in our organizing work that we do. For prisoner support just being a constant part of that. Making sure we do what we can to have the infrastructure to engage in supporting people long-term, because if people are going to be in prison for years, then we don’t want people to be forgotten about after a few years. That shows a failure on our part to not be with them, supporting them for every day that they’re in there, and making sure that people never feel forgotten.

Because if people do feel forgotten or support for them starts lacking because they’re been in there for longer, then that’s showing the state is then winning, because it just shows that if they give people long enough sentences then they lose the movement’s support. So we need to constantly be incorporating that in the work we do and making sure that, regardless of the length of someone’s sentences, they can know and trust that people will be there for them until they get out, and beyond that.

J11: Can you tell us more about the prisoners that you support?

X: So, I mentioned the Cleveland 4. I’ve been doing a lot of support for them, and they are a group of four people: Brandon Baxter, Connor Stevens, Doug Wright, and Josh Stafford. They were Occupy activist who the FBI entrapped into a plot to blow up a bridge. This plot was created by the FBI, the FBI supplied fake explosives, and had a paid FBI informant manipulate this group of young people for many months and coerce them into this plot, and then prosecuted them as terrorists. They received terrorist enhancements on their convictions when they were sentenced, and they are all serving about ten years in prison, give or take a year or two, and lifetime probation after that because of the terrorism enhancement.

So definitely ongoing support is needed for them and their case is definitely representative of what happened in the post-9/11 era, where we see the government creating these so-called terrorism plots, and then manipulating people into them. Then, the government can act like they’re capturing terrorists even though the government’s making up the plots, and then keep funding this so-called “war on terror.” We should definitely be breaking down their case. As well, the government has done this in many instances to young Muslim men. And we should just be very critical of what’s happening and pushing back on that because the government’s using it to keep creating this narrative that they need to engage in all these surveillance and COINTELPRO tactics in order to “fight terrorism,” even though the government is the one crafting these plots as well as the ones carrying out the terrorist acts.

I said I do support for Nicole and Joseph, who were indicted under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act because they were accused of freeing animals from fur farms throughout the country, as well as causing other forms of economic damage to stores selling fur. Joseph is doing two years in prison, Nicole got twenty-one months. Then following that up, Joseph has two years of probation, she has three years. And again, with the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, we can see that as well as an example of how the government uses terrorism rhetoric to try to stir up fear around social justice movements, and make people afraid to get involved and to take action, because they’re afraid then that they’ll be prosecuted as terrorists.

But again, we need to look at the bigger picture and break down the government’s goal with the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. It is, essentially, to make people afraid to advocate for animals. Very few people have actually been indicted under it, but it still has had a pretty terrible chilling effect on the movement. So by supporting people like Nicole and Joseph as well as showing that people continue to engage in work towards the liberation of animals, that’s an effective way to push back on the government’s intentions with that.

J11: Brandon Baxter of the Cleveland 4 was recently transferred to Illinois. What are the circumstances around that move, and do you know how Brandon is adjusting to his new location?

X: Yeah, so he was recently transferred to FCI Pekin, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere in Illinois. It’s near Peoria, which might be slightly better known. But he was recently transferred there from Terre Haute in Indiana, and so far the move has been good for him. It’s a much newer facility than Terre Haute, so there are better conditions in the prison, it’s bigger, and he gets to be outside more. He hasn’t been there very long yet, so he’s still in the adjustment phase, establishing new routines, getting settled in there. For anyone, the transfer process can be stressful just because of the actual process of being transferred, and then adjusting to a new environment. But overall he’s doing better being there, and just right now working through settling in.

J11: So I just saw that Josh Stafford, or Skelly, was recently released from the SHU. Can you tell us a little about that situation?

X: I don’t know details of what happened but I know that he was transferred. He was in Florida and now he was transferred to USP McCreary in Kentucky, and I don’t have any updates yet on how he’s doing with that. He just got there this week, so hopefully people are writing to him and everything because, again as I was just saying about Brandon, the transfer process can be very stressful as people are adjusting to being in the new environment. If people can, make sure to be writing letters right now so that he feels support as he is dealing with the same process as Brandon is with having to adjust to being in a new place and getting settled in.

J11: You were talking earlier about Joseph and Nicole, I think Joseph is about half-way through his prison sentence, and Nicole has been in for maybe six months. Can you tell us how they’re doing, and what kind of support they need right now?

X: Yeah, so Nicole, the last update I have about her is that she’s been doing really well. She’s been able to make friends with her bunkmates and she’s reading a lot, and has an exercise routine and has figured out a schedule for herself. She is just handling the circumstances really well, considering. Joseph unfortunately, his time has been a lot rougher. He’s been in the SHU for several months and will likely be in for a bit longer, so that brings a lot of feelings of isolation. The prison has been interfering with his mail a lot, so oftentimes letters that people are sending to him don’t get to him, or he realizes that letters he’s sending out don’t make it to people. So that’s been an additional stressor for him, to feel more disconnected from the community.

