The NYCABC Illustrated Guide to Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War has been updated. You can download it at https://nycabc.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/nycabc_polprisonerlisting_latesdec2022_02.pdf
This update includes updated mini-bios, photos, and address changes for several prisoners. This update includes the release of Mutulu Shakur (parole!).
The decision to grant parole is based on federal law guidelines for “old law” prisoners, finding that Dr. Shakur poses no threat to the community, taking into consideration his exemplary conduct in prison, his medical condition and how much time he has served. Mutulu is now with his family. This victory was secured by the steadfast support of his legal team, his family and his community comprised of all of you.
Family & Friends of Mutulu Shakur (FFMS) is greatly appreciative of everyone’s support over the course of Mutulu’s decades in prison. We ask that everyone respect Dr. Shakur’s privacy while he spends the holidays with his family and concentrates on his health and healing. Any inquiries to FFMS can be directed to [email protected], and we will be sure to release more information as it is available. May everyone celebrate the achievement of securing his release and deepen our commitment to a more just future.
See the Ways to Support page for the most up-to-date information on how you can reach out to and support Dr. Mutulu Shakur.
Dr. Mutulu Shakur comes home this week! We are thankful to everyone who has contributed to the campaign and fundraising efforts. The outpouring of support has been overwhelming and heart-warming. We want to send a clear message – Mutulu is Welcome Here-by raising $50,000 this week to help insure him and his family has what they need to bring him home. We can do this Together by donating and asking others to give as well.
Will you donate this week and share the graphics below and ask others to give as well?
Links to Family and Friends of Mutulu Shakur and Community Aid and Development can be found at https://linktr.ee/FreeMutuluNow
I still think about every fight
every scraping – making of knives
wondering what happened to those lives
they were sharpened for?
I still feel every spray
every breath it stole away
wondering what violence will come today
W/the squad at your door
I still hear every screaming voice
every life isolation destroyed
prison ain’t the place for a sensitive boy
I don’t want this no more
Eric King, November 30, 2022
Write Eric at:
Eric King #27090-045
USP Florence ADMAX
PO Box 8500
Florence, CO 81226
Buy Eric a book or two at tiny.cc/EK_Books
James River ABC (Richmond, VA) is having a holiday letter party. Check it out!
December 20th from 6-8 PM
Afterglow Coffee, 1719 Summit Ave.
We will be signing holiday cards for the folks we have written earlier this year.
Contact: [email protected]
The closing stretch of 2022 with its holidays and festive gatherings is in sight. No doubt, many of you are eager to gift the new Certain Days calendar to friends and loved ones. However, just because the year is winding down into sweater weather and hot cocoa, does not mean that the Anarchist Black Cross Federation’s struggle against repression will be taking a break.
On the contrary, we plan for 2023 to be full of solidarity, mutual aid, and freedom for political prisoners and we’d love it if you could help us get a head start on those efforts.
Tax Deductible Donations
The ABCF can now provide tax deduction receipts for donations of over $500 through our fiscal sponsor, IDAVOX/One People’s Project.
To take advantage of the tax deduction, make your check payable to “One People’s Project” with “ABCF” in the memo and mail it to: ABCF-OC, P.O. Box 4341, Santa Ana CA 92702. Be sure to include a return address (preferably email) where we can send your receipt back to you.
Of course, this isn’t the only way to contribute to the work the ABCF does– we can accept contributions of any amount through the normal CashApp, Venmo, PayPal and checks/money orders if no tax deduction is desired. You can also pick up some sweet Pushing Down The Walls and other merch from our Orange County chapter.
Looking Back and Planning Ahead
Speaking of “the work,” here’s an incomplete list of what we’ve been up to since our last year end round up:
Online and in-person letter-writing events hosted by various chapters, as well as our ongoing administration of prisonersolidarity.com.
ABCF Chapters and comrade organizations all over the US and Canada put together 12 Running Down The Walls 5K events which raised a combined $21,154.84 for the Warchest Program.
Regular, reliable disbursements to the 17 current Warchest Program recipients.
Additionally, we’ve provided mutual aid to comrade organizations internationally as well as individual political prisoner support committees here on Turtle Island. For example:
$2000 to Belarus Anarchist Black Cross to support political prisoners there.
$1500 to Moscow Anarchist Black Cross to respond to the repression of anti-war organizing against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. We were able to make this transfer before Russia was excluded from SWIFT banking systems.
