Community Coalition Meets  GA Corrections Officials... Visits First Prison. What Would Dr. King Say or Do?

Wed, 12/22/2010 - 12:37 — Bruce A. Dixon

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon, with assistance from Ingemar Smith

Last Friday members of
the Concerned Coaltion to Protect Prisoner Rights met with Georgia
correctional officials. The following Monday they commenced the first of
a series of fact finding visits to the state's correctional
institutions, seeking the reasons and right response to the stand of
inmates demanding their human rights. Dr. King's annual holiday is
coming up too. What would he say about the prisoners and the nation's
misguided public policy of mass incarceration? What would he do, and
what should we?

Community Coalition Meets With GA Corrections Officials, Visits First Prison. What Would Dr. King Say or Do?

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon with assistance from Ingemar Smith

“'The
prisoners have done all they can do now. It's up to us to build a
movement out here that can make the changes which have to be made.'”

Eight days after the
start of Georgia's historic prisoner's strike, in which thousands of
inmates in at least six prisons refused to leave their cells, demanding
wages for work, education and self-improvement programs, medical care,
better access to their families and more, representatives of the
communities the inmates came from met in downtown Atlanta with state
corrections officials. The community delegation, calling itself the
Concerned Coalition to Protect Prisoners Rights, was headed by Ed Dubose
of the NAACP of Georgia's state conference, and included representatives from the US Human Rights Organization, the Nation of Islam, the Green Party of Georgia, The Ordinary Peoples Society, and attorneys from the ACLU of Georgia, the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition and elsewhere, along with state representative Roberta Abdul-Salaam.

State officials claimed
they knew about the strike action well in advance, and said they locked
the institutions down as a preemptive measure. They declared they'd
confiscated more than a hundred cell phones, mostly in public places,
and identified dozens of inmates whom they believed were leaders of the
strike. They admitted confining these inmates to isolation and in some
cases transferring them to other institutions.

The coalition asserted
that brutal reprisals were being taken against nonviolent strikers by
prison authorities, and that constant threats being made against
inmates. These incidents, the coalition insisted, along with the vast
gulf between the reasonable demands of the inmates and some of the
well-known conditions in the state's penal institutions made the
immediate entry into the affected prisons by a fact finding team of
advocates, community representatives and attorneys at the earliest
moment an absolute necessity. The meeting adjourned awaiting the state's
decision. And late Friday afternoon, state corrections officials agreed
to access by a small number of delegated observers, who would visit
Macon State Prison, some two hours south of Atlanta the following
Monday.

The observers who visited
Macon State on December 20 would not comment on what they saw and
heard, except to confirm that they did interview staff and prisoners for
about five hours. Macon State, some said, was the institution chosen by
the Department of Corrections. Subsequent visits would have to be made
to other institutions, they confirmed, including some of those where the
alleged strike leaders were being held.

“We understand where we
are and how we got here,” explained Rev. Kenny Glasgow of The Ordinary
Peoples Society (TOPS) after his visit to Macon State. A former prisoner
himself who spent fourteen years behind the walls, Glasgow runs a
series of re-entry programs for former inmates in Georgia and Alabama.
“We only got to sit down with correctional officials, we only gained
access to the prisons because of the courageous stand of those behind
the walls. It was their willingness to work together across different
lines and to sacrifice the very limited freedom and safety they have
that got us to this point. The prisoners have done all they can do now.
It's up to us to build a movement out here that can make the changes
which have to be made.”

The Concerned Coalition
to Protect Prisoners Rights is expected to request to visit at least one
more Georgia penal institution before the year ends to continue its
fact finding process. Coalition spokespeople have been deluged with
messages of solidarity and support from across the country and around
the world. Meetings, marches and demonstrations have taken place in
Oakland, Detroit, and New York and elsewhere.
The Center for Constitutional Rights and other outfits are circulating
online petitions which have garnered thousands of signatures in support
of the prisoners. Those wishing to contact the Coalition via email can
do so at concernedcoalitionga(at)gmail.com.

“Any
holiday celebration, any dinner, parade, or commemoration of Dr. King's
life and work that does not embrace the cause of Georgia's and the
nation's prisoners... is an empty one...”

In about three weeks
we'll all be celebrating the January 15 anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther
King's birth. Many have remarked on the great distance between the
actual life and work of Dr. King and the empty plaster saint of
nonviolence that some have turned him into. The truth is that the living
Marin Luther King was a fearless opponent of injustice, a man unafraid
of endorsing unpopular causes, so long as these causes were just. If Dr.
King were alive today he would wrap his arms around the cause of
Georgia's and this nation's prisoners. Work without wages is indeed
close to slavery. Even if the 13th Amendment permits
“involuntary servitude” of those convicted of crimes Dr. King might
rightly observe, that this was passed almost a century and a half ago,
and that many things “legal” are neither moral nor advisable.

The U.S. has four and
half percent of the world's population and nearly twenty five percent of
its prisoners. Georgia leads the nation with an astounding one in
thirteen of its adult citizens in prisons and jails, or under court and
correctional supervision, thanks to innovations like the privatization
of misdemeanor probations. When advocating ever-longer sentences becomes
a standard campaign tactic for ambitious politicians, when fortunes are
made overcharging inmate families for phone calls and raking off ten
percent and more of paltry funds families send their loved ones, when
prisons become growth industries with their own lobbyists, punishment
has become a crime.

Any holiday celebration,
any dinner, parade, or commemoration of Dr. King's life and work that
does not embrace the cause of Georgia's and the nation's prisoners, that
does not critically examine the facts America's current policy of mass
incarceration is an empty one, a hollow mockery of the man King was and
the movement he stood for. More than twenty thousand in Atlanta march in
observance of Dr. King's life and work every year. The shiny new
sanctuary of Ebeneezer Baptist Church is always filled with dignitaries
on that day. Let's see how many signs there are outside the church
supporting the prisoners on King's day in Atlanta and around the
country. And let's see if the dignitaries inside Ebeneezer can even
bring themselves to mention the people behind the walls, the locked down
and and the left out, who are truly Dr. King's people. And ours.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.