Harold H. Thompson (1998)

The role of the gulag system and of the police within the grand scheme of capitalism should be discussed, not as separate issues, but as related means of repression used by the state against the working-class, minorities and the poor. The police are the knuckles on the iron fist of the state and it’s first line of defense to protect the few ‘haves’ from the many ‘have nots’. The key role of oppression by the police is complemented by the judiciary, prisons, top elected officials who are placing into law ever more Draconian ‘crime bills’ and finally capital’s last line of defense against dissent, the military, inclusive of the National Guard, a branch of the armed services that has in the past shown an eagerness to shoot down unarmed citizens, historically during black rebellions across this country. The National Guard’s role of enforcing state oppression to protect capitalism’s interests is easily understood by simply looking at Amerikkkan history.

Capitalist democracy perpetuates the myth that the state is neutral and representative of all people with the ultimate goal of protection of the ‘rights’ of all. Whilst in reality, the state’s main goal is to run capitalism for the benefit of profit of the few who hold the vast majority of this nation’s wealth under their direct control. The only way that capitalism can operate smoothly and survive is for the state to keep the working class, minorities, poor and those who challenge the status-quo in ‘their place’ to ensure the security of the economic and political power of the rich. The catch phrase ‘law and order’ used in reference to police functions means the law and order of capitalism, with far more resources and effort put into silencing dissent, stamping out potential threats to capitalist ‘order’ and keeping the lower classes down, under police terrorism than is ever paid to solving crimes or preventing criminal activity by antisocial predators against lower class victims. Most police work dealing with everyday crime is merely a smoke-screen, their main function is to defend the capitalist class and their middle class supporters who cringe at the mere thought of decisions or policy being forced on them from those below their station. The police are constantly engaged in conflict, to varying degrees, with members of the working class, minorities, homeless, unemployed and poor people. So the vast majority of the people are placed in an ‘us and them’ adversary situation with the police, who then use this to justify their wholesale assault on a segment of the population that many of the police ironically originate from themselves. This adversary type psychology manifests itself most clearly with their removal of class identity with the people they come into contact with as a whole, sows the sick seeds of racism and stereotyping, lies and corruption through the ranks of these fictitious ‘protectors of society’ from the bottom to the top. This cannot seriously be addressed, let alone corrected, by the ruling class because such a massive effort at correction would logically serve to demoralize the very force relied upon to protect it’s wealth and power. This is why so few police are prosecuted for their crimes against the working class and in the rare instances when they are convicted it’s always of lesser offences no matter what they actually do, even when cops murder citizens which is increasingly becoming more frequent .The police are often brutal, corrupt, prejudiced to the core and elected politicians will never seriously confront this horrific problem as they themselves either benefit from the actions of the police or are bought and paid for lackeys of the ruling class. The judicial branch of capitalist law enforcement is perhaps an even worse farce than the myth about the pigs ‘serving the people to protect them’. There is no such thing as ‘equal justice under the law’. In the court system money talks, the rich walk and the poor and minorities go to the gulag. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is another shaky concept founded on farce, not reality. Any person ever arrested by the pigs to be later tried before a judge or a judge and jury, will attest to the clear fact that they were never once treated as ‘innocent’ at any stage of the proceedings against them if they are not wealthy. The mainstream media, owned by the ruling class, is a powerful weapon used by them to present to the public only a very narrow view of the world. It’s often intentionally distorted, biased coverage of events is part of the propaganda drive to criminalize the poorest sections of society which makes a laughable joke out of the shroud of innocence allegedly bestowed on all citizens by the Constitution. The much touted, legendary Amerikkkan courtroom’s ‘shroud of innocence’ resembles single ply toilet tissue in this age of media backed, state terrorism, with the majority of the public, meekly ,willing to surrender their constitutional rights to be replaced with ever increasing police-state oppression and repressive Gestapo tactics, ‘Terry stops’, property seizures, the ‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on crime’, ‘no-knock’ search warrants served by wannabee robokops with battering rams, fully automatic weapons, , boot heels shattering doors…

