Chapter 7
Oh what a snag, burnt brass hands in the cuffs again,
It’s traditional calling the victim a criminal,
Try telling the jury, it’s peerless as usual.
This is called a colony, this is called a colony,
Committing those who disagree to a penal colony.
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Was sitting on death row in Pennsylvania,
They’d take his life for the truths he’s told,
A writer was sitting on death row for the words he wrote.
This is no anomaly, this is no anomaly,
American democracy depends upon a colony.
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Gave sound to those whose voice has been silenced.
In the home of the Liberty Bell
Mumia was felled by a policeman’s bullet.
More People than Ever Behind Bar$
According to Howard Zinn, “The prison had arisen in the United States as an attempt at Quaker reform, to replace mutilation, hanging, exile—the traditional punishments during colonial times.”[168] Isolation from society was intended to force inmates to reflect upon their actions and rehabilitate them through self-determination. Instead, this Quaker-inspired isolation bred insanity. Zinn writes that “by the mid-nineteenth century, the prison was based on hard labor, along with various punishments: sweat boxes, iron yokes, solitary. The approach was summed up by the warden at the Ossining, New York Penitentiary: ‘In order to reform a criminal you must first break his spirit.’ That approach persisted.”[169]
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, and many US prison populations exceed the number of inmates a facility is designed to hold. In 2014, the Sentencing Project analyzed global inmate populations: Rwanda was a distant second to America, Russia was a close third, and Brazil was fourth. In 2014 the US had almost six times the inmate population rate of China.[170]
According to a report by the US Department of Justice, in 2013 almost seven million people were incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. That’s nearly 3 percent of the US adult population! And that staggering number represented a decrease from 2007. Unsurprisingly, African Americans were disproportionately represented. Michael Suede states, “If we adopt a more inclusive definition of the criminal class, including all convicted of a felony regardless of imprisonment, these numbers increase to 19.8 million persons, representing 8.6 percent of the adult population and approximately one-third of the African American male population.”[171]
Just as worrisome as the huge number of people getting locked up are the eroding rights of ex-convicts. “Once you’re labeled a felon,” Michelle Alexander writes, “the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal.” Once someone is labeled a “criminal,” they “have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.”[172]
To truly illuminate the problems within the national prison system, we must examine inmates’ day-to-day lives beyond the obvious cruelty. Prisons often outsource inmates across long distances, making it hard for them to have contact with their relatives and creating a deeper sense of isolation and exile. For example, the state of Hawaii’s third-largest prison is in Texas; prisons I visited in North Carolina held inmates from the Virgin Islands.
Jeff Goodman, a software engineer who spent time in prison as a first-time nonviolent offender, offers perspective in his 1998 essay “What a Prison Sentence Really Means.” First, he talks about the length of his sentence, imagining what it would be like to hear the judge specifying the actual scope of his punishment. The description compares aspects of being sentenced to an actual version of hell. Getting more specific, Goodman imagines the judge might say, “You’ll be stripped of your work skills, your self-worth and your humanity while at the same time face the daily threat of assault, rape, false accusations and unjustified punishment.” Although your sentence may be only for a short period of time, you’ll be forever stigmatized, and if you manage to reenter society successfully, “some will say prison was just what you needed . . .” There will be no education programs inside prison designed to reduce recidivism and proven to do so. In fact, “you will live in an environment where recidivism is tacitly encouraged, a fact not lost on those who want to run prisons for profit.” Here’s more of what the judge might say:
You are sentenced to consume 150,000 in taxpayer dollars for your prison stay. While lawmakers cite the ever- growing cost of incarceration as a public necessity, you will learn that 10 percent of that amount goes toward your daily needs, while the other 90 percent pays for a bloated prison bureaucracy immune from any cost-benefit analysis. These tax dollars will be siphoned from school programs, child care and job training, all of which do make our communities healthy and safe and save millions in the process . . .[173]
In his essay “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” Eric Schlosser reports about illiteracy among prison inmates, as well as the hundreds of thousands who suffer from serious mental illness.
