After the Riots explosed for the murder of the guy in Anderlecht the cops arrested 57 people.

Lettera collettiva di più di mille familiari di persone detenute

Revolutionary Greetings Comrades! Today is Tuesday, April 7th, 2020. This morning the entire prison population here at USP Pollock was screened for Covid-19 and issued protective Masks! The Registered Nurse who was part of the screening team was named Pennison. I asked Mr. Pennison Two Important questions:

#1.) Are there any Confirmed Cases of Covid-19 on the entire Federal Correctional Complex here at Pollock?

He answered: ”No”

#2.) Have there been any Suspected Cases of Covid-19 on the Complex??

His answer was: ”Yes, but they have been ruled out.”

Be advised that this morning a prisoner on my Housing Unit claimed to have Covid-19 symptoms! He has been placed in quarantine. Please Pray for the Best!

The Fcc-complex at Pollock includes a Satelite Camp, a Medium Facility and a U.S. Penitentiary where I am currently Housed.

I Must take this opportunity to issue a National Call for Action!!! Now!!!

I want all of you to consider the lives of our long suffering elderly and infirm Freeom Fighters and Servants of the People who have languished in these Federal and State Prisons for Decades!!

Many of our respected elders are still housed at High Security Facilities despite excellent behavior and clear disciplinary records. They are extremely vulnerable to contracting the Coronal virus!!

These elderly and vulnerable prisoners don’t have to die from Covid -19 while in Federal or State custody!

THEY MUST BE FREED NOW!!! Help Me do this!!

Allow me to take this time to name just a few of our respected elders. WITH YOUR COLLECTIVE SOLIDARITY, MUTUAL AID, AND DIRECT ACTION ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND OTHER MEANS WE CAN FREE OUR IMPRISONED COMRADES NOW!!

Remember! May 7th is Approaching Fast!!

FREE OUR ELDERS!!!

Sundiata Acoli, Leonard Peltier, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Veronzo Bowers, Larry Hoover, and Jeffrey Fort aka King Malik!

These are just a few of the Elders in Federal Prison whom I am requesting your help with Freeing. There are numerous prisoners trapped in State Prisons across the Nation who deserve our support!!

Jalil Muntaqim, and David Gilbert both in New York!

Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, Ruchell ‘Cinque’ Magee, Bobby Dixon, Chip Fitzgerald, Michael Zaharibu Dorrough, and James Baridi Williamson—-ALL OF THEM IN CALIFORNIA!!

Kenny ‘Zulu’ Whitmore in Louisiana!!

and last but certainly not least our shining Princes—MUMIA ABU JAMAL AND RUSSELL “MAROON’ SHOATZ BOTH IN PENNSYLVANIA!!

SISTERS AND BROTHERS!! We Must fight hard for the Freedom, Health, and the Lives of our Incarcerated Elders Now!! On May 7th we must Add this Demand to our North Carolina Grievance Campaign BUT WE CAN’T WAIT TO ACT!!! THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW NOT TOMORROW!!!

As the Future Editor of the San Francisco Bay View–National Black Newspaper, this is the type of Advocacy you can expect from our News Paper and Me!! I am only following the instructions of Dr. Willie Ratcliff our Publisher who has told me to do the following and I quote him: ”FREE THE PRISONERS, HOUSE THE HOMELESS!! STOP THE WARS! SAVE THE PLANET! and LOVE THE CHILDREN!!” I can’t do this by myself!! ANARCHISTS OF THE WORLD THIS IS OUR TIME TO RISE!!

Dare to Struggle, Dare to win, All Power to the People!!!!!!! I LOVE Y’ALL!!

Keith “Malik” Washington is Assistant Editor of the San Francisco Bay View–National Black Newspaper. Malik is studying and preparing to serve as editor after his release which may come sooner than we Thought! Malik is co-founder and chief spokesperson for the End Prison Slavery in Texas Movement, a Proud Member of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee(IWOC) and an Activist in the Fight Toxic Prisons Campaign. Visit Malik’s Website at ComradeMalik.com.

_ Send Malik some much needed Love and Light: Keith “Malik” Washington #34481-037, USP Pollock, P.O. Box 2099, Pollock, LA 71467_

U$A: COVID-19 Update from Malik: Free Our Elders!