Most lawyers act as unethical pimps for capital’s status quo within the city, county, state and federal judicial whorehouses (officially designated as ‘courts of law ‘) wherein the almighty dollar reigns supreme. They will sell an indigent defendant into captivity for a number of reasons, or no reason at all. This especially applies to those habitually incompetent, professionally malpracticing lawyers associated with the many ‘Public Pretender’ offices nationwide, if they have been appointed to represent a client without funds. In my un-humble opinion most attorneys rank somewhere below serial child molesters. But not all attorneys are low-life, ambulance chasing, blood sucking cretins as there are a few exceptional lawyers which champion the causes of the people, have not bought into the capitalist system such as William Kunstler (who sadly died in 95) with a very few others like him scattered throughout this nation, as rare as diamonds discovered in a coal mine or intelligent, non serving politicians in either congress or the white house. I admire this rare, almost extinct species of attorney very much. A perfect example of ‘equal justice’ in Amerikkka is that a homeless person, forced to steal food to survive is 99.9% more likely to go to prison than a white collar criminal charged with embezzling millions of dollars of unrecovered funds from senior citizens. The lesson of the judicial system in modern day Amerikkka is that you are presumed guilty if you are a member of a minority, poor, or working class, all considered as the ‘perpetrating class’ by the cops and courts. From the judicial cesspool follows inevitable imprisonment for working class people after their farcical day in court. In other words the hallowed halls of capitalism suck but so do most of the court personnel that are employed there, particularly the black robed cross dressers sitting in judgement of us lesser beings.

Politicians have a self-serving field day whipping up public hysteria in the mainstream media about the ‘crime crisis’ in Amerikkka, perpetrating the great lie in order to enhance their images to concerned voters of being tough on crime. “The prisons are full of dangerous criminals, keep them there! Three strikes and your out! We have to build more prisons to hold them all! We need the prisons to control these animals!..” they rant and rage while lying through their pearl white teeth. The truth is easily discovered by anyone willing to do some preliminary research on the crime and prisons. Their great lie is merely just another vote grabbing fabrication which social vermin like politicians are known for coming up with in desperation to seize public office to fleece the flock! The national population has increased since the fifties and sixties where most comparison statistics are drawn from to match with the 90’s crime rates. Crime has risen comparatively with the population increase. Almost at the same rate of growth during the fifties and sixties. Some categories of violent crime have increased a bit but only because of the increased availability of automatic weapons during the 90’s era.

The simple concrete fact remains, the vast majority of people imprisoned today in the united states of Amerikkka’s state and federal gulags are incarcerated for economic crimes relating to survival. The largest percentage of these people are poor, unemployed, working class and/or members ethnic minorities. Prisons are racist, sexist environments, designed to dehumanise those within them, strip people of their identities to be replaced with numbers like warehoused spare parts. Prisons provide no treatment to solve any problems which led a person to prison. The only treatment provided is to control conduct/ behaviour of a person while in prison, if any treatment is offered at all. It is meant to isolate the prisoner from family and friends, break down their personalities to force them, through varying degrees of brain washing techniques, into becoming another obedient robot for capitalism. Prisons are being utilized increasingly to simply warehouse people, society’s throwaway segments; the homeless, unemployed, those seeking to bring political change through methods unacceptable to the elite few, the ‘unwashed’ or perpetrating class, defined as us. Prisons are violent institutions by design and teach lessons of violence through abuse to those confined within them. This taught violence is often, later misdirected and unleashed upon society in general after the person is released. Bitterness, pent-up rage, anger has to go somewhere so it explodes, most often at unexpected times and often in self destructive ways to the individual, sending them back for a second drink at the well of the gulags. The victims of the prison’s institutionalised brutality create new victims of the system, thus ensuring the vicious cycle continues after their release to gentler society to send them back for a rerun of the original dehumanising penal experience. Prison neither deters crime nor protects anybody from crime. Prison perpetuates crime. Prisons provide no realistic rehabilitation and the person is often a worse threat to society when they leave prison than when they entered it in the first place .So why are people continued to be dehumanised in these steel and concrete gulags? Why are people still locked away for years in these tombs of the undead. Why? Because prisons are a booming growth industry and as with other large capitalist ventures are propped up with dollars taken from the working class in the form of taxes.