But I’d really encourage people to do what they can to keep writing. If you’re writing to him and don’t hear back, that’s likely not his fault. But he still really appreciates hearing from people. Something I’ve found is that sometimes just a card or a postcard will get to him even when letters don’t. So if you can just take a minute to write out a postcard or something to send to him, he really appreciates those shows of support. It means a lot to him when he’s feeling very isolated. He’s also appreciating right now getting a lot of zines and magazines and articles to read. He hasn’t felt as much lately like reading books, but he’s really been appreciating the smaller forms of reading materials. So he needs continued support, and those are unfortunately some more obstacles in showing support for Joseph. But he really appreciates all the mail that does it make through to him.

J11: So the other AETA case: Kevin and Tyler, I think they’re both off house arrest and out of the half-way house now. What are some things that you learned from their cases, and how does support continue even after our friends are released?

X: Tyler is done with all of his sentence now, he’s even off probation. His sentence ended up being three months of time served that he did when he was initially arrested, six months house arrest, and then six months half-way house. He’s now completed all of that and he had a year of probation that ran consecutive to it. Kevin is actually in his last two weeks now of half-way house, he will be out on June 1^st. And so he is getting excited for that, he’s started looking for a place to live and everything. Kevin did about three years in prison.

Something that I think is a good lesson from their cases, not to be confused with Nicole and Joseph, is that the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act has the scary “terrorism” word in it, but especially looking at Tyler’s sentence (six months half-way house, six months house arrest, and then the three months of prison) the sentences aren’t that different than what we might see if they were charged not under a terrorism statute. So I think that’s an important thing to note, that sometimes we should look past what the rhetoric is around things and look more at what the sentences actually are. Not that every day in jail or prison someone has to spend isn’t terrible and shouldn’t be happening at all, but I think it is important to break down some of the fear of what “terrorism” convictions actually mean.

Kevin and Tyler are both doing really well right now, but as people are getting out of prison and half-way houses, we do have to continue to show people support because it’s a continued process of adjustment as they start to think about what their relationship with the movement is going to be, and how they want to be involved. We should be supportive and welcoming to them, but also remember that people are dealing with a lot of trauma as they are on the other side of this, and maybe trying to navigate how exactly it makes sense for them to get back involved. For me, with them as my friends it’s just been having those conversations and paying attention to what kind of support they need, and being responsive to that. And that’s something where whether we’re friends with people, or not friends but just watching updates on a website or something, being responsive to what people are asking for is important, and remembering that just because somebody is out of prison doesn’t mean that they don’t need that support.

J11: Do you often find that much of support for anarchist or other political and radical prisoners comes from a small number of people and limited circles? One aspect of this must be trying to generalize it and spread that work, and build connections with other movements and tendencies. Can you speak to the connection between animal rights circles and those of prisoner support, or other examples that you have?

X: Unfortunately a horrible trend in the more mainstream animal rights movement has been that it’s been a very isolated movement, very single-issue focused. And that ends up working out fine for animal rights prisoners because they do get a lot of support, and I’ve seen the difference in different support work that I’ve done. I’ve see how the mainstream animal rights movement overall has a lot of people with a lot of resources, maybe access to money in different forms. So there’s an outpouring of support and donations that really help the animal rights prisoners, to constantly have money on their commissary, to get a lot of letters, to have people offering support in different way.

It’s often frustrating, though, to see how limited a lot animal rights people will be in who they support. They’ll support animal rights prisoners, but then not understand that it’s the same system that’s criminalizing other people and putting people in cages, and not understand that support should be spread out to other people as well. So something I’ve personally tried to do a lot with having connections to the animal rights movements is trying to have more conversations with people. Whenever we’re talking about supporting people like Nicole and Joseph, also talking about supporting the Cleveland 4 or other prisoners. Also trying to use it to start a conversations about broadly why is prisoner support important, why we should be talking about prison abolition.

And I hope that’s something within the animal rights movement that can become more understood, that if we’re opposing putting animals in cages, we should be opposed to putting humans in cages, and we should look at all the issues with state power that come into play. But I’d say that it’s definitely something that needs more work, and luckily there are a lot of animal rights activists who do get it, and support a lot of different prisoners, and talk about prison issues more broadly. As people who already understand it, we should take it as a responsibility we have to talk to other people in the movements that we’re a part of about expanding the support that we do, and constantly challenging the idea that prisons should even exist. A lot of animal rights activists haven’t thought much into that realm yet.

J11: What are some obstacles that you’ve observed in doing prisoner solidarity work? And what do you think we could collectively be doing better?

X: Something that I’ve run into is, I mean as you said in the last question, there are often a limited number of people doing it, and it can burn people out. I know that a lot of the work that I’ve done, I’ve seen a lot of people really excited to be a core part of a support crew, and then within a year they kind of drop out of being involved. And so I think we need to have a lot more conversations what it means to do prisoner support, and that it’s not just something that you can do for the first year while a case is getting more attention, but that it is a long-term thing.

