Herman Bell denied parole again

New York State Political Prisoner Herman Bell convicted of the 1971
killing of two New York City Police Officers appeared before the
parole board for the fifth time on March 21, 2012. Despite an
unblemished institutional record for nearly 40 years, a viable
release plan and even support for release from the family of one of
the deceased officers, the panel rejected release as "incompatible
with the welfare of society" because it "would deprecate the
seriousness of the offense."

The three-person (two white, one Black) panel consisted of a former
prosecutor, a former police detective and a victims' rights advocate.

Herman is of course disappointed but is otherwise in good
spirits. He plans to appeal the decision. Most importantly, he
thanks all those who supported his release and urges everyone to
support parole release for New York State PPs Jalil Muntaquin and
Robert Seth Hayes both of whom go before the Board in June 2012.

*********************
Via Bob Boyle

3 NY State Political Prisoners Statements to Occupy 4 Prisoners

The New York Prison Justice Network and New York Taskforce for Political Prisoners received these statements of support for Occupy4Prisoners from NY state political prisoners Herman Bell, David Gilbert and Jalil Muntaqim. The statements (along with one from Mumia Abu-Jamal and several from other prisoners) will be read at the NYC and Philadelphia rallies today, and in Albany tomorrow. They are also for use at any other Occupy4Prisoners rally anywhere.

Solidarity to OWS, Wherever You Be
Herman Bell
Great Meadow (Comstock) Correctional Facility, February 20, 2012

In your pushback for social justice, you give us hope. Failure to claim your rights
is failure to know whether they exist or not. Abstract terms though they be, you make
them real. A parasitic social order has fully emerged and affixed itself to our existence
and now requires our unquestioned loyalty and obedience to its will. And we have come
dangerously close to complying.

Ordinary people doing uncommonly brave things have rekindled our hopes that
we can do better this time in safeguarding the public trust. Far too many of us have
grown complacent in our civic and moral responsibility, which explains in part how Wall
Street, big banks, and corporations, in political connivance, have gotten away with so
much. So we have to take some responsibility for that.

I think we are now coming to understand that. Your occupation in these troubling
times calls attention to much of what is wrong in our society. So keep it tight: no elitism,
no arrogance, no divisiveness, and consult the elders as you go forth, because youth often
do the wrong thing for the right reason.

And in a clear, unwavering voice wherever you go, wherever you speak, wherever
you occupy, demand release of our political prisoners, for they are the embodiment of our
movement’s resolve. And don’t let anyone punk you out, because what you do matters.
Big jobs call for big people, and you already stand pretty tall in my eyes.

Solidarity –
Herman Bell

Herman Bell, a former member of the Black Panther Party, has been a political
prisoner since 1973. He is currently imprisoned in Comstock, NY.
***************************************************
To Occupy Wall Street/ Occupy Everywhere
From Behind the Walls
David Gilbert

Auburn Correctional Facility, February 20, 2012

Your creativity, energy, and love of humanity bring warm sunshine to many of us behind these prison walls. You’ve eloquently and concisely articulated the central problem: a society run by the 1% and based on corporate greed as opposed to human need. That obscenity of power and purpose creates countless specific and urgent concerns. Among those, the criminal injustice system is not just a side issue but essential to how the 1% consolidate power.

The U.S. mania for putting people behind bars is counterproductive in its stated goal of public safety. A system based on punishment and isolation breeds anger and then difficulty in functioning upon return to society – things that generate more crime. The U.S., which imprisons people at about seven times the rate of other industrialized countries, has a higher rate of violent crime. Punishment does not work. A transformative, community-based justice model would be more effective as well as more humane. It would both support victims and work with offenders, to enable them to function well and make a positive contribution.

Although the punitive approach does not make communities safe, it has served the rulers well. In the same 30 years that the 1% nearly tripled their share of U.S. national income—with global inequities far steeper—the number of people behind bars in the U.S. went up from about 500,00 to 2.3 million. It’s no coincidence. The “war on crime” started in 1969 as a code for attacking the Black Liberation Movement, at a moment when that movement was at the front of a widespread wave of radical social action which seriously threatened the dominance of the 1%. Mass incarceration, especially of people of color, was an important part of the 1%’s strategy for holding on to their wealth and power.

The second way the criminal injustice system works to keep the powerful in power is that as the 1% steal more and more of humanity’s wealth, they face the pressing political need of deflecting attention from their colossal crimes. Over the past 30 years mainstream politics have been driven by a series of coded forms of racial scapegoating—against “criminals,” welfare mothers, immigrants, Muslims, the poor who get token concessions from the government—to turn the frustration and anger of the majority of white people away from the rulers and toward the racially constructed “other.” Confronting that demagogy and hatred is critical to resisting the
1%’s offensive.

