Isak

THANK YOU, 1980s: A Grateful Remembrance of Nelson Mandela & the Anti-Apartheid Movement

Nelson Mandela spent the 1980s in prison--the last decade of his 27-years behind bars at Robben Island. His crime? He'd been a South African anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress. Notably, his arrest in 1962 was made possible by a tip from the CIA. Mandela was convicted on charges of armed sabotage. And well, yes, he sabotaged. 

From Mandela's statement at a trial before the Supreme Court in 1964:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die

As an inmate, Mandela came to symbolize international anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s--the time when the decades-long movement that goes back even further than the Sharpeville massacre--came to a head in the U.S. The movement's primary tactic was to lobby businesses and investors to cut off its financial ties to South Africa until it dismantled apartheid.

The successful nonviolent international movement was one of the greatest we've ever seen. From Susan Collin Marks' remembrance at Common Ground News:

Few people who look back at those dark days recall that militant nonviolence was the key tool in the struggle against apartheid and, in the end, precipitated a negotiated revolution instead of the widely anticipated carnage. The scope and creativity of methods employed by anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s amounted to what the theologian Walter Wink describes as “probably the largest grassroots eruption of diverse nonviolent strategies in a single struggle in human history.”

Hunger strikes ended the mass use of the detention without trial, and protests against beach apartheid showed up the injustice of segregation and the unacceptability of police action. Gandhi’s legacy loomed large as economic boycotts of white businesses, court actions that challenged apartheid laws, rent boycotts, demonstrations, and marches proliferated.

Particularly on college campuses, the anti-apartheid movement gained in momentum in the 1980s--students demanded that their universities and colleges cease investments, operations, and trades in South Africa. And the thing is: it worked. Hampshire College was the first to disinvest. Harvard began a (slow) process of ending its relationship with the apartheid government. The University of California withdrew its full three billion dollars, a move that, according to Wikipedia, Nelson Mandela credited as being a particularly strong action towards "abolishing white-minority rule in South Africa."

By 1988, 155 colleges were fully or partially divested, thanks to the anti-apartheid movement.

Cities got on board too, as activists turned their attentions to local legislators. According to researcher Richard Knight, "by the end of 1989 26 states, 22 counties and over 90 cities had taken some form of binding economic action against companies doing business in South Africa." Among them was San Francisco.

Local and college action led to federal action in the 1980s, including the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act and the Budget Reconciliation Act.

Hell, the movement grew so strong in the U.S., it even showed up on television. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that it was no coincidence that in "The Cosby Show," Sandra and Alvin's twins are named Nelson and Winnie. Theo, meanwhile, had an anti-apartheid sign in his room. And several episodes of "A Different World" cheered on the movement; in one episode Kim chooses to reject a substantial scholarship from a company that hasn't divested from South Africa. She takes a second job--working nights at a funeral parlor--to earn the money to pay for her pre-med classes.

In 1990, the African National Congress was unbanned in South Africa and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. It was the first step towards years of truth-in-reconciliation and negotiations that transformed the country--and, I daresay, the world. In 1994, in a peaceful democratic election, Mandela was chosen by the people to be president.

 Again, from Susan Collin Marks' article:

This spiritual dimension is perhaps the X factor in the South African equation. “Any social scientist would expect 98% of blacks to hate whites and wish retribution, and yet the reality is the reverse,” said University of Cape Town political scientist Robert Schrire after the peaceful 1994 election. “And since we cannot explain it rationally, we will have to regard it as one of the great miracles of the South African dilemma.”

That's true. But still, though apartheid's officially ended in South Africa, and Mandela's a free man, we can't say that everything's 'fixed.' Consider the repulsive comments to the above video on YouTube, left within the last two weeks: 

ahh the things you see when you havent got a sniper rifle :(

lol at that black prick behind bars.....where he belongs!!

mandela is a pedo scum england and st george.

Nelson Mandela will celebrate his 90th birthday this Friday, July 18. Happy birthday to him, and thank you to all the anti-apartheid activists for the better world we have today. 