Following our communication by phone with many migrant prisoners in the Paranesti Detention Center, we were informed of the following events that took place on Friday 3rd of April. In the aforementioned camp there are 6 wings in which are places 7 to 8 containers, and in each one are cramped together 15 persons. The living conditions are terrible and the people are lacking basic resources for survival.

Under conditions of life threatening detention, the authorities on top of this, ceased to accept any asylum claims a month ago and they ordered confinement due to the corona virus. As a result the migrants were confined inside the containers without any hope of freedom. No information was given to them about the reasons they were quarantined, about what is going on outside or even what they should be doing to protect themselves from the virus.

In a climate of general upheaval and uncertainty, on Friday 3rd of April they decided to react initially regarding the terrible food that they are given and then, in coordination, 500 to 600 people in all 6 wings refused the meals. They made known to the Administration the reasons of their mobilization and the authorities reacted immediately telling them their demands would be met and convincing them to accept the food temporarily.

Later the same day they were given the same inedible food to eat and so, realizing the intentions of the Guards, they decided to declare hunger strike not only for the meals but also demanding to be informed about the health situation and the reasons for their isolation.

The managers of the concentration camp, as true heirs of their fascist predecessors, locked up the migrants inside the containers, aiming to isolate and terrorize them so as to stop their mobilization. Moreover, as punishment they cut the supply of food in the super market.

What followed is worthy of the Nazi tradition in the concentration camps. After keeping them imprisoned for hours inside the containers, around 9 pm the riot squad came along with the OPKE (heavily armed units) cops and 2 vans full of fully armed cops. Savage beatings followed with the repression forces opening the doors of the containers one by one and dragging out of them the migrants one by one beating them up. They would enter the containers, 6-7 cops together beating indiscriminately everyone in their sight. Then they would drag them outside beating them on the head, the legs, the body and wherever their batons would strike. The migrants say that even tasers were used against them.

The whole operation lasted 2 to 3 hours, and when the cops took out all their fury, they decided to elaborate their torture, by keeping some migrants outside on the containers in the cold until the middle of the night, while locking others inside.

Many of the migrants were badly hurt and taken the next day to hospital, some were punitively transferred to other detention centers while some were taken to the cells of police stations. Some were transferred to the nearest clinics for their wounds. In this way they dispersed them, isolating them so as to not have any contact between them and so as to silence the events.
This violence, the repression against hunger striker migrants should not pass!

We don’t forget, we don’t forgive.
Bastards of the police, we are drops of the coming storm.

Riot police brutally beat migrants on hunger strike in Paranesti Dramas (Greece)

9/4/20, The uprising continues in the Women’s Prisons of Eleonas, Thebes. It broke out in the morning, after the death of a 38-year-old prisoner, who developed fever and shortness of breath and died in the ward of the E΄ wing, in front of 20 prisoners. The prisoner died of coronavirus. The other prisoners set fire to mattresses and clothes, while damaging the prison’s refrigerators. A prosecutor has now arrived at the jail and a medical examiner has gone to perform an autopsy. Strong police forces – MAT – who rushed to the prison to prevent the spread of the women’s uprising to all the wings of the prison, carried out extensive beatings and – despite the repression that took place – the uprising spread throughout the prison.

Announcement of women prisoners

9/4/2020 “Today, April 9, prisoner Azizel Deniroglou died in her ward, helpless, as she also had heart problems and a high fever. She had been begging for help all night as she had chest pains and could not breathe.
According to testimonies, they did not even measure her temperature and we are unaware of the real causes of her death. The shift manager threatened her with a report, because it bothered her. The lifeless body of our fellow prisoner was dragged out with a sheet in front of the shocked eyes of the whole wing. This tragic incident took place in the E wing, where about 120 people are stacked. The prisoners revolted and the uprising spread throughout the prison. Another prisoner died a month ago. The criminal indifference to the prisoners and their health has resulted in the death of many detainees, the government and the Ministry are responsible for sentencing them to death. The government and the Ministry are responsible for the death of this prisoner. We demand the immediate release of patients, mothers with their children and the elderly, who are considered vulnerable, a groups, a total of 1/3 of the prisoners. We will not return to our cells until the end! ”

Pola Roupa, a political prisoner and member of Revolutionary Struggle, also complained that another woman had died in prison about a month ago. She stressed that: “Despite promises of prison decongestion due to the coronavirus pandemic, nothing has been done yet. Hospitals do not accept inmates from prisons, there is no doctor in Thebes. The vulnerable groups should have been released. ” We are imprisoned. We were not sentenced to death.”

