MOVE 9 Prisoner Janet Africa Harrassed

It seems Janet Africa – one of the MOVE political prisoners – is being harassed by guards at SCI Cambridge Springs. The following alert from Ramona Africa:

ONA MOVE! This is an alert to all of our supporters that the guards at SCI-Cambridge Springs, where our sisters are housed, are starting trouble.

Our sister, Janet Africa, was stopped by a male guard who said he wanted to pat search her. Janet informed him that it’s against our belief to have a man feeling on her body and that she wanted the option of having a female guard search her as provided by prison policy.

She was taken to a female prison guard named Dover who became beligerant and told janet that she wasn’t special and wasn’t getting any special treatment. Dover then told the male guard to take Janet back where he got her from and go ahead and search her. Janet start putting some information on the guards when another guard came to see what all the commotion was about.

Dover then tells him that he should give Janet a misconduct and put her in the hole.. This was obviously a set-up from the beginning because all of those prison officials know who MOVE people are and know our policy about male guards searching our women.

What Dover said about “special treatment” makes no sense either because MOVE didn’t make the prison policy that allows for a woman to refuse to be searched by a male guard and to have a female guard do the search, however it is prison policy, so where is the “special treatment”?

Officials are aware that The MOVE 9 are coming up for parole and these officials are trying to provoke a situation that would be used as an excuse to deny them parole. That’s the bottom line to what’s going on here and it’s just the beginning.

We’re asking people to call the prison and talk to the superintendent or leave a message for her if you can’t get her on the phone. The number is 814398-5400. Thanks for your support.

Ona Move—Ramona Africa
via the defenestrator

MOVE was a predominantly Black “back to nature” religious group whose anti-capitalist and in-your-face attitude made it a target for some of the most vicious police violence in recent amerikan history. Janet Africa was one of nine MOVE members (all of whom take the name “Africa”) who were sentences to 30-100 years in prison after a police attack on a MOVE house on August 8th 1978, during which a cop was killed. The MOVE 9 come up for parole next year.

The police repression would eventually culminate in a bomb being dropped by a police helicopter on their house on May 13th 1985. Six MOVE adults and five of their children were killed as the house burned to the ground. Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor, served seven years in prison for “conspiracy, riot, and multiple counts of simple and aggravated assault”.