A generation ago such people were handled primarily by the mental-health, not the criminal-justice system. Sixty to 80 percent of the American inmate population has a history of substance abuse. Meanwhile, the number of drug treatment slots in American prisons has declined by more than half since 1993. Drug treatment is now available to just one in ten of the inmates who need it. Among those arrested for violent crimes, the proportion who are African-American men has changed little over the past twenty years.[174]
Over the course of those two decades, the proportion of African American men who were arrested for drug crimes tripled. “Although the prevalence of illegal drug use among white men is approximately the same as that among black men, black men are five times as like likely to be arrested for a drug offense,” Schlosser writes. “The number of women sentenced to a year or more of prison has grown twelvefold since 1970. Of the 80,000 women now imprisoned, about 70 percent are nonviolent offenders and about 75 percent have children.”[175]
The origins of this bloated version of the prison-industrial complex can be dated back to the early seventies. At the beginning of the decade, Congress was eliminating federal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders and actually closing penitentiaries. But in 1973, Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York who had given the order to crush the Attica uprising, “gave a State of the State address demanding that every illegal drug dealer be punished with a mandatory prison sentence of life without parole.”[176]
“By proposing the harshest drug laws in the United States,” Schlosser continues, Rockefeller “took the lead on an issue that would soon dominate the nation’s political agenda.” In his State of the State address, Rockefeller argued that “all drug dealers should be imprisoned for life” and “plea-bargaining should be forbidden in such cases and that even juvenile offenders should receive life sentences.” This logic, of course, lacks coherence. Someone like Oliver North (the Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who was convicted in the Iran-Contra affair in 1989), who arguably helped decimate many innocent people, didn’t risk such sentencing, but petty street “criminals” paid a heavy price. “The penalty for possessing four ounces of an illegal drug, or for selling two ounces, was a mandatory prison term of fifteen years to life.”[177]
What comes into question here is not just the laws, but the climate of their enforcement. If laws were enforced equally, drastic measures might have a chance of transforming society, especially if prisons provided educational and vocational opportunities. Yet the massive buildup of security forces at home and abroad is significant, mainly due to the large multinational corporations that seek to squeeze huge profits from “law and order.” The media joins the effort by successfully demonizing the individuals in question. In turn, those marginalized “criminals” or “terrorists” are often subjected to inhumane conditions, as if they were enemy combatants in their own country. Unfortunately, even nonviolent offenders suffer from this predicament. Some legal parameters do seem somewhat sensible, especially for violent criminals, government and law enforcement officials who use their office to break laws and officers of large corporations whose crimes affect large numbers of people. Historically, though, the powerful are protected, while petty criminals like drug users and shoplifters are given the cruelest penalties, with long-term ramifications.
As Rockefeller and the media cast these intense penalties for drug crimes as positive and progressive, other states followed suit. No politician wanted to appear soft on crime. As a result, Rockefeller went on to become vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford, Nixon’s successor. Simultaneously, as Michelle Alexander explains, the funding to investigate and prosecute white-collar crime was defunded during the inception of the War on Drugs. Authorities and legislators whittled away at the funding for drug treatment, prevention, and education. Also, the “hypersegregation of the black poor in ghetto communities” made targeting such communities easy. “Confined to ghetto areas and lacking political power, the black poor are convenient targets. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s book American Apartheid documents how racially segregated ghettos were deliberately created by federal policy, not impersonal market forces or private housing choices.”[178]
In 2016, even though the US Justice Department issued a memo to end the use of private prisons, the industry had become one of America’s fastest-growing economic sectors, generating over $30 billion a year. Although the announcement was met with a certain amount of fanfare, “human rights campaigners and scholars of prisons and criminality [greeted] the announcement with caution . . . While private prisons have been rightfully rebuked for their human rights abuses, they ultimately are not the key driver behind mass incarceration,” according to Washington Post reporters Zapotosky and Harlan. “The directive is ‘limited to the thirteen privately run facilities, housing a little more than 22,000 inmates, in the federal Bureau of Prisons system.’”[179] The rising prison-industrial complex was turning people into profit at the expense of their souls and well-being. How disheartening is it that some American children have a greater chance of going to jail than of going to college?
Meanwhile, state and federal inmates generate more profits for private corporations, so lobbyists are chomping at the bit to get more. Trade publications indicate the scope of the prison economy: thousands of vendors offer an amazing array of products, from body scanners to assorted torture devices. Large phone companies make quite a bit of money off of the inmates and their families. MCI was caught adding illegal surcharges to inmate telephone calls; the Department of Corrections received a 32 percent share. There are also food service and health care companies that generate ample profits through their prison services.