As activists, we often grapple with a tension between prioritizing the needs of the most oppressed—based on race, class, gender sexuality, ability—and maintaining a universal vision and broad unity. But those two important concerns are not in contradiction. The only road to principled and lasting unity is through dismantling the barriers formed by the series of particular and intense oppressions. The path to our commonality is solidarity based on recognition of—and opposition to—the ways this society makes us unequal. Our challenge is to forge this synthesis in practice, on the ground, in the daily work of building the movement of the 99%. With an embrace to you and your inspiring stand, one love,
David

David Gilbert, a former member of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, has been a political prisoner since 1981. He is currently incarcerated in Auburn, NY.
************************************
America is a Prison Industrial Complex
Jalil A. Muntaqim

Attica Correctional Facility, February 20, 2012

The 2.3 million U.S. citizens in prison represent more than a problem of criminality. Rather, the
human toll of the U.S. prison industrial complex addresses and indicts the very foundation of
America’s history.

In 1865, the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution served to institutionalize prisons as a
slave system. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for
crime….shall exist within the United States.”

This Amendment evolved out of the Civil War allegedly to abolish chattel slavery. However,
since that time, prisons have become an industrial complex. As an industry, its investors are
financial institutions such as “Goldman Sachs & Co., Prudential Insurance Co. of America, Smith Barney Shearson, Inc., and Merrill Lynch & Co. Understand, these investors in this slave industry in 1994 are no different from investors in the slave system prior to 1865.

The political system supports this industry by passing laws that enhance criminal penalties,
increase penal incarceration and restrict parole. Former U.S. President Clinton’s 1985 Crime Bill
effectively caused the criminalization of poverty, exponentially increasing the number of people
being sent to prison. On May 12, 1994, the Wall Street Journal featured an article entitled,
“Making Crime Pay: Triangle of Interests Created Infrastructure to Fight Lawlessness; Cities See
Jobs; Politicians Sense a Popular Issue and Businesses Cash In—The Cold War of the ‘90s.” The
article clearly indicated how prisons have become a profitable industry, including so-called
private prisons.

Given this reality, the struggle to abolish prisons is a struggle to change the very fabric of
American society. It is a struggle to remove the financial incentive—the profitability of the
prison/slave system. This will essentially change how the U.S. addresses the issue of poverty, of
ethnic inequality, and misappropriation of tax dollars. It will speak to the reality that the prison
system is a slave system, a system that dehumanizes the social structure and denigrates America’s moral social values.

The prison system today is an industry that, as did chattel slavery, profits off the misery and
suffering of other human beings. From politicians to bankers to the business investment
community, the prison industrial complex is a multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise, all of
which has been sanctioned by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

It is imperative that those of you here come to terms with the reality that America is the prison
industrial complex, and that the silence and inaction of Americans is complicit in maintaining a
system that in its very nature is inhumane.

Abolish the American prison industrial complex!!
All Power to the People! All Power to the People!
All Power to the People!

Jalil Muntaquim (Anthony Bottom), a former member of the Black Panther Party, has
been a political prisoner since 1971. He is the author of “We Are Our Own Liberators,
and is currently incarcerated in Attica, NY.

Herman Bell - 25 to Life - What Does That Mean To Me?

25-LIFE - WHAT DOES THAT MEAN TO ME?
BY H. BELL, 3/26/11)

            Although I have served more than 37
years in prison, I am still unable to wrap my
mind around what that means; years of locking
in-and-out of cells, letters from home and the
occasional family photo; one letter telling that
the new baby has arrived, another telling that my
niece or nephew is doing well in school and that
the neighbor next door died in his sleep; the
photo shows Ma-dear and Dad looking good but are
noticeably older, 25-life (what does that mean to me?).

            If you were a family man, like I
was, with a young wife and two rambunctious boys,
the separation had to have been heart-wrenching.
It was for me. My boys, Johnes and Keith, had
thoroughly broken me into domesticity: feeding
them, changing and washing their diapers,
dressing them, consoling them, taking them for
their shots. Hoping the family dog wouldn't bite
me for reprimanding them. Their mother,
high-spirited and the love of my lie, was no less
challenging; a borderline red-bone, with a
delightful spray of freckles across her nose and
cheeks, almond-shaped eyes and pouty lips. During
our feuds, rather than talk, we wrote notes to
each other and the children handed them to us.

            What does doing 25-life mean to me?
As I mull over this question, I am reminded of
Elmina, the Portuguese slave fortress, located on
the West coast of Ghana from which enchained
afrikans were led through its infamous
"door-of-no-return" to the holds of waiting slave
ships that would take them to the New World. I
too feel as though I've walked through a "door-of-no-return."

