[Pnews] Free Mutulu Shakur Campaign Celebrates Human Rights Day With A ‘Fête For Freedom’

[Prisoner News]

newsone.com
<https://newsone.com/4258786/free-mutulu-shakur-human-rights-day-fete-for-freedom/>
Free
Mutulu Campaign Celebrates Human Rights Day With A ‘Fête For Freedom’
Anoa Changa - December 11, 2021

[image: Mutulu Shakur]

Source: New York Daily News Archive / Getty

A push to free movement elders from prison is taking it up a notch on
International Human Rights Day. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
<https://freethelandmxgm.org/free-mutulu-now/> organized a virtual
celebration to raise awareness around the case of political prisoner
Mutulu Shakur <https://mutulushakur.com/> as a part of broader efforts to
free movement elders.

Friday’s Fête for Freedom
<https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6cfNvgPXQbWIzxEceBaqPg> brings
together a virtual audience to celebrate Shakur’s life and work and
encourages people to join the fight for his release. Initially arrested in
1986, the Intercept reported
<https://theintercept.com/2021/12/02/mutulu-shakur-prison-release-cancer/>
it is over five years since Shakur was first eligible for release.

At 71 years old, Shakur carries multiple diagnoses, including type 2
diabetes, hypertension, and multiple myeloma, the same rare cancer Colin
Powell battled
<https://newsone.com/4235714/colin-powell-multiple-myeloma-statistics-by-race/>
.

Speaking with NewsOne, Monifa Bandele of the Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement shared that aging prisoners like Shakur are having their requests
for compassionate release blocked
<https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/06/11/31-000-prisoners-sought-compassionate-release-during-covid-19-the-bureau-of-prisons-approved-36>
despite having multiple health issues in the middle of an ongoing public
health crisis. She pointed to the work of the Release Aging People In Prison
<https://rappcampaign.com/> (RAPP) campaign as one example of the broader
movement to free elderly incarcerated people.  Part of RAPP’s mission is to
“dismantle the racist policies of mass incarceration by expanding the use
of parole, compassionate release, clemency, and other forms of release in
New York State.”

Bandele also noted the recent push by Rep. Ayanna Pressley and House
Democrats push to introduce a bill that would fix the clemency
process. NPR reported
the legislation
<https://www.npr.org/2021/12/10/1062757169/house-democrats-are-introducing-a-bill-to-overhaul-the-clemency-process>,
known as the FIX Clemency Act, would create a nine-member board to review
pardon requests instead of the current system of the Justice Department’s
Office of the Pardon Attorney.

*This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. *

*Anoa Changa:* Can you explain to us how this push on behalf
of Mutulu Shakur fits within the context of Human Rights Day?

*Monifa Bandele:* One of the things that we were taught by Malcolm X is
that we are in a fight for human rights. We think about civil rights; those
are the rights that basically we are able to get access to by being
citizens of the United States. But he really stressed and his teachings
that there’s global rights that come out of international bodies. And so,
one of the things that’s recognized under international law is our
political prisoners. It recognizes that if states either incarcerate people
because of their political beliefs or even extend the incarceration of
people because of their political beliefs, that is a violation of their
human rights.

*Changa: *What is the purpose of the virtual rally, and how does it fit
into the campaign and the work you all have been doing so far?

*Bandele: * Mutulu Shakur is an elder. He comes out of our parent’s
generation. He’s been incarcerated since the early 80s. He was underground
since the late 70s. But then captured in the early 80s. And he’s sick, like
a lot of our elders who are incarcerated. And so this event and this rally
is to amplify our requests for compassionate release for Mutulu…And so, we
want to make sure that his sentence doesn’t become a death sentence.

He was not sentenced to life in prison. He was supposed to eventually get
out. But the parole board has been denying his release over and over again,
even though he’s what they call a model prisoner. He is a role model. He’s
somebody who mentors young people. He doesn’t have any disciplinary
infractions. And so this is going to be an event to highlight the facts of
his case, highlight why we believe he should be released, and really put
pressure on the Bureau of Prisons and the Biden administration to grant him
compassionate release.