The issue isn’t solely about privatizing prisons, argues Alex Friedmann, “but rather privatizing prisoners. Inmates, traditionally the responsibility of state and federal governments, increasingly are being contracted out to the lowest bidder. Convicts have become commodities. Certainly offenders should be punished for committing crimes, but should private companies and their stockholders profit from such punishment?”[180] Schlosser brought to light the fact that in 1998, California held “more inmates than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined.”[181]
According to Mumia, “I’m a member and longtime supporter of the MOVE organization and ex-president of the Black Journalist’s Association in Philadelphia. I’m still continuing revolutionary journalism. I’m fighting for my life, and fighting to create revolution in America.” Mumia was famously sentenced to death by the Philadelphia court of common pleas in July of 1983 after an incident on December 9, 1981, that left a policeman dead and Mumia shot in the stomach.
Mumia started reporting when he was sixteen. As minister of communication for the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party, he published their newspaper. Although he had no criminal record, his activities generated a 600-page FBI file. In the 1970s he documented many cases of police brutality, especially the Philadelphia Police Department’s attacks on MOVE. He was becoming known as the voice of the voiceless and he was detailing what others were scared to report.
As a journalist he posed a threat to the power structure by seeking and telling the truth. And after successfully exposing their corruption, law enforcement officials were apparently determined to put Mumia away. What’s striking about his case is the lack of “due process” that an American citizen is supposed to have. Amnesty International reported that the proceedings used to convict and sentence him “were in violation of minimum international standards that govern fair trial procedures,” and “that the interests of justice would best be served” by granting him a new trial.[182]
In February 1982, two months after the shooting, a hospital security guard made the assertion that Mumia had issued a “hospital confession.” The security guard’s stepbrother later said she’d confided in him that she had lied in court about it. After she made the claim, another hospital guard and two police officers at the scene (including the slain officer’s partner) “suddenly ‘remembered’ they had also heard the alleged ‘confession’ . . . However, the officer guarding Mumia at the hospital wrote on the day of the shooting that Mumia ‘made no comment.’”[183] This string of obvious falsehoods reflected a pattern followed in many of the cases against political and social activists in the sixties and seventies. At Mumia’s trial, Judge Albert F. Sabo refused to recess court to bring in the officer guarding Mumia at the hospital on the day of the shooting. Even the medical examiner’s report, which identified the fatal bullet as a different caliber than Mumia’s, was not made available at the trial. Judge Sabo refused Mumia’s constitutional right to defend himself, and the prosecution’s star witness may have been persuaded by the combination of her previous thirty-eight convictions and the several cases still open against her. Other prosecution witnesses testified that she wasn’t even at the scene of the crime. “The police didn’t need evidence,” Terry Bisson writes. “They didn’t need to secure the crime scene, or follow their own procedures. They had the man they wanted. The rest was a mere formality.”[184]
The very nature of Mumia’s incarceration points to a serious flaw within the US criminal justice system: those who meted out the penalties advanced their careers, while those falsely incarcerated were left to languish in taxpayer-funded gulags. An unattributed brochure in support of Mumia says it best: “We must save Mumia not only because he tells the truth about the system. We must also save him to spare thousands of others who are in danger of being next.”
After more than three decades of incarceration, Mumia continues his work. He had a radio show on NPR called Live from Death Row, but in 1994 Senator Bob Dole threatened to cut NPR’s funding if they did not cancel it. Mumia has since spoken remotely at multiple college commencement ceremonies; he gave the commencement address at Evergreen College in 1999, Antioch in 2000, and at Goddard, where Mumia went to school, in 2014.
Political Prisoners in the USA
Angela Davis, a university professor who has worked on behalf of prison abolition, wrote the profoundly important book Are Prisons Obsolete? She examines the growth of US prisons, institutions that were initially intended to dole out humane, measured justice. Yet we have noticeably strayed from that goal. Innocent people are sent to prison for self-medicating, practicing self-defense and defending others, and simply speaking out against the powers that be.
In an article written from prison, Davis succinctly describes this dilemma: “There is a distinct and qualitative difference between one breaking a law for one’s own individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of a class of people whose oppression is expressed either directly or indirectly through that particular law.” Then she adds, “The former might be called a criminal (though in many cases he is a victim), but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary, is interested in universal social change. Captured, he or she is a political prisoner.”[185]
Since the social upheavals of the sixties, the number of political prisoners in the US has grown dramatically. In 1978, when Andrew Young was the US ambassador to the UN, he made a controversial public statement about political prisoners: “We still have hundreds of people that I would categorize as political prisoners in our prisons.”[186] That large number referred to activists serving short stints, and the reaction was swift. Congressman Larry McDonald immediately tried to have Young removed from office.
