Womens Day: How it would feel to Be Free...

Remember our Sisters in Jails, Prisons, and Detention Centers today.
International Women's Day, March 8, 2010.
Celebrate Women's Resistance!

This is a great (and long) article from the Revolutionary Communist Party about Nina Simone, one of our greatest contemporary resisters, written in the aftermath of her death. It seems appropriate for both International Woman’s Day and a few other things coming up this month.

Nina died in the spring of 2003, which I remember so clearly because the previous six weeks of radio (I had no TV) was nothing but war. As I heard her music soulfully come through NPR that day, I became conscious that was I was hearing was most clearly the truth - which I hadn't heard much of from any media then. I realized this woman was not just a visionary and musician; she was a revolutionary. I suspected it must have cheered her to see the unified global resistance to the war rise up before she died.

A number of years later I encountered Nina's music again - this time in a justice studies class at ASU on social movements. Our professor almost always had a great clip of protest music she played as we settled in for the class session, and Nina was one of her favorites. The Civil Rights Movement yielded to Black Power, which was tempered - not crushed - by the rabid repression and violence that liberation movement groups were met with by police organizations. Nina had a song for it every step of the way.

Nina spent the last years of her life in exile from America, as our government was determined to persecute her for her activism by prosecuting her on tax evasion if she returned. Exile is an extreme punishment we don't talk a lot about, and when we do we're usually referring to throwing someone out of a country or community after at least a showing of some kind of due process - not secretly burying them in the darkest recesses of control units and Supermaxes. Exile is what happens to the incarcerated automatically, though, which is a traumatic separation from their family, community, and daily lives, thrusting them into a world they can't possibly have prepared for that is organized and maintained entirely on the premise that anyone who fails to comply with state agents will be subjected to anything from ridicule and humiliation to massive violence. Some will also have endured the added trauma of prolonged, unrelenting isolation and invisibility. (And that just relates to what they are empowered by law to do to us under certain circumstances.)

Nina had an affinity for slaves and prisoners; she was able to make the connections pretty easily; she knew her history. Slaves and prisoners have been subjected to the most intense mechanisms of state domination and control - done at great expense not because they are irrelevant, but because they help Power control the masses by demonstrating how devastating the loss of one's liberty is through civil sanctions (enslaved by court ordered forfeitures, trapped in a low-paying, unstable job market, immobilized by crushing poverty and debt) and criminalization (with its permanent records, mandatory minimums, aggressive probation officers, attendant demonization, and post-release prohibitions from public resources).

Anyway, this summary of Nina's life also sets the stage for a lot of our issues with the prison industrial complex and militarized police state we have today...

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The Revolutionary Heart of Nina Simone

by Michael Slate

Revolutionary Worker #1202, June 8, 2003, posted at rwor.org

A little more than a month ago I heard Mississippi Goddam playing on the radio. I loved that song and I was really glad to hear it. Then within a half hour I heard My Baby Just Cares for Me and See Line Woman --that was more Nina Simone in one half hour than I'd heard on the radio for years. My heart sank. It could only mean one thing. Nina was gone.

Nina Simone died on April 21 at her home in the South of France. Her ashes have been spread across a handful of African countries, and the world is sad for her loss but a much richer place for having her among us.

I remember the first time I ever heard Nina Simone. I was 17 and living in a segregated neighborhood between Philadelphia and Chester. I lived in an Irish neighborhood bordered by an Italian neighborhood, a Puerto Rican neighborhood, and a Black neighborhood. We were all working class and the hoods were miles and miles of tiny red-brick row-homes arranged in a maze of circles. We didn't mix, except to fight. In the early 1960s my neighborhood made national news when a racist mob formed up to terrorize a Black family who had moved in.

By 1968, I had learned some things and I had friends from the Black and Puerto Rican hoods. On the night that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated I was parked with my girlfriend outside of her house. I had the car radio tuned in to WDAS, at that time a major Soul station in the city. It was sometime after midnight when the DJ popped on I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free . Everything stopped for me. My girlfriend hit another button on the radio. I looked at her hard and then reached over and brought back WDAS and Nina Simone. She stared at me and sneered, "Please don't tell me you're a n*gger lover." That was the last time I ever saw Beth. But it was the beginning of a long relationship with the music of Nina Simone.

