[News] Marilyn Buck: February letter & U.S. Prison State

[News at freedomarchives.org]

February 2004

Greetings,

It has been quite some time since I have written much of a letter. Last 
year was not a particularly good year, especially given the state of 
imperialism's march around the world. I spent half a year reading and 
studying "modernism" (the 20th century as the flowering of that). Its 
hopes, aspirations, and delusions have accumulated to this point. Things 
became their opposites. Deformed relationships between colonizer nations 
and colonized nations did not cease, nor did the devastation within former 
colonies. Technology seems to be designed for war and security first; 
consumption follows.

The government definitely has not rejoiced at campaigns to free political 
prisoners. New York state is in the forefront of vituperative hysteria 
directed at comrades who have been buried for 20 years and more. Some days 
it is hard for me to grasp the extent of the cruelty and vengeance that 
drives the repressive apparatus, even though I observe it every day on the 
local level and on the global.

Recently, a Social Justice journal (vol. 30, # 2) was released. Its theme 
is the Prison Intellectuals conference held at Brown University in 2002 
(spring), and is edited by Joy James. It is available on-line at 
SocialJust at aol.com or perhaps in bookstores. Included are articles from 
folks you likely know: Soffiyah Elijah, Laura Whitehorn, Claude Marks, Rob 
McBride, SafiyahBukhari and my "Incommunicado" poem from 9-11. Also 
included is a thought-provoking article by Frank Wilderson "The Prison 
Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal". While it is a little difficult to 
get through because of its academic language, I thought it very worth 
considering as a furtherance of analysis of this system. (I wrote to Frank 
about the academese; his is not the only article to suffer from that 
distracting condition, but his I made a great effort to to get through in 
order to understand his points.)

Once again the address to which an funds must be sent has changed. Nothing 
gets easier here in this prison world. The GA address will not work after 
end of February. Until then if you send me, or other fed prisoners at least 
in this part of the country $, please send to:

BOP - prisoner's name & Number: Marilyn Buck 00482-285 P.O. Box 474701 Des 
Moines, IA 50947 - 0001

Last notes: I, through my attorneys, Soffiyah Elijah and Susan Jordan, 
filed my appeal to the parole decision - the 15 year set-off. I do not 
expect an answer till some time in March. I am not rosy about the response. 
Not in this climate, and not given what has happened to most of the other 
political prisoners in Federal prisons, especially my own comrades.

I am happy to learn that Susan Rosenberg will be honored at Sparks Fly this 
Year, with a special appearance by Lynn Stewart. Such good sisters. Support 
them and Sparks Fly.
(February 28th, Mission Cultural center in San Francisco)

 From Monthly Review (<http://www.monthlyreview.org>www.monthlyreview.org), 
February 2004, Volume 55 — Number 9

The U.S. Prison State
by Marilyn Buck

Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, editors Prison Nation: The Warehousing of 
America’s Poor (New York: Routledge, 2003), 256 pages, cloth $80.00, paper 
$19.95.

I sit in the day room/lobby waiting to be released for lunch. I read a 
novel in which one character, a Pole, comments to another that the Germans 
consider Poles to be untermenschen, subhuman. I look at the women around 
me: Latinas arguing among themselves in Spanish; a black woman making 
signals to someone I don’t see; two white women—one of whom is stringing 
beads—are murmuring together. Two of these women are here because they are 
undocumented workers; three are incarcerated for economic offenses; the 
other is falsely convicted; all of us are caught inside the nightmare of an 
oppressive state and an expanding empire. Instead of storm trooper boots 
and brown shirts, those who command wear Tony Lamas cowboy boots, expensive 
suits, and ties—men who see in the U.S. prison establishment ways to both 
intensify control of the population and squeeze more profits out of 
late-stage capitalism.

Prison has always been the final gate in the repressive apparatus of a 
state. It serves the purpose of social and political control, although it 
manifests itself differently in different nation-states and in different 
political periods. Nevertheless, the prisoner is, with few exceptions, 
always a scapegoat and considered a deviant. Prison is not only a class 
weapon; it is also an instrument to control “alien” populations. In the 
United States, these “alien” populations are formerly colonized 
peoples—former slaves, Native Americans, Latin Americans, Asians, and 
Pacific Islanders—and they have all too often been considered the internal 
enemy. They are the people most needing control and are therefore the 
majority of those locked down in U.S. prisons.

The United States is the world’s primary example of a country that deals 
with its social, economic, and cultural problems by incarceration. But this 
is its history. Prisons are the logical outcome of the country’s foundation 
on the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and the 
“manifest destiny” of imperial settlerism—from sea to shining sea.

Prison Nation is a recently-released anthology of essays on both the state 
of U.S. prisons and the U.S. prison state. Most of the essays were written 
in the new century. One more century of American prisoners. The writers are 
prisoners, journalists, academics, and activists. Unfortunately, none of 
the writers are women prisoners or ex-prisoners.

