Greetings to you all. Hello. My name is Shakaboona. I am one of the prisoner plaintiffs in the federal civil lawsuit seeking to abolish the unlawful Silencing Act. Additionally, I am a child life-without-parole sentence prisoner incarcerated for 27 years in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, am co-founder and editor of The Movement, human rights magazine, am a news correspondent for Prison Radio, and I write political commentary about prison related issues for a couple of publications. Basically, I educate the public on the truth about the criminal judicial system and what really happens inside the Department of Corrections system of prison labor camps.
My co-plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit, Robert Saleem Holbrook, Bryant Arroyo, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prison Radio, Prison Legal News, the Human Rights Coalition and others, also performs the same function of educating the public about the devastating impact the criminal judicial system, criminal laws, and the for-profit prison industrial complex is having on society as a whole. In effect, we, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, have become the CNN of prison nation. The political authors of the Silencing Act, out of pure fear, wish to eliminate the voices of the prisoners and organizations who have become the CNN of prison nation.
They fear the power of our ideas and words changing the people’s hearts and minds concerning crime and punishment. They fear the loss of state power and control. They fear the abolition of the for-profit carceral state and prison industrial complex. They fear the monetary loss of hundreds of billions of dollars per year in profits from the abolition of all free and slave wage prisoner labor and other for-profit prison-related exploit schemes designed by Wall Street corporate masters. They fear the American people will wake up from their state of mental death and realize that they, too, are now prisoners, slaves in various forms, in a larger prison called America, and have nothing to lose but their chains in replacing the entire social, political, economic system with a new and improved one that truly puts human needs and the environment before profits.
If we allow the Silencing Act to stand in Pennsylvania, then the agents of repression will transport this anti-democracy law to every state in America. So the buck stops here today. We must never let the Silencing Act see the light of day. You all being here today, standing in solidarity against an unjust law is all the proof needed to know that we will be victorious in the end; for a people united cannot be resisted or denied for long. And with our victory against the Silencing Act, that is sure to come from the efforts of our activist pressure, we will march on for racial justice in this country; march on for the abolition of prisons, march on for the end to the so called ‘war on drugs’ and mass incarceration of poor peoples, and march on for freedom, justice and equality for all in America. We will march onward, and we will win. Thank you all for coming to this rally to end the Silencing Act. I salute each of you with a raised clenched fist of resistance. The struggle continues. Peace to you all.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison RAdio
