EDITORIAL
Justice and freedom
An oft-told lie by those who hold power in the United States
is that there are no political prisoners in this country.
What about the untold numbers of secretly detained Muslims
and Arabs swept up in racist mass arrests since Sept. 11 solely
on the basis of their religion and/or nationality?
What about Mumia Abu-Jamal and Native warrior Leonard
Peltier? Millions around the world charge they are behind bars
in the U.S. for political reasons. Now Imam Jamil Al-Amin,
formerly H. Rap Brown, has joined their ranks. Despite glaring
inconsistencies in the prosecution's case, and decades of
frame-up attempts by the government, an Atlanta court sentenced
Al-Amin to life in prison without possibility of parole on
charges he shot two deputies.
Five Cubans are languishing in Yankee prisons because they
tried to defend their own island against terrorist attacks,
fund ed, planned and trained for in the United States. The
criminalizing and jailing of freedom fighters for national
liberation has birthed the PROLIBERTAD Puerto Rican Prisoners
Committee, the Jericho Movement, and the MOVE 9 Committee--to
battle for the release of those who have carried out struggles
against national oppression and imperialism.
And what about those who are prisoners of the capitalist war
against the oppressed? There are now over 2 million people,
disproportionately people of color and overwhelmingly poor,
imprisoned in the United States. They represent 25 percent of
the world's prison population, drawn from a U.S. population
that is 5 percent of the world's total.
The disproportionate number of Black and Latino prisoners on
death row. The widespread use of racist profiling to feed the
growing exploitation of captive labor in the prison-industrial
complex by Fortune 500 corporations. Oppression has filled the
jailhouses with women, youths, gay, lesbian, bisexual,
transgender and disabled prisoners, including the mentally
ill.
What about those who are jobless, homeless, hungry, strung
out, impoverished--struggling to survive in a society that
locks up opulent wealth and those who try to take a cent of it?
Aren't they prisoners of this class war, too?
The struggle for a better society must incorporate a fight
against the unjust U.S. "justice" system and a mass movement to
shut down capitalism's dungeons.
Reprinted from the March 28, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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