Readers are probably familiar with abominable prison conditions—rape, 
torture, restraint chairs, gladiator fights—from newspaper and magazine 
accounts. Prison and human rights activists might even have read some of 
the book’s essays. But what marks this collection as a whole is the 
first-rate discussion of these brutal circumstances and how these are the 
logical and normative result of incarceration itself.

The essays in sections 5, “Malign Neglect: Prison Medicine,” and 6, “Rape, 
Racism, and Repression,” give ample evidence of the inhumanity and cruelty 
of the system: Death sentences result from nonexistent or malpracticed 
medical care. The mentally ill are warehoused and even healthy prisoners 
tend to fall prey to mental illness because of the insane and brutal 
conditions of prison’s bedlam (see “The New Bedlam” by Willie Wisely). 
Prisoner rape—both rape by guards mainly of female prisoners, and by 
predatory male prisoners of other male prisoners—is frequently given free 
reign by guards.

There are other essays which detail the more subtle elements of 
dehumanization, ones that those who have not experienced prison either as a 
prisoner or as a family member or friend of a prisoner might not ever 
consider—such as a prisoner being warehoused far from home and family. Nell 
Bernstein discusses the far-reaching repercussions of long distance 
visiting and the need of children for their parents in two essays: “Swept 
Away,” and “Relocation Blues.”

The psychological trauma and cruelty generated inside the prison system 
filters through into everything outside of it, deforming and undermining 
the whole of civil society. Prison society begins to serve as a model for 
other organizations. In his essay “Capital Crimes,” George Winslow 
concludes, “Corporate power currently allows companies to create serious 
social problems by legal and illegal means.”

The U.S. prison state has spread its tentacles into communities and 
classes, which are manipulated both by the law and the lure of economic 
development. In “An American Seduction,” Joelle Fraser draws a portrait of 
a prison town in need of more inhabitants and more work. Susanville, 
California expected economic well-being; what it got was a supermax prison, 
greater pressure on its social infrastructure, and a culture of violence 
unexpected even among its many ranchers, hunters, and fishers. Even the 
night has been affected. The author’s brother describes returning home to a 
brightly lit prison, which has destroyed the darkness of the countryside 
night. “It looked futuristic, unnatural, something out of a science fiction 
movie. Like some giant alien mother ship had landed.”

The central theme of Prison Nation is the economic dynamic and roles of 
prisons in U.S. capitalism, that is, the prison-industrial complex. This 
anthology does an excellent job of analyzing and describing how the 
prison-industrial complex works as an integral part of U.S. capitalism by 
generating large profits for corporations. Essays and case studies detail 
how the incorporation of prisons into the system of capital accumulation 
was accomplished, both through changes in the criminal code and business 
law and the manipulation of public perceptions and fears. In “The Politics 
of Prison Labor,” Gordon Lafer explains the interplay of political 
expediency, taxes, and budgets: “When the economy goes into a recession, 
the supply of decently paid jobs will shrink...some numbers of [the 
laid-off and fired] will engage in nonviolent crimes...[and end up 
incarcerated]....It is important to note that this cycle is not the result 
of a conscious conspiracy among public officials...it is, rather, the 
natural result of each party pursuing its own rational interests under 
current conditions.” (Italics in original.)

While the articles that explain how capital and the law work to create this 
expanding prison nation, there are few strategies suggested to organize to 
stop the abuses, to hold the socially-sanctioned criminals accountable, and 
to challenge more fundamentally the prison-industrial complex. A notable 
exception is detailed in “Campus Activism Defeats Multinational’s 
Profiteering” by Kevin Pranis. This is a report on campus activism in 
opposition to a foreign multinational that supplies both universities and 
prisons—Sodexho Alliance, which “...in 1994, entered into strategic 
alliance with the world’s largest prison company, Corrections Corporation 
of America [CCA].” The students forced Sodexho to get rid of its large 
stock interest in CCA. This essay is also valuable in showing the breadth 
of industrial capital’s involvement in prisons for profit. From razor 
blades to razor wire, some corporation is profiting from both public and 
private prisons.

In the essays on rape, the organization Stop Prisoner Rape is mentioned as 
a source of information on prisoner rape, but there is no article about its 
history and struggles inside the prisons, which have led to some victories. 
Its strategic view and social practice would have been valuable to prison 
activists.

The inclusion of more activist essays would have taken this anthology 
forward to stimulate further creativity and strategy in a movement to 
confront corporate/military/state power. It is not enough to shake our 
heads at a capitalism which has now shed all but a few shreds of its 
democratic facade. This struggle continues to be critically important as 
the United States expands its police state and concentration camp empire 
from Pelican Bay and Florence to the Immigration and Naturalization Service 
(INS) to the detention camps at Guantanamo—the military supermax 
concentration camp.

Mark Dow’s essay, “Secrecy, Power, Indefinite Detention,” on the detention 
and treatment of immigrants, illuminates the role of incarceration as part 
of foreign and domestic social control policies. In 2002, 115,000 
immigrants were deported. Currently, 21,000 immigrants are being detained. 
Convicted legal residents, even if they have no homeland, are being 
deported to other countries, or they remain in long-term detention, with 
little hope of release.

