U.S. Capitalism Puts Oppressed Nations Behind Bars

By Monica Moorehead
Presented by John Catalinotto
Workers’ World Party, U.S.A.

Contribution to the International Communist Seminar
"Imperialism, Fascisation and Fascism"

People around the world who are politically aware know that racism is a key component of U.S. capitalism and has been since the ruling class of this country grew rich exploiting enslaved Africans and pillaging the land of the Indigenous peoples.

U.S. Capitalism Puts Oppressed Nations Behind Bars

On Nov. 14, 1998, a conference on "Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty" was held in Illinois. The conference was a stunning affirmation that the so-called justice system in the United States is completely awry.

Twenty-eight women and men of all nationalities testified. They all had been on death row in different parts of the country. They came together to tell their horror stories.

Each had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. Only through the pressure of volunteers, family members and independent research outside the justice system were they able to win their freedom.

Most of their cases had been fought before President Clinton signed the 1996 Effective Death Penalty Act. This new law makes overturning death sentences even harder. Under it, most of those at the conference might have already been executed.

On Feb. 4, 1999, four plainclothes cop in the borough of the Bronx in New York attacked a young African immigrant in the vestibule of his home. They fired 41 shots. Nineteen hit Amidou Diallo of Guinea, killing him instantly. Diallo was unarmed, completely innocent of any crime, and had only a wallet in his pants.

The cops said they thought his wallet was a gun. On Feb. 25, 2000, all four cops were all acquitted of any crime.

In February 2000, the prison population in the United States--which was under 300,000 in the early 1970s--reached 2 million inmates. This makes the U.S. the greatest prison house on the planet.

The U.S. establishment has expanded the repressive state apparatus over the past few decades in three main areas--capital punishment, police aggressiveness, and by extablishing what has been called the "prison-industrial complex."

This growing repression has aroused resistance. Thousands of people defied police to take the streets in New York to protest the Diallo verdict. Hundreds more in Washington and San Francisco took civil disobedience arrests to demand a new trial for death-row inmate and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Meanwhile, a movement was gaining momentum around the country to declare a moratorium on executions.

The expansion of police powers can't be separated from the ruling-class ideology of racism. Right-wing politicians made "law and order" a major electoral issue, with being "tough on crime" meaning virtually the same as being hard on the Black community.

While the pressure has been from the right-wing racists, both Republican and Democratic administrations have approved this increased repression. These officials took funds from education and other social benefits and transferred it to the police and the prisons. Both far right and centrist capitalist politicians and even those considered political liberals have encouraged this development.

The U.S. ruling class of billionaires and bankers has given full backing to the increase in prisoners. It has become the accepted plan for controlling the masses of the people at a time when the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider in this country and in the world. It is in place in anticipation of wider revolt when the current capitalist expansion gives way to a collapse.

The U.S. rulers grew rich by exploiting enslaved labor and pillaging Native land. Racism was the ideology used in an attempt to justify these thefts. It is thus no surprise that the communities of color–African American, Latino, Native and Asian–bear the brunt of the vicious police attacks and the weight of the prison walls.

Repression in the U.S. seems to have little in common with that of classical fascism. There is no devastating economic crisis. There are no extralegal Nazi storm troopers and even the Ku Klux Klan--the U.S. equivalent of the Nazi gangs--seems to play a minor role today. Instead, police and courts carry out the repression under the cover of bourgeois legality.

But in communities of color the police operate like a fascist gang. They are the occupying army of an internal colony. And the prisons are concentration camps for the poor and oppressed.

Bourgeois democracy is but a form of capitalist rule. After all is said and done, capitalist democracy serves the rich and the super-rich. The explosion of the prison-industrial complex exposes the utter bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy and the deepening repression that it heaps upon the poor, especially people of color. The facts speak for themselves.

The death penalty

At the end of February 2000, two Black Texas death row inmates, Ponchai Kamau Wilkerson and Howard Guidry, took a guard hostage for 13 hours. They were justified in their actions. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain by carrying out this heroic act.

