Download a PDF of “Inside Michigan Prisons” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden: As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been
“[M]easures devised and executed with a view to ally and diminish the anti-slavery agitation, have only served to increase, intensify, and embolden that agitation.” -Frederick Douglass Back in April 2010, I wrote the article, “Your Right Not to Work in Michigan’s Prisons” where I pointed out state criminal statutes did not include a sentence
Prisoners on the west side of Chippewa Correctional Facility (Chippewa) at Kincheloe, Michigan, have been locked-down since 30 January 2018, eight men crammed into a cubicle designed for four, in old, mold-infested cattlebarns containing approximately 320 men each, sick and healthy alike, under the guise of a “quarantine” for the influenza virus epidemic that has
“The need not to mistake enemies for friends is especially great for us.”- Yaki Sayles “We would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the antifascists.” –Cornel West “When one’s opponents are friendly to each other, divide them.” –Sun Tzu Not too distant history has shown us how
When the state is most corrupt the laws are multiplied. –Tacitus Effective November 1st, 2017, the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) has instituted a new mail policy, which they falsely claim will stem the flow of contraband, primarily the controlled substances suboxone and fentanyl, into Michigan prisons, when they well-know over 80 percent of all
“Justice, dignity, nobility, freedom … these words that yap and howl, are they anything other than household pets whose masters have calmly awaited their homecoming since the time when heroic lackeys won the right to walk them on the streets? To use them is to forget that they are the ballast that enables power to
People imprisoned within the many prisons of the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC), have a constitutionally guaranteed right to send and receive mail, especially via the United States Postal Service (USPS), as do the people and organizations that send them mail, as set forth in the Michigan Constitution of 1963, art. 1, §5 and the
“The everyday activity of slaves reproduces slavery. Through their daily activities, slaves do not merely reproduce themselves and their masters physically; they also reproduce the instruments with which the master represses them, and their own habits of submission to the master’s authority.” – Fredy Perlman, “The Reproduction of Daily Life” (1969) Not since the 1980s, when
This article was published in the San Francisco Bay View on September 27, 2016. You can read it here. Back in the ‘60s, the founders of the Black nationalist Black Panther Party (BPP), Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, told white radicals asking to join the BPP to go found their own party. Thus, the
“As we all realize, punishment was never much of a deterrent, and could scarcely have afforded comfort to a victim already dead.” – Philip K. Dick, Minority Report (1956) Dear Editor, While state roads crumble the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) is wasting millions of taxpayer-dollars to remodel and reopen a long-closed “temporary” prison in
