A3N: How can our readers support the next phase of this struggle?
IO: The next phase is to hold the CDCR to good faith negotiations, and to continue our push for all of the strikers' demands to get met. It is very important for supporters to continue their solidarity work on the outside, with particular attention toward defending strike leaders from retaliation from the prison administration.
Many people are coordinating actions all over the US and in other parts of the world. A potentially important legislative hearing on conditions in Pelican Bay's SHU is happening on August 23rd in Sacramento--there is lots of talk about that being a big point of mobilization.
Folks should stay tuned to the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity website for more information.
A3N: In recent months, CURB has organized statewide mass protests against California prison politics. In response to the use of California's budget crisis as an excuse to cut state programs serving low-income residents, CURB presented a "Budget for Humanity" that called for dramatic reductions in prison spending and the number of prisoners. How does this campaign support the recent hunger strike?
IO: I think CURB's fight is absolutely related to the strike because more prisons mean more torture, more SHUs, more people be locked up, more communities devastated economically and socially--all of it.
The demands of the strikers were particular to the conditions of Pelican Bay's SHU, and the SHU has a very specific function-- but the fact that solidarity spread throughout the California system also speaks to how common the conditions the strike leaders were talking about are to all prisoners--deadly lack of healthcare, poor food, torture, overcrowding, breaking up of political organizing, and more. These conditions are also connected to those on the outside, primarily in Black and Brown communities.
Right now CURB's main platform, as outlined in the Budget for Humanity, is demanding an end to all prison and jail construction; an immediate reduction of prison and jail overcrowding; the releasing of tax dollars from the grip of imprisonment; and an end to cuts to the most vital services, along with a reprioritization of how California uses it resources, to create what, and for whom. These demands feed and are fed by each other. Ending prison and jail construction frees tens of thousands of people along with billions of dollars. Ending the attack on basic resources like education, healthcare, meaningful employment, creates strong communities for people to come home to and to thrive in.
We also have to understand that this is not just a matter of fiscal sense-making and balancing the budget. This is also about political power. This is about capitalism and white supremacy. We need to understand that SHUs, the prison system in general, and police are tools of repression used to thwart peoples' efforts and abilities to fight back, build up their communities, and build self-determination.
This also links CURB's work with prisoner strike solidarity, along with community struggles against gang injunctions, police violence, ICE raids, and more. So I think CURB's work--along with the work of so many other organizations and coalitions--is a step toward building larger and stronger grassroots movements that will make larger, stronger, and more thoroughgoing economic and social changes.
A3N: Can you give a history of California's "budget crisis"? How far back does this go? How does it relate, if at all, to the accelerated incarceration rates in the US that began in the 1970s, where the number of prisoners increased from 300,000 to over 2 million today?
IO: The best answer to this question is the wonderful and very important book Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. The book explores these questions in great detail and I really can't recommend it enough.
But roughly, we can understand that in the late 60s and early 70s, the powers-that-be in the US responded to social uprisings against racism, social and economic inequality, and other forms of oppression in the US --linked to anti-imperialist struggles happening all over the planet at the time--by making war primarily on communities of color in a variety ways, including the expansion and further militarization of policing and the expansion of imprisonment. This is intertwined with a crisis in the capitalist system occurring at the same time. So we saw an assault on organized labor and social services and programs that was basically the rise of neoliberal economic models--creating a deepening in the divide between the haves and have-nots (already pretty deep for those marginalized to begin with).
Into the 1980s we saw the war on drugs--which we should understand as a war on Black and Brown communities--go into full gear with the passing of thousands of laws, tougher and longer sentences, and the activation of all sorts of media stories and images that aggressively criminalize and dehumanize poor people and people of color, especially Black people.
Even though the so-called crime rate started dropping steadily in the early 80s, the economy, this fear-mongering, increased policing, mixed with the proliferation of anti-social ideas that social services are a waste, created the perfect storm for a gigantic increase in imprisonment. And the cycle perpetuated itself from there with harsher probation and parole conditions that made it easier to deny essential services and to land more people back in cages for longer amounts of time. Tying it back to the 60s and 70s, this cycle makes it more difficult for social movements to change the oppressive social and economic relationships the system is predicated on.
So, California, with one of the largest economies in the world, is situated in this history. The gutting of social services, the attack on labor, the loss of jobs, tax revolts , the abandonment of certain industries, financial speculation, the disuse of farmland, housing bubbles, energy speculation, "dot-com bubbles", the criminalization of people of color, anti-immigrant hysteria, the passage of the three strikes law, etc., leads to one the largest prison expansions in world history.