By far the most aggressive and resourceful weapon against these activists was the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which ruthlessly hunted down and even killed dissidents. Other activists were humiliated; they were stripped naked in front of the press and beaten mercilessly. Regarding these atrocities, Dhoruba Bin Wahad remarks, “COINTELPRO, as implemented by the FBI, was aimed at countering the rise in political power of a domestic national minority—specifically, primarily, black people . . .” It “transcended mere investigation. It was in effect a domestic war program . . . waged by a government against a people, against its own citizens.”[187] J. Soffiyah Elijah, a clinical instructor at the Criminal Justice Institute of Harvard Law School who represented Marilyn Buck and Sundiata Acoli in court, succinctly summarizes COINTELPRO’s impacts:
Before COINTELPRO was laid to rest, it was responsible for maiming, murdering, false prosecutions and frame-ups, destruction, and mayhem throughout the country. It had infiltrated every organization and association that aspired to bring about social change in America whether through peaceful or violent means. Hundreds of members of the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society, the Republic of New Africa, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, members of the American Indian Movement, the Chicano movement, the Black Liberation Army, environmentalists, the Revolutionary Action Movement, peace activists, and everyone in between were targeted by COINTELPRO for “neutralization.”[188]
Elijah addresses an issue that repeatedly undermines our democracy—the targeting of lawyers who represent controversial clients. She says that being involved in such cases “usually finds the lawyer on the receiving end of constant harassment from prison and jail officials, federal marshals, court personnel and prosecutors[189] . . . How else can we explain the recent and unprecedented arrest and indictment of New York lawyer Lynn Stewart, a zealous advocate well respected amongst members of the bar and the bench?”[190]
Prosecutors and courts traditionally comply with the FBI and their devious tactics. “Prosecutors routinely withheld exculpatory evidence as was evidenced in the cases of Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Although Pratt and Bin Wahad were eventually exonerated after serving twenty-seven and nineteen years respectively for crimes they did not commit, requests by Peltier and Abu-Jamal for new trials have been frustrated at every turn by law enforcement and the prosecution.”[191]
Some of the political activists sent to prison by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program were isolated and monitored in new facilities designed especially for sensory deprivation and behavior-modification techniques, otherwise known as torture. Sundiata Acoli was interviewed in 1996 while serving time in FCC Allenwood, and he spoke about what happened in 1975 in the New Jersey prison system. He described how unannounced, the guards rounded up 250 inmates and relocated them overnight. They had to leave their property behind. In the pre–Civil War facility, their cells were so small that “you could outstretch your arms and touch both walls.” Acoli reflected how he considered it a “smokescreen to round up about fifty or sixty either Political Prisoners or prisoners that were involved in African study classes . . .” They were no longer allowed contact visits, library access, or any meaningful recreation. They had to spend twenty-three hours and fifty minutes a day in those cells.[192]
Prisons are increasingly being used as tools of counterinsurgency by a US government facing serious economic, social, political, and military crises. In 2003, Bernardine Dohrn from the Weather Underground was quoted in the Asheville Global Report newspaper about the scope of this issue: “The mass incarceration of people of color took place through a very deliberate cultivation of fear, the legend of a crime wave, and the invention of the super-predator myth during a decade when crime rates plummeted.”[193]
By incarcerating an unprecedented number of people in our penal system, the US government has selected the most expensive social and legal reform option available to them, but also, and more problematically, the prison-industrial complex supports significant human suffering and misspends public funds. According to a 2012 report by the Vera Institute of Justice, “The total per-inmate cost averaged $31,286 [annually] and ranged from $14,603 in Kentucky to $60,076 in New York.”[194] Now imagine if that money was instead the salary inmates could earn for being productive members of society. In 2012, the total annual price taxpayers paid for incarceration was $63.4 billion.[195]
Echoing Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow, Bernardine Dohrn elucidates that “the legacy of slavery, the modern-day version of slavery, is reflected one way in prisons but it is also visible in the transformation of schools. Schools in America have become barricaded places of fear.”[196] When I accompanied one of my daughters to her first day of middle school, I recognized the school’s floor plan because it was identical to a prison I had visited with the Rastafari UniverSoul Fellowship. Indeed, according to Dohrn,
People who don’t have their own youngsters in school today may not realize what’s happened to the environment where our young people spend seven hours of their day . . . The fear of violence and the notion that it is likely to come from anywhere, including from our young people, has been the precursor and the trial run for what’s now happened in all of our public spaces and airports . . . Now we have war abroad and war at home.[197]
Rastafari Universoul Fellowship Prison Ministry
Ganja, the sacramental herb of Rastafari, is of course still illegal in most US states and the War on Drugs continues unabated. Michelle Alexander helps debunk myths regarding the horrendous military campaign against everyday people. “The first is that the war is aimed at ridding the nation of drug ‘kingpins’ or big-time dealers. Nothing could be further from the truth,” she says. “The vast majority of those arrested are not charged with serious offenses.” She explains that 80 percent of the drug arrests in 2005 were for possession and that only 20 percent were for selling the substances. “Moreover,” she writes, “most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity.”