Image Credits: Northland Poster; St. George's Park;  much more music; Stanford News Service; the UCSC Library

It's Making Banner Headlines Across the Country ...

... and well it should. The U.S. Supreme Court has -- narrowly, but finally -- decided thatthe prisoners our nation holds at Guantanamo Bay  have the right to seek their own release through our courts. You know, like every other person we incarcerate. There are men among the 270 inmates who have been locked up in this offshore prison for as long as six years--with no hearing and no charges, no ability to seek a lawyer.

President George Bush has issued a public disagreement with the Court, of course, saying that due process compromises our national security (along with, perhaps, our integrity). But as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the 5-4 majority (so breathtakingly close was this decision!), "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

The Washington Post has more about where this decision might lead us:

The much-anticipated decision was the fourth time the court has ruled against the administration's ambitious attempt to create a framework for detaining and prosecuting terrorism suspects outside the protections the U.S. legal system generally provides.

As a result of the ruling, the ... detainees remaining at Guantanamo and their lawyers will be able to challenge their detentions before civilian judges, potentially forcing the government to present evidence against them and giving them the chance to call their own witnesses.

Elsewhere

If you didn't catch it elsewhere, my article, "Society of the Incarcerated," is now up over at the website of the Atlanta Center for Policy Analysis. This think-tank is an uncommon sort, bringing together "political satire and serious comment." Which is pretty awesome.

I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself where my own article falls.

Kathy Kelly's Real News ... and Then Some

Kathy Kelly is an extraordinary woman. The noted peace activists is also the coordinator of Voices for 

Creative Nonviolence and a three-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. And just after I've written about prisons in the U.S. here and at the Women's International Perspective, here comes Kelly with her own take on the matter. Courtesy of The Real News Network (that brilliant idea), Kelly not only points to our vested profit interest in prisons, but she asks interesting questions about who is it, really, that are the criminals. Who is actually hurting you, taking away from your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, on an everyday basis?

In the meantime, Feministing (image credit!) has been featuring some wonderful guest blogs from the folks at Justice Now, a California-based organization that's challenging the prison industrial complex in brilliant ways. Check it:

• Vanessa Huang (who was lucky enough to see lead a workshop a year ago) looks at how prisons intersect with reproductive rights and gender

• Misty Rojo, a former inmate who serves on Justice Now's board, remembers the weird "career tracking" she experienced inside. 

• Robin Levi writes about sterilization in prisons

• Allison Firth poses great questions about the search for "better punishment" 

• Jeremy Bearer-Friend on how, quite simply, prisons hurt everyone.

Meanwhile, one of my favorite radio programs, NPR's News & Notes, is doing a month-long series on the criminal justice system. Stories so far look at racial tensions behind bars, prison rape and the spread of HIV, the weird "CSI effect" on how crimes are solved and proven, prisoner exoneration, the role of public defenders, the "no snitching" ethic, and how the prison system out-of-proportion affects people of color.

In short, Farai Chideya brings her kickass hosting skills to a lot of compelling conversations. Now's the time to pull up a chair.

Society of the Incarcerated

My article, "Society of the Incarcerated: Acknowledging the Voices of America's Ever-Increasing Prison Population," is the featured story over at The Women's International Perspective.

You attentive Isak readers will notice that the article expands on ideas I wrote about in this space very recently. While I see the piece more as a commentary on the prison industrial complex and the weird media vacuum it exists within, I also share my some of my own experiences with Michigan and Massachusetts prisons.

"Society of the Incarcerated" begins:

Who talks about prisoners these days? Certainly not the US presidential candidates or most others up for election in 2008, unless it’s in tangential “get tough on crime” rhetoric. In the media, quality coverage such as Jeff Gerritt’s Pulitzer-nominated series on medical care in Michigan prisons, which appeared last year in The Detroit Free Press, is overshadowed by courtroom dramas and legal thrillers. MSNBC has built something of a franchise in its “To Catch a Predator” series, which lures people to a Dateline set, humiliates them by reading their chat room transcripts with someone they thought was underage, and then calls on a police crew to rather unnecessarily tackle them in an arrest sequence right out of a summer blockbuster.