SOLIDARITY ASSEMBLY OF R.O. REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE

Prison officials thwarted an uprising of dozens of inmates at the Lansing correctional facility in Kansas on Friday, the latest example of unrest in US prisons amid concern about rising numbers of coronavirus infections among inmates.

The prisoners ransacked offices, broke windows and set small fires for several hours before the facility was secured. Randy Bowman, spokesman for the Kansas department of corrections, confirmed to the Associated Press that the incident began on Thursday afternoon in a medium-security cell house.

By late evening, some inmates had given up or gone back to their cells. The Lansing corrections department recently reported more than a dozen staff and 12 inmates had tested positive for Covid-19 at the facility.

The Kansas uprising comes as inmates nationwide protest against responses to coronavirus outbreaks at several prison facilities.

The coronavirus, which causes the respiratory disease Covid-19, has spread through the US’s overcrowded system with federal, state and local facilities housing 2.2 million people.

Nationwide, more than 16,600 people have died from Covid-19 among the general population and nearly 475,000 positive cases have been confirmed. Despite governor-mandated “stay-at-home” orders in most states, inmates remain vulnerable.

Most live at close quarters and have to purchase their own basic sanitation supplies. Many facilities have reported a lack of proper protective equipment amid the outbreak. In New York City jails, 288 inmates, 488 staff and 78 prison healthcare workers had tested positive for the virus by Wednesday, according to the New York Times.

More than 450 inmates and staff have tested positive for coronavirus at Chicago’s largest jail, representing one of the nation’s largest outbreaks since the start of the pandemic. One person has died.

Inmates have posted handmade signs pleading for help in the windows of their cells.

“Sheriff’s officers and county medical professionals are aggressively working round-the-clock to combat the unprecedented global coronavirus pandemic,” the Cook county sheriff’s office said in a statement.

Earlier this week, officers at a Washington state penitentiary fired non-lethal pellets and used pepper spray to break up a riot of more than 100 inmates after six prisoners tested positive.

In Louisiana, one of the nation’s hotspots for the crisis, an inmate at the Oakdale federal prison was sprayed and handcuffed for objecting to previously sick inmates being put back in confinement with the general population.

Eight prisoners have died in Louisiana, including five at the Oakdale facility.

Activists and proponents of criminal justice reform have called for increased efforts to protect prison populations, including boosting sanitization supplies and proper protective gear for staff.

Many have also called for an increase in early release of non-violent offenders and those who are still awaiting trial.

“The entire situation is a ticking time bomb,” writer Kim Kelly warned in an op-ed for the Appeal. “The only sane way to halt the virus’s death march and protect the vulnerable is to release as many people as possible.”

Kelly wrote the op-ed in response to a riot at the Rikers Island facility in New York, where prison guards pepper-sprayed eight people who sought medical attention after being exposed to someone who had been exhibiting flu-like symptoms.

On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas asked the state’s supreme court to release prisoners with pre-existing medical conditions such as heart disease, hypertension and diabetes – risk factors that make them more vulnerable to Covid-19.

That class action petition is on behalf of seven inmates, including at the Lansing facility.

The US attorney general, William Barr, announced on Friday that the federal Bureau of Prisons was facing emergency conditions that had prompted the agency to begin releasing more inmates into home confinement.

The remarks are in contrast to Donald Trump, who has publicly objected to prison releases, vowing to “see if I have the right to stop it in some cases”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/10/us-prisons-coronavirus-uprising-riot

In times like these, no work to be found even if we want it, not enuf weed and acid in the world to make time pass fast enuf, we must dig deep and remember play as a method of killing time. You could fill your night with such activities as:

1. Walking around your neighborhood til you find a nice banner

2. Cut it down and bring it to your sacred spot

3. Smoke weed until you come up with a cool thing to say on it

4. Remember There’s a bridge over the trader joe’s That’s good for dropping stuff

5. Make a banner encouraging looting of said trader joe’s

6. Bike over and drop that banner

7. Make your way over to the property Joel Freedman owns on 21 and locust.

8. Add your words to those of the crew who got there the night you originally wanted to

9. Steal some snacks to keep you sustained

10. Spray over a security camera at a Wells Fargo

11. Engage in a low effort cat and mouse type game with a police car

12 haviing come to a spiritual awakening

As a result of these actions , become resolutely committed to sharing the stories of them as well as the tactics involved
in solidarity with every laid off restaurant worker, and with everyone who’s ever turned a trick,

the anticapitalist contingent of the philly mural arts program

Killing time as high art during quarantine

Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
April 3, 2020

Nine prisoners under quarantine at the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center threw commissary containers at the windows of their cells in an apparent effort to break the glass. Guards responded in riot gear and used pepper spray on the prisoners. According to city officials, no prisoners or staff were injured during the conflict.