The second myth she destroys is that “the drug war is principally concerned with dangerous drugs. Quite to the contrary, arrests for marijuana possession—a drug less harmful that tobacco or alcohol—accounted for nearly 80 percent of the growth in drug arrests in the 1990s.”[198] Of course, not all inmates we served with the Rastafari UniverSoul Fellowship were locked up on possession charges; others were interested in finding out more about Rastafari regardless of their sentencing. But Rastas are easy for law enforcement to target and convict.
In 2011, I was pulled over thirteen times in one month when an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) checkpoint was set up near the house I was living in, outside Asheville. It was presumably established to catch undocumented workers; there was a factory nearby that had recently been raided by ICE.[199] But despite my other neighbors’ non-issues with the ICE agents at the checkpoint, I was repeatedly asked for my license and registration. One time I asked the officer: “Don’t you remember me from yesterday?” “Just show me your license,” he replied. Two times he asked me to step out of the vehicle so he could search the car. I complied the first time, but the second time I respectfully declined. I didn’t have to wonder what would have happened if I had misplaced my license or my registration was past due, or if I happened to have some herb on me.
I have had the unique opportunity to meet with H.I.H. Prince Ermias Sahle Selassie, Haile Selassie I’s grandson, at the Smithsonian Institute in DC. Jake Homiak, the Smithsonian’s director of the National Anthropological Archives, was also present. There were multiple agendas going on that day, but H.I.H. noticeably perked up when we informed him about our work within the prison system. Ras Miles Jacob Marley, an ordained minister, started the Rastafari UniverSoul Fellowship in Florida after inmates requested him to do so. He was a reggae DJ at the time and the prisoners tuning in to his show informed him of the violence occurring between different factions of Rastafari brethren. Once he met them personally, they asked that he represent a “universal perspective” to bring unity to the Rastas in prison from different mansions of the faith.
Rastafari is a recognized “religion” within the US prison system, so Rastas have the same rights of worship as any other recognized religion. Members of RUF (including myself) were able to visit prisons ranging from minimum to maximum security, in order to conduct “religious services” for the brethren. That means we could bring in drums and spend the day with them, chanting, reasoning, and playing music. At North Carolina’s Marion Correctional Center, we brought two reggae artists from the Virgin Islands—Niyorah and Bamboo Station. We even once brought two Rastafari elders—Binghi Irie Lion from the Nyahbinghi mansion and Priest Haile Israel from the band Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus. Seeing the prisoners reason with elders from Jamaica was a moving experience; it even brought tears to Binghi Irie’s eyes.
One time at a maximum-security facility in South Carolina, we brought our drum delegation clad in red, gold, and green and stepped into a prison yard of around three hundred inmates. We got salutes and smiles from many as we ventured down the walkway leading to the chapel. This was a facility whose Christian priest was called Chaplain One Love. He was a Jamaican who had met Haile Selassie I as a child. The prisoners and chaplains have frequently told us that our spiritual services are the only services that draw people from multiple faiths. At our events we have adherents of Judaism, Islam, Moorish Science Temple, multiple denominations of Christianity, Native Americans, atheists, and others attending. Many are inspired by Haile Selassie I’s inclusivity. Working with inmates is incredibly fulfilling because the need is so great. In no other part of my life have I experienced such appreciation.
The lack of connection between prisoners and the outside world is a huge part of why recidivism remains high. The desperation one can feel inside these complexes—even for those working there—is significant. The prisons administrations’ own literature says the best way to help prisoners become reacclimated to society is for the community to visit them as much as possible before their release. As we navigated the protocols, we came in contact with many who were teaching meditation, art, music, and other expressive outlets.
A great success RUF experienced during my time there was helping to shepherd the release of Stephen Smith. He, of course, deserves all the credit—we were merely instruments of his initiative. He was a member of the Rasta group in the Marion prison. He had served almost seventeen years; his final stint was in a minimum-security facility near where I lived. After he was released, he started his own landscaping business, served on the board of my co-op, and advocated for reentry rights in North Carolina. He is very passionate about helping inmates return to society and stay out of their cells for good.