Certainly it remains clear, the professional politicians are interested only in ways to line their pockets and not to lighten the load of those who elected them into office! A proper clean sweep of this nation’s prisons from the face of the earth should naturally include the two political party parasites. Private industry has entered the ‘corrections’ business in several ways within recent years. Privately owned corporations bid for contracts with state departments of correction in many states. Privatised medical services companies have been formed to provide for prisoners’ medical needs and at least one state, Tennessee, has even entered contractual agreement with a private company to provide meals for prisoners. Privately owned and operated prison management companies have been known to attempt to reach into the international slave market for contracts to operate gulags at a profit in other countries. A perfect example of such blatant profiteering is Corrections Corporation of America of Nashville, Tennessee, which has entered negotiations with the United Kingdom in the hope of being able to manage and operate privatised English prisons. The economic benefits to the state and the private sector operating hand in glove is immeasurable. When most other areas of the free market are in decline there is a burst of growth in the ‘corrections industry’. The harder the times for the working class, the better the times are for this growing industry which deals in systematic dehumanisation, torture and slow death for many residing in cages, with many more unfortunates to arrive in the near future due to the passage of Draconian ‘crime bills’ at state and federal levels. Over $80 billion is spent on existing prisons annually. That lofty figure is set to rise like a space rocket from Cape Canaveral in the coming years with the .- proliferation of prisons. Prisons do not work, they solve no problems for society at large and none for the people confined within them. They thrive on institutional racism and sexism. They are brutal and excessively violent. In every way the very concept of caging human beings has failed miserably though prisons will remain as monuments to ignorance and stupidity as long as there is a dollar to be made from their existence or until the working class say “NO MORE” and tear them down brick by brick. Until such a time the working class will continue to pay the ever increasing costs for the prison farce. If things continue as they are we will ultimately end up with one half of the population supporting and the other half in cages.

The USA. has the dubious distinction of incarcerating a larger percentage of it’s population than any other country in the world. Presently the rate of imprisonment is 426 people locked up per 100,000 population which means that well over 1 million men, women and children in the U.S. are behind razor wire fences, concrete walls, living in primitive steel and concrete cages or high security, state of the art tombs. The overall incarceration rate in this nation is climbing at an alarming rate and at present it even surpasses South Africa which has the 2nd highest rate globally of 333 persons per 100,000 population. Black people in the U.S. are incarcerated at seven times the rate of white people on a national average. The number of women in prison is steadily increasing, many of these women are single mothers with approximately 60% being black or Latino. Statistics show that nearly half of those incarcerated in the U.S. were unemployed at the time of their arrest, so you don’t have to be a member of Mensa to recognise the direct relationship between the boom in prison construction, the crime statistics, and the ever rising unemployment statistics. The ‘corrections industry’ is the fastest growing area of business in the nation with the initial cost of construction carried by working class taxpayers (often hoping that prison building programmes will bring new jobs for the inhabitants of areas where unemployment is very high) but with profits being reaped by private capital. The working class pays the bill through higher taxes and the company bosses walk off with the profits. The school system is hurting nationally for operating funds to be able to prepare students to compete in an ever more selective job market. There is not enough housing to even come remotely close to solving the homeless problem in this country. People want for food and little children go hungry in the richest nation on the face of the earth. By forcing homeless people to live on the streets without shelter, raising taxes progressively on working class families, while decreasing taxes on the affluent thereby causing the standard of working class living to decline, manipulation of the economy to shut down smaller business’ that can’t compete with the big corporations or allow them to leave the nation so they can set up shop in the so called ‘third world’, exploiting wage slaves at cheaper pay scales. All this and more enhances the national unemployment rate ensuring plenty of new blood for a prison system already packed beyond capacity. There is a whole new generation of victims being prepared for the inside of these cages right now in capitalist amerikkka. The prisons today are comparable to the slave trade of yesterday, where warm flesh held in captivity means profits for the realm!