Authentic communication from and about prisoners exists, but it’s relegated to a niche market outside of most print and online news sources, of influential political blogs, of the catalogues of big publishers, and of the speeches of election year candidates. Presumably, its minimal share of attention is justified because decision makers think their audiences don’t care much about prisons and the people in them.

It’s an odd assumption in the face of the prison industrial complex’s monstrous growth. We incarcerate 500% more people today than we did thirty years ago. The United States is home to a mere five percent of the world’s total population, and 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population: 2.3 million people, most of whom are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. And that number doesn’t include those living under the thumb of the criminal justice system: probationers, parolees and those on tethers, the electronic monitoring devices worn by people on house arrest.

This makes the vacuum of nuanced coverage of prisons and prisoners in the media and by the candidates all the more baffling.

Check it out. I look forward to your thoughts.

UPDATE: "Society of the Incarcerated" is picked up by Common Dreams ... where a lot of interesting commenters hold forth ...

Al-Jazeera Cameraman Released from Gitmo After 6 Years

His name is Sami al-Haj and he'd  been on a hunger strike for 16 months.

5:25

That, more or less, is the ratio of the United States' share of the world's population compared with its share of the world's incarcerated population.

That is, though we have only five percent of the world's citizens, we have one-quarter of the world's incarcerated citizens.

Adam Liptak tells more:

"Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

"... The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison."

Does this mean we are a proportionally safer country? Hardly. As the excerpt indicates, the vast majority of our country's prisoners are there for nonviolent offenses. And our violent crime rate is higher than most. I would contend that this is in part because our prison system is itself deeply violent, and that violence begets itself.

Laptik's article points to our extremely long sentences (and 'mandatory minimums') as largely responsible for the high incarceration rate. That's certainly part of it, but I'd like someone in the mainstream media to have the guts to point out an ugly underbelly to our prison system: our economy depends on it. Just as it depends on militarism.

How do we see this?

In the growth of privately-run prisons. In private companies contracted to be the single source for prison food, furniture, medical treatment, and materials. In government agencies that compel the prison population to handle toxic materials (more on that here) In the strategic building of prisons in rural or urban communities that are starved for reliable jobs for locals. In the builders who have a "niche market" in building more and more prisons.

And we see this in  corporations outsourcing labor into U.S. prisons, where they take advantage of only having to pay their 'workers' a few cents an hour (the minimum wage law doesn't apply inside the walls) and state subsidies; these corporations include Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, AT&T, American Airlines, TWA Airlines, Eddir Bauer,  Boeing, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, IBM, J.C. Penny, McDonalds, Microsoft, Motorola, Nordstrom, Pierre Cardin, Revlon, Sony, Texas Instruments, and Toys ‘R US.

Read here and here for more information on corporations that make use of what I'll call a modern form of slavery. When these prison labor habits are made public--which the corporations will never, never let happen if they can help it--they're justified on behalf of "teaching job skills" that will help an inmate find employment when he or she is released. Too bad no one's hiring for these typically menial jobs in the 'real' world--the positions are already filled by the nearly free labor guaranteed by contracts with prisons and our huge incarceration rate.

In my state, Michigan, folks are finally talking about reforming our large prison system. I'm sorry to say that the major catalyst wasn't something like  Jeff Gerritt's steller investigation series in the Detroit Free Press that looked into the serious neglect and mistreatment of inmates' physical and mental health last year (though the series did spark a governor's commission to improve the conditions that caused unneeded deaths).

But rather, the reason Michigan folks are thinking it's time to do 'corrections' differently is because of money.

Our state's broke. Our state spends an enormous amount of cash keeping 52 prisons open. And now that our economy is struggling, folks are thinking maybe we don't need so many prisons after all. I support these reform initiatives, but the context in which they come tells me that profit--not human rights, not public safety, not nonviolence or healthy communities--is the primary motivating force behind who we put in cages.