Kamau is an articulate 28-year-old man who was secretary of defense of Panthers United for Revolutionary Education, an organization of Texas death-row prisoners who studied Marxism and revolution.

What were the main demands of these two men? First to have an independent investigation into inhumane living conditions on death row. The other was for Texas Gov. George W. Bush to issue a moratorium on executions in Texas.

Despite mobilizations across the country and in Texas itself, and while courageously fighting tooth and nail to the last minute, Ponchai Kamau Wilkerson was executed on March 14.

There are 3,600 people awaiting execution in the United States. The state of Texas is second only to California with over 460 people on death row, but is executing more people at a faster rate, sometimes three or four a week. Bush has presided over 123 executions in six years, earning him the nickname "Governor Death."

In 1972, following five years without executions, the Supreme Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional. This victory followed the upsurge of the Civil Rights movement. But in 1977, the high court reinstated the death penalty, despite arguments that it was not only "cruel and unusual punishment" but was racially biased.

At first, the rate of executions was slow. The first inmate executed even said publicly that he wanted to die. But then the executions gathered momentum until in the late 1990s about 100 a year were being officially murdered.

In June 1998, the Death Penalty Information Center published a study on the racist character of the death penalty. A white person charged with murder is more likely to get life in prison than the death penalty. The DPIC states: "Race is more likely to affect death sentencing than smoking affects the likelihood of dying from heart disease."

The report revealed that in Philadelphia, for example, the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times higher if the defendant is Black. In courtrooms around the country, contemptible racial slurs abound and go unchallenged. Many racist remarks are made in front of juries by judges and lawyers, including by the defendants' lawyers.

One DPIC illustration: "When a prosecutor refers to a Hispanic defendant as a `chili-eating bastard,' as happened in a Colorado death penalty case, it sets a tone of acceptance of racial prejudice for the entire trial." Acts like the following are common: A prosecutor in Alabama said that he barred several potential jurors because they were affiliated with a predominantly Black university. A reviewing court considered this "race neutral."

In Philadelphia, Assistant District Attorney Jack McMahon used a training video for new prosecutors instructing them on how to exclude Black jurors. In 16 of McMahon's cases, Black jurors were struck from the jury four times as often as others. McMahon has prosecuted 36 murder cases. Some of those defendants are on death row today.

The race of the murder victim is a determinant of the death penalty. Black people and Latinos are more likely to go to death row if accused of killing whites. In Kentucky, for example, 100 percent of the inmates in 1996 were on death row for allegedly murdering white victims. None was there for the murder of a Black victim.

According to the DPIC, in the entire history of the United States only 38 whites have been executed for murdering Black people.

Some groups are for abolition of capital punishment because of the barbarity of the practice. Some give priority to combating its racist bias. For communists, it is also a class issue in a capitalist country like the United States.

The capitalists uphold the death penalty because they will use anything at their disposal to intimidate the working class. Their aim is to maintain rule, and the death penalty serves their aim by deepening and broadening repression. As long as the death penalty is a tool of the capitalist class against the workers, the working-class movement must oppose it.

After years of struggle by the families, friends and supporters of death-row prisoners to abolish the inhuman and racist system of executions, huge cracks have appeared in what was a ruling-class united front for the death penalty. A moratorium on executions issued by Illinois Gov. George Ryan on Jan. 31, 2000, has given renewed hope to the national campaign to end the death penalty.

The governor was forced to take the action after a 13th death-row prisoner was exonerated. Twelve people have been executed in the state since 1990. Ryan, who earlier championed the death penalty, now says he can no longer defend the system. Following his decision, activist groups have moved other legislatures to consider declaring a moratorium in their states.

This is a positive development revolutionaries and Marxists welcome. Right now, the struggle to win a moratorium on executions appears to be taking place within the electoral arena. The struggle to win a moratorium to temporarily put a halt to the death machine should become a grassroots issue. But even if this struggle has to begin from the top, it does provide activists with an opening for struggle.

One reason for this growing debate is the growing concern among capitalist politicians and think tanks over the U.S. image. This country has the most people in prison and an alarming rate of poor people, especially people of color, being executed.