If government is representative and concerned with the needs of the population as a whole as it claims to be, shouldn’t it be housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, educating the starving young minds now being thrown away and use the billions of dollars thrown away on prison construction (and other useless projects like the NASA space programme etc. .) to solve today’s social problems that are dragging us all down ? It would be naive of us to believe this is likely to happen. The prisons will continue to be full, with more being built at our expense until we the people, through taking matters into our own hands, tear them down, brick by brick and erase them from the face of the earth by sheer force! Capital will not willingly give up anything through a mere outcry or be voted away. All governmel:1ts protect the interest of capital only, not the will of the working class ,the ‘unwashed rabble’, us! Quite simply it will continue to: .- build prisons and fill them with us as long as we continue to let it happen. The Red Army Faction in Germany struck a blow against capital’s construction of a state of the art prison a few years ago when they blew it up! They hit hard because those in power who use force to oppress, fear most the use of force against their control. If such examples of direct action by the brave few were to inspire the many and seen as being an effective way of striking blows against the horror of capitalism then maybe the people would bring down this decaying monster.

The words of George Jackson, slain revolutionary of the sixties, come to mind as he spoke of the powerful force unleashed with the wrath of the people. George said “I’m part of a righteous people who anger slowly but rage undammned. We’ll gather at his door in such a number that the rumbling of our feet will make the earth tremble”.

Hit out with direct action against the system which is destroying us, me in here, you out there !

Let the earth shake with the rumble of our feet !

One small snowflake too many on a hillside, can start an unstoppable avalanche!

 

The Importance of Supporting Prisoners by Harold H. Thompson

Harold H. Thompson is an anarchist prisoner serving life plus sentences in Tennessee, USA. Behind the walls, Harold is well known for his work as a “jailhouse lawyer,” and as a result has been the target of petty harassment, including the confiscation of his anarchist literature and law books and deliberate damage and theft of his personal belongings by prison guards. Literature sent in to Harold was even withheld by the prison mailroom because it contained “narratives of anarchy.”

The following is taken from a zine of Harold’s writings, They Will Never Get Us All! that was released in 1996. A second edition is now available, and can be acquired by contacting the A Word Collective, or writing Harold, who welcomes all correspondence, at

Harold H. Thompson #93992
West Tennessee High Security Facility
P.O. Box 1150
Henning, Tennessee 38041

First, it is important to stress that none of us is immune from arrest and prosecution for any number of alleged crimes. Especially once we have placed ourselves into the eye of the storm of struggle against the masters of capital, who believe their station in life gives them the legitimate power to enslave us in whatsoever form they choose, to use us up, throw us away and profit by the blood and sweat we shed in their wage slave shops, factories and mills of capitalism. Once we step out in any form of protest then the power of the state may fall upon us with unrelenting force. We are subject to arrest and imprisonment at any time, most of us, simply because we choose to be who we are because we want to live the lives we choose in spite of the plans others make for us; because we dare to be different; or because our eyes are open to the realities of our likely future, wearing the yoke of capitalism around our necks like beasts of burden, not equal human beings, unless we throw off the weight on our back to stand in the sun in our rightful place. Look at the person beside you, across the way from you and then fully realize that individual may one day be arrested and so may you because you dare to be different, threatening to those who seek to control us, especially if your life is governed by the principles of anarchism or you believe in/have undertaken direct action against your oppressors. Getting arrested is no joke, so without getting too paranoid, find out what to do in such a situation and also wise up about the police. I am often blunt to the point of pain so I do apologize if my words have made anybody uncomfortable, but I think one sobering thought really needs to bring a wake-up call, feeling of discomfort with it. That thought is I am here today sitting in a steel and concrete, tomblike cage writing these words to you but sometime in the future it might actually be you behind prison walls, writing comparable thoughts to the outside. If they come for you in the morning…