The description of the confrontation was related to media by two corrections officers who were not authorized to discuss the incident publicly. The event comes in the midst of the city frantically trying to manage the spread of COVID-19 inside the city’s jails. And as of April 3, the day of the disturbance, 31 prisoners in Philadelphia’s jails and an unspecified number of guards had tested positive for COVID-19 disease. This makes the rate of infection in the city’s jails four times the rate of the rest of the city.

Brian Abernathy, the Managing Director of Philadelphia, told media that the jails have adopted some measures to address the health of prisoners and prison guards and staff, such making masks available and enacting a “shelter in place” policy where prisoners must remain in their cells except for access to showers and phones.

Citations:

“As the coronavirus gains strength in Philly’s jails, panic and fingerpointing mark efforts to avert crisis by thinning inmate population“, The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 4, 2020.

“Philly inmates in quarantine create disturbance as coronavirus concerns spread through jail“, The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 4, 2020.

Article published: 4/4/20
Header photo source: Sign of the Times

Disturbance at Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center During COVID-19 Quarantine

Looks like the autonomo gardeners are back this spring

Text of flyer reads:
“There is an autonomous garden here. There’ve been various gardens in this lot over the years but they were all destroyed by developers who want to build luxury condos here.
Below this plot is the old Mill Creek. The 2019 sinkhole occurred just a few days after developers began resuming their construction project.
This land should not be developed! It is not the time for new condos. It is time for us to begin healing our relationship with the land.”

Text of sign reads:
“Red Belly Autonomous Garden- Garden @ Ur Own Risk”

Guerilla Garden Poppin Back Up

Statement from group of tenants renting from the Constellar Corporation who have declared themselves on rent strike.

A group of tenants in the West Shore neighborhood of West Philly, all renting from Constellar Corp, are initiating a rent strike in response to the current public health and economic crises. Most of us have lost our jobs outright or seen huge reductions in working hours. Meanwhile, we are expected to pay or owe rent on properties managed by Constellar and owned by Hast Investments, owned by a millionaire real estate developer named Guy Laren.

We have attempted to collectively communicate the need for total rent forgiveness to Constellar, and were offered none. To be clear, deferred payment is not going to work for us. We cannot possibly know when we might be able to regain financial security during an ongoing pandemic, and we should not be expected to prioritize rent payments over our other immediate needs such as food and healthcare.

Most of us are rent burdened just like so many Philly tenants, and are unlikely to find employment that would allow us to resume regular rent payments on top of back payments — let alone to a man who once stated, “I buy stuff and figure it out later,” and whose net worth exceeds the cash and assets of all of us combined. It’s time for him to figure out that there is no ethical argument against full rent forgiveness for the duration of this crisis. The financial distress to Laren, Hast Investments, and Constellar Corp does not compare to that faced by poor and working people.

We hope that Laren and Constellar recognize this urgent need to move toward rent forgiveness. We also hope that the city council and state government move in the same direction and implement a moratorium on rent collection.

In making the difficult and stressful decision to go on rent strike, we join others in cities and towns throughout the country and world. We extend solidarity to and draw strength from fellow strikers in New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Atlanta, Chicago, Toronto, Austin, and more, including those whose fight is happening behind bars.

In the hope of avoiding retaliation, the 13 households currently on strike have opted not to sign our names on this open letter. We continue to organize with other tenants of Constellar throughout the city, including commercial tenants, and with other renters in our neighborhood. We’re very excited to coordinate with other renters in the city organizing on their own terms and can be reached through the contact information below. Media inquiries can be addressed to the same contacts.

Solidarity, and spread the strike!

– West Shore Rent Strikers

CCTenants@protonmail.com

https://itsgoingdown.org/west-philadelphia-rent-strike/