Police brutality, killer cops

Police brutality is an institution that is as widespread and deeply rooted in capitalist society as exploitation itself. Indeed, exploitation cannot be maintained without police. And wherever there are police there is racism and brutality.

When cases such as those of Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima or Rodney King break into the headlines because police have been caught in the act red-handed, the capitalist establishment feigns outrage and shock. But this is strictly for the benefit of the public.

Year after year, the bosses dish out hefty salaries, large budgets and high honors to police chiefs and commanders across the country. These chiefs and commanders in turn administer and cover up for the armies of cops in every municipality and township, large and small, that brutalize the oppressed peoples and the working class on a daily basis.

A recent Human Rights Watch report, "Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States," focused on police brutality in a sample of 14 cities. This relatively modest study compiled enough information on police brutality to lead to massive criminal prosecutions of cops at all levels. That is, it would have if the establishment had the least interest in abolishing police brutality instead of covering it up.

For example, the U.S. government, always on the lookout for so-called "human rights violations" by governments that Washington is trying to undermine or overthrow, could have started the search in any city in the U.S. A look at a few of the biggest cities involved gives the picture.

In Chicago 65 incidents of police torture were documented between the years 1972 and 1991. They included the use of electric shock applied to suspects' genitals and other parts of their bodies, burning a suspect on a hot radiator, and psychological torture techniques by and under the supervision of a Commander Jon Bunge. No one was ever prosecuted.

Some of the cops who took part in the torture were retired with full benefits. Another was recommended for valor by the mayor and promoted to captain from lieutenant.

In 1996 there were 3,000 complaints against the Chicago police, most by Black and Latino residents, for brutality, racist treatment and abuse of authority. In only six cases did the authorities even consider dismissing the cops. And then no one was dismissed.

In Los Angeles, according to HRW, "the videotaped beating of Rodney King exemplified so much that was (and in some cases still is) wrong with the LAPD.... Many of the components of the King incident are common to less-publicized abuse cases. There was the obvious race factor. ... The beating followed a vehicle pursuit, and once stopped, the defendant was not considered compliant enough--a common scenario in police beatings. When the man who videotaped the beating and King's brother ... attempted to report the incident, they were turned away or ignored. Inaccurate reports were filed by the police.

"Three out of the four officers eventually indicted ... had been named in prior complaints.... In fact, it is likely that, if this incident had not been videotaped and broadcast widely, any complaint about the beating would not have been sustained, since the sustained rate for complaints ... was about 2 percent."

According to the HRW report, Black people and Latinos are still routinely "proned out"–that is, made to lie face down with their arms and legs spread--just for walking the streets or driving in their vehicles. The vicious K-9 dogs trained to bite are still used to terrorize people. Many of the killer cops identified by the Christopher Commission after the Los Angeles rebellion are not only still on the force, but two have shot and killed people since. Chief Parks ignored the commission’s mild recommendations.

In New York City in 1992, Mayor David Dinkins appointed the Mollen Commission to investigate corruption in the NYPD after cops in the 30th, 9th, 46th, 75th and 73rd precincts were caught selling drugs and beating people to keep them from talking.

"What emerged," wrote the HRW report, "was a picture of how everyday brutality corrupted relations among police officers and city residents. The Mollen Commission heard from officers who admitted pouring ammonia on the face of a detainee ... from another who threw garbage and boiling water on someone hiding in a dumbwaiter shaft. Another ... doctored an `escape rope' used by drug dealers so they would plunge to the ground ... and the same group also raided a brothel while in uniform ... and terrorized and raped the women there. Mollen found `Brutality ... sometimes serves as a rite of passage to other forms of corruption and misconduct.'"

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, like Chief Parks in L.A., disregarded the mild measures of oversight recommended by the Mollen Commission. These recommendations are never mandatory, legally binding, but are basically window dressing.

Since then in New York, Abner Louima has been tortured, Amadou Diallo was shot down in a hail of 41 bullets, and Anthony Baez was choked to death. These are just the most notorious of the cops' crimes.

