Prisoner Faruq writes of his pending parole and the obligation to fight the designation that prisoners are the “worst of the worst,” to fight the dehumanization of prisoners; he forwards the importance of prisoner activism in changing draconian conditions.
Readers’ Views takes up: attacks on immigrants; Syria and the Left’s failure; Democratic Party’s selling out women; Women’s Liberation; Serena Williams; ending money bail the right way; Trump-Kim “peace”; genocide and war heroes; and a discussion on sex crimes and their fallout.
Readers’ Views on: Marx’s New Moments and Today’s Need for Revolution and Philosophy; Fetish of Property vs. Humanity and the Planet; Voices from Behind Bars
Readers’ Views on: Fighting Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Hysteria; Women’s Liberation; Attacks on Gays; Support Restaurant Workers; Swords into Plowshares; Human Rights Struggles in Iraq…; …And in Russia; Arthur Gursch in Memoriam
Review of “The End of Policing” by Alex S. Vitale by a prisoner who sees it as “a wake-up call as to the world in which [we] live: the police state Amerika.”
Prisoner-columnist Faruq reviews the book “Specters of Revolt: On the Intellect of Insurrection and Philosophy from Below” by Richard Gilman-Opalsky.
Readers’ Views takes up: women’s liberation, youth in the battle, Blacks vs. racism, border cop thugs, Middle East struggles, and voices from behind bars.
Prisoner Stephen Wilson comments on Faruq’s article on the meaning of legal standing before the law and how restorative justice is not enough as the need is for transformative justice which focuses on the structures that create oppression and inequality in the first place.
Readers’ Views on Women’s Liberation struggle continue and voices from behind bars.
A prisoner writes of the danger zone state and federal prisons have become as warehouses for people suffering from mental health issues.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro writes of his hopes for the 2018 U.S. midterm elections to send a message that youth, the true middle-class, women and the LGBTQI community, people of all colors will take their country back.
Readers’ Views on: Puerto Rico:Trump’s Katrina; LGBTQ in Australia; Transgender in Texas; Women’s Liberation; Racism in Canada; Detroit and “Detroit”; Labor and Robots; Haitian Revolt; Why Read N&L?; and a Correction.
A prisoner speaks against the U.S. criminal injustice system and declares that he–like so many other prisoners–is a boy who just wants to be free.
Black prisoner Faruq looks critically at Fidel Castro’s legacy, especially his turn to a one party state and the importance of freely associated labor for a true revolutionary process.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro tells of how a Wisconsin prison destroyed all library books that had been damaged in any way, thus depriving prisoners of their rights and adding “fuel to the fires of revolution.”
Readers’ Views on: Racism and Revolt Put U.S. on Trial; Life and Death Under the Class Divide; Environmental Struggles; War and Atrocities; and Women’s Lives at Stake.
Prisoner Brutha Baridi tells what it means to be released from the hell of solitary confinement and experience several new “first” experiences.
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro remembers Olga Domanski as a pillar of News and Letters Committees who helped define the organization for decades and wrote a remarkable letter to his parole board.
Spelling out the philosophical breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolutes as the total uprooting of the old and the creation of new human relations, in concrete relationship to struggles for freedom in practice and in theory, is at the heart of projecting Marxist-Humanism, and therefore of its organizational life.
Pelican Bay Prison, Calif.—Twelve years have passed since I entered the Security Housing Unit (SHU) on gang validation. This year I turned 53 years old. My cognitive skills over this past decade have taken an odd turn. The deterioration is discernible. When I first arrived I was attentive and, if you’ll excuse the expression, bright-eyed. I thought I could beat this thing, whatever this thing was. I confess—I was ignorant.
A woman prisoner talks about how women experience Security Housing Units (SHUs) at the California Institution for Women (CIW).
Crescent City, Calif.—The physical and emotional toll of being in the SHU (prisons’ “Secure Housing Unit”): • Manic guards off their meds. • That last good photograph stamped with a boot. • Classification hearings postponed for potlucks. • The daughter whose eyes fill when you ask innocently, who are you?…
An appeal from prison hunger strike activists Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa and Jabari Scott about the unlawful and inhuman conditions at Tehachapi State Prison and the non-implementation of the agreements worked out between prisoners and California Gov. Jerry Brown. News and Letters Committees has been covering the prisoners’ hunger strike even before it began (see Pelican [=>]
A new pamphlet
Pamphlet front cover
From the Introduction:
Hunger strikes by California prisoners, fighting perpetual solitary confinement, arose in mid-summer 2011 and the fall just when the Occupy movement took off. The prisoners’ thoughts and actions put the criminal justice system on trial in the same spirit as the Occupy Everywhere movements put the [=>]