Lucasville prisoner speaks on police roundup

Mosi Paki is one of the prisoners who has been in solitary confinement for the past 15 years for the uprising in the prison in Lucasville, Ohio, in 1993. He is the only one of the Lucasville uprising prisoners who did not receive a trial, but merely a ticket (rules violation) by the Rules Infraction Board. The following is an excerpt from Paki’s letter to a member of the Cleveland Lucasville 5 Defense Committee in response to news about police arrests of 90 youths in the area of East 116th Street and Buckeye Road in Cleveland.

We both know the system makes mass arrests to blame the victims, just to load up their prison/industrial complex for desired mass profits. For the supply of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of incarcerated poor, regardless of whether crime is rising or not.

Also, the poor are sent to prisons not so much because of crimes they may have or may not have committed, but largely because their communities have been criminalized. Mass arrests or other profiling by corporate patrollers is based on race, class and mass profits per individuals incarcerated in the name of being “tough on crime,” as worded by the politrickers. ...

The E. 116th roundup they say was related to robberies in the Mount Pleasant area. I see many businesses have installed security cameras and are now hiring security personnel—off-duty cops [receiving] double pay for what tax dollars pay them to do on the clock. Wow, what a politricker brainstorm on people in that area.