HOUSTON
Prison officials forced to meet with anti-death penalty
activists
By
Gloria Rubac
Houston
After five years of fighting the death penalty and the
inhuman conditions that death row prisoners have to live under,
the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement held a face-to-face
meeting in Houston on Oct. 19 with five of the top officials of
the Texas prison system.
Crammed into the small offices of TDPAM, over 30
activists--death-row family members, prison ministers and
supporters of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal--sat side by
side with the authorities.
Officials present at the meeting included Prison Director
Gary Johnson, General Counsel Carl Reynolds, Deputy Executive
Director Art Mosley, Ombudsman Kathy Cleere and Chris Carter
from the prison grievance department.
Activists presented Johnson with a list of their grievances,
ranging from unwarranted shakedowns to lack of religious
services to the horrifying conditions of living in sensory
deprivation cells with no human contact.
Originally the prison officials had said they would me et
with TDPAM in Hunts ville. The economy of the town of
Huntsville is based largely on the prison there.
Huntsville--about an hour and a half by car from Houston--is
where most of the executions in Texas take place.
But TDPAM wanted the officials to come to Houston. TDPAM has
an office at the SHAPE Community Center. That center has been
the heart and soul of struggles in the African American
community for over 30 years and was founded during the Black
liberation movement of the sixties.
It took a determined struggle to win the two-and-a-half-hour
meeting.
Members of TDPAM attended three prison board meetings during
the last 10 months. Activists raised the issue of violent and
inhumane conditions on death row--not only to the prison board,
but in front of the Texas media. The resulting media coverage
exposed some of these issues and let readers in over a dozen
Texas cities know that there were serious human rights
violations in the prison system.
At the July prison board meeting in San Antonio, the board
refused to let activists speak. The officials claimed that the
issues the activists wanted to raise applied only to state
jails and not to prisons.
The activists demanded to be heard. The board refused,
finished its meeting, adjourned and then called in a line of
armed police. Supposedly the cops were called to protect the
board from outraged activists. In reality the strong showing of
police was designed to leave the media with the impression that
those complaining about prison conditions were the source of
violence--not the prison system.
A hard-won victory
After that meeting, the head attorney for both the board and
the prison system agreed to meet informally with TDPAM. General
Counsel Carl Reynolds listened and made note of over 25
complaints.
These 25 complaints were the focus of the Oct. 19
meeting.
"It's historic," TDPAM organizer Njeri Shakur said after the
Oct. 19 meeting. "The prison system finally accepted that we
are not going away and that we will continue to raise serious
complaints about prison conditions and they have to deal with
us.
"The fact that they came to Houston and SHAPE Center to meet
with us says a lot. On the one hand they wish to placate us in
hopes of shutting us up. On the other they realize that we are
a strong opposition force that they must acknowledge. The
dialog is great but what we seek to gain are concessions,
changes in the barbaric conditions," Shakur concluded.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials agreed to
other similar meetings. Activists suggested that the next one
deal with health care issues.
TDPAM is already collecting statements on the inadequate and
often deadly care given prisoners, in addition to data on AIDS,
hepatitis C and tuberculosis--all rampant among the state's
140,000 prisoners.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME :: U.S. NEWS :: WORLD NEWS :: EDITORIALS :: SUBSCRIBE :: DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page