$1000 to the Civil Liberties Defense Center to assist with their eventually successful representation of Eric King. The BOP’s bogus, retaliatory charges were designed to bury him decades beyond his original sentence.
$4000 to Sundiata Acoli’s post-release support fund.
$1000 to the housing fundraiser for Herman Bell, a former Black Panther and political prisoner who was incarcerated for 45 years.
$1000 to the support committee of Kamau Sadiki to help cover ongoing legal, medical, and visitation costs.
Now that you have some idea of what to expect from us in 2023, please consider making a contribution and inviting your friends to do likewise. As an organization made up entirely of volunteers, our ability to fight for the survival and freedom of imprisoned comrades is dependent on gifts from our community.
They’re in there for us. We are out here for them.
1. 2 doors
2. No cell-to-cell contact
3. TV
4. Books
5. You ‘program’ in your cell
6. Rec is totally by yourself—indoor and outdoor
7. Bunk is made of concrete
8. Desk is made of concrete
9. Every door is 100% electronic
10. Every man is 2-man hold
11. Guards have batons in hand
12. No screaming or rapping-thank god
13. No one is ever coming and going, in the SHU people are constantly coming back with news or transferring, everyone is stationary here
14. We can wear sweatpants and shoes
15. We have to slide ‘cop-outs’ under the outside door. Never hand to hand.
16. No standing count ever
17. I control my lights
18. Guards drop off trays—if I don’t want I don’t have to say or interact in any way with them
19. I have all my sheets, blankets, and laundry. Tues and Thurs are laundry day
20. Often feel dizzy in these cells
21. Campers do laundry, canteen, and make our food
22. No radios
23. Hella coffee
24. Entire prison is on the same status, mostly
25. Heard absolutely zero shit talk or antagonism from staff – yet
26. It’s so quiet, eerily so
Write Eric:
Eric King #27090-045
USP Florence ADMAX
PO Box 8500
Florence, CO 81226
Buy Eric books!
tiny.cc/EK_Books
These greeting cards were made by indigenous political prisoner Oso Blanco and the proceeds go to the Children’s Art Project (benefiting youth in Chiapas, Mexico). Get it from independent bookstore and our friends at Burning Books and its even better.
Order at https://burningbooks.com/collections/greeting-cards-and-postcards/products/oso-blanco-greeting-cards
Imprisoned by the US government for expropriating from banks to fund the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Oso Blanco has been using art to continue his mission. These first four designs were all painted by Oso Blanco after he had been captured in 1999. Proceeds from the sale of these greeting cards will benefit children in the autonomous Zapatista zone of Chiapas, Mexico, and on reservations here on Turtle Island. Learn more at schoolsforchiapas.org & freeosoblanco.org
It can be really scary for prisoners who have been taken for a significant time to return to the world outside. Technology, news events, society at large, all have changed so much. Prisoners returning must play what feels like the Worst possible game of trivia!! It doesn’t need to be so terrible–play along with Eric King and fellow comrades as we have some fun and help him prepare to finally come home.
**We’ll post new topics and prompts and you come up with fun true/false, multiple choice, or a short story that comes to mind**
by
Natasha Lennard November 10 2022,
Mutulu Shakur should have been released long ago, but the cruelties of carceral system know no bounds. MUTULU SHAKUR WILL not die in prison. Once he is free, though, he will only be free to die.
On Thursday, the U.S. Parole Commission confirmed that the Black liberation elder and stepfather of rapper Tupac will be permitted, after more than 36 years behind bars, to spend his final days outside of prison walls.
In May, a Bureau of Prisons doctor said Shakur had less than six months to live. It was not until after an October hearing, however, that the federal parole commission admitted the obvious.
Shakur is dying of bone marrow cancer. His body and mind have deteriorated. In May, a Bureau of Prisons doctor said Shakur had less than six months to live. It was not until after an October hearing, however, that the federal parole commission — an antiquated institution that has denied the 72-year-old’s release 10 previous times — admitted the obvious: that the dying man, who has long posed zero risk to society and holds an impeccable institutional record, and who is considered a mentor to many, will likely not commit another offense and should be released.
Shakur’s belated release is a poignant example of the criminal punishment system’s breathtaking cruelty. While Shakur’s case turned on an obscure parole commission that today directly affects several hundred people, the broader forces behind his unnecessary and protracted imprisonment cast a shadow over America’s entire sprawling mass incarceration system.