Prisons could truly become incubators for creative innovation. Millions of talented people languish behind bars; with the right direction, many inmates could become future leaders and innovators. Vocational and recreational endeavors complement each other. Prisons should become farms, job training facilities, music schools, technical colleges, craft schools, etc. The possibilities are endless. And instead of making pennies on the dollar, inmates should be able to earn real wages, so that they may learn the true value of an honest day’s work. Some inmates are already making this happen.
I never imagined that working in a cooperative, I would find the ideal model to rehabilitate myself.[200]
—Roberto Rodriguez
Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard helped educate me about co-ops in prisons. I had heard about the phenomenon but never experienced it, and finding information online was difficult. In Cuba, longtime cooperative educator Anne Hoyt and I often ate breakfast together. At our breakfast table, I learned about her travels around the world. She had discovered that people in other countries were surprised to learn that there were so many co-ops in the US. But according to the National Co+op Grocers, “There are more than 29,000 co-ops in the United States with Americans holding 350 million co-op memberships.” Also, “The majority of our country’s 2 million farmers are members of the nearly 3,000 farmer-owned cooperatives. They provide over 250,000 jobs and annual wages of over $8 billion. [201]
Unfortunately, there are still no co-ops in US prisons that I know of. But one of our country’s “possessions” in the Caribbean—Puerto Rico—has implemented co-ops within their prison system. Lymarie Nieves, a marketing director at a credit union on the island, is so inspired by her work with prison co-ops that she has made it her life’s mission to serve as a spokesperson for what she calls “transformational cooperativism.”
She first made contact with Roberto Rodriguez and the Cooperativa ARIGOS because she wanted to write an article about the group. Then she began teaching them cooperative principles, philosophy, and history. Thus, what is likely the world’s first prisoner worker co-op started as a self-motivated mental health program rather than an income stream. Hector Quiñones, Efrain Oriz, and Santos Villaran started an arts and crafts collective in 1993 “to keep their minds together.” Rodriguez became the secretary of the co-op. As he tells it, the road to incorporation was not an easy one, but surprisingly, the governor was willing to allow their continuance and the law was amended, so four prisoner co-ops sprang up in Puerto Rico. Rodriguez is now out of prison and has traveled with Nieves to Worcester and Amherst, Massachusetts, as well as to Berkeley and Oakland, California, to spread the gospel that will improve the nation’s prisons.
The entire Puerto Rican cooperative movement supported them, even holding an exhibition for the prisoners. Through the co-ops the prisoners exhibit their work at co-op events, and sell their wares. The board and cooperative members attend cooperative events with two guards. Nieves lobbied the correctional system to gain respect for the co-op and allow them to work by themselves. She helped to educate the co-op members inside the prison, organized government meetings so that the members could present their projects, served as the group’s spokesperson in the co-op movement, and helped with marketing and seeking support from other cooperatives.[202]
Gordon Nembhard argues that beyond their market value, co-ops “provide leadership development, financial education and literacy, high-level social skills and collective decision-making.”[203] These are highly needed components for inmates to successfully reenter society. Most importantly, in a better system prisoners could shorten their terms by working in co-ops, which might produce a tangible drop in recidivism. In Italy, one of the participants pointed out that “80 percent return to prison, in general, but for those employed by a social co-operative the recidivism rate drops to less than 10 percent”[204] Anne Hoyt’s research has found that prisoner cooperatives are very “cost-effective,” and with the “deep commitment on the part of the Italians to the rehabilitation of prisoners,” roughly “10 percent of prisoners in Italy participate in prisoner cooperatives.”[205]
Before I coincidentally met up with her in Cuba, Gordon Nembhard had visited my hometown for a speaking engagement, and I spoke with her briefly afterward. When I told her about the various statements Haile Selassie I had made about the value of co-ops, she was already aware; she was, in fact, preparing to visit Ethiopia to learn about their prison co-ops. Here’s a related passage that I later found in the USDA’s Rural Cooperatives magazine:
Convicts at Ethiopia’s Mekelle Prison have formed more than 20 cooperatives through which they perform various forms of work, including farming, carpentry, plumbing, electric work and handicrafts. An Ethiopian banking institution provides loans to prisoners to start cooperatives, and the loans are guaranteed by the prison. Prisoners use wages for restitution to victims and to invest back into the cooperatives.[206]
Clearly there is a lot of opportunity for America, “the world’s incarcerator,” to develop co-ops within the prison system.