INTRODUCTION

by the Anarchist Black Cross - Gent

Greetings all,

First we would like to thank the organizers of this symposium to bring us all together to share our experiences and knowledge and to find ways to strenghten the struggle against isolation torture. We send our greetings of strenght, courage and solidarity to all the prisoners in struggle against isolation and torture; the deathfasters in Turkey continuing till today their feirce resistance, the prisoners struggling (since more than 3 years now) in Spain, all the prisoners fighting back individually or collectively all over the world.  Further, we want to thank those prisoners who did send a message to be read here, to be amongst us: Claudio Lavazza, Santos Perez Ayaso, Jose Cabrera, Sundiata Acoli, Jerome White-Bey, Herman Wallace, Thomas Meyer-Falk, … We couldn’t reach all prisoners we are in contact with and they couldn’t all reach us - demonstrating again the isolation and the silence the authorities want to impose upon them -, but they are here and we are with them. Finally, we want to thank Bonnie Kerness, lifelong anti-racist activist and since decades involved in the fight against control units in the U.S., for the information she did send to us and which we can share here today.    

  The struggle against isolation torture is of utmost importance. As was said here already, it is a tool of imperialism to destroy the resistance against its domination worldwide. That is a fact and that is its origin: isolation or control units were designed to break political prisoners who continue their struggle within the prison system. We would like to add that it is also a tool of social control, a means to control and oppress whole populations. The “dangerous classes”, the masses of the poor and exploited, the wretched of the earth must be deterred and learned to be submissive and that resistance is futile. In the U.S., it is estimated that 25,000 to 100,000 prisoners are locked up in maximum security or control units. The proliferation of maximum security prisons points to the fact that isolation and “white torture” have become a systematic part of the prison industrial complex that is used against everyone posing a threat to the system. It is not only political prisoners, strictly defined, who are held today in maximum security. In Spain, the struggle against the FIES is waged by political and social prisoners; in the struggle the differences between political and social prisoners are wiped out.   

As Anarchist Black Cross, we  work in support of revolutionary prisoners, and we do this from the perspective of a society without prisons. We see the prison struggle as part of the struggle of the working class to regain its freedom. If you can’t conceive of a society without prisons, then you ’re on the wrong track. After decades of wars on crime, on drugs, etc. we need to develop a counter-discourse on crime and criminality, only then we’ ll be able to see prisoners as who they really are: as human beings, and mostly as proletarians who refuse to submit to the world of exploitation and struggle to survive with the means at their disposal. As our comrades in struggle against prison in Spain wrote: 

“Before everything else we have to become aware of one thing: we may be drug addicts, thieves, anarchists or whatever, we are prisoners because we do not accept the reality they want to impose upon us. Everyone of us, in his/her way, did revolt against the miserable existence offered to him/her by a society that sinks away in shit. That’s why we sometimes have let us to be seduced by the trap of drugs, that’s why we took up a weapon, and above all, that’s why we endure the repression. These are indisputable facts. Let us not loose in political theories and speeches, let’s fight against every form of  coercion (…)”           

We hope the information brought together in this little dossier here, together with the info youcan find on our table, will contribute to the debates here, to a growing awareness of the reality and significance of isolation and torture all over the world and of the ongoing struggles against it, and to a renewed  and enforced determination to fight it together.

Thanks.