Graphic of Bear

STANDING DEER
Native American Political Prisoner and Spiritual Activist



Prison, Poverty and Power

It is you I have needed to write for so long. I know that it is not enough to be kindred spirits. The kindling needs to be added to the fire of friendship, brotherhood and comradeship. And it has been me who has been so lax in maintaining any sort of communication. I will ask you to forgive my long silence although I know that it isn't necessary because I know you, of all people having an understanding what life in the Ironhouse of Greed can be like and the things that it can do to men's minds. I think I still maintain some semblance of sanity. The guards hate me and would like to kill me and that is my barometer that tells me I must be doing something right. I pray that you will be able to continue your work as it is so important to so many of us both inside and out. Give my love to Ches-ne-o-na-eh. I heard that he got a reversal and I would like to hear all about it. Also give my love to Winston Holloway and Ron Reed.

Prison is a control device designed to make poor people want to do what the rich want them to do. We were just sitting around yesterday talking about what the establishment would do if they woke up some morning and found their scientists had invented a pill that people with "criminal tendencies" could eat and think and behold all their spirit of resistance would be neutralized. Instead, they would all be pleading for a job in a mine or factory or some other work place. Some of the naive fellows said they would beat us over the head with a hammer and administer it to us immediately. But most of us knew that never in life would they give out that pill and furthermore, the invention of it would be totally non-publicized.

Prisons are a hustle for millions of people. They pay guards about fifteen thousand a year here at Marion and many of them don't have walking around sense. Their claim to a paycheck is knowing how to insert a key in the lock and how to cock their feet up on a desk in front of a fan and blow whistles at prisoners. Where would these automatons fit in if there was all of a sudden a free society and they had to do something constructive. I wouldn't want them jailed because I don't believe in any kind of jail for any reason. But how the hell would you rehabilitate some of these oafs and make productive citizens out of them. Not productive in the economic sense, but productive in their contribution to humanity.

There is an illumination with me - a spark of life like a dream that tells me that human beings were meant for something better than knocking their brains out in somebody's mine or factory. I think this system is insane to expect anybody to do that. They have stolen just about all the land and resources from my people. They have taken the lumber from the forests and now the game and fish are almost gone since they have poisoned the lakes, rivers and streams. Our Mother Earth Suffers.

Oh, how she cries out but the pitiless have no pity. Now that they've stolen all our shit, they make us volunteer to become their slaves without even putting chains on our hands and feet. They steal our labor. They issue us, pieces of green paper to buy food, clothes and things we just have to have and then they tell us we are free. And while we work until we wear out like used up automobiles, they become richer and richer and more powerful.

Prisons in this country have become such big business that they haw made power moguls out of ordinary people. All the judges, prosecutors, lawyers, police, and prison guards would have to go out and get a job if us crooks were suddenly no longer crooks. We spent a whole morning on this with one man listing prison connected parasites as the others would name them and explain how they were connected with the prison business. Before too long, we had a list so long we couldn't believe it. The economy would fall if they didn't have us -the fodder - to occupy their prisons.

How can some of them be so rich and pass through squalor, unbelievable poverty, suffering and despair without feeling the least bit of desire to want to help alleviate these conditions? Some people say these capitalists are this way because they are evil and have bad thoughts in their heads. But that's bullshit. The reason they compete in building and destroying personal empires is because they are driven by the real material forces at work within the social system of production which they direct. And while some of them are good "god-fearing" christians they will mash your guts in the street before they will concede one iota of the riches that they have stolen from the children of the poor.

Somebody once said, "no amount of moralizing, of philosophizing, of preaching, of clean living, of eating natural foods or praying will change any of this." Only when the people who suffer the immediate deprivations and punishments of this insane form of social organization are, organized into a force that can physically wrest control of this society from the tiny minority of criminals who today "own" all the mass technology and the means of production, only then will freedom become a possibility. And in the happy event that that should ever happen and somebody jumps up and says he is the new general, king, dictator or pope, that is the man I'm going to strangle with my bare hands before he has a chance to gather about him some more sickos who want to run something to do with my life.

With soup lines in all the major cities, and unemployment ranging from 10 to 80 per cent (depending on whose numbers you want to believe) politicians are selling the political snake oil of longer sentences to get at least part of the work force off of the streets and into the prisons. Admittedly, this approach is a tremendous vote-getter because ever since John Wayne showed the world how a real man is supposed to act (before his stomache rejected him) people have admired the get tough approach to everything. The off the cuff remark by Sturdley Quane, "The total destruction of the planet is a small price to pay to keep America number 1" is a case in point.

Now judges blithely hand out 200 year sentences and the public loves it. But when it comes time for legislators to appropriate money to run all these packed prisons the people don't want to have anything to do with it. Apparently, they imagine we prisoners who have forever sentences are just supposed to disappear, but unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

They create self-fulfilling prophecies like Marion. They claim that here they cage the meanest, most dangerous creatures on the face of the planet. So they bring a prisoner here and beat him, torture him, gas him, deny him access to his loved ones, deny him medical treatment and starve him and lo and behold, when he gets out, instead of being rehabilitated he writes a poem like When I Get Out. What manner of madness is this? Most of the guys in here grew up in special sections of the country with savage neighbourhoods, abandoned housing, wretched schooling and massive unemployment, all of it sustained for so long a period that a proportion of these children of the underclass, white and non-white, have a culture that is at odds with the affluent segment of society.

They have increased their machinery of so-called "justice" by increasing the number of police. They can appoint more prosecutors and judges and hire more administrators and prison guards, build more jails and prisons, and murder more prisoners by "humane lethal injection". But until the problem of the masses who are without any way to make a dollar to feed themselves is alleviated there will be courageous people who will get a gun and do what the violence-oriented TV teaches them in order to get what they have been conditioned to believe they are supposed to have to be a worthwhile member in the great society of Ronald Reagan's. They have my greatest respect and admiration. I'll save my umbrage for the cowards who will let their little ones starve to death in the midst of plenty. Expropriations by compulsion must come from the oppressor and not the oppressed; a good way to tell the difference is to look for a four letter. sign that says BANK. You can't go wrong, . .

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,

Standing Deer


divider



Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1