The ‘system’ and mainstream media portrays those of us within the ever-increasing number of jails and prisons as being the equivalent of the proverbial biblical ‘unclean people’, to be feared, less than humans, and not to be bothered with or worth any degree of outside concern or support. It amazes me how many intelligent people, including anarchists, active in political struggles, have to varying degrees bought into the disinformation put out by the system. The majority of the unfortunate residents of the gulags are for the most part just like other working class people on the outside, only through a twist of their destiny they were arrested, stood trial and were imprisoned. The system provides the sensationalist image of those behind gulag walls being a bad lot, best steered clear of because the system fears association between those inside and outside. Inside is a potential army waiting to happen, which needs education, direction and support. The system desires nothing more than to maintain a wall of silence around the gulags isolating prisoners to break their minds and spirits. I have seen bodies broken and minds fragmented forever by the brutal hands of the keepers and their clever use of weak, inmate lackeys. I have seen many men reach out to the struggles outside with heartfelt letters, eager for information about the various movements, education about them. Prisoners seeking compassion and comradeship. I have seen only a few of those who make contact, who are encouraged to learn, to grow, to realize who they are, their potential value to themselves and to the communities outside gulag walls.

I have seen far many more give up and sometimes even gravitate towards the hate groups which are now in abundance within the gulags as they are out there. These eventual recruits to the ranks of the extreme right could have been soldiers within our ranks but those who claim to be revolutionaries outside chose to ignore their very existence.

I myself tried in vain for over a decade ‘inside’ to make contact with like-minded people embracing anarchist politics. I was determined to reach out and refused to give up, unlike a lot of other prisoners around me. I reached out at every opportunity and continued to reach out when there was no response, through many letters requesting political literature and anarchist books but above all, comradeship with other anarchists. My unanswered letters began in the late seventies, continued throughout the eighties and into the early nineties. Finally a first anarchist solidarity letter was handed to me by a faceless clone of a guard at a Tennessee gulag in 1992! That letter and letters since has been like a welcome breeze of fresh air blowing through a place where the air and life stands dormant. The mere fact a fellow anarchist bothered to write brought tears to my eyes, eyes I was long convinced would never feel tearful moisture again. I’ve worked hard since that first communication to break down the walls between us, you and I, to reach out, to show those who write I’m not different except for my circumstances of being within the belly of the beast.

I am not saying the gulags do not hold their fair share of social predators but many prisoners do become politicized within gulag walls often due to their own learning efforts. Through direct experience of the system itself, which generally treats prisoners with such blatant injustice that many soon feel only resentment, contempt and anger towards it. Repression breeds resistance. I am merely trying to point out the obvious pitfall of not supporting those seeking the tools to become politicized.

Sadder still than these social prisoners ignored by the revolutionary movements are those souls captured during direct or other political actions only to discover once in captivity that they appear to have somehow not been deemed worthy of support and are hence soon forgotten by their so called ‘comrades’. One conceptual truth screams out in my heart to be voiced so I will state it now. Any political movement or people’s struggle which fails to provide support to fallen comrades is doomed to failure as certain as day follows night. Prisoner support should be considered as a top priority within all political movements and with all activists, as we, you or I never know when gulag gates will slam shut behind us or when those gates to the outside will open again to allow our passage back out once the system has us in its grasp.

I have endured many hard years, over two decades and a half, within the gulags of this state. As I’ve already said I spent the first decade banging my head and heart against a wall of silence, attempting to reach out to ears that appeared to be deaf and eyes which appeared to be blind to my existence in hell. I never gave up and have earned the right to point these issues out now. I have earned the right to speak out with the shedding of my blood, the pain of this, in past beaten, tired body, and my spirit of anarchism has never been broken by my keepers and never will be! It has only been in recent years that I have been acknowledged by my anarchist brothers and sisters out there. From my heart I state to you that I love you all! I will close now with these final words. Take care of each other, keep each other safe in the struggles which you face and never forget those in captivity because tomorrow’s captive of the monsters of this earth may well be you. Our common enemies are the same from country to country being only different in name and face. They represent the same ideology, which sees this planet and its populace as throwaway commodities. They threw away their humanity in exchange for Power and profits. Stay strong and know in your hearts I am with you in revolutionary spirit in every act you undertake against those who oppress us. We only want the earth, they will never get us all!

Written April 18 1995
Revised July 18 2005