"Philadelphia's police," reported HRW, "are grappling with the latest of the corruption scandals that have earned them one of the worst reputations of big city police departments in the United States. ...[There is] an undisturbed culture of impunity that surfaces and is renewed with each successive scandal, as each new generation of police officers is taught through example that their leadership accepts corruption and excessive force.

"As a result, police officers ... have unlawfully injured and killed citizens, the city has paid enormous sums in settlements and awards ... and many minority communities are distrustful of police officers, who too often act like criminals. The shortcomings of the department are reinforced by a police union that tirelessly defends officers accused of human rights violations."

This is the police force that made the case against Mumia Abu-Jamal and made sure no one would testify in his behalf at his trial.

The HRW report had similar reports about "liberal" San Francisco and smaller cities like New Orleans, Minneapolis, Providence, Rhode Island, and Portland, Oregon and others. It leaves out some of the even more notorious police departments in the South and Southwest, such as Houston, Phoenix, Dallas or Birmingham.

It leaves out Louisville, Ky., where the police in March 2000 attempted a fascist-like revolt against a mayor who fired the police chief.

But the picture painted is sufficiently clear to issue an indictment against the entire police establishment, the politicians who appoint them and cover up for them, and the ruling class that promotes the system of police terror against the population.

It is absolutely naïve to regard this virtually universal existence of police brutality as something "out of control," something that has escaped the supervision of the authorities, a result of poor administration.

The art of administration has been brought to its highest pinnacle of development by U.S. capitalism. Wall Street and the Fortune 500 can administer global empires that stagger the imagination. They can summon armies of efficiency experts at a moment's notice when it comes to downsizing the workforce or merging giant monopolies.

If the ruling class were so inclined, it could wipe out police brutality. These bosses and bankers, the millionaires and billionaires control the arteries of political and economic life, the big-business parties and the state and local governments throughout the country. But the very idea they would put a stop to the intimidation and terror practiced against the workers and the oppressed is like expecting them to voluntarily cut off their right hand.

The cops are there to make sure that during this great Wall Street boom there is no rebellion by the masses of people. These workers’ wages are getting relatively lower, their working hours are getting longer, and they are forced to give up social services like health care, welfare, childcare, education and housing to serve the balanced budget of the bond holders, the military-industrial complex and the Pentagon.

The cops are there to feed the prison-industrial complex with Black and Latino youth who can't get jobs on the outside but are forced to work at slave wages on the inside.

It is impossible to regard the phenomenon of police brutality as anything other than a systematic policy of the ruling class to intimidate by force and violence the millions of oppressed people, both in and out of the work force.

As such, it must be opposed by an equally systematic organization of the masses into a powerful force that can defend itself against the terror. Commissions, review boards, government investigations of every kind always leave the same parasitic and brutal structure intact after all the publicity is over. The communities, the unions, the movement are still left to face the cops.

The working class and community organizations must ultimately organize to defend themselves against these cowardly hired thugs of capitalism.

The prison-industrial complex

The United States has only 5 percent of the world's population but has 25 percent of the world's incarcerated. That amounts to 2 million people. This number includes 130,000 in federal prisons, about 1.2 million in state prisons and almost 700,000 in city and county jails, where people are held for short terms or are awaiting trial.

In Texas alone, since George W. Bush became governor in 1994, the prison population increased from 41,000 to 150,000. These convictions came about mainly for drug possession. The irony is that it’s an open secret that Bush himself is a former drug user.

Sixty percent of those in federal prisons are drug offenders with no history of committing violent acts. While 60 percent to 80 percent of all prisoners have a substance addiction, only one out of ten inmates receive any kind of drug treatment in prison. In addition, 70 percent of the prisoners in the U.S. are functionally illiterate.

In a July 1999 report, the Justice Department estimated that some 16 percent of prisoners are mentally ill. This makes over 300,000 inmates of the country's federal and state prisons and local jails who either had a history of mental disease or had stayed overnight in mental hospitals at some time in their lives. An additional 547,800 mentally ill people are on probation in the community. So the so-called criminal-justice system has major responsibility in providing--or in criminally neglecting to provide--mental-health care for close to a million people.