Security and intimidation are the sidearms of an immigration policy that 
leads to exploitation of both workers and undocumented workers. This is a 
two-pronged attack: one on the immigrant, both those who are legal and 
those who are undocumented, and another on the U.S.-born black, Native 
American, Latino, and Asian and Pacific Islander populations. Both of these 
attacks are based primarily on skin color.

Noam Chomsky, in “Drug Policy as Social Control,” observes that in the 
typical third world society, where there is a great disparity between the 
wealthy few and the impoverished many, the solution is “to get rid of the 
superfluous people, and...to control those who are suffering.” He posits 
that the drug war is the “U.S. counterpart to ‘social cleansing’” because a 
so-called democracy has to rely more on techniques of social control than 
straightforward murder and genocide. This noted, what this anthology lacks 
is sufficient analysis of the historic role of prisons as an integral part 
of imperialism and white supremacy.

Several articles discuss racism. The disproportionate number of black men 
in prison is noted, but overall national and colonial status is diffused 
into “the poor.” There is little analysis of why there is such a racial 
disproportionality. Mumia Abu Jamal, the noted journalist and political 
prisoner long held on death row, states in one of his two essays, “Anatomy 
of a Whitewash,” “if the status quo is an oppressive one, with white 
supremacy as the guiding principle, to preserve such a regime is wrong 
indeed.” He also discusses the role of white supremacy. And, in an 
excellent article, “Color Bind: Prisons and the New American Racism,” Paul 
Street explores the role of incarceration in the suppression and 
destruction of the black community. He notes that prison becomes, according 
to Bureau of Justice Statistics Director Jan Chaiken, “almost a normative 
life experience” in black urban communities. He delineates some of the ways 
in which the imprisonment of an increasingly large part of black 
communities is destroying the ability of those communities to develop. The 
black community is used to generating economic activity that does not 
benefit but rather injures the community through loss of potential earnings 
and savings. Even more important is the loss of human and social capital 
and therefore social development.

Finally, Street points out that “mass incarceration is hardly an inevitable 
product of capitalism.” In Europe mass incarceration is not part of the 
capitalist system. In the United States, however, it is an integral part of 
capitalist and imperialist development. The Trail of Tears and the Middle 
Passage are journeys to the first of the concentration camps—Indian 
reservations and plantations—and the beginnings of the U.S. strategy to 
work the captured and colonized to death.

The absence of analysis about this role of the prison nation is 
conspicuous, precisely because of the detailed description and analysis of 
the prison nation as a class issue. However, to talk about class without 
understanding that white supremacy is one of the ideological bases of 
imperialism and therefore informs all of its strategies, domestic and 
international, leaves one less clear about the historical role of the 
descendants of slaves, Native Americans, colonized Mexicans, and imported 
Asians as the backbone of the “American” working class. This leads to 
repeating the past. It would be wise to heed W. E. B. Du Bois when he 
pointed out in Black Reconstruction that the lack of support for black 
slave workers by the white working class set back the international class 
struggle a hundred years—or more, as we now witness.

Ultimately, there is no “humane” way to detain, incarcerate, or isolate the 
criminalized elements of a society. It is likely that even in a more ideal 
society, prisons will still tend toward dehumanization and degradation. 
That is the nature of institutions where human beings are held 
involuntarily, whether it be a boarding or military school, a mental 
hospital, or a prison.

George Winslow concludes that “[u]ntil there is a political movement to 
address these problems by creating a more just society, there is little 
hope of achieving justice in our prisons and courts.” I would add that any 
struggle to change the society must include changing the nature and 
purpose, if not dismantling, the repressive apparatus and the prison system 
that helps to define it. Mumia Abu Jamal cites Thoreau in his attack on 
slavery, Civil Disobedience, “the law will never make men free; it is men 
who have got to make the law free”; and, says Mumia, “...the law protects 
white class interests above all else.”

The women I see in the day room fall asleep each night dreaming of more 
effective or semi-miraculous paths to their freedom—a way home to their 
children and families. Each of us, as well as our families, friends, and 
communities, are caught up in both a personal and social tragedy—we all pay 
a price for the absence of prisoners from the world. If all who know and 
love even one prisoner, or who simply detest the dehumanization, 
degradation, and racism of the U.S. prison apparatus, were to join in some 
facet of the struggle to bring this insane system under control and, 
perhaps, to change it, even abolish it, change could occur. Millions of 
people across the United States are connected to prisoners and former 
prisoners. They have the power to act in the struggle to overturn the 
prison nation.

Marilyn Buck is a political prisoner serving an eighty-year sentence. She 
may be contacted at: Marilyn Buck, #00482-285, FCI Dublin Unit B, 5701 8th 
St. Camp Parks, Dublin, CA 94568.


The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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