----- Original Message -----
From: Network Africa - Sweden (NAS) <[log in to unmask]
Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 2:00 PM
Subject: Report From Angela Davies Meeting


> Network Africa - Sweden (NAS)
>
> "ABOLISH THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX" - ANGELA DAVIES
>
> Angela Davies, a former member of the Black Panther Party, has called for
> the abolition of the "Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)", the death penalty
> and an end to slave labour in prisons around the world. Speaking at the
> "Riv Murarna" conference held at Brygghuset in Stockholm on 28th October,
> Angela said that out of the two million people locked behind bars in US
> Federal prisons and County jails, one million are Black or people of
> colour. The conference had been organised by "Andra Chansen", an
> organisation that works with prison-related questions in Sweden.
>
> Angela is currently an active member of the US-based "Critical
> Resistance", a Movement seeking to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex
> by challenging the structure of the "criminal justice" which PIC says, is
> based on revenge, punishment and violence.
>
> Angela compared the Prison Industrial Complex to the Military Industrial
> Complex, which she said, produces destruction. "The difference is that the
> Prison Industrial Complex produces nothing", she said. She explained that
> the large representation of Africans and people of colour in US jails was
> a direct result of racism.
>
> She deplored the privatization of the prison system especially in the US
> which, she said, had converted prisons into profit-making institutions.
> She pointed out that International corporations, which have nothing to do
> with the prison system, were involved in the exploitation of prison labour
> and provision of telephone  and other services solely for profit.
>
> Specifically, she told the audience that Australia had the largest number
> of private prisons in the world, adding that privatisation of prisons had
> led many corporations into relying on the expansion of prisons as a means
> of making money. She criticised the large number of Aborigines being kept
> in Australia's prisons for petty drug related offences.
>
> She told the audience that Critical Resistance had filed a lawsuit aimed
> at stopping California from constructing a new prison with a capacity of
> more than 5,000 prison beds and at a tune of 335 million Dollars.
>
> She said that women prisoners in the United States were constantly
> subjected to sexual violence. "Many women prisoners are often subjected to
> gynaecological or pelvic examinations by male Doctors even if this kind of
> examination is not necessary", she said. She stunned her listeners when
> she revealed that a Chief Medical officer in the US had said on a TV
> programme watched by millions of people that female prisoners "liked"
> gynaecological examination because "they had no contacts with men".
>
> She said that she had visited a prison in Stockholm to look at the
> condition under which women prisoners were being held and reminded the
> audience that the number of prisoners in the United States was more than
> the population of Stockholm city.
>
> According to the African-American revolutionary, many people are serving
> long jail terms for petty offences which, she said, could earn them
> lighter sentences. She said that the campaign against PIC being waged by
> CR was a campaign against capitalism, a system which, she said, thrives by
> locking people in cages.
>
> In calling for the abolition of PIC, Angela said that prisons have not
> been able to rehabilitate prisoners neither has imprisoning people been
> able to minimise crime. Questioning why more money was being spent on the
> prison system in the US than in education, Angela charged that the prison
> system was providing spurious solutions to problems which could be dealt
> with in another way. She said that one of the objectives of the
> anti-prison movement was to popularise a different way of talking about
> prisons, adding that radical movements could make a big difference in the
> situation.
>
> The former Black Panther activist said that the campaign for the abolition
> of the prison system should be connected to the campaign for lighter
> sentences. She said that Texas had the highest number of death row inmates
> followed by California and gave the example of Mumia Abu Jamal (the
> African-American journalist who has been on death row for the last 20
> years) as a typical case in which a person had been put on death row
> despite the fact that available evidence showed that he was innocent.  She
> said that the emergence of DNA evidence had created campaigns for a new
> category of innocent people who were behind bars.
>
> She said that in the United States, expansion of prisons began to increase
> at a time when criminologists were saying that crime rate was on the
> decline. Angela, who was herself jailed for 18 months as a result of her
> activism in the Black Panther Party, said that it was disheartening that
> many people had accepted a twisted notion that incarceration created a
> sense of security. "People don't question what appears to create
> collective emotional security. They don't question things that they think
> make them safer", she said.
>
> She said that it was pathetic that in certain parts of the US where people
> relied on agriculture for subsistence, the tendency had changed so that
> people had come to believe that the construction of prisons on
> agricultural land could lead to economic revitalisation and creation of
> jobs.  She narrated how in the State of California, people collected money
> to give to the state so that the state could build prisons as a way of
> creating jobs.
>
> In another example in San Francisco, she said that people could not
> recognise the existence of a prison which had become part of their social
> landscape because since they thought it was a museum, they did not notice
> it. She appealed for the fostering of alliances of different people -
> workers, activists, students etc to campaign against the prison system
> which, she said, was similar across the world.
>
> She answered questions from her audience and later hosted a press
> conference which lasted for about half an hour.
>
> Okoth Osewe
> ARIBIS Media Group
> -------------------
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
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