 Logo of the Prisoners Rights Union [1] | |
| Formation | November 17, 1970 |
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The Prisoners' Rights Union (PRU) was a prisoners' rights advocacy group, modelled after labor unions, founded in California in 1970. Its members paid dues and its lawyers sued courts for better conditions. The organization still exists, but became effectively defunct as a mass member-run organization in the 1990s.
On November 17, 1970, the idea for a prisoners union was born at a press conference held by former prisoners in support of the 1970 Folsom Prison strike. [2] : 202 Its constitution argued that prisoners were an enslaved social class with the right to collective struggle for better conditions: [2] : 202–3
We the convicts and our people imprisoned or at large throughout the state of California are being subjected to a continuous cycle of poverty, prison, parole and more poverty; the same cycle that prisoners the world over have endured since the first man was enslaved. It is more than a game of Crime and Punishment; it is a social condition of inequality and degradation that denies us the opportunity to rise up and pursue a dignified way of life as guaranteed by the UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION. Once convicted, forever doomed has been the practice of society. We are the first to be accused and the last to be recognized. We are branded the lowest of all people: We the CONVICTED CLASS.
The right to organize for protection and survival is an inalienable right which is guaranteed to all people regardless of their social, racial, religious, economic, or political condition. Therefore, we the CONVICTED CLASS have banded together to form a cooperative Union to be hereafter called the UNITED PRISONERS UNION. We believe the creation of this Union will enable us to put an end to injustice, protect the lives and interests of our people, gain our constitutional rights and free us of our bondage.
In February 1971, the organization was created as the California Prisoners Union. [3] : 75 By December 1971, the organization had 50 members, including both former prisoners and prison reform activists. [4] The organization was soon renamed the United Prisoners Union. [5]
In 1971, UPU published a "Bill of Rights", which declared that "We have been historically stereotyped as less than human, while in reality we possess the same needs, frailties, ambitions and dignity indigenous to all humans". The Bill of Rights demanded the abolishment of capital punishment; the prosecution of all prison, jail, parole, and military personnel for crimes inflicted upon prisoners; due process of law; the right to counsel of the prisoner's own choosing; a minimum wage and other labor rights; and many other prisoners' rights. [6]
Although UPU's constitution used the language of class, and opposed capitalism, it largely eschewed the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist language of other radical California organizations, which would later fracture the organization. [2] : 202–3
In 1971, the organization claimed 3,000 members, 1/3 of which were current prisoners. [7] [8] : 501–2
Over time, the UPU shifted away from work stoppages (strikes) in prisons and toward publicizing abuse, lobbying, and winning court cases. In 1972, as a result of one such case, UPU won the right to publish its Outlaw newspaper in San Quentin. [2] : 214–5
In 1973, the UPU accused Popeye Jackson of stealing money from the organization. In response, he went to the union office with a gun and chased staff members around and denounced the UPU as a white supremacist organization. [2] : 75 As a result, the UPU split in two: The radical minority into the United Prisoners Union led by Popeye Jackson and the moderate majority into the Prisoners' Union (PU) headed by Willie Holder. [2] : 214–5
In the mid-1970's, this shift toward revolutionary rhetoric and political violence by Bay Area groups resulted in a rapid decrease in outside support for prison support groups. [2] : 203–4
In 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst and demanded that the Hearst family distribute $400 million in food aid. The Hearsts funded a Seattle organization, People in Need (PIN), which worked with UPU, the American Indian Movement, and other organizations to distribute food. [9] : 91
On June 2, 1975, Popeye Jackson was shot dead by a member of the radical underground Tribal Thumb organization. After Popeye's death, the UPU splinter quickly disintegrated, leaving only the PU, [2] : 254–5 which would later be renamed the Prisoners Rights Union (PRU).
In 1976, in Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners do not have the right under the 1st Amendment to form a union, claiming that prisoner unions might increase the likelihood of prison riots. In fact, empirical evidence suggested that prisoner unions like PRU often worked to stop riots and to stop intra-prisoner violence. [10]
In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled against PU's lawsuit to establish local PU union offices in prisons where they had a large membership. [1]
UPU published Anvil from 1971 to 76 and The Outlaw from 1974 to 77. PRU published The California Prisoner from 1989 to 96. [5] In 1991, The California Prisoner had a readership of 30,000. [11]
PRU became defunct in the early 1990s, [12] when its key lawyer Paul Comiskey moved to private practice as a criminal defense attorney. [13]
Patricia Monique Soltysik was an American woman who was best known as a co-founder and activist in the Symbionese Liberation Army, a far-left militant group based in Berkeley and Oakland, California. She participated in the group's violent activities, including armed bank robbery.
