A Statement in Support of September 9th

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“Where the conditions for revolution are not present, they must be manufactured.”
-George Jackson

Prison officials recently placed Siddique Abdullah Hasan, a death row prisoner held at Ohio’s supermax, in segregation. Siddique was framed as a leader of the Lucasville prison uprising in 1993 and has been a vocal supporter of the September 9th national prisoner work stoppage. His segregation should really come as no surprise as prison (mis)managers have long waged a brutal war on truth and on the captives who tell it. What is disturbing and highly instructive is that Siddique’s segregation didn’t originate with the prison warden, but with the FBI.

Yeah. The FBI.

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Greetings from the Depths of Solitary Confinement: Zine Feedback from an Illinois Prisoner

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The following letter comes from a prisoner in solitary confinement in Illinois.

Greetings from the depths of solitary confinement.

Hello once again and I thank you from the bottom of my corazon for the three zines you sent back in May. One of these zines was “The Colonizer’s Corpse.” This zine re-opened my eyes to this ongoing torture chamber called segregation. I say re-open because I’ve been incarcerated from the age of sixteen and I’m now thirty-three. By coming here at such a young age with an outrageous outdate, my mind acclimated to this environment and accepted segregation as just another part of prison. As of June 15th I’ve been in this isolation cell created by the oppressors for a fight I had in the prison yard. I was lucky to have received the zines you had sent me and I’ve put them to good use.

Four individuals and myself have begun a study group with “The Colonizer’s Corpse” as our first study. We’ve all read it and have had positive talks over the gallery. They have also opened their eyes to the reality of our current situation. Even a certain individual which was completely lost to this torture chamber (all day he’d just bang on the door and disrespect people for no other reason than to get attention) both physically and mentally has been slowly coming back to reality.

During our last study session I used that brother’s situation as an example of how this machine destroys individuals and renders them useless to any struggle. Of course this individual heard and lashed out on me, but I didn’t blame him for lashing out because his oppressors have put him in his current debilitated and chaotic state and I told him so. As our conversations went on, this individual who was lost to the machine surprised everyone and joined our conversation. He is now the sixth member of our study group and I’d like to thank all you guys for the resources that helped bring this brother back from his own hell.