And also be more openly talking about the stresses involved in doing prisoner support, because it’s not easy. A lot of times we’re dealing with heavy issues with people, a lot of times people doing support work are friends or partners of the people in prison, and so there’s even greater emotional stress in doing it. We need to constantly be having those conversations of how can we show each other support, and how do we make sure we do have the emotional capacity to do the support long-term, to be doing it in ways that are as healthy as possible, and to be able to talk about the stress and how we can deal with it, and what we can do to find ways to release. Because it is going to be difficult and it’s going to bring up issues for people, and not everyone’s going to want to do it, but for the people that want to, we should make it something that is sustainable, and that we do talk about it.

J11: Can you speak to how the strengths or failings of prisoner support have personally affected your friends, either currently or previously in prison, or who are doing some of the core support work?

X: Hearing from people who are my friends in prison, it’s great to see their reaction when they do feel support, how excited they are when they get letters, and how much it means to them to be hearing from people, sometimes around the world, who are showing support for them. It can help them still feel connected to a community when they feel so isolated. It’s great to see those examples of people reaching out, that always makes me happy to see for those people, and it makes me glad to know as someone working to support them that people are being responsive to all the effort we’re doing to encourage people to write letters and all that.

But a lot of times the initial support doesn’t continue at the same level, and I’ve seen moments when it seems hard for people when they’re starting to get fewer letters, or people they’re writing to stop writing to them because people just don’t continue with that. So again, that goes back to having a conversation about how we do continued support for people. Whether that means people being a part of support crews and being more directly involved in all the layers of support work, or just being someone who takes time to write letters to prisoners, we should remember that it’s important to keep writing, to keep staying involved in doing whatever we’re doing because it’s not fair for us to start lacking in the support we’re doing while they’re still in prison.

J11: Do you see ways that June 11^th can help address these challenges? And what are your hopes for June 11^th this year?

X: I think that June 11^th and other days where there are pushes for prisoner support are great reminders to people to keep doing what they’re doing, and to encourage thinking about the bigger issues that we’re dealing with. There are definitely layers to this, there’s the layer of: we’re doing this because we want to support our friends and comrades, and we want to make sure that they don’t feel alone, and that they know we have their back. And then there’s the bigger level of: it’s a fucked up system and we need to constantly be doing what we can to expose what the prison industrial complex is, and to be doing work to reduce the strength that it has, and to be challenging its legitimacy, and to have the bigger conversations, whether it’s in our movements or more publically than that, about what we should be doing and how to turn that into action.

It’s great to see campaigns against building new prisons or campaigns to reduce funding the police forces and things like that. And to keep also organizing against prisons in tangible ways that are beyond the support work that we’re doing for prisoners, but also challenging the ability of prisons to function as they do.

J11: What are your broader hopes and vision for June 11^th in the years to come?

X: I hope it continues to be something that more and more people know about. In my experience it’s something that mostly the anarchist community knows about, so I’d like to see more of the resistance movements and other social justice movements become more aware of it, and it be something that can be a way to introduce more people to the importance of prisoner support and the other issues that come with that. Prisoner support stuff, I just always hope will be something that encourages people to look further into issues, to get involved in some way, or to write to someone, and that it could be an entry point for them to get more involved in the work.

And for people that are new to it, I encourage people to start writing letters to someone, because hearing someone’s personal experiences from being on the inside and getting to know them as a person rather than just someone who’s labeled a prisoner. That’s the best way to learn about what the system really is, and what it does to people, because I think people are often surprised that things aren’t what they seem, and that some of the worst things about prison sometimes wouldn’t be what people anticipate even before they start writing to someone. But once you start to get to know someone personally, you really see what this system does to people and how it can tear people apart and how important it is to be in touch with people and have those different forms of support, and to do what we can to try and stop it from doing this to people.

J11: Are there any struggles or moments in the recent past that have been inspiring to you?

X: It’s been quite the year of things, something that stands out to me is that I had the opportunity to do legal support at Standing Rock, and that was a place where a lot of new people were getting involved. And it was cool to see how, in an on the ground, in the moment situation, people were figuring out how to do jail support and prisoner support. And when I was doing jail visits with people there, I had some pretty inspiring and amazing conversations with people about why they were there and what that moment to them meant.

I had super intense, emotional conversations with young indigenous people who were in jail out at Standing Rock, and about the brutality that they were experiencing from the police there. But they had such conviction that this is what they needed to be doing, they needed to be out there, and just so inspiring to see how much they understood the violence of the system, yet they were still there pushing back on it. So looking at situations like that where we’re seeing the violence of Standing Rock playing out on social media, to see it closer up and to see just the devotion that people had to what they were doing was just pretty incredible.

J11: Are there any other projects you’re involved in or interested in that you’d like to talk about?

X: I guess the final thing I’d like to say is to encourage people to support the Cleveland 4, and Nicole and Joseph. There are support websites for both of them. Its cleveland4solidarity.org and supportnicoleandjoseph.com. As well as Facebook pages for both, and also there’s a Twitter page for Cleveland 4. Those are great places to watch for updates about what’s going on, and what kind of support they need. You can see addresses for writing to them, you can see book lists, and you can see how to make donations to support them. They need support, and hopefully lots of other prisoners are getting support as well, and I hope this is all continuing to be a part of these bigger conversations that we need to be having about supporting individual prisoners as well as what this means on a broader scale.