The Brother You Choose by Susie Day

Author:Susie Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

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UNDERSTAND THIS: SINCE SLAVERY

EDDIE: Prison actually encourages gangs to form. In Maryland, if you belong to the Black Guerrilla Family, there’s a whole area in which those members are housed. You all become a unit, a tribe. People are put in there and they either join or they become victimized. If you make the guards angry, they take you from wherever you were and put you in the Black Guerrilla housing area or with the Bloods or the Crips or Murder Inc or DMS, the white gang. Two or three of you in there, with three hundred people that want to get you.

This is how they control the population and this is how they create killers. Because those people come back to the community and they kill. They kill because they’re angry; they kill because they think we have abandoned them; they kill because they never got visits because people couldn’t afford to visit them. Or because, when people did come visit them, the people themselves are criminalized. They’re searched and degraded and made to feel like they’re involved in some criminal activity.

Just now, in the state of Maryland, there’s a ban on hugging your family at visits.11 It’s in some prisons; in others, it’s not—the best I can tell is that it’s unevenly applied. That means fathers and mothers can no longer pick up their children, you can’t hug your brother or sister, a mother can’t hug her son or daughter. This is designed not only to isolate, but to further dehumanize people. It diminishes you when your family comes in, and you can’t even hug your mother.

I can’t emphasize this enough—this violence is manufactured in prisons all over the country. It’s not just an instance where the capitalist system is taking away its surplus labor, where marginal populations are obsolete because manufacturing is now automated. You have something now that’s the foundation of fascism: fear. That fear you have when you walk down the street and you see three or four people coming toward you, and it’s like, “Damn, what might happen?”

You have that fear, first, because of the multinational corporations that control most of the media; that control what you get in terms of news. They’re billionaire operations, and they run on the concept: If it bleeds it leads. “Baby Killed!”—“Shootout!”—“Bodies Over There!” You get tons and tons of stories about threats to your security and your safety. They make you think: “Well, maybe the police have a right to do this. We need more police. Let them do whatever it takes.”

So, what’s happening? Six hundred thousand people coming out of the prison system every year. See, everybody talks about the two million or more people in prisons, about the five to seven million people under some kind of jurisdiction, whether on parole or probation or in the hole. But nobody considers that flood of people being released. All these angry people, abused in these faraway places by the clash of culture, economics, and race. People that are angry, frustrated, and can’t get a job because they’re felons.

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