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The federal parole commission is not acting out of compassion. It is simply — and finally — following its own purported guidelines. Shakur had been gravely ill with terminal cancer in April, when the same parole commission denied his release; medical reports had also attested then to his decline in physical function, his confusion and hallucinations. Yet it was only with the further dramatic decline of his health that he has now been deemed eligible for freedom.
He will spend his remaining days in Southern California with his family.
Although long overdue, this is a result for which Shakur’s lawyers, family, and supporters have been fighting tirelessly, on numerous legal fronts, for many years.
“We are relieved that the Parole Commission now recognizes what has long been true — that Dr. Shakur’s release poses no risk whatsoever,” said one of Shakur’s attorneys, Brad Thomson of the People’s Law Office. “It is tragic that it took until he was on the verge of death for that truth to finally be realized.”
SHAKUR WAS CONVICTED of racketeering conspiracy charges alongside several Black liberationists and leftist allies for his involvement in the 1981 robbery of a Brink’s armored truck, during which a guard and two police officers were killed. Shakur has taken responsibility for his actions and expressed remorse for the lives lost. He was also convicted for aiding in the prison escape of Assata Shakur.
Prior to his incarceration, Shakur was a member of the Black nationalist organization Republic of New Afrika. He was a renowned acupuncturist and a central figure in the movement to bring holistic health care and self-determination to Black residents in the Bronx in the 1970s — a struggle against the conditions of organized abandonment imposed on poor, Black communities under racial capitalism.
Freedom for longtime incarcerated Black liberation elders has always been hard won. Several aging former Black Panthers — like Herman Bell, Jalil Muntaqim, and Sundiata Acoli, who were imprisoned in state prison systems for all too many decades — were granted parole in recent years, despite the zealous opposition of powerful police unions. Shakur has faced the same systematic, ideological intransigence, plus further institutional blocks as a longtime prisoner in the federal rather than state system.
Shakur was incarcerated under a set of federal sentencing guidelines, known as “old law,” because he was convicted for crimes that took place before 1987, when the guidelines changed. As such, his parole decisions have been under the oversight of the U.S. Parole Commission: an outdated body consisting of just two decision-making commissioners that was intended to be phased out decades ago.
The new sentencing guidelines eliminated parole for defendants convicted of post-1987 federal crimes, decreasing the need for the commission. The commission’s very existence thus rests on the continued incarceration of fewer than 200 “old law” prisoners like Shakur, who are eligible for parole. There’s a grim vested interest in keeping these people in prison. With Shakur on the verge of death, however, it would have been an extreme violation of the commission’s own guidelines to deny parole once again.
According to the guidelines, the commission “shall” release any prisoner on mandatory parole if they have served two-thirds of their sentence, or 30 years of a sentence of more than 45 years, unless “he has seriously or frequently violated institution rules and regulations or that there is a reasonable probability that he will commit any Federal, State, or local crime.” Shakur more than qualifies; he has qualified for years.
“We now find your medical condition renders you so infirm of mind and body that you are no longer physically capable of committing any Federal, State or local crime,” noted the parole commission in its decision to grant Shakur’s release.
Grounds offered by the commission to deny Shakur’s release in the past have, as I’ve noted, been preposterous. The commissioners previously cited as a “serious violation,” for example, the fact that Shakur had been put on speakerphone during a phone call with a professor and her class in 2013, while they discussed his support for founding a truth and reconciliation commission in the United States.
Meanwhile, Shakur’s parole packet has been a glowing testimony to his character and the positive influence he has had on those incarcerated with him. “I recognize Dr. Mutulu Shakur not only as my father, but as the man who changed my way of thinking and saved my life,” Ra’ Sekou P’tah, who served 20 years in prison for a nonviolent drug crime before his sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama, wrote in a letter of support for Shakur’s parole. Dozens of letters detailing how Shakur has been a transformative force for his communities both within and beyond prison walls accompanied his parole application.
That Shakur has only been released on his deathbed did not come as a surprise. A judge who rejected his request for compassionate release in 2020 told him he should not expect anything less. The judge told Shakur that he could reapply at “the point of approaching death.” That same judge, now over 90 years old, was the one who sentenced Shakur to prison over 30 years ago.
In the end, Shakur’s release has been granted through the parole commission, not the court, and only after his legal team and support committee had been urgently trying every avenue to secure his freedom before death.
Thomson, his attorney, said, “Mutulu will now be able to live out his final days, surrounded by the love and care of his family and close friends.”