"I wish I knew how
It would feel to be free
I wish I could break
all the chains holding me
I wish I could say
all the things that I should say
Say 'em loud, say 'em clear
For the whole round world to hear
I wish I could share
all the love that's in my heart
Remove all the bars
that keep us apart
I wish you could know
what it means to be me
Then you'd see and agree
That every man should be free."

Fifteen years later, a couple of friends were getting married in Baltimore. They both came from Black working class families and were revolutionary communists. Late one night, a couple of weeks before their wedding, they came by my house to borrow Nina's Silk & Soul album because they wanted I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free to be their wedding song. The ceremony was beautiful, the song was perfect--it raised things to a whole other level. It took me years to get the album back. Whenever I saw the brother, he would always half-jokingly explain that his wife felt a special tie to that album--and it was stronger than my tie. I did finally get it back. When I played it I found that it had been played over and over so often that the grooves had almost disappeared, especially the song I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free. I replaced the album but I've held on to that original copy. Those worn grooves are a beautiful testimony to the bond between Nina and the masses of Black people.

FROM BACH TO NINA

Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon on Februarry 21, 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina. As Nina tells it, she was born into music and the big question for her was what was she going to do with it. Nina trained in classical music. Bach was her favorite musician; and she modeled herself after singer Marian Anderson. She wanted to be the first Black concert pianist, and towards that end she attended the Juilliard School of Music in New York for a year until her scholarship expired. She later applied for admission to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia but was rejected because she was Black and poor...

(pick up the rest of the article here: http://revcom.us/a/1202/ninasimone.htm )

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This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online rwor.org
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Women's Day: Girls Rights in Detention.

Remember our Sisters in Jails, Prisons, and Detention Centers
on International Women's Day, today.
Celebrate Women's Resistance!

Bill of Health Rights for Incarcerated Girls

A right is defined as something that all people deserve, simply because they are human beings. This bill of rights was created by young women who are or have been incarcerated in Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. These are rights that all young women deserve, regardless of their involvement with the juvenile justice system.

1. Family Contact. We believe girls should be able to see their children more than once a week and without a judge's special permission. Girls should be allowed to see their immediate family members regardless of age.


2. Accurate Information. We believe girls should have access to information about their health records and their court case details.


3. Personal Privacy and Confidentiality. We believe girls have a right to privacy that includes their personal information as well as their bodies and personal space.


4. Food, Water, and Exercise. We believe girls should have access to nutritious food, sufficient water, and daily exercise.


5. Proper Hygiene. We believe girls should have more time to bathe, quality bathing products, as well as clean clothes and towels more often.


6. Adequate & respectful mental health care. We believe girls should have access to counseling services for their mental health.


7. Another Chance. We believe girls have the right not to be treated as criminals upon their release from detention and to be connected with community resources prior to release.


8. Medical care. We believe girls have a right to receive medical attention and medicine when they are ill.


9. Gender-specific care. We believe young women struggle with issues that are specifically related to their experience as girls, and deserve support in doing so from people who understand those issues.


10. Freedom from discrimination and verbal & physical abuse. We believe girls have a right to be respected by both staff and peers.

Through a partnership between Health and Medicine Policy Research Group and Girl Talk, this document was created in 2005 by both girls in and recently released from detention.

How CCA and GEO Buy US States (AZ Next)

Remember our Sisters in Jails, Prisons, and Detention Centers today.
Celebrate Women's Resistance!

In These Times

News » September 4, 2006

Follow the Prison Money Trail

Private prison companies invest millions in elections.

By Silja J.A. Talvi

While New Mexico’s landscape may make the state the Land of Enchantment, its rapidly growing rates of incarceration have been utterly disenchanting. What’s worse, New Mexico is at the top of the nation’s list for privatizing prisons; nearly one-half of the state’s prisons and jails are run by corporations.

