AN ATTACK ON ONE IS AN ATTACK ON US ALL! FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, IT IS THE ONLY THING WORTH FIGHTING FOR!
A group in the Michigan General Defense Committee has taken on a project to write to around 10 women currently held captive in Women’s Huron Valley Prison in Ypsilanti, Michigan. It’s in our letters that we exchange messages of support, celebrate birthdays, receive information about the current conditions on the inside, and provide information on the local goings-on including demonstrations and news from the outside.
We took on this project after connecting with the family of Krystal Clark and having regular communications with Krystal, finding out how she’s been kept in segregation, how she’s been retaliated against for speaking honestly about the political retaliation she’s facing. Krystal is a Black woman who has been held captive and suffers from unaddressed mold growing in her ears. Heard in many calls to Prison Radio, she’s been thrown in the hole for congregating with other prisoners, for calling into Prison Radio, for calling out the prison doctors and nurses abusing her, and for pursuing a lawsuit against MDOC. Above all, she is being retaliated against for being a Black woman imprisoned for violating capitalist law, for maintaining trusted relationships with other women inside, and for refusing to give in to the demands of prison officials telling her to be quiet and bide her time.
It’s from her accounts of life within the prison that we learned how dire the situation really is. Black mold infests the walls, the water, and people’s bodies. The shitty excuse for a “health system” inside is collapsing. The infrastructure of the prison is literally rotting. Prison staff are dropping like flies from their employment. In the midst of all this, prison officials are trying to squeeze every penny from families with costly food + water prices inside. Families are separated by prison, in particular lower income families, working class families, Black and Native families.
We believe we have a duty to the prisoners in WHV who we see as our loved ones, our neighbors, our community members, our sisters and siblings in struggle to support them and fight alongside them on the outside. It’s clear that people’s lives are at stake. We also know it’s a tried and true pattern for the government to test torture and detention tactics on prisoners that they intend to use on people outside. We hear what women inside are telling us — how they were arrested, their unfair court proceedings — and understand that we’re only a few steps removed from facing that abuse ourselves.
Police and ICE lurk in our streets, hungry to arrest migrants in the name of “Americans,” stepping over homeless folks to get to them. Police chase after us when we’re coming home from work, for “loitering”, for smoking, for protesting, for making marks on a car, for putting posters up. We have to fight like hell to make sure our people don’t end up in prison or jails, and that we must uplift any struggle for freedom and dignity on the inside through collective action and pressure on the outside. This news bulletin will be a source of information for people to understand the conditions of the prison directly from prisoners themselves, to be called to protest and disrupt the abusive functions of the prison, and to fight for the end of this prison.
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