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Prisoners

Maroon the Implacable

Russell Maroon Shoatz is a political prisoner who has been held unjustly for over thirty years, including two decades in solitary confinement. He was active as a leader in the Black Liberation Movement in Philadelphia, both above and underground. His successful escapes from maximum-security prisons earned him the title “Maroon.” …

The Rock, May 2013, Vol. 2 #5

Editorial by Ed Mead As many of you may know, I am also the editor of the Prison Focus newspaper, a position I’ve held alone or jointly for the past thirteen years. Prison Focus #39 was mailed out to readers in early March. This week California Prison Focus received word …

Action Alert for Russell Maroon Shoats: Call to demand his IMMEDIATE release from solitary confinement!

Former Black Panther Russell Maroon Shoats has been held in torturous conditions of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania prisons for the past thirty years. He has not had a serious rule violation for more than two decades. Maroon’s role as an educator, human rights defender, writer, and critical intellectual of liberation movements is …

On the Backs of Mexicanos

It is a fact that never in the history of this country’s parasitical existence has it every fully supported itself. Just as the settler economy of the east was erected on the backs of African and indigenous slaves, so too was the economy of the west erected on the blood …

COINTELPRO Murders (Intervention by Geronimo ji Jaga)

The following is Geronimo ji Jaga’s intervention at a September 14, 2000 forum that Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) hosted during the Congressional Black Caucus’s legislative weekend in Washington, DC. It was initially included in a pamphlet published in 2001 by the Human Rights Research Fund (founded by activist attorneys Kathleen …

Geronimo ji Jaga

Geronimo ji Jaga was a freedom fighter who spent almost three decades behind bars in the united states, as a New Afrikan prisoner of war. In 1968, Geronimo returned to the U.S. as a decorated war veteran after three years in Vietnam. Originally from Louisiana, he moved to Los Angeles, …

Snapshot of Genocide

An excerpt from Loic Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Duke University Press 2009), pages 59-73: The Gaols of the Subproletariat: An Experimental Verification It suffices, to discern the extrapenological functions served by the outsized extension of the US carceral apparatus even as crime plummeted for …

Out: The Making of a Revolutionary

Convicted of the 1983 U.S. Capitol Bombing, and “conspiring to influence, change, and protest policies and practices of the United States government through violent and illegal means”, Laura Whitehorn, an out lesbian and one of six defendants in the Resistance Conspiracy Case, spent 14 years in prison. “OUT” is the …