Supposedly, states turn to private companies to cope better with chronic overcrowding and for low-cost management. However, a closer look suggests a different rationale. A recent report from the Montana-based Institute on Money in State Politics reveals that during the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, private prison companies, directors, executives and lobbyists gave $3.3 million to candidates and state political parties across 44 states.

According to Edwin Bender, executive director of the Institute on Money in State Politics, private prison companies strongly favor giving to states with the toughest sentencing laws—in essence, the ones that are more likely to come up with the bodies to fill prison beds. Those states, adds Bender, are also the ones most likely to have passed “three-strikes” laws. Those laws, first passed by Washington state voters in 1993 and then California voters in 1994, quickly swept the nation. They were largely based on “cookie-cutter legislation” pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), some of whose members come from the ranks of private prison companies.

Florida leads the pack in terms of private prison dollars, with its candidates and political parties receiving almost 20 percent of their total contributions from private prison companies and their affiliates. Florida already has five privately owned and operated prisons, with a sixth on the way. It’s also privatized the bulk of its juvenile detention system. Texas and New Jersey are close behind.

But in Florida, some of the influence peddling finally seems to be backfiring. Florida State Corrections Secretary James McDonough alarmed private prison companies with a comment during an Aug. 2 morning call-in radio show. “I actually think the state is better at running the prisons,” McDonough told an interviewer. His comments followed an internal audit last year by the state’s Department of Management Services, which demonstrated that Florida overpaid private prison operators by $1.3 million.

Things may no longer be quite as sunny as they once were in Florida for the likes of Nashville, Tenn.-based Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the former Wackenhut, now known as the GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla. But with a little bit of spiel-tinkering—and a shift of attention to other states—the prison privatizers are likely to keep going.

The key shift, Bender explains, is that “the prison industry has gone from a we-can-save-you-money pitch to an economic-development model pitch.”

In other words, says Bender, “you need [their] prisons for jobs.”

If political donations are any measure, economically challenged and poverty-stricken states like New Mexico are a great target. In this campaign cycle, Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson has already received more contributions from a private prison company than any other politician campaigning for state office in the United States. The Institute of Money in State Politics, which traced the donations, reported that GEO has contributed $42,750 to Richardson since 2005—and another $8,000 to his running mate, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish.

Another $30,000 went from GEO to the Richardson-headed Democratic Governors Association this past March. Richardson’s PAC, Moving America Forward, was another prominent recipient of GEO donations. Now, its former head, prominent state capitol lobbyist Joe Velasquez, is a registered lobbyist for GEO Care Inc., a healthcare subsidiary that runs a hospital in New Mexico.

But don’t get the idea that GEO has any particular love for Democrats: $95,000 from the corporation went to the Republican Governors Association last year alone. What companies like GEO do love are the millions of dollars rolling in from lucrative New Mexico contracts to run the Lea County Correctional Facility (operating budget: $25 million/year), and the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility ($13 million/year), among others. CCA also owns and operates the state’s only women’s facility in Grants ($11 million per year).

To make sure that those dollars keep flowing, GEO and CCA have perfected the art of the “very tight revolving door,” says Bender, which involves snapping up former corrections administrators, PAC lobbyists and state officials to serve as consultants to private prison companies.

In fact, the current New Mexico Corrections Department Secretary Joe Williams was once on GEO’s payroll as their warden of the Lea County Correctional Facility. Earlier this year, Williams was placed on unpaid administrative leave after accusations surfaced that he spent state travel and phone funds to pursue a very close relationship with Ann Casey. Casey is a registered lobbyist in New Mexico for Wexford Health Sources, which provides health care for prisoners at Grants, and Aramark, which provides most of the state’s inmate meals. In her non-lobbying hours, it turns out that Casey is also an assistant warden at a state prison in Centralia, Ill.

It appears that even for a prison industry enchanted by public-private partnership, Williams and Casey may have gone too far.