The United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army was a small, American militant far-left organization active between 1973 and 1975; it claimed to be a vanguard movement. The FBI and wider American law enforcement considered the SLA to be the first terrorist organization to rise from the American left. Six members died in a May 1974 shootout with police in Los Angeles. The three surviving fugitives recruited new members, but nearly all of them were apprehended in 1975 and prosecuted.
The Black Cultural Association (BCA) was an African-American inmate group founded in 1968 at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, a California state prison, and formally recognized by prison officials in 1969. The primary purpose of the BCA was to provide educational tutoring to inmates, which it did in conjunction with graduate college students from the nearby San Francisco Bay Area. Outsiders were allowed to attend meetings of the BCA, and tutors provided remedial and advanced courses in mathematics, reading, writing, art, history, political science, and sociology. In time, radical political organizations such as Venceremos infiltrated the BCA, giving rise to BCA factions such as Unisight, which eventually gave birth to the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Donald David DeFreeze, also known as Cinque Mtume and using the nom de guerre "General Field Marshal Cinque", was an American man involved with the far-left radical group Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and convicted criminal.
Wendy Masako Yoshimura is an American still life watercolor painter. She was a member of the leftist terrorist group the Symbionese Liberation Army during the mid-1970s. She was born in Manzanar, one of numerous World War II-era internment camps for Japanese Americans who were forced out of their homes and businesses along the West Coast. She was raised both in Japan and California's Central Valley.
Venceremos was an American far-left and primarily Chicano political group active in the Palo Alto, California area from 1969 to 1973.
The rights of civilian and military prisoners are governed by both national and international law. International conventions include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the United Nations' Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Emily Harris was, along with her husband William Harris (1945–), a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an American left-wing terrorist group involved in murder, kidnapping, and bank robberies. In the 1970s, she was convicted of kidnapping Patty Hearst.
Kuwasi Balagoon, born Donald Weems, was an American political activist, anarchist and member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. Radicalised by race riots in his home state of Maryland growing up, as well as by his experiences while serving in the US Army, Weems became the black nationalist known as Kuwasi Balagoon in New York City in the late 1960s. First becoming involved in local Afrocentric organisations in Harlem, Balagoon would move on to become involved in the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, which quickly saw him charged and arrested for criminal behaviour. Balagoon was initially part of the Panther 21 case, in which 21 panthers were accused of planning to bomb several locations in New York City, but although the Panther 21 were later acquitted, Balagoon's case was separated off and he was convicted of a New Jersey bank robbery.
A prison strike is an inmate strike or work stoppage that occurs inside a prison, generally to protest poor conditions or low wages for penal labor. Prison strikes may also include hunger strikes.
Stuart Hanlon is an attorney based in San Francisco, California who represented San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr, Geronimo Pratt and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, 433 U.S. 119 (1977), was a United States Supreme Court case where the court held that prison inmates do not have a right under the First Amendment to join labor unions.
Penal labor in the United States is the practice of using incarcerated individuals to perform various types of work, either for government-run or private industries. Inmates typically engage in tasks such as manufacturing goods, providing services, or working in maintenance roles within prisons. Prison labor is legal under the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
The International Labor Defense (ILD) (1925–1947) was a legal advocacy organization established in 1925 in the United States as the American section of the Comintern's International Red Aid network. The ILD defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the anti-lynching, movements for civil rights, and prominently participated in the defense and legal appeals in the cause célèbre of the Scottsboro Boys in the early 1930s. Its work contributed to the appeal of the Communist Party among African Americans in the South. In addition to fundraising for defense and assisting in defense strategies, from January 1926 it published Labor Defender, a monthly illustrated magazine that achieved wide circulation. In 1946 the ILD was merged with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties to form the Civil Rights Congress, which served as the new legal defense organization of the Communist Party USA. It intended to expand its appeal, especially to African Americans in the South. In several prominent cases in which blacks had been sentenced to death in the South, the CRC campaigned on behalf of black defendants. It had some conflict with former allies, such as the NAACP, and became increasingly isolated. Because of federal government pressure against organizations it considered subversive, such as the CRC, it became less useful in representing defendants in criminal justice cases. The CRC was dissolved in 1956. At the same time, in this period, black leaders were expanding the activities and reach of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1954, in a case managed by the NAACP, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.