The Justice Policy Institute report entitled "The Punishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates of the Millennium" includes the latest numbers and trends in incarceration from the U.S. Justice Department. The JPI report illustrates how the U.S. prison population grew at a faster rate during the 1990s than during any other previous decade. By the end of the year 2000, there will be 2.07 million people behind bars.

Looking now at subgroups, a federal study done by the General Accounting Office reports that there were twice as many women incarcerated during the 1990s as the decade before. This indicates an even faster growth than for the male prison population. Most of these women are serving time for what are called nonviolent drug crimes.

These women prisoners suffer a higher rate of HIV infection and mental illness than imprisoned men. Eighty-four percent of female federal inmates and 60 percent of female state inmates are mothers. Because of systematic racism, Black women are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than white women. Latinas have a higher rate of incarceration as well, compared to the overall population. And more women prisoners are courageously coming forward to report that they are victims of sexual abuse and rape at the hands of male guards.

Prisons have little to do with "crime prevention" and everything to do with repression and exploitation. The prison-industrial complex is an integral component of the globalization phenomenon of raking in super profits for Wall Street investors during this post Soviet, imperialist expansion era.

This current boom comes about mainly with the privatization of prisons and the youth, primarily African American and Latino, are the main targets. For instance, since 1991, while the rate of violent acts has decreased by 20 percent, the number of people in prison has increased by 50 percent. According to the U.S. Department of Justice 1997 statistics, "violent juvenile crime" has declined by 9.3 percent but the population of youthful juveniles in privately operated facilities has increased more than 10 percent.

Even as prisons are privatized, the U.S. government is spending more money on jails than ever before. In 1996 Washington spent more money on prison construction than on university construction--almost a billion dollars. This was the same year that President Bill Clinton signed away welfare.

A study called "The Color of Justice" substantiated that within the California juvenile system youths of color are twice as likely as white youths to be tried under the same rules as adults, which subjects them to harsher sentences.

California has one of the biggest prison systems in the world, with more people incarcerated than Belgium, France, Great Britain, Germany and Japan combined. The number of prisoners has grown from 19,600 in 1977 to over 160,000 at the end of 1998. California is also notorious for its law that sentences those convicted three times for a felony–that is, for a higher level crime--to an automatic life sentence with no hope of parole--the "three-strikes-and-out" law.

Study co-author Dan Macallister wrote: "Discrimination against kids of color accumulates at every stage of the justice system and skyrockets when juveniles are tried as adults. California has a double standard: throw kids of color behind bars, but rehabilitate white kids who commit comparable crimes." Los Angeles County produces 40 percent of the juvenile-court cases that make it to the adult courts. The study showed that of the 24,000 young people arrested there in 1996, 56 percent were Latino, 25 percent were Black, 12 percent white and 6 percent Asian.

Of the 561 cases that made it to adult court, 59 percent were Latino, 30 percent Black, 6 percent Asian and 5 percent white. Compared to whites, Black youths were 18.4 times more likely to be convicted, Latino youths were 7.3 times more likely, and Asian youths were 4.5 times more likely to be jailed. The study pointed out that in Texas, Black and Latino youths make up just one-half of the state's youth population but they make up 80 percent of imprisoned youths--and 100 percent of juveniles housed in adult jails.

The disproportion is even more astounding considering there are equivalent drug-abuse problems in white communities and communities of color. And so much of the jailing is drug related.

Just from these statistics alone, we can see the role that racist repression plays in the social composition of who is incarcerated. But this still remains a political and social symptom of this crisis. It also has an economic basis that drives it forward.

The bottom line is this: under capitalism, investors and bankers will put their money into any sector of the economy, no matter how anti-human it may be, in order to maximize profits. This is not a matter of policy but is based on the independent laws of capitalist development that drive big business to gravitate to wherever the rate of profit is the highest.

