Of prisons, prisoners and stories that slip by

In the year 1994, Darron Bennalform Anderson of Oklahoma, USA, was found guilty of multiple crimes including kidnapping, grand larceny, burglary and rape. He was sentenced initially to 2200 years in prison and after an appeal (turned down) this was extended to a total of 11,950 years.

A subsequent appear in 1997 pruned off 500 years, leaving the man with a sentence of 11,450 years in jail. As things stand Anderson is eligible for parole in the year 12,744.

Compared to this, the 19 years that Burman’s longest-serving political prisoner (the journalist Win Tin) spent in jail seems a light sentence. A bit stiffer would be the 32 years (and counting!) that Nael Barghouthi, a Palestinian, has spent in Israeli prisons. He is currently the longest serving political prisoner.

Then there is Eusebio Pe¤alver Mazorra an African-Cuban captured in 1960 during Fidel Castro’s ‘War Against Bandits’. When he was released in 1988, he had already spent 28 years behind bars.

Incidentally, about 85 percent of Cuba’s jail population is black while just 0.8 of the rulers are Afro-Cubans, something that those who talk of Cuba and Fidel as though they are talking of Heaven and God respectively, might find sobering.

Have you heard, though, of one Elmer ‘Geronimo’ Pratt, i.e. Geronimo ji-Jaga? He spent 27 years in prison, eight of them in solitary confinement courtesy the FBI’s ‘COINTELPRO’ program which aimed at neutralizing Pratt as an effective functionary of the Black Panther Party.

He was freed in 1997 when his conviction was vacated on the grounds that the prosecution had not disclosed that a key witness against Pratt, Julius Butler, was an informant for both the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department, and that this fact was “favourable” to the defendant, “suppressed” by a law enforcement agency, and “material” to the jury’s decision to convict.

Then there is Leonard Peltier, member of the American Indian Movement, who is serving two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for the murder of two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

You can learn about it in a documentary by Robert Redford and Michael Apted called ‘Incident at Oglala’. There’s enough concern about the fairness of proceedings for some to contend that Peltier is a political prisoner. That’s 33 years in the ‘sin bin’.

I got interested in prison sentences and their length when I was investigating the status of the US prison system (about which a lot has been written - you have to know where to look: try the sixth ‘O’ in goooooooooogle and beyond). I checked because the USA is so good at preaching democracy, transparency, accountability, good governance, rule of law and civilization, the very things they are so bad at back home.

We are talking about a country where there are political prisoners facing 30-40 year jail terms because they’ve objected to social injustice or held political convictions that the White House frowned upon.

They are victimized by judicial unfairness, get-tough-on-crime policies, guilty-unless-proven-innocent mentalities, and the crisis of indigent defence, and for being ‘undocumented’, violating drug laws that are patently racist, for being Black, Latino or Muslim and of course to satisfy the needs of the prison-industrial complex.

The US prison-industrial complex is said to be one of that country’s fastest growing businesses and one which includes a private gulag, prisons for profit, with corporations running dozens of facilities housing tens of thousands of prisoners. The Wall Street Journal, no less, has a comment:

“This multimillion-dollar industry has its own advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”

There are over 2.4 million prisoners held in various facilities, at least 15 percent of that number estimated to be wrongfully convicted. I was surprised to learn that US prisons produce 100 percent of US military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens.”

They also supply 98 percent of equipment assembly services, 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes, 92 percent of stove assemblies, 46 percent of body armour, 36 percent of home appliances, 30 percent of headphones, microphones and speakers, 21 percent of office furniture, and much more.

It’s not just the USA of course, but then again being a country that brags about freedom, democracy, civilization, decency and so on like no one else does, the lie is that much more objectionable.

There is no ‘story’ about the USA’s prison system. There are ‘stories’. Not a PhD thesis, but an entire library. I am not even ‘scratching the surface’ so to speak.

But perhaps the following ‘storylet’ would persuade people to look people like Robert O Blake and Patricia Butenis in the eye and ask some questions the next time they start doing the School Principal number.

Ask them about Marilyn Jean Buck, who died on August 3, i.e. less than 10 days ago. She was a communist, a revolutionary, a convict, and poet imprisoned for her participation in the 1979 prison break of Assata Shakur, the 1981 Brinks robbery and the 1983 US Senate bombing. Buck received an 80-year sentence, which she served in Federal prison. She was released on July 15, 2010, less than a month before her death at age 62 from cancer.

Just another law-breaker who was duly punished? It is not as simple as that.

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