James William Kilgore is a convicted American felon and former fugitive for his activities in the 1970s with the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left-wing terrorist organization in California. After years of research and writing, he later became a research scholar and ultimately worked at the University of Illinois' Center for African Studies in Champaign–Urbana.
Thero Lavon Wheeler (1945–2009), aka Bruce Bradley while a fugitive (1973–1975), was a founding member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, an American left-wing organization in the San Francisco Bay area. He left the group in October 1973 as he objected to its plans to undertake violent acts. Law enforcement later classified the SLA as a terrorist group.
Mary Alice Siem was a student at the University of California, Berkeley when she became involved in 1973 with a prisoner outreach program at Vacaville Prison. She became the girlfriend of Thero Wheeler, an inmate who escaped in August 1973. He was a founding member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an extremist group based in Oakland that was classified as terrorist by law enforcement. It was known for murders, armed robberies and the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst after Wheeler and Siem left the group in October 1973.
Joseph Michael Remiro is an American convicted murderer and one of the founding members of the Symbionese Liberation Army in the early fall of 1973. It was an American leftist terrorist group based in the Bay Area of California. He used the pseudonym or nom de guerre "Bo" while he was a member of the group.
Colston Richard Westbrook was an American teacher and linguist who worked in the fields of minority education and literacy. At the University of California, Berkeley, he established a program of prison outreach and approved students from the Bay Area to serve as volunteers. Some of the participants from Berkeley and two former prisoners at Vacaville Prison were among the founding members in 1973 of the radical leftist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.
The 1970Folsom Prison strike was a significant event for U.S. prison reform and protest. During the strike, over 2,400 incarcerated individuals at Folsom State Prison in Folsom, California, initiated a work stoppage and hunger strike. The strike began on November 3, 1970, and lasted 19 days. The strike was organized to address various grievances, including racial discrimination, inadequate medical care, overcrowding and labor conditions. Prisoners from different backgrounds, including members of the Black Panther Party and Brown Berets, participated, helping the strike gain attention nationwide. The strike was declared the day prior to the 1970 California gubernatorial election, increasing public and political attention to the demands.
So, in the winter of 1971, a group of 50 or so ex-prisoners and activists who had been working on prison issues organized the "California Prisoners Union."
The group, called the United Prisoners Union, says it has a membership cadre of some 3,000 California convicts, former inmates and members of their, families. It has drawn up a bill of rights for prison reform as an alternative to what it calls "the certainty of more riots and bloodshed, more Atticas and San Ouentins." [....] Less than one‐third of the union's 3,000 charter members are actually in prison. Their identities are kept secret.
Attempts to organize prisoners are becoming increasingly commonplace. Organizing is presently occurring in at least six states. In California, the United Prisoners Union claims a membership of over three thousand. 2 California is also the headquarters of the Prisoners' Union of San Francisco 3 and the Prisoners Legal Union at the Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo." In New York, more than half of the inmates at Greenhaven Correctional Facility are said to belong to the Prisoners' Labor Union.5 " The State Prison of Southern Michigan is presently being organized by another Prisoners Labor Union."8 A request for an election has been made to the Delaware Department of Labor to determine if the Imprisoned Citizens' Union ought to be accorded representative status
The right of prisoners to form a union was also considered by the United States Supreme Court in 1976, in Jones v North Carolina Prisoners Labor 433 US 119 (1977). Union meetings were prohibited by the Department of Corrections and union members were not allowed to solicit others to join. When prisoners challenged this, the Court ruled that prisoners did not have a right under the First Amendment to join the union. One reason the court took this view was that it thought that doing so would make prison riots more likely. Yet this has not been validated by subsequent experience. In none of the major riots in the US in the 1970s and 1980s studied by Useem and Kimball (1991) were prisoners' unions or rights groups' actions a contributor to or catalyst for the riot. On the contrary, in one case, they tried to stop the riot and at Attica and Michigan, the prisoners most willing to engage in negotiations were those least likely to harm hostages. Associations or unions may also be beneficial in building mutual trust between prisoners as conflict between prisoners is a major source of violence within prisons. Prisoners' unions may therefore contribute to the stability of prisons rather than undermine it.
But in most of the cases, the prisoners were represented by the Prisoners' Rights Union, which subsequently became, as one of its own members admits, "defunctish."