from anarchist news:
On the night of July 2nd, in solidarity with the hunger strikers in Pelican Bay State Prison, CA, a group of roughly 30 people equipped with a mobile sound system met in front of the King County Juvenile Detention Center in the Central District of Seattle.
The police response to this demo was large, most likely due to the recent disturbances on Capitol Hill during the Pride weekend. Despite this, the group proceeded to blast music, bang on pots and pans, and make speeches through megaphones in front of the prison cells. At one point, every occupant in the cells along the southern end of the Detention Center was banging on the walls and windows of their cells, responding to the cheers and words from outside.
Instead of the normal oppressive routine of lights-out, the prisoners were able to spend the night acting wild, defying the terrified screws, and listening to the words of rebellion and freedom being blasted from outside. Once night had fallen, a large mortar firework was shot into the air, the green round exploding in the air over the Detention Center.
The event lasted for an hour and there were no arrests.
Towards the destruction of all prisons!
Solidarity with the Pelican Bay Hunger Strikers!
Text handed out and read aloud at demo:
On July 1, 2011 prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison in California will begin an indefinite hunger strike to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. The hunger strike is being organized by prisoners in an unusual show of racial unity, their five key demands are:
1. Eliminate group punishments.
2. Abolish the debriefing policy and modify active/inactive gang status criteria.
3. Comply with the recommendations of the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons (2006) regarding an end to longterm solitary confinement.
4. Provide adequate food.
5. Expand and provide constructive programs and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates.
We are here tonight to express solidarity with the Pelican Bay Prisoners on hunger strike as well as the youth imprisoned at this institution in order to break the isolation that is both a requirement and a function of prisons.
We want both, the youth and the hunger strikers, to know that they are not alone that there are those of us in the outer walls who are saying “fuck prisons, down with every prison wall”.
This prison society we live in, with every one of its laws, courts, cops, prisons and networks of surveillance, has made it very clear that the ‘life’ we’re supposed to accept is nothing more than a life sentence in an open air prison and upon violation a ‘life’ of extreme alienation, isolation, and degradation. The hunger strikers recognize this as they continue to refuse the meager existence that the state and capital tries to impose on them.
Prison has a long history within capitalism and governments, as being one of the most archaic forms of prolonged torture and punishment. It has been used to kill some slowly and torture those “undesirables” of the reigning social order – who do not fit within the predetermined mold of civil society.
Youth, the most anti-establishment social group, are often used as the definition of undesirable. Those in charge are correct in their assumption that the youth are the last to submit, the last to be controlled. In response, they build institutions like, the King County Juvenile Detention Center. The same people that build these prisons are the ones that create poverty and discrimination. They create the conditions of crime and then build the prisons to contain their “criminals”. There is no solving the prison problem because prisons are exactly what this repressive society needs to function: social control and fear. This is why we are not only against prisons but against the whole system that relies on them.
Solidarity with every youth who fights for freedom, and all prisoners, around the world, who refuse to accept forced confinement, isolation and abuse, who dream of the day that we together destroy these walls.
For an end to prisons and the world that needs them!
“I wouldn’t be free while those men ready to gun me down or lock me up and enchain me existed on the face of the earth. I wouldn’t be free while some cold prison cell awaited me.”-Xose Tarrio, Former Longterm Solitary Confinement Prisoner (FIES Regime, Spain)