The cost of prison construction has averaged annually for the past decade a staggering $7 billion a year. The U.S. government has spent more money on prisons than building universities. It costs $35 billion dollars annually for incarceration. That figure is expected to rise to $41 billion by the end of 2000. If one counts all prison labor as working for the same firm, the prison industry is the second largest employer in the country with 523,000 employees, second only to General Motors.

Eighteen private firms located on Wall Street are responsible for the upkeep of local jails, private prisons and immigration detention jails. The list includes American Express, General Electric, Goldman, Sachs and Company, Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney. Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch alone provide between $2-3 billion dollars worth of prison bonds every year.

World Research Groups, a New York based investment firm summed up the corporate takeover of correctional facilities this way, "while arrests and convictions are steadily on the rise, profits are to be made-profits from crime. Get in on the ground floor of this booming industry now."

Prison slave labor

Profits arise not just from prison construction or management, but also from prison labor. Between 1980 and 1994 the value of goods prisoners produced rose from $392 million to $1.1 billion. The Corrections Corporations of America, the country's largest private-prison conglomerate, is a main factor. CCA operates 46 penal institutions in 11 states including seven juvenile facilities. Its stock value climbed from $8 a share in 1992 to $30 a share in 1997. One investment firm called CCA stock, "the theme stock of the 90s."

Transnational corporations no longer have to shut down factories here and go abroad to set up sweatshop conditions--not with super-cheap labor locked up right there in the next state. "Competitive prison labor" means a CCA prison in Tennessee can pay prisoners a maximum "wage" of 50 cents an hour.

In Ohio, prisoners make car parts for Honda for $2 an hour while the average wage for a unionized worker at Honda is $20 to $30 an hour. In Oregon, prisoners slave for $3 a day no matter what the industry, and this slavery has been "legalized." Trans World Airlines can pay prisoners $5 an hour to book reservations by phone--one-third of what it pays to its non-inmate workers.

The multi-billion-dollar prison industry has now expanded to manufacture clothes, car parts, computer components, shoes, golf balls, furniture and soap, and also includes telemarketing, data entry and print shop operations. Starbucks, Microsoft, Victoria's Secret, Best Westin and Boeing are examples of U.S. corporations that super-exploit prison labor. It was especially gratifying to see the youth in Seattle during the World Trade Organization meeting trashing Starbucks. Starbuck’s prison workers can't even afford to buy their coffee.

Wall Street is not alone in terms of making super profits off of prison labor. There is the Federal Prison Industries, Inc., a unit of the Justice Department, which "employs" 21,000 inmates in federal prisons. This corporation pays inmates anywhere between 23 cents to $1.15 an hour. Last year, FPI reported $540 million dollars in sales to its only customer--federal agencies. This captive labor force manufactures electronic components, furniture and clothing.

Union jobs threatened

A captive work force can make super-profits for local, state and national governments--and slave labor can be pitted against other workers with better paying jobs.

There is growing concern, especially among labor unions, that FPI will become more and more privatized. In fact, the FPI board of directors has proposed that it expand its services and products to the private sector. Shouldn't the unions make it their business to organize prisoners and demand union wages and conditions, so they can't be used as scab labor?

There is a bill before Congress called the Prison Industries Reform Act. The act has the backing of corporations and many Republicans. If passed, this act will allow the Federal Prison Industries to compete directly for private contracts while phasing out its seven-year relationship with the government. The bill’s sponsors want to lure factories back from abroad to super-exploit prison labor at home.

The federal prison population is expected to increase by 50 percent by the year 2006 from its current 130,000 to 200,000. This expected increase is due to the severity of prison sentences for drug convictions, the elimination of parole at the federal level and the lack of drug rehabilitation. This means more cheap labor to super-exploit.

All the repressive arms of the state work hand in hand to build up this imprisoned army of the unemployed and the sky is the limit. The courts play their part by providing incompetent defense lawyers for poor suspects, railroading innocent people to jail or handing out harsh terms for minor and non-violent drug offenses.

Then there are those waiting to be jailed. In a December 1998 Atlantic Monthly article, it was reported that the backlog of arrest warrants stands at 2.6 million people because of overcrowding in the prisons.