IO: The next phase is to hold the CDCR to good faith negotiations, and to continue our push for all of the strikers' demands to get met. It is very important for supporters to continue their solidarity work on the outside, with particular attention toward defending strike leaders from retaliation from the prison administration.
Many people are coordinating actions all over the US and in other parts of the world. A potentially important legislative hearing on conditions in Pelican Bay's SHU is happening on August 23rd in Sacramento--there is lots of talk about that being a big point of mobilization.
Folks should stay tuned to the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity website for more information.
IO: I think CURB's fight is absolutely related to the strike because more prisons mean more torture, more SHUs, more people be locked up, more communities devastated economically and socially--all of it.
The demands of the strikers were particular to the conditions of Pelican Bay's SHU, and the SHU has a very specific function-- but the fact that solidarity spread throughout the California system also speaks to how common the conditions the strike leaders were talking about are to all prisoners--deadly lack of healthcare, poor food, torture, overcrowding, breaking up of political organizing, and more. These conditions are also connected to those on the outside, primarily in Black and Brown communities.
Right now CURB's main platform, as outlined in the Budget for Humanity, is demanding an end to all prison and jail construction; an immediate reduction of prison and jail overcrowding; the releasing of tax dollars from the grip of imprisonment; and an end to cuts to the most vital services, along with a reprioritization of how California uses it resources, to create what, and for whom. These demands feed and are fed by each other. Ending prison and jail construction frees tens of thousands of people along with billions of dollars. Ending the attack on basic resources like education, healthcare, meaningful employment, creates strong communities for people to come home to and to thrive in.
We also have to understand that this is not just a matter of fiscal sense-making and balancing the budget. This is also about political power. This is about capitalism and white supremacy. We need to understand that SHUs, the prison system in general, and police are tools of repression used to thwart peoples' efforts and abilities to fight back, build up their communities, and build self-determination.
This also links CURB's work with prisoner strike solidarity, along with community struggles against gang injunctions, police violence, ICE raids, and more. So I think CURB's work--along with the work of so many other organizations and coalitions--is a step toward building larger and stronger grassroots movements that will make larger, stronger, and more thoroughgoing economic and social changes.
A3N: Can you give a history of California's "budget crisis"? How far back does this go? How does it relate, if at all, to the accelerated incarceration rates in the US that began in the 1970s, where the number of prisoners increased from 300,000 to over 2 million today?
IO: The best answer to this question is the wonderful and very important book Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. The book explores these questions in great detail and I really can't recommend it enough.
But roughly, we can understand that in the late 60s and early 70s, the powers-that-be in the US responded to social uprisings against racism, social and economic inequality, and other forms of oppression in the US --linked to anti-imperialist struggles happening all over the planet at the time--by making war primarily on communities of color in a variety ways, including the expansion and further militarization of policing and the expansion of imprisonment. This is intertwined with a crisis in the capitalist system occurring at the same time. So we saw an assault on organized labor and social services and programs that was basically the rise of neoliberal economic models--creating a deepening in the divide between the haves and have-nots (already pretty deep for those marginalized to begin with).
Into the 1980s we saw the war on drugs--which we should understand as a war on Black and Brown communities--go into full gear with the passing of thousands of laws, tougher and longer sentences, and the activation of all sorts of media stories and images that aggressively criminalize and dehumanize poor people and people of color, especially Black people.
Even though the so-called crime rate started dropping steadily in the early 80s, the economy, this fear-mongering, increased policing, mixed with the proliferation of anti-social ideas that social services are a waste, created the perfect storm for a gigantic increase in imprisonment. And the cycle perpetuated itself from there with harsher probation and parole conditions that made it easier to deny essential services and to land more people back in cages for longer amounts of time. Tying it back to the 60s and 70s, this cycle makes it more difficult for social movements to change the oppressive social and economic relationships the system is predicated on.
So, California, with one of the largest economies in the world, is situated in this history. The gutting of social services, the attack on labor, the loss of jobs, tax revolts , the abandonment of certain industries, financial speculation, the disuse of farmland, housing bubbles, energy speculation, "dot-com bubbles", the criminalization of people of color, anti-immigrant hysteria, the passage of the three strikes law, etc., leads to one the largest prison expansions in world history.
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