Tag Archives: PIC

Arizona Prisons: A De Facto Death Sentence

Prison Abolition, Rapolitic, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As predicted, COVID-19 is currently spreading through Arizona Department of Correction (ADOC) facilities. Guards at facilities in at least Tucson and Winslow have tested positive for COVID-19.

 

Despite these positive tests, ADOC continues to disclose inaccurate data about the members of our community who are currently being detained. There are repeated failures to provide the protections recommended to the public. There has also been a failure to release people from these viral incubation situations.

 

It is not a matter of “if”; it is a matter of WHEN incarcerated people will die from COVID-19 in Arizona. Officials must act now.

 

In Arizona detention facilities the people being detained are being denied the proper personal protective equipment to prevent the spread of this virus. They are also, like most of the rest of the public, not receiving tests for the virus unless they have crossed a severe and dangerous threshold of symptoms, and often not even then. They are also being denied the appropriate cleaning supplies to sterilize their living quarters.

 

On all counts, the Arizona Department of Corrections and thereby, the State of Arizona and Governor Ducey are failing the members of our community.

 

The State of Arizona has made the people being detained in ADOC facilities wards of the state, and as such, has assumed a special relationship and responsibility for their care and wellbeing. They have an affirmative duty to provide protection because the people they are detaining are limited in their ability to choose on their own how to respond to this pandemic. The State of Arizona is morally and legally responsible to take appropriate steps to protect the people they are detaining.

 

The failure to release people from ADOC custody is an unconstitutional, de facto death sentence. The virus has been reported to mortally affect those who are older and those who have compromised immune systems, but there are also many instances of people dying from this virus who do not fit those constraints. In fact, even with the “symptom screening” that ADCRR Director David Shinn is reporting to be happening is insufficient because people who are asymptomatic are also spreading the virus. Furthermore, the Arizona Department of Health Services is identifying that it is not only people over 65 that are contracting the virus, and in fact, has identified that the age group of those between 20 and 44 have the highest prevalence of positive tests in the state. Therefore, there is no way of predicting who among those being detained or those working for ADOC will or will not be killed as a result of the negligence of the Arizona Department of Corrections. Also, approximately 49.6% of the 42,000 people held in Arizona prisons are between the ages of 25 and 39 years old. So, what is clear is that everyone is at high risk and ADOC is not responding with appropriate care.

 

The aforementioned issues regarding Arizona’s prisons and those detained within them were predicted by the community. This is why Mass Liberation Arizona, in coalition with 24 other local organizations released a platform of demands for all ADOC facilities in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Among those demands, the following three are vitally important:

 

  • End the restricted or skewed/limited information on the conditions of our loved ones and our community members who are being detained in ADCRR.
  • Prepare and publish accurate, daily reports on the effect and the prevalence of the virus in ADCRR facilities and publish this information on a publicly accessible website.
  • Immediately release of all vulnerable people, people with less than 6 months left on their sentences, and anyone charged with an offense that does not involve a risk of serious physical injury to a reasonably identifiable person.

 

A full list of demands can be found here.

 

None of the community’s concerns were addressed before this became a problem. It is imperative that the State of Arizona, Governor Duecy, Director David Shinn, and Arizona Department of Corrections Rehabilitation and Reentry heed these demands and act now. Otherwise, more people will be infected and may be killed as a result of their lack of action to fulfill their obligation to protect our families and friends.

Shelf-Life

Poetry, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
I was born with an expiration date,
hung from my neck,
stamped like a license plate
It was a notice to the world stating
Get what you can from him because he won’t see 18
He won’t make it to college, not through high school
And do not listen to him when he tells you these are his dreams
Because they’re lies, and whether he recognizes it or not
We, have plans for him
And those plans neither include a family nor a happiness
Because neither are sufficient motivation for him to comply with us
No! for us to get what we want from him,
he must be, broken, shattered, hopeless
And he must believe he is the one responsible for his condition
He must believe it is the result of, his, decisions
That he chose his position
That he had an equal opportunity with everyone else to do something different
He can never know that the wrong side of the tracks
was really red lines on a map
drawn down at city hall
That it was the National Housing Act of 1934
That laid the path for the rise of the ghetto,
urban farms, where it’s not crops that are grown,
but people, stock for cell blocks,
to subsidize markets locked
by inflation from free trade participation in a nation
that ain’t never done shit without enslavement
These are the things he can never know
He cannot know that poverty, like wealth is created
He cannot know that it wasn’t chance,
or a roll of the dice that planted him in impoverishment like cracks in the pavement
He cannot know that the ghetto is not inevitable,
that it is not unchangeable, that being poor is not a fate, not predetermined
but planned, scripted, constricted to particular segments of the society we live
Because should he ever learn these things,
then that is the moment we lose control of him
And we need a continuous supply of workers, strong, and ready to go
Who will accept never drawing a check,
never checking the drawing and asking,
did I ever actually have a chance to live?
Is having a shelf-life really living?
Knowing you are member to a group of human beings they call and endangered species, they, call me, an endangered species
I was never expected to live
Imagine the weight of a license plate like that
If it hung from your neck could you ever stand fully erect, would you perform to your best, if the best you could expect was to somehow slip detection or to die in prison, stamping the plates of future children who will be following your steps
How would you feel?
How would you act?
If you knew the system might have more to gain from your death?
 
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What is Really Going On

Black Radical Thought, Prison Abolition, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Street crime, drug addiction, and delinquency have been asserted to be the result of the immorality of the impoverished. Therefore, poverty, which is a human creation, that is, it is an institution which is being blamed for the depravity of the people in our society. The extension of this is that those who are most disenfranchised and without the power to influence and shape society are being blamed for the creation of the institution of poverty. Yet, there cannot be poverty if there is not the massive consolidation of wealth. Thus, if the object of the “Tough on Crime” and “War on Drugs” campaigns that lead to the development and expansion of the Prison Industrial Complex were really to heal the immorality of our society, then the most obvious solution given the underlying assumptions would have been to eliminate poverty and diminish the pervasive disparities of this country. This would mean that the best method and strategy to limit the harms that occur in our society is to redistribute the control of wealth merely beyond the threshold of their being people who are impoverished. It is not the case that people do not want to work yet, it is the case that many cannot afford to work because the minimum wage in most states does not even begin to permit a family to escape poverty. When a person has a forty hour work week and still has to rely on welfare to eat and maintain a place to live, and at the end of the month are still in poverty is the quintessential example of the creation and maintenance of a system of impoverishment. But, this solution has been rejected because it is believed to present too much of a short-term burden in exchange for a long-term peace and moral maturity. Those who claim to be the most concerned with the immorality and depravity of our society, and who are also the most responsible for their existence, are also least interested in doing what is necessary to solve the problems they themselves have created. Instead, to retain their comforts and privilege they blame the people least responsible and most disenfranchised, while expanding the penal code and criminalizing even the smallest infractions, that are then arbitrarily enforced by the police institution, to put these people behind bars to further fatten the pockets of those most responsible by increasing the prison labor pool.