Orisanmi Burton has said, “Prisoners are positioned behind enemy lines and have a unique political capacity. War studied from both sides shows us that incarcerated people are the tip of the counterinsurgency spear that is pointed towards us who are outside of the wall. And the prison is a strategy for controlling us.”
Prisons are sites of war. They are where state officials create conditions of hardship that make it difficult to survive, where “Correctional Officers” aka prison guards freely instigate violence between prisoners, where prison guards sexually, physically, and emotionally violate prisoners, and where prisoners are kept from gathering, socializing, and organizing in groups. And still, the people held captive in Women’s Huron Valley work together in creative ways to support each other, spring into action to defend each other, get involved in legal defense together, educate and develop hobbies, and always seek to expose the truth about what prison is actually like.
Prisons — from the facilities, to the personnel, to the processes and boards that we’re told to put our faith in — will never address the root causes of the systemic violence that occurs against prisoners inside prisons. They can’t, because they are a tool of repression, segregation, and control. How can a system created by and for capitalists, colonialists, and slave-owners, adequately “punish” or hold anyone accountable? Why are people made to suffer in cells and in torture camps, with little access to sunlight, fresh air, fresh food, clean clothes, for being Black, being poor, being women?
The toppling of this empire and the birth of a new world does not happen without our people held hostage inside cages in the belly of this dying beast. While we may fight for reforms that limit, decrease, or eliminate parts of the carceral apparatus, we know this carceral system cannot be saved or abolished through reform. Any transformative movement must center imprisoned people and create forms of organization that facilitate their real participation in decision making. Prisons have been the key site of struggle and rebellion in conjunction with the rebellions in the streets. Prison revolts, rebellion, and organizing, like the long Attica revolt, are the most successful models for abolition that we’ve seen within the belly of the beast. We must be ready to support and disrupt from the outside. Any revolutionary movement that abandons or neglects those incarcerated during the course of that struggle isn’t revolutionary at all.
The Women’s Huron Valley prison, the Michigan Department Of Corrections–from the ombudsman to the prison guard–have refused to do anything to help Krystal Clark and won’t until they are FORCED to do so by our collective struggle both inside and outside of the prison. The warden was forced to remove Krystal from that filthy observation cell and start giving her warm soft food again because of the force of our phone calls and emails demanding for her to be released in a phone zap from early 2024. This was only possible because Krystal made her situation known to us.
We’re seeing this with how the same strategies of detention and torture of Black people, poor people, and women who defend themselves against abuse are being used against immigrants, migrants, and protesters who dare to question why the U.S. is using money and resources to murder Palestinians, to occupy Haiti, to bomb Yemen, to pollute our water and destroy the wetlands. The capitalist government tests out its strategies in prison to also use against people suffering on the outside of the walls. How can we call ourselves a “free society”?
Our fight against the carceral system today has not changed much since the abolitionist movement to end slavery during the 19th century. Today’s white supremacist carceral system is the continuation of that genocidal chattel slavery. One of the core differences is that the Black proletariat which had been the main economic powerhouse throughout the entire existence of the U.S. is now less central to production in the U.S. after slavery was abolished on paper and then repackaged into this genocidal prison system that we fight against now. The fight to abolish slavery, as well as the fight for gay and transgender and women’s liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, has been the people’s answer to U.S. capitalism. In response, the U.S. has expanded its prison system to cage larger and larger portions of the population. It is one of the main tools for disciplining and disappearing Black people, the US working class, the poor, the homeless, those who fight back against the system or don’t abide by its racist laws.
In our conversations with women we’re writing to, we’ve realized that there are issues that are coming to a head. Correctional Officers are subjecting women to sexual abuse, taking advantage of the bodycam reform to film already violating strip-searches. Like prisons in other states, WHV is also short-staffed, which means slower services, prisoners not getting medication, and visitation delays.
Healthcare in the prison is purposefully negligent to prisoners, with doctors like Matt Ellison refusing to get Krystal Clark outside care and telling her nothing is wrong with her ears, even recommending her to be “isolated” from other prisoners.
“All of them need to be fired. You stood up there, took an oath, and let us die. This is unacceptable. They’re working here because they can’t get jobs out there. This medical field needs to get shut down.” — Krystal Clark
This can’t stand, and the cracks are widening.
We defend the wins that prisoners struggle for including their lawsuits and the demands they make for better food, better air, better water, better programs. But we realize how exhausting and ineffective the changes pushed through “prison reform” can be when MDOC only chooses to advance what fits their agenda to keep prisoners oppressed. Like the push for the body cam policy to “prevent violence.” The correctional officers instigate fights between prisoners; THEY smuggle the “contraband” inside that they’re supposedly monitoring prisoners for; they sexually assault women, and feel comfortable doing so on camera. They are there to terrorize prisoners, and to carry out the agenda of the prison officials, not to prevent violence.
At a recent Family Advisory Board meeting with family members of prisoners in the MDOC system, official Kyle Kaminsky endorsed proposals for different kinds of transportation systems to prisons, even sponsoring a company to carry out the project, and rejecting the complaints of family members who stated they simply don’t get time to see their loved ones during weekdays, weekends are too packed, and prison guard shift switches cause delays. People drive for hours across Michigan to see their fathers, mothers, children, friends, and MDOC tells them the best they can do is set up a paid transportation service that profits a local company.
Prisons are a result of oppression and poverty in this country; they are America’s answer to “handling” resistance to wrong-doing, slavery, and war. They cannot address societal violence like rape, child abuse, addiction, murder, when they recreate them inside. Reform groups and advocacy groups in Michigan see the issues that the individual prisoner faces, but don’t see the systemic problem with the existence of prisons themselves that abuse all prisoners. They want to differentiate between the “good” prisoners and the “bad” prisoners based on the harm they’ve done, but dismiss that prison doesn’t effectively correct and educate people about harm. In a country where colonizers have stolen land from Native peoples and kidnapped and exploited Africans through slavery, land owners steal rent from tenants on the first of every month, bosses steal wages from workers, our ability to grow food and self sustain is stolen from us every day, those same forces cannot create healthy processes for accountability.
Let us feel agitated by the words of prisoners, their family members, and formerly imprisoned people in the bulletin to the right. We are called to act against the prison officials, the politicians, the capitalists who gain from the suffering of our people.
“The Valley of Death we are coming for you. Warden [Jeremy Howard] we are coming for you. The doctors and nurses we are coming for you. The officers who look down on us we are coming for you too. We’re going to stand together.” – Krystal Clark
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