The prison expansion is spiraling out of control. A sector of that capitalist class has a big stake in continuing to enrich itself on the state-subsidized prison industry. Prison expansion has also had a big impact in impoverished rural areas. With devastating layoffs in other industries, prison construction has created an economic boom in correctional jobs and related industries.

Reform the prisons?

There are some immediate plans in the work to help reform prison conditions. For instance, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton from Washington, DC has submitted three bills in response to the increase of women in federal prisons. One bill will require those states receiving federal funding for prison construction to submit a plan on how they propose to provide health and other services for women inmates.

Another bill would require the Bureau of Prisons to utilize existing prison funding to establish two pilot community based facilities in the Washington area for non-violent, short-term, pregnant offenders. And a third bill would establish sentencing alternatives in the federal system such as allowing first time non-violent offenders to serve their sentences at a community-based facility.

A fight for prison reforms is progressive, especially if there is a struggle from below. But looking at the situation in its totality, these three bills, if Congress passes them, are like putting Band-Aids on a cancer. These bills fail to reach the heart of what is wrong with the prisons.

These prisons are concentration camps and modern day slave plantations for the poor, the oppressed and the youth, who have no bright future under this system.

Political prisoners and the fight to free Mumia

There are more than 3,000 political prisoners in the U.S. These heroic women and men, the majority of them from nationally oppressed communities, either entered prisons as activists during the 1960s and 1970s or became political in jail--like the murdered Black Panther leader George Jackson.

They all have at least two things in common: they stand against racist repression and other forms of injustice, and the capitalist state wants to silence them.

Many political prisoners are well known, like American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, the MOVE 9 and the Puerto Rican independence fighters remaining in prison.

The most recognized prisoner on death row is Mumia Abu-Jamal, "the voice of the voiceless." Mumia is more than just another innocent man, like so many who languish in apartheid-like dungeons. In the eyes of the U.S. government, he is "guilty" of being an uncompromising, unwavering revolutionary who has helped to expose police brutality, the death penalty, and other forms of racist atrocities since he became a member of the Black Panther Party as a teenager.

Mumia's fight for a new trail has stimulated unity among progressives and revolutionaries of all nationalities and ages. The struggle to free Mumia and all political prisoners is tied to the overall struggle against a class system that persecutes the poor, workers, the oppressed, and all who resist the tiny clique of parasitic bosses and bankers.

Marxists will continue to search for an opening to struggle. They will reach out to both the existing political movement and reach out further to new layers of the masses on these issues. The opening right now with the most potential is the struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.

By demanding his right to a new trial, the movement can explain how Mumia got railroaded to death row in the first place. It can also generalize to explain the role of the capitalist courts. These courts railroad to prison not only revolutionaries like Mumia, but all poor people.

We can not only show how Mumia was a victim of a police frame-up and brutality but also link his situation to millions of others who have been brutalized daily by the cops and will never receive real justice. And Mumia would be the first to say that yes, this is the right thing to do-this is just not about me but about the whole rotten, capitalist system that is quick to oppress and repress the majority of humanity to make a lousy buck.

The most powerful factor that can win a new trial for Mumia, the one capable of making the government step back from this "fast track" execution, is the organized force of millions of outraged people from every community. This is the urgent task of the progressive and revolutionary movement in the United States at this time.

In the spring of year 2000, Mumia’s case is at a critical point. To bring the story of this serious injustice before a broader public, the movement has called a meeting for Madison Square Garden in New York on May 7. This renowned meeting place, usually considered a showplace for the major spectacles of capitalist society, will for a day become the center of a struggle to free a heroic opponent of that same capitalist system.

The state--and especially the police force--wants to execute Mumia as a vehicle to strengthen their repressive apparatus and to strike a blow against the movement. To save Mumia and free him, the movement has to help create a dynamic atmosphere that will make the ruling class worry about the threat to its stability if the state tries to murder Mumia.

A victory in this case will be a strong first step toward fighting for all the oppressed against the repressive capitalist state.

Free Mumia, Leonard Peltier and all Political Prisoners! Fight police brutality! Tear Down the Prison Walls!