And the folks making the money seem to think that no one cares, that your average citizen either forgets or hates the people in prison and anything can be done (under the auspices of "get tough on crime") to incarcerated people. But with 2.3 million people in prisons (to say nothing of the number of people on tethers, on parole, on probation or otherwise answerable to the 'corrections system'), we're reaching such a critical mass that it is rare for the 'average' citizen to not be personally touched by it.

Where I tried to be a regular inside a medium-security prison in Massachusetts, I learned of the prison policy that volunteers aren't permitted to have personal contact with anyone, in any state, who was or who had ever been in prison or in jail. I was so excited when I began, but that rule ended up keeping me out despite offering years of experience in prisons, solid recommendations, and the backing of PEN New England. But I knew too many folks who were or had been incarcerated, and I wasn't going to simply stop talking to them for this writing workshop.

Keep this up (that is, the rising incarceration rate and absurd rules) and there will be no volunteers left.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to be part of a society that has a profitable interest in putting people behind bars. More and more voices are challenging our "jailing nation."

It's time to pull a Gandhi and practice "non-cooperation." What follows are his words, despite my laziness with quotation marks.

Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

Noncooperation means refusal both to help the sinner in his sin and to accept any help or gift from him till he has repented.

Noncooperation is measure of discipline and sacrifice and it demands respect for the positive views.

Nonviolent noncooperation with evil means cooperation with all that is good.

Noncooperation is intended to pave the way to real, honorable and voluntary cooperation based on mutual respect and trust.

Noncooperation in political field is an extension of the doctrine as it is practiced in the domestic field.

The avowed policy of noncooperation has been not to make political use of disputes between labor and capital.

Real noncooperation is noncooperation with evil and not with the evil doer.

Noncooperation is not a hymn of hate.

My Noncooperation is with methods and systems, never with men.

Nonviolence is the rock on which the whole structure of noncooperation is built.

How Forgettable Is An Immigrant Woman?

From the Associated Press:

"A bailiff who forgot about a woman locked in a courthouse holding cell and left her there for four days without food, water or access to a bathroom has been suspended for 30 days but will keep his job, officials said Wednesday.

"Washington County Cpl. Jarrod Hankins acted without 'intentional misconduct' when he left Adriana Torres-Flores in the 9 1/2-by-10 1/2-foot cell, Sheriff Tim Helder said.

"Hankins 'became busy and simply forgot' about the woman last Thursday, leaving her in the cell with only a jacket until Monday morning."

I'm stunned that the baliff is given a wrist-slap for what amounts to the torture of Torres-Flores.

For Real This Time: Bilal Hussein Released

After two years of incarceration, and too long after his release order was issued, AP photographer Bilal Hussein has been released from  U.S. military custody.

In other wonderful news, British photographer Richard Butler, who was kidnapped two months ago, has been freed by Iraqi soldiers.

Free?

Yesterday, Simon Owens responded to the Isak post that celebrated AP photographer Bilal Hussein's court-ordered release from two years of U.S. military custody in Iraq.

Owens wrote:

"I guess this is our chance to see if the US military force really respects Iraq's sovereignty by complying with the order."

It is indeed. And here we are with a report headlined, 'U.S. Continues Holding AP Photographer.' It seems that the U.S. military wants to take the time to review the court's order for release for man who spent the majority of his incarceration uncharged and without due process. How prudent of them.

According to the AP report:

"In an e-mail response to an AP request for comment, (Lt. Cmdr. Kenneth) Marshall said 'all charges are now reviewed to determine the applicability' of the law on individual detainees in American custody. The amnesty law, passed in February, was strongly encouraged by Washington as a trust-building measure among Iraq's rival groups.

"U.S. authorities have said a U.N. Security Council mandate allows them to retain custody of a detainee they believe is a security risk even if an Iraqi judicial body has ordered that prisoner freed. The U.N. mandate is due to expire this year.

"Under Iraq's amnesty law, a grant of amnesty effectively closes a case and does not assume guilt of the accused."

The AP has done an admirable job of standing by Hussein, of keeping his case in the forefront of public mind. Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch are adding their powerful voices to the call for Hussein's undelayed release.