IMPRISONMENT (A MODERN PLANTATION)

           If one knew nothing about the
geography of a town in upstate NY where one is
imprisoned, then one can readily imagine what the
afrikan slave must have felt on a southern
plantation � not knowing where to run or how to
get there. For me, getting from Attica or Clinton
Dannemora, to my hood, seemed no different than
for the afrikan on a slave plantation in Georgia
getting from there back to Afrika. Across the
country, I have been held in many jails, and my
family has had to travel thousands of miles to see
me at considerable expense.

            You know how families are received
at these places: standing in the elements to get
in; suffering the indignities of disparaging
remarks; seating arrangements; frustrating
package rules. Prison is where spiteful, petty,
contemptible, morally unkind acts find free
expression at the whim of those who have
authority over us. The keepers are vigilant and
they instinctively ferret out unguarded
self-esteem, courage, and strength. Prison is
designed to break you down, not build you up. It
casually destroys the weak and unwary (as though
they were an afterthought), and turns the
spiritually debased into beasts. What's not so
strange about this is that the spiritually
debased elicits no particular attention from the
keepers. 25-life (what does that mean to me?).

AS THE YEARS GO BY

Time, faces, and relationships change, and like
sand cascading down the funnel of an hourglass,
nothing can resist this change. One day, you look
in the mirror and see gray hair and a face that
tells you you've aged; your body tells you that
too. Some of your old friends have moved on and
new ones have come to take their place.

Your mother and father may have passed away, as
have mine, and I was unable to see them buried.
You may have contemplated numerous possible
scenarios, should you be imprisoned, but never
that; and neither did I. The years take their
toll, the people you believed in, the certainties
you once embraced might have led you to realize
that the more you know, the more you realize you
don't know. With luck, we come to understand that
humility and wisdom come with age and experience,
and that death is often merciful.

RELEASE TIME AND ITS UNCERTAINTY

In doing 25-life, you never now when your release
time will come; as it is with death, you can
never foretell the day it will knock on your
door. Yet, in both instances, you better be prepared.

MAKE TIME WORK FOR YOU (SELF-IMPROVEMENT

The old-timers in here will tell you: make time work
for you, not against you.

Education:
            I earned a dual Bachelor of Science
degree in psychology and sociology and a master's
in sociology. It was hard work and could not have
been accomplished without discipline, commitment,
and sacrifice. Through the self-help projects
I've developed on the outside while imprisoned,
e.g., Calendar, Community Gardens, I have built
remarkable relationships inside and outside these
walls. And I have managed to keep a good name
(which is all one can rightly claim as one's own
in here). Because of that, I have managed to make
it through the day, one day at a time. 25-life (what
does that mean to me?).

THE PAROLE BOARD

            Parole is discretionary, we are
told, not a right. When one's freedom is withheld
by another, be it a state institution or a
private individual, it's tantamount to slavery
and is a poignant reminder that slavery was never
abolished in the US; the 13th Amendment preserved it.

            State parole commissioners have
guidelines to aid them in their parole decision;
that decision, nevertheless, is still subjective.
A host of variables weigh in on this process,
including the kind of day a commissioner is
having, societal stereotypes, the crime that one
committed 30 years ago. As a parole candidate,
one has to be impressed by what I've accomplished
inside and on the outside; and my disciplinary is
exemplary. Yet my next Board appearance will mark
10 years beyond my minimum sentence. And I am not
alone in this experience. Because of consistent
denials, one is led to conclude that more is
involved in these parole denials than what meets
the eye. One is led to conclude that power,
politics, and economics are driving them. And
that this triumvirate serves special interests.
Yet those invested in this practice, and who
profit handsomely from it, still argue that the
mission of prisons is and always shall be about
corrections and rehabilitation. They argue that
prisons are not used as an employment agency or
as a tool of social repression. But if that were
true, then surely fewer people would be in prison today.

CONCLUSION

           This is just a tiny piece of the
picture. The point is that we remain in the grips
of an economic order and culture that's as
formidable and treacherous as the recent quake,
tsunami, and meltdown in Japan, and I wish it were not so.

            Think about it. What do you or I
produce in prison? Okay, there is the Corcraft
Industry, which generates a few million dollars a
year, yet it's a pittance compared to the bigger
picture relating to you and me. Billions are made
just by keeping us in a cell. Our very presence
is the raw product that sustains the prison
industry. It did the same during chattel slavery
for almost 400 years, and, like today, we've
benefited none from it. Today, our people spend
well over 500 billion in the US economy, and we
control practically none of it. The only
institution of any consequence we control today is
the Black church.

            Today, the sons and daughters of the
people employed to keep us here have begun to
keep watch over us and our children, who now are
finding themselves in here. We have to get out of
these places, stay out of them and keep others
out. And while still in here, it is our duty to
use this time constructively, and thus be an
asset to our communities when we get out. That
way, we turn this thing on its head, snatching
victory from the jaws of defeat, which in this
instance is what is meant by: falling in a
shithouse and coming out smelling like a rose.