The second piece is that he’s had such an exemplary prison record that he
has what people call earned good time. So there’s a system in place that
came through the passage of the First Step Act, where you’re supposed to
your prison time is decreased if you do good time called earned good time.
And so he’s calculated all of this earned good time
<https://abcnews.go.com/US/doj-finds-bureau-prisons-failed-apply-earned-time/story?id=81204260>,
which if applied, he will be released today. But it’s being blocked. So
we’re demanding that they either release him based on his earned good time
or give him compassionate release because of his health condition.

*Changa: *This isn’t the first case that we’ve seen where compassionate
release or parole of a movement elder is being blocked, particularly since
we’ve been in the pandemic. Can you talk a little more about the broader
issue of compassionate release being denied to other elders?

*Bandele: *As an organization, the Malcolm X Grassroots movement in
coalition with the Black Freedom Project was like “Free em,” release these
elders…so that they do not become sick and contract COVID. And that
basically whatever sentences, they don’t become death sentences.

That was a big fight in many states across the country. And it was amazing
how much it was blocked. And so you have to think about if mass
incarceration is supposed to be a tool of public safety, and you have these
elders who have underlying conditions, so they’re sick or no harm to
anyone. Why do the states and federal government insist on continuing to
house and incarcerate them, deny their parole, and deny their compassionate
release? There’s an economic factor. Because we know these towns and cities
have economies that fuel off of prison populations, and there’s a political
reason why this kind of continual punishment of prisoners like Mutulu
Shakur and others.

*Changa: *How can people get more involved not just for him but in some of
this other work that you’ve described as well?

*Bandele: *One of the things we’re asking people to do right away is sign
his clemency petition
<https://campaigns.organizefor.org/petitions/support-parole-and-compassionate-release-for-dr-mutulu-shakur>
to
support his compassionate release. We already have well over 50,000
signers. What people need to understand is that the Mutulu Shakur was not
only an activist around racial justice but was also a public
health activist.

He spearheaded programs at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx that helped detox
people from drug abuse that helped to organize people to get the support
services they needed if they had drug addictions. And so, he was well ahead
of his time when we talk about drug policy reform. And all the
organizations seem to now look at public health interventions to drugs as
opposed to a criminal justice intervention with the opioid crisis, but
Mutulu was talking this back in the 70s.

Soon we’ll be asking people to have their members of Congress sign a letter
to the Bureau of Prisons asking for his compassionate release so that he
could spend his final days at home with his family.

As far as other prisoners like him, follow the Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement. We’re working to free Sundiata Acoli
<https://sundiataacolifc.org/>; you can get information on Mumia Abu Jamal.
There are so many former Black Panthers and members of the Republic of New
Africa who are still in prison. And even though we know COINTELPRO targeted
them, we know COINTELPRO assassinated them, as people saw with the Fred
Hampton movie “Judas and the Black Messiah,” like this is what was done to
our parents. And in some of them, the target was to criminalize them, and
they’re still in prison. Mumia sat on death row for decades. But it was
because of the will of the people that he wasn’t executed back in 1995. So
we have power.

*Changa:*  What else should people understand about freeing Mutulu and
other political prisoners?

*Bandele: *This really connects to the larger conversation that we’re
having around abolition. So some people say, ‘Oh, you fighting just for
these dozen prisoners?’ It’s like, ‘No,’ this is part and parcel of a
larger understanding that prisons are a tool of political repression. And
so we’re highlighting this showing you there’s a political prisoner, but
also that this is a system that needs to be done away with.

And so we have an amazing federal bill that Cory Bush called the people’s
response act
<https://newsone.com/4168889/rep-cori-bush-the-peoples-response-act/>,
where she’s like ‘Okay, you want to talk about community safety? I’m a
nurse. I know what makes communities safe is public health. And I want to
establish a grant program that will fund states and cities to implement
first responders that are medics that are nurses.’ That’s a lot of times
what people need when they pick up and call 911.

And it also links back to the work that Mutulu was doing. He was like; it’s
a public health crisis. You look at violence. You don’t meet it with
violence and militarization. That’s what happens in our community. You go
in with care; you go in with public health. You dig to get to the root
cause, and you cure it. So that’s something I really want people to
understand about Mutulu Shakur, why we do this work and how it ties to the
larger movement for Black lives.
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